241–250 of 323 posts
You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…
lol this will age well. i remember designing CPUs at intel when they had like a ~2.5 gen process lead (literally 4-5 years) and the result was still barely better than competition. what outsiders don’t realize is intel management never had to deal with competition. they spent their entire careers fighting each other in petty internecine political battles. if you think intel vs amd is a feud, you haven’t seen intel ar…
> internecine, adj.:
> destructive to both sides in a conflict.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Top end performance is power limited, so optimizing for performance per watt is almost the same thing as optimizing for performance.
I’m not sure what point you’re arguing anymore. I’m arguing against this statement. I don’t think it’s true. “ You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple.” My point is a good process is necessary but not sufficient to make a part competitive with Apple on performance per watt. There’s a lot of “magic” to go around.
I think if x86 get rid of their legacy instructions, they could reduce their core size, and a few side effects will be performance per watt gains and maybe also performance (smaller cores), and if you need the legacy instructions you could just emulate, most consumer PCs don't need those. That's the biggest difference with x86 and ARM, ARM got a lot of breaking changes with their versions, while x86 don't (I'm not su…
X86 will always be slower because it has stricter memory ordering semantics.
I guess it should be slower too?
You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…
Their GPU is similarly impressive, with a minimal TDP it handily crushes any other iGPU.
You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…
It’s true 5nm definitely gives M1 an edge, but Apple’s ARM chips have lead the pack by a mile in performance for a long time, at comparable nodes. To say all the magic lies with TSMC is to claim that with M1 Apple suffered a huge loss is leadership position in terms of design, saved only by TSMC. I don’t see how that’s a credible claim.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS Intel Rocket Lake FP64: 32 Flops per core per cycle at 8 cores and 5GHz Nvidia Ampere: 1/32 Flops per core per cycle at 2048 cores and ~2 GHz Even though there are more architectural differences, there IS a difference in orders of magnitude ... for the things that you can do on a GPU (SIMD).
This is because FP64 is emulated on the NVIDIA Ampere as it is missing dedicated FP64 hardware. This is not a fair comparison. FP32 is 64x faster on NVIDIA Ampere than FP64 per: https://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/nvidia-ampere-ga-102-gpu-... Ampere has 60 TFLOPs of Performance on its top GPU, the Hopper per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere_(microarchitecture) . Which is roughly 50% to 100% faster than Rocket Lak…
A100 has 6912 cores (excluding tensor as they don't do 32-bit float math). Each core does 2 (32-bit) floats per cycle and runs at 1410MHz peak frequency. It is 826mm^2 and has an official 300w TDP. This yields 19491.84 GFLOPS.
Threadripper (Zen 3) has 64 cores. Each core does 32 (32-bit) floats per cycle and runs at 4300MHz. It has 8 CPU chiplets (80.7mm^2 each) and one IO die (416mm^2) for a total area of 1061.6mm^2. This chip yields 8806.4 GFLOPS.
Alder Lake has 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores. If you have an unlocked chip with AVX-512, that yields 64 (32-bit) floats per cycle running at up to 5.3GHz along with 32 (32-bit) floats per cycle running at up to 4GHz. Die area is around 215.25mm^2 (though much of that die area is taken up by the GPU) and it has a TDP of 150w (peak 241w). This chip yields 2713.6 GFLOPS for the P-cores and 1024 GFLOPS for the E-cores for a total of 3737.6 GFLOPS.
The first thing of note is that orders of magnitude is a gross overstatement as there isn't even a single order of magnitude of difference between the slowest and fastest systems here.
Dividing GFLOPS by die area gives 23.60 GFLOPS/mm^2 for the A100, 8.30 GFLOPS/mm^2 for the Threadripper, and 17.36 GFLOPS?mm&2 for the Alder Lake. Considering the GPU size of the Alder Lake, I suspect that GFLOPS per die area actually favors Alder Lake over the A100 (though this is also somewhat offset by the presence of tensor cores and other non-related stuff in A100).
Also noteworthy is that power is a much weirder metric due to how turbos affect all the things. I suspect this is where the A100 has a major advantage not to mention real GFLOPS dropping off steeply in long-running workloads (though this will affect all of these systems to greater or lesser degrees).
On the flip side, I should add that branchy code dramatically slows down actual performance on a GPU while only slowing down a CPU when a misprediction happens (in theory this should be only 1-5% of cases).
A more interesting question would be Alpha EV9 with it's proposed 1024-bit SIMD unit running at around 2GHz. That chip would have delivered 256 GFLOPS of performance per core around 2005. Scaling to a modest 32-core chip at 4GHz gives a very impressive 16384 GFLOPS while retaining all those CPU advantages too.
This leads to the observation that adding large SIMD/vector units to a CPU isn't really hard. A small, in-order core with very wide vector units running at a slower speed to conserve energy seems like an interesting idea and several startups are working in this direction (not to mention this being the basis of Intel's Larabee and later Knight's Corner designs).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
X86 will always be slower because it has stricter memory ordering semantics.
Ordering semantics (TSO) that Apple's M1 implements. I guess it should be slower too?
If TSO didn’t have a performance penalty, it wouldn’t need to be a separate mode. Also, it should be obvious that stricter ordering constraints inherently allow less parallelism, so lower performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont fall in the "apple has changed the world" camp, but bear in mind what you're saying here - the flagship $1500 MSRP GPU is less than an order of magnitude quicker than a $2000 (total) device, with less than half the power usage. That's a pretty impressive feat for a first attempt.
But can it run Crysis? Apple is pretty much a no go for gaming.
Yes?[1]
"Qualcomm Confirms Nuvia Arm Chips Will Be in PCs by Late 2023" https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar... "Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it pub…
Qualcomm has been "on track" with desktop level chips based on their mobile platforms for at least four years. I've tested the first Windows on Arm laptop with a series 8 "desktop" Snapdragon in 2018. Yet, they still have to ship anything meaningful. They lake the vertical integration Apple has, and they will never have it. Hard for me to see how competitors (Qualcomm + Microsoft + OEMs) are supposed to go after Appl…
Qualcomm got impatient and entered too early causing people to write them off.