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Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

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Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#251

Post by maccard »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #193
maccard wrote: post #87

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.

No disagreement on that, but that is a very complicated topic. It's not _just_ a hardware problem on Mac, there's also the OpenGL/Vulkan/Metal debacle, and lack of audience compared to windows for developers to target. There are more using steam with windows 7 than steam on Mac [0]

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#252

Post by maccard »

onepointsixC wrote: post #102
maccard wrote: post #87

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.

> the flagship $1500 MSRP GPU is less than an order of magnitude quicker than a $2000 (total) device Could you point out which precise Apple device you are thinking of? Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra appear to be $3999 MSRP, and I was assuming that's the cheapest option for an M1 Ultra.

You're right sorry - I accidentally compared the price of an M1 Pro instead of an M1 Ultra.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#253

Post by solardev »

zinekeller wrote: post #110
belltaco wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that metric Microsoft utterly dominates the web server market.

Yes, but that's not the point here. I don't know what Microsoft does with their IIS profits but Apple is definitely reinvesting them back into making better phones.

> I don't know what Microsoft does with their IIS profits

That's ok. Microsoft doesn't either ;)

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#254

Post by zimpenfish »

naillo wrote: post #79

Considering that no one with an apple M1 chip is gaming or training ML with it, I'm not even sure what it means that these are supposedly better. What are people even using the extra performance for? Keeping thousands of tabs open simultaneously?

> Considering that no one with an apple M1 chip is gaming or training ML with it,

Anecdatum of one: I use my M1 chip for gaming (predominantly Minecraft with smatterings of Cities Skyline, Rocket League, etc.)

(I have trained MLs using the Metal version of Torch, too, but generally only tiny textgenrnn things for fun.)

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#255

Post by hajile »

PeterStuer wrote: post #189

And then you try gaming and it is comparable to a Ryzen 7 4800H (45W)/ Nvidia GTX 1650ti (50W).

The biggest problem has been Metal and incompatibilities. Metal 3 brings most of the important things they've been missing. We're already seeing companies like crossover working on this to make a lot of additional games work on their hardware.

The second issue is dev relationships. The real AMD/Nvidia advantage over other GPU makers is that they pay huge amounts of money to optimize games to the point that their drivers will detect a game and then completely replace huge sections of the game with optimized versions they wrote. These relationships take a lot of time to establish and maintain.

In any case, supply chain rumors strongly indicate Apple launching a very expensive VR headset in 2023 (which also matches up well with games that would be delivered after a half-billion dollar investment into their gaming subscription service around 2019). There are also rumors of Apple making an offer to buy EA games.

Apple makes more money from games than every other major game company put together. They have a huge interest in moving further this direction going forward. I don't see any way they don't just throw large amounts of money into this problem until it goes away.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#256

Post by doublepg23 »

NobodyNada wrote: post #170
alberth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM only officially dropped 32bit support last year. https://m.gsmarena.com/arm_will_drop_32bit_support_in_the_bi...

...“in big Cortex-A cores.” ARM designs both the architecture specification and some reference designs. 32-bit support has been an optional part of the specification since ARMv8 in 2011. The article you link is saying that ARM’s Cortex-A reference designs will no longer include 32-bit support, which has nothing to do with Apple since Apple uses their own custom designs. Apple dropped 32 bit support in their own desig…

afaik the last remaining 32 bit Apple SoC is in the Apple Watch Series 3.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#257

Post by hajile »

erichocean wrote: post #244
layer8 wrote: post #177

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?

And it is a LOT slower to run rosetta apps instead of native ones despite all the silicon thrown into emulation.

If it were as simple as "they are the same once everything is decoded", then you'd expect a pre-decoded and pre-optimized program to be at least as fast, but it's not.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#258

Post by dmitrygr »

jcranmer wrote: post #186
dmitrygr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example: Decode. One of the things Apple CPUs keep being praised for is how wide they are. To be wide effectively and keep your execution units busy, you need a wide decoder. With aarch64 it is easy. Every instruction is 4 bytes on a 4 byte boundary. Want a 4-wide decoder? Ingest 16 bytes and copy-and-paste the same decoder 4 times. X86 instructions are variable-length: 1-15 bytes. And you do not know how long an…

That would be a dumb way to build a decoder. Which is why that's not how it works on x86 processors. What an x86 processor does is fetch an entire cacheline of instructions at once. Working out which byte corresponds to instructions is a straightforward state machine--and state machines can be parallelized as reduction tree, because function application is associative! (This is usually described as "x86 processors st…

> fetch an entire cacheline of instructions at once

And how many instructions fit into it? Are you going to feed an 8-wide decoder with a single 64B cacheline? Especially with no promises that any instruction starts or ends on that boundary?

> It's actually hard to come up with x86 instructions that are 15 bytes long.

Something as simple and trivial as loading a 64-bit immediate into a register is a 10-byte instruction in x86... So for you to feed an 8-wide decoder even with such simple things as that, you're already at TWO cache lines ingested per cycle (80 bytes)... good luck with that...

I hear intel is hiring. Their current top of the line decoder is IIRC 5-wide. I am sure they’d like to hear your ideas as to how easy it is to decode x86 8-way

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#259

Post by ClumsyPilot »

zinekeller wrote: post #110
belltaco wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that metric Microsoft utterly dominates the web server market.

Yes, but that's not the point here. I don't know what Microsoft does with their IIS profits but Apple is definitely reinvesting them back into making better phones.

The point is that you've chosen a questionable benchmark that is only correct if you adopt a very spwsific point of view.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#260

Post by freemint »

gaudat wrote: post #196
freemint wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To continue the tree of suppliers. Zeiss SMT would be nothing without: HAP GmbH Dresden, MBFZ Toolcraft GmbH, Corning Advanced Optics, AGC Inc, RUAG Space, Schmolz + Bickenbach, RORZE CORPORATION and GEWO Feinmechanik GmbH

It sounds fun looking at how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I was only able to find that out because Zeiss SMT has an annual "supplier of the year" award.
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