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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?

#291

Post by fundad »

Bud wrote: post #238
modeless wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm chooses low cost over performance on purpose. AMD 6900U is still at a process disadvantage compared to M1. AMD's comparable chips won't come out for many more months.

You're still wrong. Design counts. Apple has a huge design lead here. There's no way to successfully obscure or distract from that fact.

It’s obvious they invested so much design energy making A series much faster every year to build the competence to build the M series the way they wanted it.

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

#292

Post by greggsy »

webmobdev wrote: post #267
greggsy wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasing its recurrent revenue from services that is tied to monetising the personal data of its users. My understanding is that they’re more responsible than other services with respect to personal data. Unless I’m mistaken, their strategy isn't to monetise and sell data, but is instead to sell services that allow users to interact with their own personal data , which is incredibly rich given the ecosystem that…

As an Apple user, I see it more cynically now - their whole idea of "privacy" has morphed into a strategy to prevent their competitors access to the personal data of the users, while ensuring they have more invasive access to it. This idea is offensive to me. Preventing data collection is the first step to user privacy. Once BigTech has your data, they can do anything with it in the future (despite what they say toda…

>Preventing data collection is the first step to user privacy.

Apple are the first to actually do this properly by cross-app tracking, forcing developers to outline data collection statements, and providing clearer sharing acceptance pages.

> Once BigTech has your data, they can do anything with it in the future (despite what they say today) because of the lack of appropriate law and regulation to prevent this.

This is entirely incorrect. HIPPAA and GDPR are very clear about PII health data, and a large corporate like Apple will be fined through the teeth violating it. Changes to the PP are communicated, and allow the user to opt out by discontinuing the service. Sure they’re sometimes opaque, but Apple has built a reputation on responsible data policies, which are frequently contrasted with those of other big tech data factories like Facebook and Google.

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

#293

Post by skavi »

hajile wrote: post #235
alberth wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ARMv8-A is backward compatible.

Apple dropped support years ago and the last couple ARM chip designs finally dropped support too. A715 in particular made it's decoder 20+% wider while reducing die area by 75% all due to eliminating 32-bit support.

IIRC, you’re a bit wrong with the numbers. The decoder is now a fourth the size it used to be, and they’re now using 5 (up from 4).

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

#294

Post by JohnHaugeland »

defactoPun wrote: post #51
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #49

Apple fans sure love pretending other chips are as slow as they are > The Apple M1 Ultra SoC chip achieves 87% of the performance of the Intel 12900K and Nvidia RTX 3090 Benchmarks not run by Apple do not support this claim In reality it is not competitive with chips five years old

Well, I dont think there's need for a personal attack here. Even though they might not be 87% faster, they are still quite significantly faster for an ultrabook and they do deliver the battery life. So I guess the OP's question can be taken as, could intel or amd or OEMs achieve the performance to power ration soon ?

> Well, I dont think there's need for a personal attack here.

Correctly observing that someone is making false claims due to their allegiance to a brand name is not a personal attack.

.

> they are still quite significantly faster for an ultrabook

The benchmarks do not support this claim.

.

> and they do deliver the battery life.

Tom's hardware has them at 14 hours, the Surface Laptop at 17. Tom's hardware also says the Surface Laptop is faster. There are Lenovos with 35 hour battery life.

14 hours is pretty standard. The flagships of HP, Dell, Lenovo, and MSI also all do 15-17 hours. Apple's actually slightly behind the pack here.

Please note that battery life and CPU power are inversely correlated; you'll never find a laptop that's good with both, and if someone's telling you they have, they're lying to you

It's like saying that the car that delivers the most horsepower also uses the least gas. No, it doesn't, and you should know that.

In reality, these are both average middle of the road machines. They aren't particularly powerful when compared to one of MSI's beasts, and they aren't particularly battery lived when compared to one of those glorified tablets you can get.

.

> could intel or amd or OEMs achieve the performance to power ration soon ?

They did five years ago, according to the measurements and evidence.

I have never shopped for laptops according to their "performance power ratio."

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

#296

Post by stefanfisk »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #294
defactoPun wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I dont think there's need for a personal attack here. Even though they might not be 87% faster, they are still quite significantly faster for an ultrabook and they do deliver the battery life. So I guess the OP's question can be taken as, could intel or amd or OEMs achieve the performance to power ration soon ?

> Well, I dont think there's need for a personal attack here. Correctly observing that someone is making false claims due to their allegiance to a brand name is not a personal attack. . > they are still quite significantly faster for an ultrabook The benchmarks do not support this claim. . > and they do deliver the battery life. Tom's hardware has them at 14 hours, the Surface Laptop at 17. Tom's hardware also says t…

What are your sources for these claims? A quick googling led me to https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/microsoft-surface-laptop-..., and there they clearly state that the MBP has both better battery life and performance.

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

#297

Post by Const-me »

fxtentacle wrote: post #206
tambourine_man wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that more an indictment of ROCm immaturity or of PyTorch/TensorFlow unwillingness to support it?

I believe ROCm isn't usable yet. I don't know anyone who successfully trained a state of the art neural network on anything that was not NVIDIA. AMD keeps offering their own forks of PyTorch and TensorFlow, but last time I checked they were years outdated, and nobody uses them. So either PyTorch/TensorFlow are secretly sponsored by NVIDIA, or AMD's and Apple's CUDA replacements aren't mature enough yet. Given how man…

> building a GPU-capable BLAS library is just a lot more work than one would think

I made a few pieces when needed: dense and sparse matrices, conjugate gradient, householder QR decomposition, other things. Wasn’t terribly hard.

I only needed to support relatively new GPUs, that’s one reason why. Another one, I based on DirectCompute not ROCm. The thing’s well tested (modern videogames are using compute shaders a lot), and works with all 3 vendors of GPUs. The main downside it’s Windows only.

> NVIDIA has a GUI installer for CUDA.

It’s still more friction compared to D3D runtime, which is an essential OS component installed and updated as a part of the OS.

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

#298

Post by aninteger »

philistine wrote: post #283
pjmlp wrote: post #184

Given that whatever Apple has is not going into 80% of the desktop market, 60% of the mobile market, 100% of game consoles, or 100% of the server market, it matters much less than some Apple afficionados make out of it.

When Apple can make a game console for half the price with the same GPU power as the competition, which is something that could happen in ten years, Microsoft and PlayStation are going to sweat and pay very close attention to what Apple is doing.

Does Apple make anything at half the price of a competitor? Nothing is impossible in the future but past behavior indicates that an Apple console would likely not be "half the price". Also, Apple has sometimes been considered a "luxury" brand in tech, and that probably also means it's unlikely to push a reduced price console without diluting the brand or their image.

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

#299

Post by webmobdev »

greggsy wrote: post #292
webmobdev wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Apple user, I see it more cynically now - their whole idea of "privacy" has morphed into a strategy to prevent their competitors access to the personal data of the users, while ensuring they have more invasive access to it. This idea is offensive to me. Preventing data collection is the first step to user privacy. Once BigTech has your data, they can do anything with it in the future (despite what they say toda…

>Preventing data collection is the first step to user privacy. Apple are the first to actually do this properly by cross-app tracking, forcing developers to outline data collection statements, and providing clearer sharing acceptance pages. > Once BigTech has your data, they can do anything with it in the future (despite what they say today) because of the lack of appropriate law and regulation to prevent this. This…

If I can't prevent Apple from collecting my personal data, I consider it as an intrusive violation of my privacy by Apple. Health data is a very small subset of personal data that does have some regulations. Its scope needs to be expanded to cover how BigTech, like Apple, use it. As for Apple building a reputation of having "responsible" data policies, the cynic in me remembers how Google too sold the same bullshit as "privacy respecting" company a decade or two ago - Apple seems to be following the exact same strategy with its marketing while slowly but surely escalating data collection.

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

#300

Post by hajile »

skavi wrote: post #293
hajile wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple dropped support years ago and the last couple ARM chip designs finally dropped support too. A715 in particular made it's decoder 20+% wider while reducing die area by 75% all due to eliminating 32-bit support.

IIRC, you’re a bit wrong with the numbers. The decoder is now a fourth the size it used to be, and they’re now using 5 (up from 4).

It's more nuanced than that though 75% smaller is a fourth the size (I guess depending on where you're looking from).

A710 had a uop cache.

A710 had 4 decoders but it was like Intel's decoders where one (I assume one, but less than all of them) decoder could decode anything and the others could decode common instructions, but would block and send complex decodes to the complex one. A715 now has not just 5 decoders, but every one of them can decode anything reducing pipeline complexity and increasing theoretical throughput (depending on how often those complex instructions would be used).

A710 did instruction fusion in the uop cache, but A715 now does it in the L1 cache during fetch which increases effective instruction throughput by occasionally turning 2+ instructions into one.

Finally, A710 used a uop cache. The decoders would fill the uop cache at a rate of 4 instructions per cycle (less if one of those complex decodes happened). Once the uop cache would fill, it would provide 5 instructions per cycle to the rest of the frontend.

If A710 could prefetch and keep the uop cache full and there were always enough loops to reuse some parts while others were refilling, then you could keep the full 5 instruction theoretical output. A715 gets rid of all these exceptions making it more consistent.

In truth, the final difference is definitely less than 20% in the real world, but even a 0% increase in throughput while getting rid of 75% of your transistors would still be a massive win.

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