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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?

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they make it for half the price, they won't sell it at that price. They'll make sure to make a hefty margin on every console sold. Realistically, Apple will stop putting old phone chips in its TV box, and they'll start putting the more recent chips with good GPUs.

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

#312
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The competent people say that ISA doesn’t matter, so there’s that.

Do their actions match their words? ARM could have extended their ARMv7 ISA to also be 64-bit without much trouble at all (plenty of space in the ISA). Instead, we got a ground up redesign that has more in common with MIPS64 than with ARMv7 (to the point that it's fascinating that ARM and some others bought MIPS just to get patent rights before immediately selling them off again). I'm sure the go-to individual here i…

When you're designing a new chip and working at a a fabless semiconductor startup, that doesn't mean you're free from corporate constraints. The most obvious is that if you design an ARM-based chip, the company has to pay royalties, and if you design a RISC-V chip, you don't.

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

#313

Reading this thread, the delusional thinking is thick! I’m hearing that we need to wait until Intel moves to 5nm to really compare. When that means that the whole PC market cedes the crown to Apple, who is not slowing down. Apple is on its second generation on 5nm and the x86 crowd as yet to show any response! That it’s only because Apple is on 5nm that they’re competitive. Which is crazy, since we can directly compa…

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

#314
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that. Remember Pippin.

How can the Pippin relate to any future console endeavour of Apple? I can't think of any piece of tech, or employee, who was there when the Pippin was released.

Lack of understanding of game development culture.

You can also look into Apple Arcade on Apple TV to see how current culture plays out.

Their golden eggs for game developers is the iOS, thanks market share on mobile platforms.

Don't mix that with living room culture from consumers and content providers.

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

#315
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do their actions match their words? ARM could have extended their ARMv7 ISA to also be 64-bit without much trouble at all (plenty of space in the ISA). Instead, we got a ground up redesign that has more in common with MIPS64 than with ARMv7 (to the point that it's fascinating that ARM and some others bought MIPS just to get patent rights before immediately selling them off again). I'm sure the go-to individual here i…

When you're designing a new chip and working at a a fabless semiconductor startup, that doesn't mean you're free from corporate constraints. The most obvious is that if you design an ARM-based chip, the company has to pay royalties, and if you design a RISC-V chip, you don't.

ARM typically charges 1-2% in royalties. A company has to sell a LOT of chips for this to be the driving factor. In the case of a startup, we're talking about eliminating two entire teams costing tens to hundreds of millions per year and probably getting to market faster. You can sell a LOT of chips for even a small 100M R&D cost.

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is the Surface Laptop Studio, a different computer than the one that I named

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

#317
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let's analyze 3 real cores. 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) fo…

> 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).

As well as the Sony/IBM Cell processor used in the PS3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)

Wide SIMD or just in-order massive FP capabilities is not new. But it is hard to program for.

In many ways special purpose ASICs fill this role if you just need raw massive FP capabilities. Or eventually memory embedded computing can even take this further.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

DirectCompute is only the execution of fully trained neural networks, so they can skip all the gradient calculations, which are the compute-heavy and memory-heavy part. To give you and idea, I need 24GB of GPU RAM to build a background separation model, but once it's finished, it's only 500kb of parameters and it can run on CPU in JavaScript in realtime. As for the friction, CUDA is easy enough for motivated gaming k…

DirectCompute is pretty close to CUDA. When handled with care, it can do these compute-heavy pieces with similar performance.

The main downside is the libraries: cuBLAS, cuFFT, and similar pieces of CUDA are manually optimized, and nVidia ships multiple versions of these compute kernels for different GPUs. DirectCompute doesn’t have an equivalent, need to implement manually in HLSL. This can be tricky because for optimal performance different chips need slightly different implementations.

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

#319
post #126

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'…

AMD is going to be on the same node as Apple as of this year - Apple is not moving onto N3, they're staying on N5P, and Zen4 will also be N5P, so we can make iso-node comparisons.

This will be juicy come the fall!

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

#320
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's analyze 3 real cores. 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) fo…

> 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). As well as the Sony/IBM Cell processor used in the PS3…

The Cell was a very flawed implementation.

Load hit store issues where you could wait around almost a hundred cycles (and stall it because no OoO). Getting rid of SMT and adding complete OoO support would have been a much better result even if the die area was a bit bigger as a result.

The SPE had NO branch prediction and were pretty close to VLIW in design. It relied on the provably false trope of a "sufficiently advanced compiler" that can somehow solve the halting problem and of course leading to a 50-50 chance that you plowed ahead on the wrong branch and now must wait almost 20 cycles for everything to reset. As it only had 128 registers to unroll loops into, this problem is basically guaranteed to happen a lot.

They didn't provide any cache per core. Instead, programmers have to micromanage the 256k of RAM as if it were cache. Accurately predicting every possible memory pattern is impossible (it would require proving all execution paths which the halting problem says is impossible). Even modern GPUs include cache and choose the appropriate fetching patterns on the fly.

I'll also note that the SPE used a different ISA from the CPU (PPE) which adds yet another layer of headaches.

We'll never know how powerful the cell could have been because it had so many footguns that devs were seemingly incapable of avoiding all of them. These problems were called out by places like Anandtech or Real World Tech a year and a half before the PS3 launched and was then reiterated by the people using it.

Sony allegedly took to threatening teams that wanted to release their finished xbox 360 games before the PS3 version and even took to flying around a couple teams of cell developers to try to get games out the door quicker.

A system using the same ISA for both CPU and GPU isn't such a common idea in practice. There are supposedly a couple companies trying to use RISC-V to do this. I guess we'll have to wait and see what they can come up with. I certainly don't see them repeating these major mistakes.

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