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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#231

Post by mijkal »

girvo wrote: post #52
ksec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015 . From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip…

Silly idea: could they put a M-series processor connected to a Xeon as a coprocessor to get the “benefits” of both wrt. adding their NPU stuff? Would that even make any sense?

Once upon a time, Apple shipped a few models with both Motorola PPC + Intel x86 CPUs.

Eg: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_quadra/specs/mac_quad...

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#232

Post by inkyoto »

philistine wrote: post #151
sylens wrote: post #76

Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using. T…

In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the…

> […] and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips.

«Laptop parts» connect M1 CPU clusters to RAM via a 512-bit wide (M1 Max) and a 1024-bit wide (M1 Ultra) memory bus yielding 100 Gb/sec (per a CPU core), 200 Gb/sec (per a CPU cluster) and 400 (M1 Max)/800 (M1 Ultra) Gb/sec cumulative data transfer speeds. GPU and ANE cores access the main memory via the same wide memory bus. L1 caches (I+D) are 128kB+64 kb (efficiency cores) and 192+128 kb (performance); L2 caches are 24 Mb (M1 Max) and 48 Mb (M1 Ultra), and L3 cache is 48 Mb (Max) and 96 Mb (Ultra). Auxiliary tasks (disk encryption, video encoding/decoding etc) are off-loaded to dedicated processing units which is reminiscent to that a typical mainframe architecture with channel processors and channel programmes rather than that of a laptop.

Most «hi-end» servers today do not come anywhere close to such configurations leave alone the form factor and the net system efficiency. 512-bit wide memory bus is currently only found inside hi-end GPU cards, and the compute off-loading / accelerating units are an add-on feature for a server that may or may not be available.

Only POWER10 and Telum systems from IBM offer similar (albeit far more scalable and feature rich) designs and at a completely different price scale.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#233

Post by wtallis »

martinald wrote: post #185
SirGiggles wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say efficiency instead? It's to my understanding that the latest offerings from both AMD and Intel are competitive in regards to synthetic benchmarks at the cost of higher power consumption.

The other problem with Apple is just how expensive the RAM/SSD upgrades are now. I've got a Mac Mini M1 as soon as it came out. I recently got a Ryzen PC, 6 core 5600G w/ 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Cost approx £500. Upgrading the M1 spec from 256GB SSD to 1TB (£400) costs basically the same as the entire PC I bought. I'm impressed with the 5600G, it is super cool and quiet compared to what I was expecting and the 32GB of…

> I'm pretty sure that hasn't increased since I got the retina macbook pro in 2012 unless I'm mistaken?

They were still using 128GB SSDs in the entry-level 13" MBP from 2015 (replaced by the touchbar MBP in late 2016, but not actually discontinued until sometime in 2017).

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#234

Post by wtallis »

inkyoto wrote: post #232
philistine wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the…

> […] and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. «Laptop parts» connect M1 CPU clusters to RAM via a 512-bit wide (M1 Max) and a 1024-bit wide (M1 Ultra) memory bus yielding 100 Gb/sec (per a CPU core), 200 Gb/sec (per a CPU cluster) and 400 (M1 Max)/800 (M1 Ultra) Gb/sec cumulative data transfer speeds. GPU and ANE cores access the main memory…

> 512-bit wide memory bus is currently only found inside hi-end GPU cards,

AMD EPYC CPUs just went from 512-bit DDR4 to 768-bit DDR5, per socket.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#235

Post by wtallis »

Maxburn wrote: post #187
Maxburn wrote: post #43

Niagara makes HVAC control software and there's a big push to get it Mac compatible. Seems like a terrible time to make the investment now with two architectures involved. Prolonging the transition isn't in anybody interest.

People that are downvoting, what am I missing? Developers either target apple silicon and ignore intel, ignore apple silicon and rely on rosetta2 for as long as that's here, or invest in both to optimize performance and just eat all the extra work both require? I'm not a mac user, is there such a thing as making a app targeting apple silicon work on a x86 machine? If someone is looking to add their application to Mac…

Why would anything in HVAC control software be written in a way that is at all specific to a particular CPU architecture? Most software really doesn't need to use inline assembly or SIMD intrinsics, so usually the only extra effort to support both x86 and arm is in configuring the build system correctly.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#236

Post by nerdbert »

yakubin wrote: post #115

I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in gen…

Something is unusual in your situation. I am a very intense Mac user and I see maybe one application crash a year.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#237

Post by inkyoto »

wtallis wrote: post #234
inkyoto wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. «Laptop parts» connect M1 CPU clusters to RAM via a 512-bit wide (M1 Max) and a 1024-bit wide (M1 Ultra) memory bus yielding 100 Gb/sec (per a CPU core), 200 Gb/sec (per a CPU cluster) and 400 (M1 Max)/800 (M1 Ultra) Gb/sec cumulative data transfer speeds. GPU and ANE cores access the main memory…

> 512-bit wide memory bus is currently only found inside hi-end GPU cards, AMD EPYC CPUs just went from 512-bit DDR4 to 768-bit DDR5, per socket .

… which is another testament to the fact that a wide memory bus is an attribute of server or hi-end components rather than «laptop parts» that one can throw into a bucket, stir vigorously, cook on a slow fire and get a M1 Ultra with a 1024-bit wide memory bus.

I ought to have used «typically» rather than «currently» as wide memory buses were coming and going more mainstream in the server space, whilst not yet being widely available today. The hardware transition cycle will take a few years, and as of today «currently» still holds true, semantically and factually, as cloud platforms and data centres run nearly entirely exclusively on Xeon something Lake and EPYC 3rd Gen CPU's, and neither has such a wide memory bus.

> … per socket.

Does that mean that 2x socketable EPYC CPU's (say, 512-bit wide each) will be able to access RAM via a 1x 1024-bit wide memory bus? If yes, how will access to RAM work, i.e. access multiplexing – memory banks? time interleaved access? something else?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#238

Post by pjmlp »

philistine wrote: post #230
Damogran6 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. Apple's decisions and methods have been criticized for longer than many HN viewers have been alive. The OP is making a claim that Apple's decisions are unwise [i]despite the fact that it's the most profitable company evar[/i] cite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-3-trillion-market-cap-fir... What chance can anyone else have if the Mac Pro is doomed if iPhone sales dip?

People have not updated their opinions with regards to facts since 2008. It might actually be new information to that person that Apple is now the most profitable company in the existence of the human race .

Because they got lucky by being reverse acquired by NeXT.

History would have taken another path without that reverse acquisition and Microsoft's money injection.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#239

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #83
UltraViolence wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

The Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...

The Apple before being reverse acquired by NeXT was at the edge of bankruptcy, so Macs hardly sustained them back them to the point that they even got Microsoft's money to keep going.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#240

Post by pjmlp »

UltraViolence wrote: post #58

I have famously predicted that sales of Mac's will decline and could even lead to a rout. Many professionals need Intel CPU support in order for them to run Windows on their Macbooks natively. And no, emulation isn't an option. I predict that Mac sales will sag and that this will lead Apple to slash more and more models, eventually undermining the legitimacy of the platform. Most users will switch to Linux on Intel l…

Eventually everyone that can afford a laptop will own one, and only replace them when it dies, the days of upgrading hardware every three years is long gone.
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