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Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

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Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#61

Post by hajile »

monocasa wrote: post #48
Rinzler89 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, becaus…

To a degree, that makes sense. Due to the end of dennard scaling, most high end raw compute makes more sense as more but simpler cores, and has for a long time. For instance the blue gene supercomputers made of tons of pretty individually anemic PowerPC 4xx cores. For battery powered devices, race to sleep is the current meta, where once you have some bit of heavy compute work, you power up a big core, run it fast to…

Because clockspeed ramps power exponentially, there’s a limit to how high you can clock before the cost of racing outweighs the savings of running a short time.

I believe I’ve read that Apple’s chips run under 3GHz unless their job runs longer than 100-150ms. I suspect that’s their peak race to sleep range.

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#62

Post by ben_w »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #53
ben_w wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like MKBHD, calling it a overpriced Netflix machine. I've not seen that quote anywhere. Google no longer actually finding quotes no longer means the quote isn't present on the internet, so do you have a citation for that?

It wasn't a quote, just implied via other words and expressions. Watch his M4 iPad review.

I did*, he didn't.

You might have "overpriced if used as a", but not "it's overpriced and only a".

* Assuming "What" is a typo for "watch"; gosh, isn't auto-corrupt an annoying part of this era…

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#63

Post by runjake »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #36
runjake wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a benchmark flex. I have been using Linux since 1992, for many or most of those years on both desktop and server. I am currently more productive while on an Apple Silicon Mac. I would venture to guess that for most people, they would be more productive on a Mac or an iPad versus Linux. Pedantry: To my knowledge, there was no M3 iPad.

The question from me was whether the M4 makes iPad users more productive vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was, not if the iPad itself make you more productive than Linux or window s. And since people keep bringing up the M4 as the yardstick in discussions on generic X86 and Qualcomm chips, then my productivity metric for comparison was also meant in a global generic way, as in the general purpose compute chip…

  > The question was whether the M4 makes you more productive on the iPad vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was
This same question applies to any other computing platform upgrade. So far, the hardware for most common platforms far out-scales the majority of use cases.

Nonetheless, tech must and is advancing, regardless. Every platform is releasing newer and faster versions, and only a tiny fraction will make use of that power year over year.

As to the rest of your comment, I see what you're saying, but those are your opinions. However, the vast majority of the user base would probably disagree with you, because they are not technical people.

They are productive on these closed platforms. they have different workflows than you or I. I'm not very productive on these platforms. These are consumption devices for me. I need things like a development toolchain and a command-line interface to be productive.

By and large, non-technical people are Apple's target audience, not technical people. In raw numbers, these people outnumber technical people by an order of magnitude.

This dinosaur (me) recognizes that what constitutes a computer has evolved and shifted away from what I think of as a computer. And this shift will further continue.

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#64

Post by ben_w »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #56
dagmx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if your question is “what new capabilities did it unlock?” then doesn’t that apply to the whole CPU market? Did any of the stuff you mentioned you do has fundamentally changed in desktop in the last decade +. People like faster and snappier things. Along with that the new hardware unlocks the use of tandem oleds which is a big change for HDR creation and color accuracy. They go hand in hand. A lot of people c…

>Like this argument you’re proposing just boils down to “it doesn’t solve my needs and therefore I can’t imagine it solving other people’s needs” I never said that. I asked what needs does the M4 solve that the M3/2 couldn't? I asked that because people keep bring up the M4 in discussion, arguing against X86/Qualcomm chips, how they're slower than Apple's latest M4 chips, and for that I counteract with the fact that…

> I never said that. I asked what needs does the M4 solve that the M3/2 couldn't? I asked that because people keep bring up the M4 in discussion, arguing against X86/Qualcomm chips, how they're slower than Apple's latest M4 chips, and for that I counteract with the fact that for a lot of cases the M4's extra performance over x86/Qualcomm is irelevant since X86/Qualcomm chips solve different and a lot more diverse problems that the highly restrictive and niche problems the iPad solves.

If you think one brand of "chips solve different and a lot more diverse problems" than another, it sounds like you don't know what "Turing machine" means.

All chips can always do what other chips can do — eventually.

M4 is faster. That's it. That's the whole selling point.

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#65

Post by Rinzler89 »

runjake wrote: post #63
Rinzler89 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question from me was whether the M4 makes iPad users more productive vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was, not if the iPad itself make you more productive than Linux or window s. And since people keep bringing up the M4 as the yardstick in discussions on generic X86 and Qualcomm chips, then my productivity metric for comparison was also meant in a global generic way, as in the general purpose compute chip…

> The question was whether the M4 makes you more productive on the iPad vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was This same question applies to any other computing platform upgrade. So far, the hardware for most common platforms far out-scales the majority of use cases. Nonetheless, tech must and is advancing, regardless. Every platform is releasing newer and faster versions, and only a tiny fraction will make use…

>They are productive on these closed platforms.

I never said otherwise, I asked what's the point of commenters bringing up the M4 performance in comparisons with X86/Qualcomm when due to the open vs closed nature of the platforms they're not directly comparable because the M4 is much more restricted in the iPad vs the other chips.

That's like comparing a Ferrari to a van saying how much faster Ferraris are. Sure, a Fierari will always be faster than a van, but you can do a lot more things with a van than with a faster Ferrari, and just like M4 iPad Pros, Ferraris are lot less relevant to the function of society than vans which deliver your food, medicine, kids to school, etc. Is the M4 good for you and an improvement for your own workflow? Good for you, just don't compare it to X86 until it can run the same app as those chips.

Like you said, it's mostly a consumption device, and as such, the M4 is mostly wasted in that, until they bring it into a device with a more open OS that can run the same SW as the other X86/ARM platforms, which Apple delays intentionally because they're trying to nudge users off the open Mac platform towards the closed iPads OS platform for that sweet 30% AppStore cut they can't get on their devices running MacOS/Linux.

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#66

Post by immibis »

kernal wrote: post #29
bhouston wrote: post #2

From the article it seems like it clones a lot of the Apple M1 technology. So smart acquisition on Qualcomm's part to get competitive again. Apple engineers who worked on the Apple M4 should go start another company so Qualcomm can acquire it again for +1B. :). Or better yet, acquired by ARM themselves. It is likely that as this tech makes it to the smartphone market, Android phones are going to get a major speed boo…

>Android phones are going to get a major speed boost. They have been so uncompetitive against Apple for a while now. Uncompetitive? These numbers indicate otherwise while being on a previous generation TSMC 4nm node. Just imagine if they were on the same 3nm node as the A17. https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-list/rating https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8-gen-3-vs-apple...

It doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, if you can't run the software you need to.

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#67

Post by awesomepeter »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #55
Rinzler89 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, becaus…

Asahi Linux runs great on all of the M-series Macs

I think my M3 isn't supported yet and won't be for some time

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#68

Post by hajile »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #37
retskrad wrote: post #4

The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet without cooling. I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient consumer chips, years after the M1.

> I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Why are you saying this? The article doesn't seem to imply that? Apple isn't in any kind of trouble. But the gap between Apple and the competition does appear to be closing. Right now Apple's biggest advantage is they buy up all of TSMC supply for the latest node. They're always a littl…

The first 4 minute mile was revolutionary. It’s not ordinary today, but isn’t super surprising either.

Apple bet big that we hasn’t hit the limits of how wide a machine can go. They created ARM64 to push this idea as it tries to eliminate things that make this hard.

Everyone wrote off iPhone performance as mobile only and not really representative of performance on a “real” computer.

M1 changed that and set the clock ticking. Once everyone realized it was possible, they needed to adjust future plans and start work on their own copy (with companies like Nuvia having a head start in accepting the new way of things due to leadership who believed in M1 performance).

In the next few years, very wide machines will just be the way things are done and while they won’t be hyper common, they won’t be surprising either.

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#69

Post by seabrookmx »

spockz wrote: post #60
seabrookmx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but likely lima or colima if working with containers.

Is Lima or Colima so much better than docker desktop for Mac these days? In what respect, the performance?

I don't have recent experience with Docker Desktop. Around the time they went commercial we still had lots of stability issues with it (eating memory and needing restarted) so we told their sales people to take a hike. We tried Rancher Desktop for a while but something with their docker-cli implementation didn't play nice with dev containers so our remaining Mac users jumped to colima. For my part I'd had enough of faking docker/containerd on a non-native platform so I'm daily driving Linux (Fedora on a Framework 13). No more VM's for me :)

Re: Qualcomm's Oryon core: A long time in the making

#70

Post by gjsman-1000 »

dagmx wrote: post #26
Rinzler89 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, becaus…

That’s a very narrow definition of “useful” and one I’d say is rather focused on yourself? Why is Linux the arbiter of what is “useful”? Why would it still be a benchmark flex if it was on macOS, an Os where millions of people do professional work everyday? And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well?

> And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well?

For my family, the iPhone and other Apple devices are the ultimate productivity machines. The App Store, fantastic.

Why? Because they are (rightly) terrified of installing apps on Windows. Or any “computer.” They’ve been burned too many times, warned too many times. Unless it’s Microsoft Office, it doesn’t happen. “Programs” are a threat.

But apps? Apps don’t hurt you. iPhones and iPads turn on every day when you want them to, they act predictably, it feels consistent in a way a laptop is not. As for the speed of the chip only being useful for “consumption” - technology advances. That A10 Fusion powered iPad from 6 years ago stings to use now, even though it was plenty comfortable at the time. 5 years from now, nobody will regret an M4.

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