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

chipsandcheese.com

121–130 of 182 posts

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

#121
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world's most powerful CPU maybe the most powerful / watt - desktop CPUs like the 9950X are still way more powerful.

M4 still has a 10% higher Geekbench single core score than the 9950X.

Do note that the M4 is built on TSMC's 3nm process while the 9950X is built on the relatively older 4nm process. This has been the case for the earlier Apple ARM processors too, as Apple made deals with TSMC to get priority access to the newer processes. In the end as a user you get a slighly faster machine, but that doesn't mean that's all thanks to the CPU architecture.

Apple's also has lower memory latencies by virtue of being a SoC design. Memory speed is increasingly becoming the bottleneck compared to computing power. However this is done at the cost of other features, like repleacable/upgradable RAM and CPU, which the other desktop processors support. This is not to say that one is better than the other, but there are surely tradeoffs involved.

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

#122
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clocks aren't the only way to race. Powering up the massive core with it's over a dozen pipelines, massive reorder buffer, etc. is another way. This is they way Apple has chose to focus on.

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

#123
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Linux in a VM on my M1 mac all day long. That VM was the fastest Linux instance I had anywhere. Faster the my 5950 and way faster than anything in cloud. Your can't using it is your choice.

Sir, in the comment you're replying to, I was talking about the iPad here, not the Mac where you can indeed use most of the M chips potential while on the iPad you can't do that.

Look at such a fruitful branch of the conversation that you created! Did you think that would be an option when you bought it? Don't answer.

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

#124
post #119
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like a lot less I think quite a bit more. Meteor Lake seems to have faster ~100% multicore and ~25% single core performance and better battery life.

Still have double the power draw of my entire desktop mac. For a supposed mobile chip. Intel power consumption/heat is terrible

That wasn't the question, they did improve tremendously over the last 4 because the were basically not doing anything 4 years prior to that...

To be fair desktop Macs these days are just laptops without a screen so it's not that surprising. Of course they are significantly more power efficient but also much slower than high end AMD/Intel chips (if you don't care about heat/power usage that much like a lot of desktop users).

Also even on mobile 165H seems to be not that far from M3 e.g. 10-20% worse battery life, slightly slower single core but faster multi-core. Not ideal but considering where Intel was when M1 came out not that bad either.

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

#125
post #117
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot emphasise strongly enough how niche "compile the Linux kernel" You can replace that with compile pretty much any software in general or do any real software development on it which isn't even remotely niche...

I think that even software development in general is pretty niche; about 29 million of us worldwide, putting us significantly behind sex workers (40 million or so), which I get the impression most regard as (at the very least) an unusual profession? I want to say it's also way behind the number of YouTube channels, but I can't find a citation for the 3rd party claim of "114 million" active channels, though obviously…

I doubt there are more professional video editors than software developers (or people working in related areas/fields).

Even if we focus on video editing the apps available on the iPad and they are crippled by having very low amounts of memory which also makes "professional" usage rather difficult. The iPad Pro is mainly a luxury product for people who just want the "best" iPad and don't really care about the cost.

> 114 million" active channels

You should be comparing this to the number of active Github accounts or something like that which seems to be about the same.

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

#126
post #124
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still have double the power draw of my entire desktop mac. For a supposed mobile chip. Intel power consumption/heat is terrible

That wasn't the question, they did improve tremendously over the last 4 because the were basically not doing anything 4 years prior to that... To be fair desktop Macs these days are just laptops without a screen so it's not that surprising. Of course they are significantly more power efficient but also much slower than high end AMD/Intel chips (if you don't care about heat/power usage that much like a lot of desktop…

You’re the one that brought battery life into it, which certainly does put power consumption in play.

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

#127
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M4 still has a 10% higher Geekbench single core score than the 9950X.

Do note that the M4 is built on TSMC's 3nm process while the 9950X is built on the relatively older 4nm process. This has been the case for the earlier Apple ARM processors too, as Apple made deals with TSMC to get priority access to the newer processes. In the end as a user you get a slighly faster machine, but that doesn't mean that's all thanks to the CPU architecture. Apple's also has lower memory latencies by vi…

> end as a user you get a slighly faster machine

You don't, though. Unless you only care about single core performance and/or power usage.

Apple's chips are not even close to AMD/Intel value wise when it comes to MT performance on desktop. The $6,999 Mac Pro somehow losses to the $400 14700K (of course you still need a GPU/etc. but unless you care about niche use cases i.e. very high amounts of VRAM, you can get a GPU equivalent to the M2 Ultra for another $300-400 or so)

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

#128
post #126
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't the question, they did improve tremendously over the last 4 because the were basically not doing anything 4 years prior to that... To be fair desktop Macs these days are just laptops without a screen so it's not that surprising. Of course they are significantly more power efficient but also much slower than high end AMD/Intel chips (if you don't care about heat/power usage that much like a lot of desktop…

You’re the one that brought battery life into it, which certainly does put power consumption in play.

Well yeah... I was saying that they improved power consumption massively compared to Apple since 2020. Which is true.

10th gen was horrible and now they have almost caught up with the M series.

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

#129
post #128
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re the one that brought battery life into it, which certainly does put power consumption in play.

Well yeah... I was saying that they improved power consumption massively compared to Apple since 2020. Which is true. 10th gen was horrible and now they have almost caught up with the M series.

According to Wikipedia the lastest meteor lakes have a peak draw of 57w. My entire Mac Studio draws 38w.

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

#130
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the year of Linux on the desktop It already happened: Windows + WSL2. Windows is the best linux distro.

Eh, yes and no. Windows kernel plus it's backend features for security, emulation and virtualization, which enable things like WSL2 and backwards compatibility to work are great, but they're hampered by a crap front end with news, ads, web search in start menu, and dark patterns everywhere being forced down your throat like OneDrive holding your files ransom in the cloud if you don't pay attention or the failed push…

So on my main PC I have Windows 11 and NixOS. I don't remember the last time I've rebooted to linux. Simply because, thanks to home-manager, my terminal experience is identical between nixos in WSL2 and nixos on bare metal.

But yeah, Windows 11 was a bit of a downgrade compared to Windows 10 in terms of how much needless shit has been added to it.

> learning to fix the rough edges of Linux will serve me better in my career than trying to keep up with and fight the dark pattern frog that Microsoft keeps boiling slowly.

Yes, but pretty much everything desktop related is completely useless in non-desktop use-cases. I'd rather go back to macOS.

"fun story": couple weeks ago I had to do something that was not possible in WSL2 due to how esp32 devboard I had worked. I've decided to add linux vm to my freebsd server, and passthrough usb controller that conveniently was plugged in (unused). Simply because I knew that the moment I reboot to linux I might get sidetracked into fixing my linux on desktop instead of working.

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