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Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

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Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#11

Post by rbanffy »

poisonborz wrote: post #8
zibzab wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the kind of risk people warned about. You cannot do everything in-house and think you can always be better than every other company in the world. One bad year in one department and your competitors will eat your market share.

No, this is exactly the opposite. If you lock in your users in an ecosystem that's compatible with exactly nothing outside, they will happily eat your marginal updates for years. Even if problems would endure, Apple can plan calmly, as the switch would be much more costly for its customers.

I'd say it's too soon to call the updates marginal. This is a process improvement with some, small, architectural improvement. You can't pull an M1-level improvement on every generation.

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#12

Post by rbanffy »

mightymercado wrote: post #9
codingpanic wrote: post #5

Grinds to a halt? The M1 was quite possibly the best consumer ARM cpu in the past year and CPU development has just stopped? M1X/M2 is expected later this year, wait until then before we all decide Apple is "doomed." Could it be that the phone is getting more incremental boosts in a time where the Mac/iPad is getting the real improvements? I think its much more likely that the effects of COVID measures are just now b…

The M1 is essentially a large version of the A14 chip and uses the same firestorm and icestorm cores. With such unsubstantial improvements in the A15, the M2 should theoretically also have unsubstantial gains because it will be a large version of A15. The article also mentions that some key technical staff jumped ship so that might somehow halt innovation.

How substantial really depends on the workload. It's small in single-thread performance, but it's easy to grow it with more cores and I'd love to see a lot of background processes moving to more icestorm cores to keep the firestorm ones free.

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#13

Post by rbanffy »

zibzab wrote: post #2

> "Apple has been long hailed for having the best CPU cores for consumer workloads for years. They have by far the highest performance per clock and efficiency driven by performance in the same class as AMD and Intel’s best current CPUs. This was driven by breakneck gains with architectural changes every year for a decade." I don't think this is event remotely correct to begin with (Apple advantage was in mips-per-wa…

> Apple advantage was in mips-per-watt. AMD wipes the floor with them in performance department

Are we talking single or multi-core? I don't think they are far in single-thread performance.

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#14

Post by pjmlp »

poisonborz wrote: post #8
zibzab wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the kind of risk people warned about. You cannot do everything in-house and think you can always be better than every other company in the world. One bad year in one department and your competitors will eat your market share.

No, this is exactly the opposite. If you lock in your users in an ecosystem that's compatible with exactly nothing outside, they will happily eat your marginal updates for years. Even if problems would endure, Apple can plan calmly, as the switch would be much more costly for its customers.

They managed to do that the first time for about 20 years, then had to be rescued.

Now they have enough money to do that more than just 20 years, but nothing lasts forever.

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#15

Post by matthewmacleod »

zibzab wrote: post #2

> "Apple has been long hailed for having the best CPU cores for consumer workloads for years. They have by far the highest performance per clock and efficiency driven by performance in the same class as AMD and Intel’s best current CPUs. This was driven by breakneck gains with architectural changes every year for a decade." I don't think this is event remotely correct to begin with (Apple advantage was in mips-per-wa…

the architecture was mostly created by ARM

What do you think this means?

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#16

Post by TimTheTinker »

codingpanic wrote: post #5

Grinds to a halt? The M1 was quite possibly the best consumer ARM cpu in the past year and CPU development has just stopped? M1X/M2 is expected later this year, wait until then before we all decide Apple is "doomed." Could it be that the phone is getting more incremental boosts in a time where the Mac/iPad is getting the real improvements? I think its much more likely that the effects of COVID measures are just now b…

Could it be that rivals are behind these negative articles and trying to drum up negative PR by spinning them and not telling the whole truth?

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#18

Post by webmobdev »

rbanffy wrote: post #10
webmobdev wrote: post #3

The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitatio…

> non-upgradeable SoC That doesn't seem to be slowing down sales of laptops and minis, or phones. Memory is tightly packed, but that's for SoC size - the processor tile talks to the memory via a DDR4 bus on the SoC board and can easily talk to memory across the motherboard. I'd bet on that for future ARM-based MacPro's and upgradable iMacs. Making a socketed M1/M1X/M2/M2X is a matter of packaging, IF Apple wants it:…

> That doesn't seem to be slowing down sales of laptops and minis

It did and that's why Apple themselves had to backtrack when the Mini with the soldered RAM and SSD failed to sell as much as anticipated. (That's why the next version had swappable RAM, and not soldered).

All things being equal, people will always choose the device that is more easy to repair and upgradeable.

Apple has 2 things going for the M1 devices:

- They are priced cheaper to make the hardware attractive.

- They offer similar performance to AMD CPUs (with the advantage of lower power consumption.)

Both these factors help overcome the obvious deficiency - that the hardware is not upgradeable or repairable and the system software is limited to one OS. If Apple's ARM processors cannot keep up with AMD / Intel / other ARM cpus, both hardware and software limitations become glaring. And Apple is left with only the price advantage. (And we all know that Apple doesn't play that game as it isn't interested in the low margins market).

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#19

Post by webmobdev »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #16
codingpanic wrote: post #5

Grinds to a halt? The M1 was quite possibly the best consumer ARM cpu in the past year and CPU development has just stopped? M1X/M2 is expected later this year, wait until then before we all decide Apple is "doomed." Could it be that the phone is getting more incremental boosts in a time where the Mac/iPad is getting the real improvements? I think its much more likely that the effects of COVID measures are just now b…

Could it be that rivals are behind these negative articles and trying to drum up negative PR by spinning them and not telling the whole truth?

Could be. But then it should be easy to verify the facts - did 100's of Apple engineers, along with senior ones, leave Apple CPU division? And does the Apple ARM division suffer because of this talent drain? The whole article makes assumptions based on these facts. Perhaps the assumptions may be exaggerated ... but if people working on the M1 left Apple, it would certainly be an issue for Apple.

Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim

#20

Post by webmobdev »

ginko wrote: post #6
webmobdev wrote: post #3

The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitatio…

>this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus I'm sure Qualcomm & Co. would happily help them out if they're in a bind with their own design.

I meant their own ARM cpus. If they have to turn to someone else they lose the price advantage, in which case it doesn't make sense to run their own CPU division to manufacture CPUs.
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