Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon? • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by zinekeller » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

stevenjgarner wrote: post #62

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.

I think the @simonh "domination" point is that Apple has dominated the mobile phone CPU PROFITABILITY landscape, not the SALES landscape, and I for one feel @simonh has a valid point.

To emphasise, according to Counterpoint Research as of last year (https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-handset-market-o...) Apple is able to maintain 75% of the total profits on the phone market, while Samsung only captures 13% and others (including Xiaomi and the BBK group) capturing the remaining 12% with no single company peaking above 5%. Apple could store two-thirds of its profits offshore (waiting for an opportunate tax break) while only moving a third of that profits into actual use and it will still be better than Samsung's position.

(Rant specific to HN: some even are comparing IIS sales. Geez, it seems that most here are not willing to understand correctly what the GGP's comment pointed out is that Apple has a massive R&D budget that is unbeatable.)

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

#102

Post by onepointsixC » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #87

XCSme wrote: post #55

> achieves 87% of the performance of the Intel 12900K and Nvidia RTX 3090 combined This sounds insane (not in a good way). A 3090 destroys M1 Ultra in tasks like machine learning, 3090 being 5x-10x faster than the M1 Ultra.

I dont fall in the "apple has changed the world" camp, but bear in mind what you're saying here - the flagship $1500 MSRP GPU is less than an order of magnitude quicker than a $2000 (total) device, with less than half the power usage. That's a pretty impressive feat for a first attempt.

> the flagship $1500 MSRP GPU is less than an order of magnitude quicker than a $2000 (total) device

Could you point out which precise Apple device you are thinking of? Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra appear to be $3999 MSRP, and I was assuming that's the cheapest option for an M1 Ultra.

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

#103

Post by agsnu » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #99

alberth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple was able to just create a new CPU based on the much more modern ARM architecture Is that accurate? x86 launched in 1978. (64bit in 2003). ARM launched in 1985. (64bit in 2011). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

X86-64 INCLUDES all the legacy cruft of x86-32 and x86-16 and is thus 44 years old. Aarch64 in Apple chips doesn’t include A32 and is thus 11 years old. It is indeed a large age difference.

Apple was also the first vendor to ship an ARMv8-A compatible chip; I'm sure there have been reports that they heavily influenced the design of AArch64 but I can't dig them out right now.

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

#104

Post by dmitrygr » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #78

rob74 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

Do we know whether that x86 backward compatibility is all that problematic? If I’m not mistaken, it is only used as a “public API” even in current CPUs, and on a microcode level it doesn’t have as much relevance.

For example: Decode. One of the things Apple CPUs keep being praised for is how wide they are. To be wide effectively and keep your execution units busy, you need a wide decoder. With aarch64 it is easy. Every instruction is 4 bytes on a 4 byte boundary. Want a 4-wide decoder? Ingest 16 bytes and copy-and-paste the same decoder 4 times.

X86 instructions are variable-length: 1-15 bytes. And you do not know how long any instruction is until you read almost every byte of it (there is no length byte up front - it is just a list of prefixes). Thus to make a 4-wide decoder you need to ingest up to 60 bytes, and your decoder cannot start on instruction #2 till it finds the end of # 1. (Or guess, and rewind as needed). Much harder and a rather long dependency chain for decoder #4 to even get started.

Now say you want to go wider: 8-wide.

Arm64: copy and paste same decoders again. Done

X86: Now you need to ingest 120 bytes, and find even more boundaries, each depending on the previous - an even longer dependency chain. Decoder #8 cannot start till #1 - #7 are almost done. A mess nobody has managed to solve yet.

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

#105

Post by johnklos » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:38 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #98

rob74 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

> much more modern ARM architecture ARM is nearly as old as x86 and has had just as many evolutions in architecture as x86.

But ARM didn't start out as a shitpile of attempted backwards compatibility with an 8 bit CPU. The i8086 was made as an evolution of the i8080.

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

#106

Post by phoe-krk » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #97

rob74 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

> Apple was able to just create a new CPU based on the much more modern ARM architecture Is that accurate? x86 launched in 1978. (64bit in 2003). ARM launched in 1985. (64bit in 2011). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

You should not consider the dates that support for these initial revisions had started, you should consider the dates it had been dropped. For x86, it's "never", unlike for modern ARM (see sibling comment).

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

#107

Post by qeternity » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

uniqueuid wrote: post #14

qeternity wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> magnitudes faster No...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS Intel Rocket Lake FP64: 32 Flops per core per cycle at 8 cores and 5GHz Nvidia Ampere: 1/32 Flops per core per cycle at 2048 cores and ~2 GHz Even though there are more architectural differences, there IS a difference in orders of magnitude ... for the things that you can do on a GPU (SIMD).

> here IS a difference in orders of magnitude

No, that is a single order of magnitude.

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

#108

Post by bee_rider » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

matwood wrote: post #76

pella wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are supposed to go after Apple in this area, Talent can be poached [1] and Technology can be acquired [2] [1] "Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips" https://hothardware.com/news/intel-poaches-head-apple-silico... [2] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/03/qualcomm-comp... ------ The real problem - Apple is slowing down [3][4] [3] "Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt…

Doom and gloom for Apple is a common way to get clicks. The M2 in many workloads looks like ~20% increase which is certainly not a slowdown for YoY performance. Additionally, everyone is alway 2 years out from beating what Apple is selling today, ignoring where Apple will be in 2 years. With that said, of course competitors can catch up with what Apple is doing. Doing things you link to is how, and it's exactly how c…

How could we define a slowdown or speedup in YoY performance improvements, for the M2? It is the first successor.

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

#109

Post by pca006132 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #90

tambourine_man wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software changes much faster these days. We are all dealing with high abstraction layers and legacy x86/64 and even CUDA can be replaced without much disruption in most cases. If it’s proven that Apple can consistently provide better performance per watt per dollar and have enough chips available that people can actually buy, I think they can stand a chance to gain the AI market.

"even CUDA can be replaced without much disruption in most cases" Tell that to AMD who's been missing out on the very lucrative government data-center market because they can't replace CUDA well enough. BTW, PyTorch and TensorFlow still ship without AMD support despite AMD's ROCm being around for 6 years now.

iirc there are comments saying that ROCm is not very mature yet. I wish OpenCL can evolve to compete with CUDA

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

#110

Post by zinekeller » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #64

dav43 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read “dominates” as has the “dominate share of the profits for the industry”. Not dominates shipments.

By that metric Microsoft utterly dominates the web server market.

Yes, but that's not the point here. I don't know what Microsoft does with their IIS profits but Apple is definitely reinvesting them back into making better phones.