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Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

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

#111

Post by alberth »

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.

But ARMv8-A is backward compatible.

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

#112

Post by pca006132 »

defactoPun wrote: post #50
breadloaf wrote: post #46

In general what I see as a massive issue for ARM and big win for x86 is standardization (or in case of ARM lack of) - Can you run ARM system on any ARM processor, or are you limited by core architecture, endianness (BE/LE), and RAM addressing, forcing you to recompile for specific SoC? I honestly don't know what are the exact limitations. - Can you boot any ARM processor in one specific way like x86 processor? No you…

Can there be a software side compensation for this lack of standardisation? Because I too don't see any hardware standard coming very soon to ARM and I don't think it can even. But, maybe there can be a build automation which can handle all the hassle and minimize the randomness?

I thought user-space applications should be fine? Bootloaders that kind of stuff has to deal with low-level interfaces and those do differ from SoCs to SoCs.

You can build multiple functions to handle different architectures by function multi-versioning[1], not sure if it works for embedded though.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Function-Multiversioning....

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

#113

Post by zinekeller »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56
simonh wrote: post #18

Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology. Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments…

> 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'm sorry but I have to label this as a bad-faith attack. "dominates" in this context means being the fastest available, not necessarily that most people will buy that. It's like saying "the i9/Ryzen 7 dominates" and then answering with "most people buys Celerons/Athlons". You need to read the context of the conversation: it is about performance domination and not usershare domination.

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

#114

Post by modeless »

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple's performance again.

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

#115

Post by cmrdporcupine »

breadloaf wrote: post #46

In general what I see as a massive issue for ARM and big win for x86 is standardization (or in case of ARM lack of) - Can you run ARM system on any ARM processor, or are you limited by core architecture, endianness (BE/LE), and RAM addressing, forcing you to recompile for specific SoC? I honestly don't know what are the exact limitations. - Can you boot any ARM processor in one specific way like x86 processor? No you…

Almost nobody actually runs ARM in big-endian. I suspect although the ISA is technically capable of endian switch many SoCs wouldn't even work in BE.

I seem to recall trying to get uboot and and RPi to boot big endian at one point and it was infeasible.

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

#116

Post by abc_lisper »

dmitrygr wrote: post #104
kaba0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Excellent answer. I learnt something today!

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

#117

Post by bee_rider »

datavirtue wrote: post #69
TruthWillHurt wrote: post #39

Quoted post unavailable.

The first thing I did with my M1 MBP was fire up my game of choice for the last twelve years. It performed adequately, and respectably, but the performance is not equal to my Nvidia 1060/70. Still, I shut off my modern i5+Nvidia desktop that day and haven't turned it on since. MBP is too damn fast (holy shit the build times!!) and too damn quiet to go back. The M1 put the i5 in a headlock and had it begging for mercy…

One of Apple's major advantages, I think, is that they don't use very many shitty components. Meanwhile, OEMs always cheap out on components that don't produce the numbers that consumers understand -- hard drive? memory? Who cares! Here's the core count and clock frequency.

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

#118

Post by dmitrygr »

alberth wrote: post #111
dmitrygr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But ARMv8-A is backward compatible.

Armv8 aarch32 (32-bit) support is optional and hasn’t existed in Apple CPUs for years… (according to jail breakers and public SDK info). Aarch32 is a separate mode so dropping it is easy. In x86 you cannot drop 32bit because… it is part of the 64-bit mode and needed.

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

#119

Post by paulmd »

bee_rider wrote: post #108
matwood wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Despite the M1 moniker, Apple has been doing in-house silicon for about 7 generations now - they started with A7 iirc, and M1 is part of the A14 generation, and M2 is part of the A15 generation. M1 is what would have traditionally been called an "A14X", meaning wider GPU than the phone-sized SOC. So there are basically 8 generations of YoY comparisons to make.

M2 is not a particularly large jump as these generations go, but it's on the same node and it's actually decent in that context.

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

#120

Post by alberth »

phoe-krk wrote: post #106
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

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).

ARM only officially dropped 32bit support last year.

https://m.gsmarena.com/arm_will_drop_32bit_support_in_the_bi...

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