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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?

#131

Post by wmf »

chrsig wrote: post #122
modeless wrote: post #114

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'…

I was under the impression that having it all as an SoC was a significant benefit by cutting down latency between components.

Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have been shipping SoCs for years.

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

#132

Post by jurmous »

user_named wrote: post #47

Perhaps the competition will instead come from China. Xiaomi, OPPO both make their own chipset now.

ASML is banned to sell the newest machines to China so I don't think it will happen soon.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/asml-still-has-no-licence...

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

#133

Post by wmf »

modeless wrote: post #114

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'…

That's not true. Compare the 8+ Gen 1 (TSMC N4) against A15 (TSMC N5).

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

#134

Post by jurmous »

throwaway4good wrote: post #80
user_named wrote: post #47

Perhaps the competition will instead come from China. Xiaomi, OPPO both make their own chipset now.

China has their infamous five year plans and for 2025 they have a goal of suppying 70% of their own semiconductor demand. So it is pretty much given that we will see high-end Chinese CPUs by then.

Good luck with that if you cannot get the latest chipmaking machines from ASML. There is basically no competitor to ASML for latest gen chipmaking machines.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/asml-still-has-no-licence...

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

#135

Post by paulmd »

fxtentacle wrote: post #7

For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component. It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination. Also, I expect that the 5nm process is res…

> It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it.

"I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him."

Yes, a misquotation, but still. The Java/JVM world has dived into it. Java is all JVM code and it's platform-independent, and unlike, say, Python, the Java world never dived that heavily into native-interface code that tied them to a specific instruction set, they built a faster JVM instead of going out to native code. M1 is so good you can get better performance on a M1 MBA with significantly longer battery life compared to an i9 MBP of the previous generation.

Same for average users who don't do any of the developer things - HN itself is a bubble and most users don't know or care the uarch is different at all, they just know a base-tier M1 feels better than an i9, and they're right.

> So I would expect an AMD CPU on TSMCs 5nm to be pretty close in terms of performance per watt. It's just that the mainstream market isn't willing to pay the premium price for 5nm yet

Apple and AMD are going to be on the same node this year.

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

#136

Post by marcinzm »

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.

I mean, the top and bottom GPUs of any generation differ by much less than 10x the performance but do differ by 5-10x the price. The 3090 is $1500 while the 3050 is $250 so 6x the price. The 3090 is only 2-3x the performance of the 3050.

There's large diminishing returns as you push performance to the utter maximum.

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

#137

Post by wmf »

daneel_w wrote: post #26
pclmulqdq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple uses LPDDR RAM which is a very different protocol. It is actually faster than DDR, and this may be a big part of the performance difference. For obvious reasons, desktop CPUs cannot use LPDDR RAM, because you can't put it in DIMM form.

Are you really sure about that? I thought LPDDR is all about low power consumption - running at half the frequency but making up for it by twice the bus width, ending up at same performance but with an emphasis on the LOW POWER part of its name. Add.: or maybe I got it the wrong way around; smaller bus width but same performance due often being clocked faster. Either way I cannot find anything suggesting LPDDR offers…

In Apple's case, it's the same width (M1/2) or much wider (Pro/Max/Ultra) and also clocked faster (6400 vs. 4800).

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

#138

Post by wmf »

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.

Classic ARM mode has been removed. Only ARMv8 is supported now.

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

#139

Post by UncleEntity »

pella wrote: post #44
camillomiller wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm has been "on track" with desktop level chips based on their mobile platforms for at least four years. I've tested the first Windows on Arm laptop with a series 8 "desktop" Snapdragon in 2018. Yet, they still have to ship anything meaningful. They lake the vertical integration Apple has, and they will never have it. Hard for me to see how competitors (Qualcomm + Microsoft + OEMs) are supposed to go after Appl…

> 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…

> More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers.

I thought that’s how it works in Silicon Valley these days, people leave the company to create a startup with the intent to be acquired once they make enough progress.

If apple were planning a risc-v future then this seems like much ado about nothing.

If not they have plenty of cash to throw at the problem when it becomes a real issue.

I wouldn’t bet against them since they take secrecy very seriously and everyone is predicting doom and gloom without any idea what they’re doing behind the curtains.

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

#140

Post by pizlonator »

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.

The other answer was awesome but here’s another one: Number of registers.

Of course internally the CPU has some huge number of registers. But it matters how many registers the machine code can speak of, and arm64 has 32 while x86 has 16. Consequently, x86 machine code has more cases of data flow obscured by spills to the stack. In a very sophisticated cpu, that might mean more decoding work to try to reconstruct the original data flow, or more likely (what’ll probably happen in most cpus), those spills will limit how wide the cpu can go.

I don’t know what limits you more in practice - the smaller number of registers or the variable length instructions. X86 throws at least one more limiter just for good measure: the TSO memory model, which causes memory effects to have dependencies between them in cases where they wouldn’t on arm.

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