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

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

#161

Post by baybal2 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #152

baybal2 wrote: post #27

The question is "Would they, and do they need it?" For as long as it can't run Windows, it's not a competitor. A mass market chip will never survive the yield on such extremely large dies. Most of mass market chips will be many times smaller physically to make money. Apple does not make money on these chips.

> Apple does not make money on these chips. You really believe that they treat their hardware as a loss leader when they are primarily a hardware company?

Yes, otherwise they wouldn't have gone into own chips with such low volumes. Even now their volumes probably don't afford for them making much money on such big chips if we compare them to top tier competitor SoCs.

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

#162

Post by ac29 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #133

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).

Where'd you see benchmarks of 8+ Gen 1? It was only announced about a month ago and isnt expected to even start sampling until later this quarter.

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

#163

Post by davidf18 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #142

amelius wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. And part of the magic comes from ASML.

I simply don’t believe this is true enough to matter. If it was a simple case of paying ASML X billions for their equipment, then we’d see more TSMC competitors. It is entirely plausible TSMC co-developed some of ASML’s IP and has exclusivity - or that the tech to make a working process out of ASML machines is intrinsically hard.

The ASML EUV machines are extremely complicated and rate limited by the polishing of the Zeiss mirrors which require 9 months to manufacture. Zeiss is in the process of scaling up, but in the meantime the EUV machines are very much backordered and that supply limitation is partially responsible for the slowdown in the release of updated nodes. There is an update of the ASML machines which are far more complicated that cost twice as much and should be part of a fab line in production in 2025.

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

#164

Post by wmf » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

ac29 wrote: post #162

wmf wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where'd you see benchmarks of 8+ Gen 1? It was only announced about a month ago and isnt expected to even start sampling until later this quarter.

Ian Cutress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QZIN8LFE-U

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

#165

Post by pdpi » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

cowtools wrote: post #157

CoastalCoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO a major enabler for this is LLVM. I think it's significantly reduced the time / cost / difficulty in rolling out a new instruction set architecture.

Are the GCC cross-compilers for ARM64 not sufficient? We're not talking about some niche, new architecture here like RISCV or WASM.

Rolling out a new architecture isn't just about getting your own tools out, it's about enabling the rest of the ecosystem to come along for the ride.

LLVM is specifically meant to be a compiler backend that you write languages frontends against. It sort of solves the expression problem for programming languages, and there's a whole range of production-ready compilers out there using it. When they add support for an architecture, every one of those languages also gets a large part of the work to support it done for them.

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

#166

Post by wmf » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

spenvo wrote: post #150

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'…

Even there, it looks like Samsung is on track to beat TSMC to mass production of 3nm chips: https://www.reuters.com/technology/samsung-elec-starts-3-nan...

Nanometers are fake though. Samsung 3GAE probably has worse performance than TSMC N4.

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

#167

Post by danaris » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #91

sph wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number is 2^31-1, the maximum number representable as a signed 32bit integer. Sounds like someone managed to push their fake Geekbench score. "Text compression: 22.8 TB/s". How long does the battery last though?

Yes, that's what I wanted to say. Geekbench scores aren't that trustworthy.

"You can post obviously absurd scores" does not logically lead to the conclusion "therefore none of the scores can be trusted."

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

#168

Post by gary_0 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

CoastalCoder wrote: post #100

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…

IMHO a major enabler for this is LLVM. I think it's significantly reduced the time / cost / difficulty in rolling out a new instruction set architecture.

I think it goes beyond LLVM, it's software in general. 20 years ago, software was locked into a particular architecture because proprietary compilers and binary blobs were the norm, and vendors still ruled their platforms with an iron fist. But nowadays, open source libraries and compilers are a lot more standard, and a lot of hardware/software is cross-platform so switching is easier. Linux is mainstream and gives you support for dozens of architectures for free.

Also, CPU technology (outside of tiny embedded chips) is a lot more uniform with fewer weird variations or cost-cutting shortcuts, and transistors are ridiculously cheap. You can assume 32/64-bit, little-endian, twos-complement math, IEEE-754 floats, etc.

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

#169

Post by cowtools » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

throwaway4good wrote: post #66

I don't think there is a technical reason why a chip based on the x86 ISA could not be just as efficient as one based on Apple's ARM-variation. And AMD (and probably Intel soon) has access to the same process technology as Apple so I think it is only a matter of time before you will see a catch up.

I would imagine that any implementation of x86 would have to bear the weight of reverse-compatibility. With reverse comparability, the bad design decisions just compound, for example complicated stuff like memory synchronization https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=2956

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

#170

Post by NobodyNada » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #120

phoe-krk wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

...“in big Cortex-A cores.”

ARM designs both the architecture specification and some reference designs. 32-bit support has been an optional part of the specification since ARMv8 in 2011.

The article you link is saying that ARM’s Cortex-A reference designs will no longer include 32-bit support, which has nothing to do with Apple since Apple uses their own custom designs. Apple dropped 32 bit support in their own designs in (IIRC) 2016.