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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?

#21

Post by pella »

"Qualcomm Confirms Nuvia Arm Chips Will Be in PCs by Late 2023"

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar...

"Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it publicly pinned its hopes on addressing the always-connected PCs (ACPCs) market with a processor that could get in the ring and trade blows with the Apple M1. This could be an exciting introduction for the Windows ecosystem, if all goes to plan."

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

#22

Post by uniqueuid »

daneel_w wrote: post #20
uniqueuid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I was imprecise there, the M2 is using LPDDR5. So I'm expecting Apple to stick with that for future macs of this generation. The gap between M1/M2 is pronounced in laptops but you can get faster (and hotter) multicore CPUs. Single-core is also not the same gap that it was because Rocket Lake has caught up and Zen3 had less of a gap to begin with.

And M2 benchmarks aren't even out yet. The topic will be yet more interesting in the coming months.

They are absolutely out, because the M2 MBP is publicly available.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15482594

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

#23

Post by rob74 »

uniqueuid wrote: post #2

The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…

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 based on the much more modern ARM architecture, and switch to it like they have already done two times before (from 68k to PowerPC and then to x86), because they control the whole Macintosh platform. Compare that to Microsoft's largely unsuccessful attempt of selling ARM-based Windows machines.

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

#24

Post by norman784 »

I think if x86 get rid of their legacy instructions, they could reduce their core size, and a few side effects will be performance per watt gains and maybe also performance (smaller cores), and if you need the legacy instructions you could just emulate, most consumer PCs don't need those.

That's the biggest difference with x86 and ARM, ARM got a lot of breaking changes with their versions, while x86 don't (I'm not sure if there was any breaking change in the las 20 years at least).

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

#25

Post by camillomiller »

pella wrote: post #21

"Qualcomm Confirms Nuvia Arm Chips Will Be in PCs by Late 2023" https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar... "Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it pub…

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 Apple in this area, considering how incapable they are at working together in a productive way.

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

#26

Post by daneel_w »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #15
daneel_w wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to smaller processes and switch to much faster memory (ddr5 as apple has done). Maybe the gap is large in energy consumption, but not in total performance. There are 18 months worth of benchmarks from the Apple M1 that show that the gap really is large in total performance, and the "standard" M1 doesn't use DDR5, it uses the same DDR4 memory everything else uses. Th…

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 practically faster performance on memory-bound operations than the DDR equivalent, but I'd love to see some tech details and numbers explaining how it works.

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

#27

Post by baybal2 »

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.

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

#28

Post by fxtentacle »

uniqueuid wrote: post #22
daneel_w wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And M2 benchmarks aren't even out yet. The topic will be yet more interesting in the coming months.

They are absolutely out, because the M2 MBP is publicly available. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15482594

Oh so the M2 is a lot slower than Samsung phones?

Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G = 2147483647 multi-core score https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15129294

But only 8928 multi-core for the new M2.

Or maybe that page is kinda unreliable?

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

#29

Post by jl6 »

If your views on technological progress are informed by the 80s and 90s, and you think it is an exponential curve, then it seems unlikely that today’s leaders will ever be caught.

If your views on technological progress are informed by the 00s and 10s, and you think it is an S-curve, then today’s leaders might never be caught in an absolute sense, but the competitors will get arbitrarily close eventually.

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

#30

Post by personjerry »

jl6 wrote: post #29

If your views on technological progress are informed by the 80s and 90s, and you think it is an exponential curve, then it seems unlikely that today’s leaders will ever be caught. If your views on technological progress are informed by the 00s and 10s, and you think it is an S-curve, then today’s leaders might never be caught in an absolute sense, but the competitors will get arbitrarily close eventually.

Past performance is not indicative of future results
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