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Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

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Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#271

Post by giantrobot »

janmo wrote: post #219

Many people overstate Apple's achievement, in reality most credit should go to TSMC the company that manufactures the M1 chip. The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC in order to be the first one to use their 5nm technology.

Apple's only achievement...besides the actual design of the CPU, GPU, and ML accelerator that TSMC is manufacturing. Besides that what have the Romans every done for us?

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#272

Post by ducktective »

bhouston wrote: post #253
hugi wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What utter nonsense. Different ARM chips aren't "somewhat compatible" anymore than Intel/AMD x86 chips. It's a standard instruction set. And even if we'd get different instruction sets, we have much better toolchains/compilers to work with multiple architectures now than we did in "the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s" (GCC and LLVM aren't really comparable to Sinclair Basic). The M1 has been out for a…

I thought the m1 has dedicated js instructions.

What are js instructions and what does javascript(?) have to do with ISA?

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#273

Post by wezen »

bhouston wrote: post #253
hugi wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What utter nonsense. Different ARM chips aren't "somewhat compatible" anymore than Intel/AMD x86 chips. It's a standard instruction set. And even if we'd get different instruction sets, we have much better toolchains/compilers to work with multiple architectures now than we did in "the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s" (GCC and LLVM aren't really comparable to Sinclair Basic). The M1 has been out for a…

I thought the m1 has dedicated js instructions.

Which are part of arm ISA

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#274

Post by masklinn »

FredFS456 wrote: post #243
GeekyBear wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There will be N somewhat compatible ARM chips, that is to say they are somewhat incompatible. This isn't how ARM's architecture license works. All ARM implementations are required to pass the same standard test suite. >Architectural licensees get a set of specs and a testing suite that they have to pass, the rest is up to them. If they want to make a processor that is faster, slower, more efficient, smaller, or anyt…

Sure, for the instruction set all the CPUs are required to be compatible. However, Apple seems to be going in the direction of having many many hardware accelerators builtin to their SoC and integrated into their software ecosystem. I assume that if Google and Amazon were to build their own chips, they'd do the same. Those accelerators will not be intercompatible, and we'll have a dozen different vendored drivers, li…

> Sure, for the instruction set all the CPUs are required to be compatible. However, Apple seems to be going in the direction of having many many hardware accelerators builtin to their SoC and integrated into their software ecosystem.

There is little evidence that Apple has built anything truly non-standard in the M1 so far, the closest thing they have is the TSO mode, and that's not an optimisation since it provides stronger guarantees (and thus lower performances) than normal. That cost happens to be recouped tenfolds when emulating a TSO architecture (aka x86) rather than having to do it in software, but that's got nothing to do with ARM workloads.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#275

Post by t-writescode »

janmo wrote: post #219

Many people overstate Apple's achievement, in reality most credit should go to TSMC the company that manufactures the M1 chip. The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC in order to be the first one to use their 5nm technology.

Did Apple not actually _design_ the chip, lay out transistor locations, do virtual testing against the future design, find bottlenecks, etc?

5nm is incredible and should not be understated; but I don't think anyone on the outside can say "most credit" should go to TSMC. A lot of credit? Absolutely. Most credit? I don't know.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#277

Post by eeZah7Ux »

pmontra wrote: post #159

Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…

> Back to mainframe / time sharing?

Back to the entirely proprietary mainframe of 1970 with dumb remote terminals.

But this time the mainframe performs pervasive surveillance.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#278

Post by rsynnott »

SirIntruder wrote: post #171
gameswithgo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is unity3d running natively?

It definitely uses x86 emulation, if that's what you mean. But based on the these M1 threads I would expect M1 x86 emulation to work like magic, not be 5 times slower than some dual core 2016 model.

Rosetta does quite badly with JITed stuff (notably, it does very, very badly with x86 JVMs). I assume it'll be fine once native Unity is available.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#279

Post by janmo »

cr3ative wrote: post #258
janmo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with their architecture. Here are the facts: The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. No surprise the M1 is faster. Most credit should go to TSMC for being able to manufacture 5nm chips.

This... isn't a fact. It's the opposite from what I've read - the architecture is just as important as the smaller nm process. This post is good reading on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932

I really doubt the M1 would perform nearly as good if it was a 14nm chip with 8b transistors.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#280

Post by easton »

tartaglia wrote: post #229
geogra4 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon already makes their own chips on the Graviton line. I wonder how long before you can get a graviton pc? maybe never?

I just had a vision: Amazon Basics Laptops

That's very interesting. A CR-48 looking, basic laptop with workable keyboard and trackpad. Chrome/Chromium OS (similar to CloudReady) since all the schools are on Google. If they could get it to $249 with reasonable performance, they could crush it.
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