M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

Zen 3 chiplet is 4.15B transistors. The consumer IO die is 2.09B transistors. The Threadripper IO dies is 8.34B transistors. M1 is 16B transistors. A14 is 11.6B transistors. That difference is mostly 2 firestorm cores/cache, 4 GPU cores, another DDR4 controller, and some Thunderbolt/PCIe.

Taking a ruler to a die shot and multiplying that area by transistor density (16B/119mm^2) gives us somewhere around 500M transistors per core plus 3mb of cache. Adjusting out to 4.5MB per core to match Zen 3 adds another 75-100M transistors.

Zen 3 gives 518M transistors per core, but that includes interconnects. Taking a ruler to the core reveals about 14% of the die is interconnect, SMU, and wafer tests (about 580M transistors). Subtracting that from 4.15B and dividing into even core/cache gives 446M transistors per core.

We'll assume an identical IO cost of 8.5B transistors and 150M transistors of interconnect per core. (64 * (600 + 150)) + 8500 is 56.5B transistors and 420mm^2 total area. A zen 3 chip with similar densities would be 310mm^2.

No matter how you slice and dice that, Apple's chip is going to be significantly more expensive than AMD's chip. Thinking anything different is a pipe dream.

EDIT: also note that formal verification adds a lot to chip pricing.

Now if we look at what people are buying and ask ourselves 'are these the people who care about TDP?' the answer is simply 'no'

The majority of laptops sold are sub 700, as the previous post said, low budget, low power and in education, markets that Apple has never even considered (except education, but it's mainly college students in USA)

Not saying M1 aren't good, but that they won't shake the market as NVidia buying ARM could

P.s. M1 is a Zen 3 competitor, threadripper has been mentioned for the exact opposite reason: because that's the state of the art for people looking at performances in personal computing (while in HPC ARM is prominent)

With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them.

With Zen3 on mobile, giving a similar 20% boost as it did on desktop, plus a jump from 7nm to to 5m, giving another 20%, next year might be a very good year for Ryzen laptops. Looking forward to a Ryzen 6000 XPS 13.

The other thing I'm grateful for M1 is that will most likely push the laptop manufactures to pay attention to thermals and noise.

The unpleasant thing, is that most likely Apple will be a process node ahead, with them most likely getting TSMC 3nm in 2022, and everyone else a year later. With a competitive year in-between.

I'm looking forward to next year, to upgrading to a Ryzen 6000(5nm) cpu, if it's good. And I'm looking forward for the more beefy apple arm chips and comparison between them. Also, maybe someone would compare a Ryzen 6000 hackintosh with an arm mac while it will be possible.

Also looking forward at Intel's response, be it a partnership with TSMC, or fixing their nodes, and, fingers crossed, a completely new risc-v cpu.

Anyway, interesting stuff.

I mean, what would the market be for a super-fast ARM laptop/desktop machine? It would run Windows RT, I guess?

How much better than Intel/AMD would the ARM machine need to be to justify buying it and running that? It seems like the M1's "magic" is not just the chip, but very much also the Rosetta thing.