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Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

lemire.me

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Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#31

Post by kube-system »

tedyoung wrote: post #17
LAMike wrote: post #16

Anyone want to take a guess at how long it will be until Apple has their own fab in the US making M1 chips?

Not in the next 10 years. Why would they? Fabs are extremely capital-intensive and take years to get up and running, when (like Taiwan Semi) knows how to do it. Intel has shown how hard it can be to do this right. Let TSM work on production (and hopefully get more/larger fabs in the USA up and running) and getting better at packing in the transistors, and let Apple improve the design (and software).

They’ve vertically integrated everything else, and they’ve had great success along the way. TSMC has other customers that compete with Apple for production capacity. And there’s geopolitical risk in the region where TSMC (currently) operates.

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#32

Post by cyanydeez »

simongr3dal wrote: post #26
tedyoung wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the next 10 years. Why would they? Fabs are extremely capital-intensive and take years to get up and running, when (like Taiwan Semi) knows how to do it. Intel has shown how hard it can be to do this right. Let TSM work on production (and hopefully get more/larger fabs in the USA up and running) and getting better at packing in the transistors, and let Apple improve the design (and software).

> Why would they? Because Apple has a lot of capital and they wouldn’t need to compete as hard for their share of tsmc production capacity.

they are addicted to cheap labor.

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#33

Post by Reason077 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #23
thefourthchime wrote: post #2

I love my M1, but does anyone else have horrific performance when resuming from wake? It’s like it swaps everything to disk and takes a full minute to come back to life.

Yes. This is actually a known issue, provided you have an external monitor attached; lots of people complaining about it. The Mac actually wakes up instantly if you lift the screen, but it usually takes 5-10 seconds before it will wake up the external monitor. Worse, for some of us when it does finally wake up the monitor, sometimes it wakes it up with all the wrong colors, and rebooting is the only reliable fix. (an…

For me it's maybe 5-10 seconds for it to wake my Thunderbolt monitor (LG 4K) from "cold".

It's much faster if the monitor has been used recently, though, so I always figured it was the monitor that was causing the delay by going into some deep sleep state?

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#34

Post by throwaway1777 »

paxys wrote: post #29
LAMike wrote: post #16

Anyone want to take a guess at how long it will be until Apple has their own fab in the US making M1 chips?

Without a major geopolitical change, like escalation of US-China tensions, sanctions on SE Asia or straight up war - likely never. Despite every incentive in place (tax breaks, consumer goodwill, better accessibility/control), what is the last domestic electronics manufacturing success story?

Seems likely Taiwan situation will escalate in the next 10 years. Apple may want to get started on the Fab now.

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#35

Post by paxys »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #34
paxys wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a major geopolitical change, like escalation of US-China tensions, sanctions on SE Asia or straight up war - likely never. Despite every incentive in place (tax breaks, consumer goodwill, better accessibility/control), what is the last domestic electronics manufacturing success story?

Seems likely Taiwan situation will escalate in the next 10 years. Apple may want to get started on the Fab now.

Manufacturing capacity will shift to South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, India etc. before the US if that happens. The labor and expertise needed to set up such an operation is just not available here anymore.

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#36

Post by tzs »

I wonder if order matters? That is, would mul followed by mulh be the same speed as mulh followed by mul?

How about if there is an instruction between them that does not do arithmetic? (What I'm wondering here is if the processor recognizes the specific two instruction sequence, or if it something more general like mul internally producing the full 128 bits, returning the lower 64, and caching the upper 64 bits somewhere so this if there is a mulh before something overwrites that cache it can use it).

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#37

Post by Zenst »

LAMike wrote: post #16

Anyone want to take a guess at how long it will be until Apple has their own fab in the US making M1 chips?

With Apple holding a lot of cash offshore awaiting for a favourable way to onshore it, combined with the political eagerness to bring chip production onshore. Those two aspect may well pan out to a situation in which the accountants see it as a win win.

Even then, do Apple use enough chips to justify running a fab, let alone one that would be locked into the node of the time. I really don't see it happening for many reasons and the only reason they would - would be some tax break incentive to onshore some of the money they have offshore in that it pays for itself, win or fail.

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#39

Post by CameronNemo »

Waterluvian wrote: post #18
rckoepke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instant wake for me. However any time I come across a password field in a website the computer freezes for a painfully long 10 seconds or so while it presumably decrypts my password vault. Sometimes this will happen multiple times per page load if I deselect and reselect the password field.

Did you somehow accumulate a bajillion passwords?

Crypto optimizations are no joke. My Pinebook Pro takes several seconds longer than my T430 to decrypt my keepassxc database.

Re: Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product

#40

Post by titzer »

Did anyone actually look at the machine code generated here? 0.30ns per value? That is basically 1 cycle. Of course, there is no way that a processor can compute so many dependent instructions in one cycle, simply because they generate so many dependent micro-ops, and every micro-op is at least one cycle to go through an execution unit. So this must mean that either the compiler is unrolling the (benchmarking) loop, or the processor is speculating many loop iterations into the future, so that the latencies can be overlapped and it works out to 1 cycle on average. 1 cycle on average for any kind of loop is just flat out suspicious.

This requires a lot more digging to understand.

Simply put, I don't accept the hastily arrived-at conclusion, and wish Daniel would put more effort into investigation in the future. This experiment is a poor example of how to investigate performance on small kernels. You should be looking at the assembly code output by the compiler at this point instead of spitballing.

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