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Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

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Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#41

Post by eightysixfour »

topspin wrote: post #20

I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…

> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area.

Is average over an area the meaningful achievement or is the meaningful achievement the smallest individual gate length? Neither are super useful without additional context.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#42

Post by topspin »

moonchild wrote: post #29
topspin wrote: post #20

I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…

> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Not some arbitrary dimension of some cherry picked subset of these components. I disagree. The meaningful achievement is how power-efficient, fast, and cheap you can make a given chip. (Secondarily, how small and how durable wrt cosmic rays; but for most purposes these are not super important.) If that follows as a…

> If that follows

Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#43

Post by hinkley »

eightysixfour wrote: post #41
topspin wrote: post #20

I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…

> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Is average over an area the meaningful achievement or is the meaningful achievement the smallest individual gate length? Neither are super useful without additional context.

Let's say I made a tiny transistor but to avoid leakage/interference or melting the transistor, I had to surround it by a bunch of empty silicon. There are lots and lots of cases where this could not be called a success.

I hesitate to say there are none, because I'm sure some task that is highly sensitive to latency might potentially benefit, but if you build the whole chip that way, it would actually be a regression.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#44

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

topspin wrote: post #42
moonchild wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Not some arbitrary dimension of some cherry picked subset of these components. I disagree. The meaningful achievement is how power-efficient, fast, and cheap you can make a given chip. (Secondarily, how small and how durable wrt cosmic rays; but for most purposes these are not super important.) If that follows as a…

> If that follows Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand.

> Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand.

They are related, of course, but the important stuff can be measured more directly by looking at how well programs work on a given computer. I think it's just a little odd to praise one cherry-picked, arbitrary metric for being less game-able than another cherry-picked, arbitrary metric. Especially when we have metrics to hand that are a lot closer to what real people care about in a computer. I certainly have never shopped for a CPU based on the number of transistors, but I have made purchasing decisions based on things like cinebench and passmark scores, which try to get at what ultimately matters to me (i.e. how many FPS a CPU will drive in the games I play).

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#45

Post by wincy »

talentedcoin wrote: post #6

I think this is cool if they’re the future of the Mac, but aren’t these chips just wasted in the iPad? I say this as an iPad Pro (1st-gen) owner ... it’s already way more processing power than I can really use, because after trying for months to get a sensible workflow going (mostly based around Pythonista, Editorial and RealVNC) I’ve relegated it to a OneNote and Netflix machine. What’s the point other than the cool…

I sold my 2080ti and am playing Eve Echoes (new, mobile version of EVE Online) and Among Us, and Civ VI on the 2nd gen iPad Pro I bought used with less than half of the proceeds. The battery lasts a good long time and it feels pretty good to be able to play these full sized games on a screen like this. When I'm not using it the toddler watches some kids shows, and with the keyboard case I can type almost as quickly as I can on my 15" Macbook pro. If it had XCode I'd be set, honestly.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#46

Post by ummonk »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #44
topspin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that follows Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand.

> Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand. They are related, of course, but the important stuff can be measured more directly by looking at how well programs work on a given computer. I think it's just a little odd to praise one cherry-picked, arbitrary metric for being less game-able than another cherry-picked, arbitrary metric. Especial…

Are you asserting performance benchmarks aren't gameable?

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#47

Post by schappim »

topspin wrote: post #42
moonchild wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Not some arbitrary dimension of some cherry picked subset of these components. I disagree. The meaningful achievement is how power-efficient, fast, and cheap you can make a given chip. (Secondarily, how small and how durable wrt cosmic rays; but for most purposes these are not super important.) If that follows as a…

> If that follows Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand.

Exactly this.

From the article:

“Even if SRAM scaling kept up, the cost per transistor would still have remained flat from N7 to N5.”

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#48

Post by eightysixfour »

hinkley wrote: post #43
eightysixfour wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Is average over an area the meaningful achievement or is the meaningful achievement the smallest individual gate length? Neither are super useful without additional context.

Let's say I made a tiny transistor but to avoid leakage/interference or melting the transistor, I had to surround it by a bunch of empty silicon. There are lots and lots of cases where this could not be called a success. I hesitate to say there are none, because I'm sure some task that is highly sensitive to latency might potentially benefit, but if you build the whole chip that way, it would actually be a regression…

Sure but, despite the extra space around any individual transistor, you're still shoving 49% more transistors into the same overall amount of space. Then everything benefits and no one cares about the node name.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#49

Post by coherentpony »

topspin wrote: post #20

I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…

These things aren't _really_ two-dimensional. They're not really three-dimensional either, but they are objects built out of layers of two-dimensional things. When you measure number of transistors per unit area you will inevitably see something more dense than the "number of 5nm square in a millimeter of area".

It's the silicon equivalent of measuring one's BMI.

Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²

#50

Post by jacobolus »

jiggawatts wrote: post #32
talentedcoin wrote: post #6

I think this is cool if they’re the future of the Mac, but aren’t these chips just wasted in the iPad? I say this as an iPad Pro (1st-gen) owner ... it’s already way more processing power than I can really use, because after trying for months to get a sensible workflow going (mostly based around Pythonista, Editorial and RealVNC) I’ve relegated it to a OneNote and Netflix machine. What’s the point other than the cool…

I was just looking into optimising a large web application. I told the customer that using a caching layer such as a CDN would help paper over the worst of the inefficiencies in their application and the network stack. That was true! The download times halved. However, benchmarks with F12 developer tools showed that while downloads reduced from 200ms to 100ms, the overall load times were still seconds, of which about…

There is no speed of computer which cannot be overwhelmed by badly written code.

I guess your point is that sloppy web developers / web companies make poorly performing code and shift the burden of handling it out to visitors’ machines, so those machines have to keep improving to not be left behind?

That might be true, but is pretty depressing.

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