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Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

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Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#41

Post by dagmx »

Josteniok wrote: post #26
dagmx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has been pushing this conjecture for a year over the past year or so, and has been repeatedly called out on the Hardware reddit. I would recommend not taking their business conjecture without a giant pinch of salt. Just today they were claiming Apple has lost hundreds of engineers in the chip division. The idea that a single division somehow lost hundreds without the industry noticing is ridiculous.

I wondered about this too and I like your advice about salt but apparently Apple is suing Rivos about this very thing: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-...

I never said or implied that they didn't take many, just not hundreds. In the tens? I believe that. Up to a hundred? That's a tall order. Multiple hundreds? That's catastrophic to any org, including one as large as Apple

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#42

Post by dagmx »

wmf wrote: post #25
dagmx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has been pushing this conjecture for a year over the past year or so, and has been repeatedly called out on the Hardware reddit. I would recommend not taking their business conjecture without a giant pinch of salt. Just today they were claiming Apple has lost hundreds of engineers in the chip division. The idea that a single division somehow lost hundreds without the industry noticing is ridiculous.

Why do you think the industry hasn't noticed? If it's not hundreds, how many Apple employees have moved to Nuvia and Rivos?

In multiples of tens, I would believe it. Upto a hundred over a couple years? That's a stretch but possible if you count a very wide range of roles. Multiple hundreds as they imply on Reddit? That would be catastrophic to any company, even one as large as Apple. You would certainly see it reflected in their job postings after even a few, let alone hundred+

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#43

Post by iosystem »

modeless wrote: post #27
daguava wrote: post #2

There's a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] "Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars" How true is this? If they're on the money it's an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.

Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TS…

I thought AMD succeeded because they managed to get Jim Keller and other great engineers? Unsure why you're placing your hope on a CEO.

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#44

Post by MBCook »

Thanks to being based on their phone chips Apple came out of the gate with the M1 and cleaned everyone’s clock on performance-per-watt while putting in good to great numbers in general (as a CPU).

But their rate of improvement on the A series has been slowing on general tasks. They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit.

Is it really that surprising that performance didn’t take a massive jump? You can’t keep up a 20% increase in normal stuff every release for long.

You can use accelerators like they do for video and ML to help some tasks. You can improve your GPU some and make it a little bigger.

It seems like in some places people are trying to push a “the M2 is a failure because it’s not a huge leap above the M1“ narrative. But no one exits that from Intel or AMD every year anymore. Or Apple’s A-series.

So why here?

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#45

Post by inkyoto »

modeless wrote: post #27
daguava wrote: post #2

There's a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] "Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars" How true is this? If they're on the money it's an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.

Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TS…

> No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs.

The fixation on the fab process is bewildering. Yes, it does help, but it is also an optimisation step that is decoupled from and that bears no relevance on the chip design. Yes, the smaller node size also brings the increased density along and an increased number of things that can be whacked into the same sized piece of silicon, but it will not magically improve the overall system performance or result in the linear architecture scalability.

The article is specifically calling out a potentially decreased ROB size in M2 cores, and ARMv9 also potentially not arriving until M3 which are crucial to the speed or software performance. There is absolutely nothing the fab process can do to make SVE2 and matrix instructions automagically appear in lithographic chip designs – those are the «silicon» design time decisions. As we have recently been seeing more and more practical, mainstream use cases of the advanced use of the SIMD instructions at the C/C++/Rust runtime level that bring an order of magnitude level performance gains, having the SVE2 implementation at the ISA level is becoming somewhat critical.

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#46

Post by wmf »

iosystem wrote: post #43
modeless wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TS…

I thought AMD succeeded because they managed to get Jim Keller and other great engineers? Unsure why you're placing your hope on a CEO.

No one person deserves the credit for a processor and if Intel had delivered on their roadmap (Ice Lake in 2017 and Alder Lake in 2019) AMD would be dead today.

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#48

Post by krasin »

wbl wrote: post #37
exhilaration wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still amazed at how jumping to a rival firm like this is possible in California, those of us in pretty much the rest of the country are locked behind non-competes.

Horace Greely had the answer 150 years ago.

I am curious. Would it be possible to provide a more direct reference?

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#49

Post by happyopossum »

exhilaration wrote: post #21
dhanna wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The youngest, strongest RTL engineer I know jumped from Apple to Rivos.

I'm still amazed at how jumping to a rival firm like this is possible in California, those of us in pretty much the rest of the country are locked behind non-competes.

That’s quite an exaggeration - many states disallow or severely limit non-competes, and in many of the states that allow them, they are often unenforced, or easy to get around. So yeah - some people in some parts of the country are locked behind non-competes (if they aren’t willing to move), but it’s hardly everyone.

Re: Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

#50

Post by rowanG077 »

postalrat wrote: post #33
brokencode wrote: post #24

Why does the biggest and richest company in the world ever have to suffer from talent leaving because they don’t get paid enough? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Well they aren't the richest and certainly aren't the biggest.

Depending on how you define richest Apple could very well be the richest. It has something like 200 billion dollars in cash in hand. I would be surprised if any company could match that.
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