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Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

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Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#51

Post by defactoPun »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #49

Apple fans sure love pretending other chips are as slow as they are > The Apple M1 Ultra SoC chip achieves 87% of the performance of the Intel 12900K and Nvidia RTX 3090 Benchmarks not run by Apple do not support this claim In reality it is not competitive with chips five years old

Well, I dont think there's need for a personal attack here. Even though they might not be 87% faster, they are still quite significantly faster for an ultrabook and they do deliver the battery life. So I guess the OP's question can be taken as, could intel or amd or OEMs achieve the performance to power ration soon ?

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#52

Post by yxhuvud »

rob74 wrote: post #23
uniqueuid wrote: post #2

The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

How about waiting until the competitors is actually on the same process node size until declaring the x86 baggage to costly? Most of all, Apple is currently in the lead because they threw money on TSMC to get a virtual monopoly on the smallest node size. How much of that which will remain once the competitors are comparable is an unknown at this point.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#53

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

Apple Silicon:

Be node ahead of competition.

Solder memory on-package.

?????

Profit!

Not that Apple Silicon isn't impressive but I think we ignore the shortcomings and take a lot of what other processors do for granted.

Silicon often struggles on workloads that don't use some sort of hardware acceleration. If you never go off the beaten path it is very compelling.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#54

Post by bhouston »

uniqueuid wrote: post #14
qeternity wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> magnitudes faster No...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS Intel Rocket Lake FP64: 32 Flops per core per cycle at 8 cores and 5GHz Nvidia Ampere: 1/32 Flops per core per cycle at 2048 cores and ~2 GHz Even though there are more architectural differences, there IS a difference in orders of magnitude ... for the things that you can do on a GPU (SIMD).

This is because FP64 is emulated on the NVIDIA Ampere as it is missing dedicated FP64 hardware. This is not a fair comparison.

FP32 is 64x faster on NVIDIA Ampere than FP64 per: https://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/nvidia-ampere-ga-102-gpu-...

Ampere has 60 TFLOPs of Performance on its top GPU, the Hopper per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere_(microarchitecture). Which is roughly 50% to 100% faster than Rocket Lake depending and that doesn't account for the parallelism/memory benefits that comes with the GPU architecture.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#56

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

simonh wrote: post #18

Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology. Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments…

> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape,

That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#57

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #19
fxtentacle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you don't need the high performance, then I'd expect people will go for a cheap CPU, meaning no M1 Ultra.

ML training isn't the only application of high performance computing. Apple is making video editing machines - which is why they have the mix of cores that they do. Simulations are also high-performance computing applications.

> Apple is making video editing machines - which is why they have the mix of cores that they do.

Nope. They have that mix because they've decided to prioritize power consumption reduction (I suspect because they sell way, way more laptops that desktops/servers). It's actually a PITA for developers (you have to ensure that your compute-heavy threads are always on the performance cores), and conceptually confusing for users if they ever have to confront it. For pure performance, with no concern for power consumption, there are faster solutions.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#58

Post by yxhuvud »

Apple will stay in the lead as long as they pay TSMC for a virtual monopoly on the smallest die sizes. How it will look when that situation changes is anyones guess. Apple is likely to continue to use the least electricity as they have spent a lot of effort on that, but other than that is impossible to say.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#59

Post by dav43 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56
simonh wrote: post #18

Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology. Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments…

> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.

I read “dominates” as has the “dominate share of the profits for the industry”. Not dominates shipments.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#60

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

defactoPun wrote: post #51
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #49

Apple fans sure love pretending other chips are as slow as they are > The Apple M1 Ultra SoC chip achieves 87% of the performance of the Intel 12900K and Nvidia RTX 3090 Benchmarks not run by Apple do not support this claim In reality it is not competitive with chips five years old

Well, I dont think there's need for a personal attack here. Even though they might not be 87% faster, they are still quite significantly faster for an ultrabook and they do deliver the battery life. So I guess the OP's question can be taken as, could intel or amd or OEMs achieve the performance to power ration soon ?

This is precisely the right reformulation of the actual question.

Apple's competitors are already ahead of of Apple in terms of pure performance. "Catching up" is only a thing if you care about the performance/power ratio.

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