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Have they reached apple m level of performance/watt after half a decade of the apple m parts being out yet? Do either AMD or Intel beat Apple in any metric in mobile?
Yes and yes - again, go look at the published results.
https://www.xda-developers.com/tested-apple-m4-vs-intel-luna...
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I remember reading this Jim Keller interview: https://web.archive.org/web/20210622080634/https://www.anand... Basically the gist of it is that the difference between ARM/x86 mostly boils down to instruction decode, and: - Most instructions end up being simple load/store/conditional branch etc. on both architectures, where there's literally no difference in encoding efficiency - Variable length instruction has pretty…
Apple’s ARM cores have wider decode than x86 M1 - 8 wide M4 - 10 wide Zen 4 - 4 wide Zen 5 - 8 wide
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That's not mostly because of a better ISA. If Intel and Apple had a chummier relationship you could imagine Apple licensing the Intel x86 ISA and the M series chips would be just as good but running x86. However I suspect no matter how chummy that relationship was, business is business and it is highly unlikely that Intel would give Apple such a license.
It's pretty difficult to imagine. Apple did a ton of work on the power efficiency of iOS on their own ARM chips for iPhone for a decade before introducing the M1. Since iOS and macOS share the same code base (even when they were on different architectures) it makes much more sense to simplify to a single chip architecture that they already had major expertise with and total control over. There would be little to no u…
It's not like Intel or AMD are known for letting other customize their existing chip designs.
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> x86 didn't dominate in low power because Intel had the resources to care but never did Remember Atom tablets (and how they sucked)?
> how they sucked Care to elaborate. I had the 9" mini laptop kind of device based on Atom and don't remember Atom to be the issue.
This is an entirely uncontroversial take among experts in the space. x86 is an old CISC-y hot mess. RISC-V is a new-school hyper-academic hot mess. Recent ARM is actually pretty good. And none of it matters, because the uncore and the fabrication details (in particular, whether things have been tuned to run full speed demon or full power sipper) completely dominate the ISA. In the past x86 didn't dominate in low powe…
This is an entirely uncontroversial take among experts in the space. x86 is an old CISC-y hot mess. RISC-V is a new-school hyper-academic hot mess. Recent ARM is actually pretty good. And none of it matters, because the uncore and the fabrication details (in particular, whether things have been tuned to run full speed demon or full power sipper) completely dominate the ISA. In the past x86 didn't dominate in low powe…
I remember reading this Jim Keller interview: https://web.archive.org/web/20210622080634/https://www.anand... Basically the gist of it is that the difference between ARM/x86 mostly boils down to instruction decode, and: - Most instructions end up being simple load/store/conditional branch etc. on both architectures, where there's literally no difference in encoding efficiency - Variable length instruction has pretty…
Since newer CPUs have heterogeneous cores (high performance + low power), I'm wondering if it makes sense to drop legacy instructions from the low power cores, since legacy code can still be run on the other cores. Then e.g. an OS compiled the right way can take advantage of extra efficiency without the CPU losing backwards compatibility
There's just too many footguns for the OS running on such a SoC to be worth it.
Since newer CPUs have heterogeneous cores (high performance + low power), I'm wondering if it makes sense to drop legacy instructions from the low power cores, since legacy code can still be run on the other cores. Then e.g. an OS compiled the right way can take advantage of extra efficiency without the CPU losing backwards compatibility
This is an entirely uncontroversial take among experts in the space. x86 is an old CISC-y hot mess. RISC-V is a new-school hyper-academic hot mess. Recent ARM is actually pretty good. And none of it matters, because the uncore and the fabrication details (in particular, whether things have been tuned to run full speed demon or full power sipper) completely dominate the ISA. In the past x86 didn't dominate in low powe…
How can you avoid it?