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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

#81

Post by dylan522p »

sushicat wrote: post #58
GeekyBear wrote: post #55

From Anandtech's deep dive into the performance and efficiency cores in the A15, which are reused here in the M2. Performance Cores: >Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here – usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is impr…

This is a really great article from Anandtech with benchmarks and analysis, it explained a lot of things. > The overall performance gains are quite disappointing when you factor in the raw cost increase that comes with this new M2 and the fact that it has been nearly 2 years since the M1’s introduction. Also the logic of article in the title is little weird to me. M1 was introduced in the same year as A14, they use t…

M1 2020, M2 2022?

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

#82

Post by dylan522p »

thimkerbell wrote: post #18

As a casual reader, I notice the "die shot bleeding" and wonder if that was intended. I hope it wasn't, but I also hope not to have to wonder this about the posts here.

Author here. What do you mean die shot bleeding?

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

#83

Post by imwillofficial »

TylerE wrote: post #38
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.

Things don't become the "est" anything by being wasteful.

That’s such a contradictory statement given the facts I don’t even know where to begin.

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

#84

Post by imwillofficial »

otikik wrote: post #73
riffraff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad used to tell a story when as a kid he worked at a gas station. Guy shows up with a Ferrari, asks for a full tank, pays with a large note and my dad asks him to keep the change. The guy replied - boy, I got a lot of money Really, a lot. You know how I got them? I never gave anything away for free. Hand that change over.

That just illustrates that a lot of rich guys are entitled assholes. The correlation between assholery and driving an expensive car in particular has been studied. https://youtu.be/1EHhFwGeQLc

No post body was provided.

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

#85

Post by gnicholas »

Jyaif wrote: post #80
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.

There are a downsides to paying a lot: * you attract/retain more people that are interested in money/status. * the employees become entitled. Also, just like Apple's customers are OK with paying a premium price because it's Apple, employees are OK with paying a premium price to be an employee of Apple (by accepting lower salaries).

Economists call it 'psychic income'; it's often cited as a reason why salaries for teachers are not higher.

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

#86

Post by inkyoto »

brigade wrote: post #76
inkyoto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stuff like SVE2 is really marginal when looking at whole system performance. It is not. A recent paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05982.pdf ) from Google engineering has compared performance of a vectorised (SIMD) vs non-vectorised implementation of the quick sort in the Highway library as well as the performance difference of the AVX-512 vs NEON/SVE1 implementations. By switching to the SIMD processing alone, th…

Soo... basically a 2x speedup in going from 4x128b to 2x512b ALUs, after discounting the frequency difference. But realistically, Intel's client configurations are 3x256b, which is only 25-40% faster in that paper. (I suspect any application doing enough quicksort that the 2x speedup is significant, would be even happier going slightly off-core to a coprocessor more specialized in vector processing, like Hwacha. Ther…

> Soo... basically a 2x speedup in going from 4x128b to 2x512b ALUs, after discounting the frequency difference. But realistically, Intel's client configurations are 3x256b, which is only 25-40% faster in that paper.

2.4x difference was, in fact, reported, however I still find it somewhat difficult to interpret the reported results. The processing unit size difference alone and the number of LU's can't account for such a big difference in transfer speeds as the M1 Max that was used in the assessment has a very wide memory bus (256 bit wide for a performance core cluster or 512 bit wide for the entire SoC) as well as unusually large L1-D cache and a large L2 cache, with both caches having deep TLB's. The test set they used could also fully fit into the L2 cache. I have asked the Google engineer a question in a separate thread about what else could influence the observed performance difference but have not received a satisfactory explanation.

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

#87

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

BackBlast wrote: post #62
wmf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AMD survived bulldozer. They survived not because of the quality of their chips, but because there exists a sizable x86 market that is literally anything except Intel.

Why does that market exist?

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

#88

Post by innocenat »

bombcar wrote: post #3
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.

I suspect we're looking at Apple implementing tick/tock, whether because they're forced to or because they want to - they've already been doing something similar on the iPhones, and supply constraint may make them do it on the chips, too. Few people are going to upgrade from the M1 to the M2 anyway, so it makes sense to keep powder dry for the M3.

Intel tick-tock was alternating microarchitecture change with process optimization every other year.

It looks like M2 is neither of those, and it's already 2 year.

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

#89

Post by modeless »

inkyoto wrote: post #79
modeless wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely ignored the "whole system performance" part of my statement. What percentage of your CPU time is spent running SIMD-optimized implementations of Quicksort? Now apply Amdahl's law.

«Whole system performance» is a meaningless term as it is a function of many, usually poorly controlled, input variables, and your whole system is different from my whole system. If my VPN tunnel allows me to have faster transfer speeds simply by virtue of having ISA assisted optimisations in the cryptographic library it uses, the net result will be very noticeable to me but perhaps not for you unless you also have t…

The idea that my overall browser performance might improve in a noticeable way because it is switching from NEON optimized Quicksort to SVE2 optimized Quicksort is simply laughable. On the other hand, switching to a processor fabbed on a better process node could easily have a noticeable impact on overall browser performance, or battery life while browsing, or both.

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

#90

Post by skohan »

dagmx wrote: post #19
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.

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 agree, reading this it just seems like this author has found a market for people who want read news about how AAPL is going to drop tomorrow
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