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GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

developer.apple.com

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Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#81

Post by reroute22 »

monocasa wrote: post #79
reroute22 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that sounds like a very impressive level of separation of concerns. May I kindly ask for some links for further reading? If you have any handy.

It's a pretty standard driver model internal abstraction layer. In kernel space you as the hardware manufacturer implement a display miniport driver, and heavily lean on dxgkrnl.sys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d... And implement interfaces like this one for D3D12 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d... There's quite a bit though and it's kind of spread across sev…

Thanks!

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#82

Post by aurareturn »

pjmlp wrote: post #78
aurareturn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also more games on Metal than DirectX. And when I say DirectX, I meant the latest versions of DirectX. No idea what the count is for all games released for DirectX total. It's not relevant for the topic I was replying to. The OP said Apple should switch to DirectX. They can't because it's closed source. The reason given was that devs won't support 2 APIs. They already do. They support DirectX and Vulcan (PS…

Missing the games on XBox and Cloud offerings? Also many developers support even more than 2, as you are fogetting Playstation and Switch, both of which with their own APIs, 2 for Playstayon (GNM and GNMX), 3 for Switch (NVN, Vulkan and OpenGL).

There are 480k games on iOS. Yes, most of them are bad. But it's a fact that there are more games running on Metal than DirectX.

>Also many developers support even more than 2, as you are fogetting Playstation and Switch, both of which with their own APIs, 2 for Playstayon (GNM and GNMX), 3 for Switch (NVN, Vulkan and OpenGL).

I didn't imply that developers only support 2.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#83

Post by thaanpaa »

pavlov wrote: post #26
zmmmmm wrote: post #8

Does apple document exactly how many actual true cores there are inside their GPUs? It is always confusing they say "40 core GPU" but I assume these are shader cores which each inside them can execute (per the video) "many thousands" of parallel execution paths. So how does one translate to an equivalent in "CUDA cores" type terminology?

What Apple calls a GPU core seems to be roughly the same as what Nvidia calls a “stream multiprocessor”. For example a 1080 GTX GPU has 20 stream multiprocessors (SM), each containing 128 cores, each of which supports 16 threads. Meanwhile Apple describes the M1 GPU as having 8 cores, where “each core is split into 16 Execution Units, which each contain eight Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs). In total, the M1 GPU contai…

If the architecture is vastly different, these comparisons become sort of meaningless, though. The ultimate performance is determined by all the tiny little bottlenecks, like how quickly the architecture can move data between different types of cores, memory, cache, etc.

Apple has always been really good at parallelism, which is why they get so much performance from less power consumption.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#84

Post by reroute22 »

Okay, I went through the other video they reference ("Discover new Metal profiling tools for M3 and A17 Pro" [1]), and there is actually a whole bunch of extra very relevant (IMO) information on the subject, starting about 13:30 or so.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111374?ti...

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#85

Post by cm2187 »

pavlov wrote: post #26
zmmmmm wrote: post #8

Does apple document exactly how many actual true cores there are inside their GPUs? It is always confusing they say "40 core GPU" but I assume these are shader cores which each inside them can execute (per the video) "many thousands" of parallel execution paths. So how does one translate to an equivalent in "CUDA cores" type terminology?

What Apple calls a GPU core seems to be roughly the same as what Nvidia calls a “stream multiprocessor”. For example a 1080 GTX GPU has 20 stream multiprocessors (SM), each containing 128 cores, each of which supports 16 threads. Meanwhile Apple describes the M1 GPU as having 8 cores, where “each core is split into 16 Execution Units, which each contain eight Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs). In total, the M1 GPU contai…

Question from a GPU novice. I presume a thread is the individual calculation perform on one element of the vector? Can the 128 cores, or 20 SM perform different operations at the same time or all 24,576 threads perform the same operation at the same time, on a vector of data of length of 24,576?

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#86

Post by pjmlp »

There are additionally related videos,

"Discover new Metal profiling tools for M3 and A17 Pro"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111374/

"Learn performance best practices for Metal shaders"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111373/

"Bring your high-end game to iPhone 15 Pro"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111372/

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#87

Post by pjmlp »

aurareturn wrote: post #82
pjmlp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the games on XBox and Cloud offerings? Also many developers support even more than 2, as you are fogetting Playstation and Switch, both of which with their own APIs, 2 for Playstayon (GNM and GNMX), 3 for Switch (NVN, Vulkan and OpenGL).

There are 480k games on iOS. Yes, most of them are bad. But it's a fact that there are more games running on Metal than DirectX. >Also many developers support even more than 2, as you are fogetting Playstation and Switch, both of which with their own APIs, 2 for Playstayon (GNM and GNMX), 3 for Switch (NVN, Vulkan and OpenGL). I didn't imply that developers only support 2.

And the number of DirectX games sold across Valve, Epic, Windows and XBox is....?

Since it is a fact I am expecting a number for them as well.

Also you naturally also have a number for the ones that are still using the legacy OpenGL ES API, or the MoltenVK wrapper on iDevices.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#88

Post by creshal »

coldtea wrote: post #57
creshal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of Apple's "winning formula" is taking their giant piles of money and negotiating exclusive contracts for whatever is scheduled to be the most advanced semiconductor node next year. Anyone else literally cannot compete, they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise, so they'll have to wait until the exclusivity agreement expires.

Well, they got into that position starting from a near bankrupt company, which couldn't negotiate anything exclusive, and which was for a long time at the mercy of Motorola and the Intel. So it's something they took advantage of after they grew (well, which company at their scale wouldn't ask for the best wholesale deals?), but not what made them big in the first place.

What made them big in the first place were the iPod/iTunes/iPhone and the ludicrous revenues from the App Store.

The iPod's only notable hardware that wasn't just a random off the shelf part was the click wheel, the chips were all off-the-shelf (until old iPhone chips counted as that), and iPhones didn't get custom chips until the 4.

So I guess the other part of the winning formula is "use market dominance in one sector to subsidize expansion into the next". I guess that's indeed one area where Google could reasonably try to be less inept, but I think all the institutional inertia makes that impossible by now. They'll go the DEC route of just drowning in their own internal problems until someone buys them up.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#89

Post by creshal »

simbolit wrote: post #73
creshal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of Apple's "winning formula" is taking their giant piles of money and negotiating exclusive contracts for whatever is scheduled to be the most advanced semiconductor node next year. Anyone else literally cannot compete, they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise, so they'll have to wait until the exclusivity agreement expires.

> they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise your parent comment's example is literally Google, world-class experts at burning money on developers producing a million dead-end products and abandoning them a year later. if Google would get some sensible leadership, focus on a few core products, and stick with them for a decade, they'd have just as much money to spend. But "focus"…

> My point: the 'winning formula' of Apple is laser-sharp focus: have a few products, do them as well as anyone else or better, and only introduce a new product if it is mature-ish and very profitable. (We'll see how the vision headset fits in here)

They also aimed at markets that are ripe for disruption, because of weak competition: The MP3 player market before the iPod, the PDA-with-a-SIM-card market before the iPhone, etc. pp. all could be reasonably disrupted by just delivering a reasonably (but not even best-in-class, specs wise) product with better UX (not hard, in the cases mentioned) and massive marketing. You can't do that in a heavily competitive market that's already full of these products. VR headsets are probably closer to the "ripe for disruption" end of the spectrum, and I think the Vision will probably do well. But I doubt the "Apple Car" plans that have been floating around for 10 years now will ever lead to anything.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#90

Post by i5-2520M »

alphanullmeric wrote: post #7

It’s amazing how bad the competition is. The A17 pro has 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The Google G3 has 9 cores of 3 different types, the fastest being slower than Apple’s performance cores, the most efficient being less efficient than apple’s efficiency cores. And it’s a phone so you don’t take advantage of the extra parallelism. You just get the worst of both worlds. no wonder these android phones ha…

Google is probably not delusional, so they know the Tensor has no chance of being "good" as it is. Why don't you compare the A17 to the 8g3 and 8g2?
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