Originally posted by birdie
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Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up
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Originally posted by birdie View PostBehold the beast: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10476727
Almost as fast as Ryzen 7 5800X both in ST and MT performance.
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Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
Unless most of that is doubled on the Max, the GPU is still giant. 57bn for the max - 34bn for the pro leaves the GPU side at ~23bn for the pro and ~46 for the max unless more than just the GPU is getting added on the max version.
You're correct that the CPU is probably smaller, though.
There’s also more video decoders, and twice the memory channels (400GBps vs 200GBps bandwidth) on the Max. That should also take some extra transistors. But not much to make an huge difference on the numbers. But I am no silicon expert.
Hopefully some die shits will be available soon for analysis. AnandTech usually makes great deep dives.
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Originally posted by amxfonseca View Post
Well, you can put an actual 8086 inside a modern CPU and it would only use 29000 transistors 😛. Which is not much in todays billion transistor CPUs.
I think legacy doesn’t help, but I don’t think it’s a transistor count limitation. Especially in modern microcoded architectures where the instruction set is independent of the internal microarchitecture.
Originally posted by amxfonseca View PostI think Apple just focus on key areas, and they aren’t trying to make profit on the SoC alone, so things like die size and manufacturing process is not as important. But if you are Intel and AMD and your business is only to sell chips then you need to keep the costs down.
Originally posted by amxfonseca View PostThere’s a lot of other ARM CPUs on the market. But they also fall short when compared with a modern Apple developed core when it comes to performance and efficiency. So I don’t think it’s architecture (ISA) related.
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Originally posted by spykes View PostI believe a big part (not the only one) of Apple technical advance is due to their exclusive access to the best manufacturing node at TSMC.
I think part of the problem competitors face is that they're all using off-the-shelf cores that were designed by ARM to address a broader swath of markets, and probably with smaller area targets than what Apple is designing. That's not to take away from their technical prowess, which is also the best in the industry.
Originally posted by spykes View PostI really hope Intel will manage to catchup on TSMC at some point, otherwise X86 PC will never catchup on Apple ARM.
I'm quite certain that both Intel and AMD have post-x86 cores in development. Jim Keller's last project at AMD was the K12 -- a custom, in-house ARM core that I think they wisely chose not to bring to market, due to financial constraints and the ARM server market being too immature at the time.
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Originally posted by amxfonseca View PostI think legacy doesn’t help,
Originally posted by amxfonseca View PostEspecially in modern microcoded architectures where the instruction set is independent of the internal microarchitecture.
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Originally posted by amxfonseca View Post
Well, you can put an actual 8086 inside a modern CPU and it would only use 29000 transistors 😛. Which is not much in todays billion transistor CPUs.
Originally posted by amxfonseca View PostI think legacy doesn’t help, but I don’t think it’s a transistor count limitation. Especially in modern microcoded architectures where the instruction set is independent of the internal microarchitecture.
I think Apple just focus on key areas, and they aren’t trying to make profit on the SoC alone, so things like die size and manufacturing process is not as important. But if you are Intel and AMD and your business is only to sell chips then you need to keep the costs down.
There’s a lot of other ARM CPUs on the market. But they also fall short when compared with a modern Apple developed core when it comes to performance and efficiency. So I don’t think it’s architecture (ISA) related.
They've been throwing transistors at the problem ever since. Back when risc and x86 chips could still go head-to-head, risc chips used half as many transistors for the same performance. Ultimately, economies of scale and sales volume of the PC won out anyway and killed off most of risc.
There's only so much you can do with that transistor budget though, even if you sink it into huge decode caches. Past a certain point the complexity becomes unmanageable. AMD Zen managed 4-way parallel decoding to bring instructions into the core and keep it fed with uops to crunch. Intel moved mountains for 5-way. The M1, apple's first effort, is 8-way. First in history afaik.
There's lots of arm cores out there, but none have been designed with performance in mind. It's always taken a back-seat to power consumption. This is the first time serious focus has been given to performance and there's still probably a lot of catching up to do.
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Wasn't one of the selling points of the Apple M1 the "one processor for everyone" and how they were breaking the market by challenging the i3, i5, i7 and similar market segmentation into a single processor for everyone?
I don't recall, maybe Apple never said that, and it was just said by others. I definitely read that somewhesomewhere.
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Originally posted by Developer12 View PostThe M1, apple's first effort, is 8-way.
Originally posted by Developer12 View PostThere's lots of arm cores out there, but none have been designed with performance in mind. It's always taken a back-seat to power consumption.
Originally posted by Developer12 View PostThis is the first time serious focus has been given to performance and there's still probably a lot of catching up to do.
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