Apple Announces Its New M2 Processor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Announces Its New M2 Processor

Apple's WWDC keynote this year was used to announce the M2 processor alongside a slew of other announcements...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-M2

[tildearrow]

It's honestly sad to see how Apple is the only low-power high-performance desktop CPU provider, because Apple is the king of lock-in considering how many people sought and worked hard to liberate their devices (e.g. "jailbreak") and had to reverse engineer the architecture to no end (e.g. Asahi Linux) just so that they could run a better operating system.
Ampere will never look at us (instead exclusively focusing on server) and so we will be stuck to either:
- low-cost, low-power systems with poor performance (e.g. Raspberry Pi)
- high-cost, high-performance systems but with terrible power efficiency (x86)

The high-cost, high-performance and low-power option is non-existent besides Apple...

[birdie]

It's honestly sad to see how Apple has a monopoly on the low-power high-performance CPU market, because Apple is the king of lock-in considering how many people sought and worked hard to liberate their devices (e.g. "jailbreak") and had to reverse engineer the architecture to no end (e.g. Asahi Linux) just so that they could run a better operating system.
Ampere will never look at us (instead exclusively focusing on server) and so we will be stuck to either:
- low-cost, low-power systems with poor performance (e.g. Raspberry Pi)
- high-cost, high-performance systems but with terrible power efficiency (x86)

The high-cost, high-performance and low-power option is non-existent besides Apple...

Qualcomm/Nuvia CPUs/SoCs are expected in 2023 and they will rival Apple's (and most likely destroy Intel/AMD in terms of performance per watt).

I also suspect NVIDIA is working hard on its own high performance ARM cores.

[torsionbar28]

It's honestly sad to see how Apple has a monopoly on the low-power high-performance CPU market,

I don't think that's exactly the case, as the AMD and intel products are certainly capable of this behavior. It's just that it isn't their default configuration. AMD and intel are going for maximum processing power within the available TDP envelope. So long as there is thermal headroom available, they ramp up the clocks to consume it.

If you want your AMD or intel machine to run cool and quiet all the time, simply disable the "Turbo Boost" feature, and also the "Hyperthreading" feature. You'll be surprised how cool and quiet it will become. This is true for desktops as well as laptops. It's how I configure all my machines because I don't want a room heater or a high-speed fan headache. The standard non-boosted clocks in the 3.x Ghz range are more than enough for all standard productivity work.

[amxfonseca]

Seems like a decent incremental upgrade. The current platform already seems to have an acceptable baseline performance anyway.

Probably the M3 will be a die shrink to 3nm. So we can have a few more CPU/GPU cores without adding too much the overall power consumption.

[birdie]

Seems like a decent incremental upgrade. The current platform already seems to have an acceptable baseline performance anyway.

Probably the M3 will be a die shrink to 3nm. So we can have a few more CPU/GPU cores without adding too much the overall power consumption.

Acceptable baseline performance?

Apple M1 literally destroys top Intel and AMD CPUs in terms of absolute performance (per core <10W power envelope vs. e.g. ~25-30W for ADL/Zen3) and power efficiency (MT performance).

And their unified memory architecture? The PC can only dream of it. XBox/PS have it though but they are not PCs.

[luno]

no AV1 support is big down, overall good incremental improvement , now they support running x86_64 linux binary in Rosetta https://nitter.net/never_released/st...090944258054#m

[ssokolow]

I don't think that's exactly the case, as the AMD and intel products are certainly capable of this behavior. It's just that it isn't their default configuration. AMD and intel are going for maximum processing power within the available TDP envelope. So long as there is thermal headroom available, they ramp up the clocks to consume it.

If you want your AMD or intel machine to run cool and quiet all the time, simply disable the "Turbo Boost" feature, and also the "Hyperthreading" feature. You'll be surprised how cool and quiet it will become. This is true for desktops as well as laptops. It's how I configure all my machines because I don't want a room heater or a high-speed fan headache. The standard non-boosted clocks in the 3.x Ghz range are more than enough for all standard productivity work.

This post argues that's not the case and that the reason M1 manages to do so well is a fundamental limitation in x86 ISA chips' ability to parallelize instruction decode for a CISC architecture with variable width opcodes. (In addition to other things like "SoCs have certain advantages and there aren't any x86 SoCs in that market segment yet".)

[birdie]

no AV1 support is big down, overall good incremental improvement , now they support running x86_64 linux binary in Rosetta https://nitter.net/never_released/st...090944258054#m

It can decode AV1 4K@120fps in software without breaking a sweat.

[Sergey Podobry]

And their unified memory architecture? The PC can only dream of it. XBox/PS have it though but they are not PCs.

PC has unified memory since buldozer AMD APUs.