Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

[carlycue]

The Apple M1 Ultra SoC chip achieves 87% of the performance of the Intel 12900K and Nvidia RTX 3090 combined while only consuming 34% of the power. The entire M1 Ultra chip draws 225W at full load and 11w at idle. Forget the Nvidia card and the other PC components, the 12900K alone can draw 250W and the Ryzen 5950X 140W.

This is a seismic shift. Can Intel and the other players like AMD and Nvidia catch up to this peformace per watt that Apple has on their hands?

[modeless]

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple's performance again.

[bearjaws]

This is just absolutely incorrect.

Design is over half the battle, look at Qualcomm n5 performance vs Apple M1 on n5 performance.

It's not even comparable in anyway.

Even AMD 6900U struggles in many regards compared to M1 pro, and even more so at performance per watt.

For example Cinebench runs at 118% more power draw on the Ryzen at only a 11% multi-core performance advantage.

[n7pdx]

lol this will age well. i remember designing CPUs at intel when they had like a ~2.5 gen process lead (literally 4-5 years) and the result was still barely better than competition.

what outsiders don’t realize is intel management never had to deal with competition. they spent their entire careers fighting each other in petty internecine political battles. if you think intel vs amd is a feud, you haven’t seen intel arch/design vs intel fabs. and in that kind of environment, loyalists and politicians are promoted, not people willing to critically inspect your own processes and improve things.

end result: intel has a massive competence gap. in the extremely unlikely scenario where intel can regain the process lead, they will still be behind the curve on innovation and execution.

[msbarnett]

To reach 87% of the perf of a 12900K at a max clock of 3.2 GHz versus the 12900K‘s monstrous 5.2 GHz, the M1 has something like a 75% IPC advantage.

Are you seriously claiming that you expect a single node shrink from Intel 10nm (roughly equivalent to TSMC 7nm) to Intel 7nm (equivalent TSMC 5nm, the M1’s node) to give Intel an enormous 75% increase in IPC such that they’d be able to compete on performance per watt by not having to clock so stratospherically high (with the attendant voltage penalties) to compensate for their low IPC?

That would be an unprecedented outcome for several node shrinks, let alone a single one. It’s Apple’s super-wide design that’s the primary factor in the IPC here. To pin it all on a single node shrink is magical thinking.

[simonh]

It’s true 5nm definitely gives M1 an edge, but Apple’s ARM chips have lead the pack by a mile in performance for a long time, at comparable nodes. To say all the magic lies with TSMC is to claim that with M1 Apple suffered a huge loss is leadership position in terms of design, saved only by TSMC. I don’t see how that’s a credible claim.

[pizlonator]

That’s a bold statement.

I don’t think we really know how much of the lead is due to Apple’s design.

I would bet it’s more due to fab than design, but the design plays a nontrivial role.

[paulmd]

AMD is going to be on the same node as Apple as of this year - Apple is not moving onto N3, they're staying on N5P, and Zen4 will also be N5P, so we can make iso-node comparisons.

[wmf]

That's not true. Compare the 8+ Gen 1 (TSMC N4) against A15 (TSMC N5).

[hajile]

A13 and Zen 2/3 were all on TSMC N7, but A13 still crushes in performance per watt by a HUGE margin.

[jjtheblunt]

that's absurd. fabrication depends on a design, and Apple has done years of research into low power performant designs, going back to be a cofounder of ARM.

Citation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_(company)#Founding

[spenvo]

Even there, it looks like Samsung is on track to beat TSMC to mass production of 3nm chips: https://www.reuters.com/technology/samsung-elec-starts-3-nan...

[sliken]

Er, no, sure it's a contributing factor. But Apple's lead in perf/watt is much higher than you can attribute to the process.

Their GPU is similarly impressive, with a minimal TDP it handily crushes any other iGPU.

[amelius]

I agree. And part of the magic comes from ASML.

[boringg]

You think Intel can right their ship? That's a fairly large order given some of the internal problems that have spilled into the public limelight. Takes a lot of energy to change that momentum.

[chrsig]

I was under the impression that having it all as an SoC was a significant benefit by cutting down latency between components.

[spoonjim]

Wrong, the majority of Apple’s thermal efficiency comes from superior design which in turn comes from the fact that they were able to design it from the ground up with no backwards compatibility requirements (since they don’t have any customers of the chip besides themselves).

[kurupt213]

what’s your superpower?

I’m really rich.

That justice league exchange is what came to mind when I read your comment

[uniqueuid]

The picture you're painting is far too simple.

There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth.

On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete.

So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to smaller processes and switch to much faster memory (ddr5 as apple has done). Maybe the gap is large in energy consumption, but not in total performance.

[daneel_w]

> So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to smaller processes and switch to much faster memory (ddr5 as apple has done). Maybe the gap is large in energy consumption, but not in total performance.

There are 18 months worth of benchmarks from the Apple M1 that show that the gap really is large in total performance, and the "standard" M1 doesn't use DDR5, it uses the same DDR4 memory everything else uses. The observed performance gap is larger than what we can see happen between DDR4 and DDR5, and larger than what is expected to happen for AMD's and Intel's x86 between 7 and 5 nm.

[rob74]

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU.

By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU based on the much more modern ARM architecture, and switch to it like they have already done two times before (from 68k to PowerPC and then to x86), because they control the whole Macintosh platform. Compare that to Microsoft's largely unsuccessful attempt of selling ARM-based Windows machines.

[XCSme]

> achieves 87% of the performance of the Intel 12900K and Nvidia RTX 3090 combined

This sounds insane (not in a good way). A 3090 destroys M1 Ultra in tasks like machine learning, 3090 being 5x-10x faster than the M1 Ultra.

[alberth]

1. Apple literally pays billions to TSMC to build a new fab

2. So Apple gets exclusive rights to those new fabs for the first 2 years

3. As a result, Apple gets access to the latest performance benefits of the newest nodes 2 years before anyone else

4. Additionally, since Apple chips are SoC - EVERYTHING (gpu, memory controller, memory, cpu, etc) gets fabbed on thr newest highest performing node. This has never been done before because even Nvidia latest chips, due to cost, are typically in 4 year old nodes, along with memory controllers etc.

You can’t underestimate the massive benefit of having the entire SoC fabbed on a node that no other company can gain access too for 2+ years

[fxtentacle]

For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component.

It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination.

Also, I expect that the 5nm process is responsible for a large part of the power savings in the M1. So I would expect an AMD CPU on TSMCs 5nm to be pretty close in terms of performance per watt. It's just that the mainstream market isn't willing to pay the premium price for 5nm yet. So AMD produces "good enough" at a price that people are happy to pay, which means they need to hold off on going 5nm for now.

[simonh]

Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology.

Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments their competitors can’t. Also because their competitors use commodity chips developed by Cisco and Samsung none of the Android vendors can use those chips to differentiate their products, which means even for flagship phones the CPU isn’t a unique selling points, so they can’t justify buying super premium chips. Without the guaranteed sales, the chip vendors can’t justify investing in making super premium chips. They’ve been stuck in this rut for almost a decade now, and still not found a way out. Success breeds investment, but without investment they can’t achieve success. It’s a negative feedback loop, compounded by a prisoner’s dilemma.

With desktop and server chips these factors don’t apply. Apple will never dominate the desktop and server CPU market because they’ve positioned themselves as a niche premium brand. They don’t even make servers, and the desktops they do make are ridiculously high end. They can’t go down market without eviscerating their margins. There’s still huge amounts of money to be made in those sectors, so vendors like Intel and AMD can afford to put in massive investment in new designs. They may be behind now, in some ways, but I don’t see any barriers to them competing in the near to long term.

[sausagefeet]

Intel is investing in RISC-V[0] as well as working on its own chips.

But this kind of question is not new. 10-20 years ago nobody would be thinking ARM could catch up to Intel. But also, is your question just about laptops and mobile devices? I don't see Apple taking on server markets, where the power per watt is perhaps less important. Finally, lots of people will be using non-Apple hardware for a long time (think anyone who isn't in Engineering at a company, they will probably be on a Windows system), which means there is guaranteed revenue for these other folks to compete, and possibly, catch up.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-r...

[breadloaf]

In general what I see as a massive issue for ARM and big win for x86 is standardization (or in case of ARM lack of)

- Can you run ARM system on any ARM processor, or are you limited by core architecture, endianness (BE/LE), and RAM addressing, forcing you to recompile for specific SoC? I honestly don't know what are the exact limitations.

- Can you boot any ARM processor in one specific way like x86 processor? No you can't. Every ARM processor has its own booting mechanism and you basically need to bend your system to it.

This lack of standardization is the reason, why Android phones does not have universal Lineage OS, but has build for phone X, build for phone Y, build for tablet Z and on the other hand this basic standardization is what will keep x86 alive for decades to come.

[cmrdporcupine]

Almost nobody actually runs ARM in big-endian. I suspect although the ISA is technically capable of endian switch many SoCs wouldn't even work in BE.

I seem to recall trying to get uboot and and RPi to boot big endian at one point and it was infeasible.

[mike_hearn]

That used to be true, but ARM has been standardizing these aspects now for a long time. Modern ARM systems can use ACPI for example.

Android phones have different builds because the hardware varies a lot, and because the OS is an integrated part of the product offering. It's not like the PC space where the hardware makers can't compete by better integrating the OS.

[defactoPun]

Can there be a software side compensation for this lack of standardisation? Because I too don't see any hardware standard coming very soon to ARM and I don't think it can even.

But, maybe there can be a build automation which can handle all the hassle and minimize the randomness?

[bluescrn]

Performance isn't everything.

Even if the comparisons to the RTX3090 were legit, all that power is still 'trapped' inside a Mac.

As the main reasons to have that level of power are gaming and VR, you'd be probably be better off having a bit less performance but on a Windows machine.

[r00bot]

The main reasons to have that power certainly are not gaming and VR. A computer is a tool for work as well as leisure. For artists, editors, programmers, scientists, etc. more power means less time sitting around waiting on a render, build, simulation, or export. Apple aren't making these chips for gamers lol.

[philistine]

Reading this thread, the delusional thinking is thick!

I’m hearing that we need to wait until Intel moves to 5nm to really compare. When that means that the whole PC market cedes the crown to Apple, who is not slowing down. Apple is on its second generation on 5nm and the x86 crowd as yet to show any response!

That it’s only because Apple is on 5nm that they’re competitive. Which is crazy, since we can directly compare slightly older chips made on a 7nm process and Apple comes out way ahead.

That the competitors like Qualcomm are not optimizing for performance. When the reality is much simpler. The benchmarks are this bad from Qualcomm because they’re optimizing for their wallets.

The reality is simple: for a decade, Apple has had the fastest phones, and the fastest tablets. Are you PC guys ready to admit Apple has the fastest computers?

[pella]

"Qualcomm Confirms Nuvia Arm Chips Will Be in PCs by Late 2023"

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar...

"Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it publicly pinned its hopes on addressing the always-connected PCs (ACPCs) market with a processor that could get in the ring and trade blows with the Apple M1. This could be an exciting introduction for the Windows ecosystem, if all goes to plan."

[camillomiller]

Qualcomm has been "on track" with desktop level chips based on their mobile platforms for at least four years. I've tested the first Windows on Arm laptop with a series 8 "desktop" Snapdragon in 2018. Yet, they still have to ship anything meaningful. They lake the vertical integration Apple has, and they will never have it. Hard for me to see how competitors (Qualcomm + Microsoft + OEMs) are supposed to go after Apple in this area, considering how incapable they are at working together in a productive way.

[grecy]

> Late 2023

>could get in the ring and trade blows with the Apple M1

If you're aiming to match something that was on shelves for sale in November 2020 in late 2023, you're not really competing are you?

[unix_fan]

Their problem has never been technology or talent, just the fact they care a lot more about the margins they make on those chips.

The newest snapdragons have had gimped cashes for years now.

[sharikous]

The M1 is packed to the brim with top of the class technology (lower node, big ROB, big caches, fast buses, very complex prefetching and branch prediction...) and has the advantage that it was basically wrote from scratch during a decade or so from simple mobile level processors to full grade CPU, but it is not magic. Competitors can certainly catch up in some years

A lot of their best engineers left and joined the competition and a whole lot depends on them. The second thing that needs to happen is a serious restructuring of existing processors, to the point of rewriting parts from scratch. It will take some time but there are companies with the budget and the know how to do it.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

This isn't the first time there's been a shift in claims to the various performance thrones and it certainly won't be the last. It might take a while before there's another king on the CPU with integrated GPU throne, but someone will catch up eventually.

Back in the 90's, there were more contenders than just AMD and Intel. Apple was using PowerPC chips, and on the x86 side there were several other competitors. Sure, it's been a bit one-sided since Apple went the Intel route, Via faded into obscurity and Transmeta went belly-up, but something else re-appearing as a viable, competitive platform is neither unprecedented nor unexpected.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Apple Silicon:

Be node ahead of competition.

Solder memory on-package.

?????

Profit!

Not that Apple Silicon isn't impressive but I think we ignore the shortcomings and take a lot of what other processors do for granted.

Silicon often struggles on workloads that don't use some sort of hardware acceleration. If you never go off the beaten path it is very compelling.

[naillo]

Considering that no one with an apple M1 chip is gaming or training ML with it, I'm not even sure what it means that these are supposedly better. What are people even using the extra performance for? Keeping thousands of tabs open simultaneously?

[maccard]

We use it for compilation. The M1 Mac Pro we use is about 50% quicker than the i7 we had before it for an end to end compile of our project.

[zimpenfish]

> Considering that no one with an apple M1 chip is gaming or training ML with it,

Anecdatum of one: I use my M1 chip for gaming (predominantly Minecraft with smatterings of Cities Skyline, Rocket League, etc.)

(I have trained MLs using the Metal version of Torch, too, but generally only tiny textgenrnn things for fun.)

[Joeri]

Audio and video production, and web and app development.

I don’t think many people are switching from linux and windows (although I switched from a linux thinkpad to m1 air), but those upgrading from intel macs to m1 macs are seeing huge jumps.

[pjmlp]

Given that whatever Apple has is not going into 80% of the desktop market, 60% of the mobile market, 100% of game consoles, or 100% of the server market, it matters much less than some Apple afficionados make out of it.

[philistine]

When Apple can make a game console for half the price with the same GPU power as the competition, which is something that could happen in ten years, Microsoft and PlayStation are going to sweat and pay very close attention to what Apple is doing.

[jacknews]

I hope so, but I'm also sure.

Technology is created by people, and I believe a big chunk of Apple's silicon team left last year.

So I hope we will see good performance from non-vertically integrated cpus soon. ie companies offering devices using a Qualcom or whatever cpu, which can run windows, linux, etc, not just tied into the Apple ecosystem.

[yxhuvud]

Apple will stay in the lead as long as they pay TSMC for a virtual monopoly on the smallest die sizes. How it will look when that situation changes is anyones guess. Apple is likely to continue to use the least electricity as they have spent a lot of effort on that, but other than that is impossible to say.

[throwaway4good]

I don't think there is a technical reason why a chip based on the x86 ISA could not be just as efficient as one based on Apple's ARM-variation.

And AMD (and probably Intel soon) has access to the same process technology as Apple so I think it is only a matter of time before you will see a catch up.

[PeterStuer]

And then you try gaming and it is comparable to a Ryzen 7 4800H (45W)/ Nvidia GTX 1650ti (50W).