This is certainly plausible for early hardware but I’d wait for more widespread confirmation before treating it as anything more than a fluke. It’s very easy to imagine that a new platform might have something like power management or driver issues which can be resolved without touching the hardware.
I haven't looked at CPU architectural comparisons, but Apple must have a major benefit in owning the whole stack: from the lowest hardware level to the OS to many of the applications. And with the right focus (which they almost certainly have) the ability to optimize the system as a whole instead of each level taking care of just their own section.
If the x86 translation team can make their case that a specific CPU feature will be a significant enough performance benefit, chances are that a discussion within the company will have less friction that a discussion between, say, a Microsoft SW team and a Qualcomm or ARM CPU design team.
And while Microsoft may care about power consumption and power management, I can't image that they care as much as the Apple MacBook team. (My POS high-end Dell laptop is still a power management disaster. It would fail any internal go-to-market review at Apple.)
But there's also the simple fact that the Apple silicon team is very good, and they've been cranking out best in class silicon IPs for more than a decade. A lot of IPs on an SOC are developed incrementally, with smaller improvements from one generation to the next accumulating into major advancements over the years. Even if the competition builds an equally capable silicon team, they may not have the solid foundation to build on and it can take generations to match what the competition already had.
It's also true that for Apple, the silicon is not a product that's being sold on its own. I'm sure they care about silicon area (and thus cost), but they can once again put this cost in the larger context of the full laptop. For Qualcomm, increasing a cache by 50% is a much bigger hit on their gross margins than for Apple. If that cache increase will result in significantly better laptop characteristics, Apple may decide to go for it while Qualcomm may not.
It’s not just TSMC - they also have a very good CPU team giving AMD heartburn even when you compare the chips on the same TSMC process, and they have the part which is hardest to match: they control the OS, compilers, libraries, and key apps. That allows them to ensure that hardware acceleration is actually used, tailor chips for the power and usage patterns their devices need, and avoid the conflicts of interest inherent to multi-vendor systems because they share responsibility for a great device and profits aren’t unevenly distributed. That’s not perfect and they’re certainly in a bad place if they misjudge but it’s worked so far.
Apple's core "Silicon" team was the Centaur Technologies chip design group. At the time, they had brought to market a PowerPC CPU chip that was a breakthrough in performance per watt -- for 32-bit PowerPC. Which had already lost to Intel for mainstream applications.
At Apple, Centaur joined engineers who had helped to develop early ARM RISC processors.
While I know that the talent pool migrates, engineers have moved on, Apple has retained deep institutional knowledge of how to build systems that work really well. And developed teams worldwide to deliver manufacturing at scale.
By no means are they the only company to do so. Vast resources in competition. But please understand that Apple isn't new to full-stack hardware design.
Based on the original reddit thread discussion benchmarks are running with the cpu peaking at 2.5ghz when x elite should be able to go up to 4ghz. Seems like there me be some firmware issue in this model. What's more interesting is that the reviewer was able to play resident evil village at 60-100fps on battery using the x64 version of the game from steam.
Like any PC laptop, the results are going to vary wildly based on the manufacturer's thermal solution. You can't buy based on the CPU part number. You have to wait for reviews of specific machines and buy the one that's actually good.
Sensationalist article based on a reddit post which the OP already updated stating it has to do with a driver or chipset issue as the CPU did not go over 2.52GHz.
This is based on a Reddit report of a CPU that seems like it’s not boosting…ofc the score will be low
Yeah a cpu clocking 2.5 isn’t going to give you the same score you see at designed 4+. Unless it was limited that way due to thermals this is likely not a big deal in long run
You can not run Linux on IPhone 12. Neither you can run Linux on Snapdragon X laptops in any meaningful way, today. While there was some Linux demos before Computex, there was no Linux demos on Computex, and people presenting the laptops were declining to comment about Linux.
acdha|1 year ago
throwaway888abc|1 year ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyBook/comments/1dd7t0v/samsung...
nightowl_games|1 year ago
tverbeure|1 year ago
If the x86 translation team can make their case that a specific CPU feature will be a significant enough performance benefit, chances are that a discussion within the company will have less friction that a discussion between, say, a Microsoft SW team and a Qualcomm or ARM CPU design team.
And while Microsoft may care about power consumption and power management, I can't image that they care as much as the Apple MacBook team. (My POS high-end Dell laptop is still a power management disaster. It would fail any internal go-to-market review at Apple.)
But there's also the simple fact that the Apple silicon team is very good, and they've been cranking out best in class silicon IPs for more than a decade. A lot of IPs on an SOC are developed incrementally, with smaller improvements from one generation to the next accumulating into major advancements over the years. Even if the competition builds an equally capable silicon team, they may not have the solid foundation to build on and it can take generations to match what the competition already had.
It's also true that for Apple, the silicon is not a product that's being sold on its own. I'm sure they care about silicon area (and thus cost), but they can once again put this cost in the larger context of the full laptop. For Qualcomm, increasing a cache by 50% is a much bigger hit on their gross margins than for Apple. If that cache increase will result in significantly better laptop characteristics, Apple may decide to go for it while Qualcomm may not.
Sephr|1 year ago
Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21445/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-a...
acdha|1 year ago
watersb|1 year ago
At Apple, Centaur joined engineers who had helped to develop early ARM RISC processors.
While I know that the talent pool migrates, engineers have moved on, Apple has retained deep institutional knowledge of how to build systems that work really well. And developed teams worldwide to deliver manufacturing at scale.
By no means are they the only company to do so. Vast resources in competition. But please understand that Apple isn't new to full-stack hardware design.
kcb|1 year ago
kyriakos|1 year ago
jeffbee|1 year ago
poisonborz|1 year ago
Havoc|1 year ago
This is based on a Reddit report of a CPU that seems like it’s not boosting…ofc the score will be low
Yeah a cpu clocking 2.5 isn’t going to give you the same score you see at designed 4+. Unless it was limited that way due to thermals this is likely not a big deal in long run
r00fus|1 year ago
popcalc|1 year ago
betaby|1 year ago
brookst|1 year ago
r00fus|1 year ago
This is a laptop chip, right?
unknown|1 year ago
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