throwarchitect
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5 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
The greater simplicity of ARMv8 and its fixed sized instructions definitely helps, but also Intel runs their cores at nearly 2x higher frequency, which means a lot less logic can be squeezed into a clock cycle. That makes it much harder to to make a wider processor.
throwarchitect
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5 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
Guess where some of Intel's engineers have fled to? People move around, so it's not like one company has a strangle-hold on knowledge that can't be replicated by another company, especially when one of those companies is willing to pay more for talent.
throwarchitect
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5 years ago
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on: Why is Apple's M1 chip so fast?
That paper uses no actual benchmarks, but rather grabbed a single system utility and then hand-optimized it; SPEC and geekbench show x86-64 comes in well over 4 bytes on average.
throwarchitect
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5 years ago
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on: Why is Apple's M1 chip so fast?
Considering that x86 is less dense than any RISC ISA, the "compression" argument behind CISC falls apart. No surprise a denser, trivial to decode ISA does better.
throwarchitect
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5 years ago
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on: Why is Apple's M1 chip so fast?
>
the M1 is fast isn’t due to technical tricks, but due to Apple throwing a lot of hardware at the problem.Apple threw more hardware at the problem and they lowered the frequency.
By lowering the frequency relative to AMD/Intel parts, they get two great advantages. 1) they use significantly less power and 2) they can do more work per cycle, making use of all of that extra hardware.
