It will be interesting to watch people trade their privacy for convenience. I just hope that Intel wakes up and give new architecture a push or maybe they'll start licensing x86 in a similar way that ARM does and we could finally get more players in the PC space.
It's not like Intel is stellar in terms of privacy. If you want to actually be secure, you'll need something where everything is de-blobbed and open, such as the POWER9 workstations from Raptor.
It's not like Intel is stellar in terms of privacy.
I think the grandparent means that using an M1 implies using macOS, which had its share of potential privacy issues recently (regularly phoning home on launching apps, having Apple service circumvent VPNs and application firewalls).
Until the point in time where Apple decides to publish documentation so that drivers can be written in order to actually run other operating systems, the M1 will remain as locked down as any iPhone - minus finding a way to jailbreak.
It's a matter of opinion I suppose but in my view 'locked down' is not the same as not providing driver support. The former implies actively preventing people from running other OSs on the hardware - which they could have done but chose not too.
IME is strictly local, and is concerned with handling the hardware. AMT, built on top of IME is not, it has networking, but if you have AMT, you know very well, because you paid extra for it.
None of the above is at the same level as phoning home or ignoring the user's firewall.
At least Apple’s certificate checks are (ostensibly) anonymised. Windows telemetry is explicitly designed to build a personalised profile about you for advertisers. There are a lot of options you can disable throughout windows’ control panel, but I’d be shocked if you can actually turn all of it off for good without registry tweaks.
> me_cleaner currently works on most of the Intel platforms; while this doesn't mean it works on all the boards (due to the different firmware implementations)
Faster isn't just convenience. It's also lower power consumption for the same compute, which means a smaller/lighter battery, or longer runtime at the same weight.
This is not a privacy-vs-convenience battle, sadly; this is a very carefully planned circumstance where you can maintain privacy, or you can be effective in life. It's already impossible to use most mobiles in a private fashion, and within a few years, effective desktop computing will be exactly the same way. You're going to have to provide ID to do anything with a "normal" phone or computer.
Recently I learned that Apple will only give out NetworkExtension API entitlements for apps (that are required for VPN apps to work on macOS) to apps distributed via the Mac App Store. Aside from the obvious antitrust issues here (you can't self-distribute VPN apps, or run a competing app store that can distribute apps with the same functionality as Apple's), this means that you can't get access to e.g. the WireGuard app on macOS without IDing yourself to Apple to get an Apple ID and installing it via the Mac App Store.
Want privacy via a VPN? You're going to have to show ID first.
Faster isn't just convenience. It's also lower power consumption for the same compute, which means a smaller/lighter battery, or longer runtime at the same weight.
As has been discussed in various threads the last few weeks, the difference in power efficiency is not that large compared to recent AMD Ryzen APUs, accounting for a move from 7nm to 5nm node.
I surely hope that this is one of the outcomes of Apple and Amazon's ARM push. Perhaps Intel will realize that's it is better to have competition on its own architecture than complete ecosystems moving to foreign architectures.
One could well argue that ARM/RISC is more elegant. But x86_64 besides backwards compatibility has the large benefit that it is an open platform when it comes to operating systems. Moving to ARM will be an excuse for many vendors to lock bootloaders to their blessed software (such as the iOS/Android ecosystems).
- The server and desktop markets move to ARM. The AArch64 instruction set becomes the default that people develop and deploy on. Optimizing for x86_64 CPUs becomes an afterthought. Intel only sells CPUs to organizations that have legacy systems somewhere that cannot be emulated. Intel has to enter the highly commoditized ARM market to stay competitive.
- The server and desktop markets largely stay on x86_64 as a result of Intel licensing x86_64 to three other vendors, increasing competition. The market is not commoditized, because Intel can decide who they license x86_86 to and also control extension to the instruction set. They lose market share due to the increased competition. But they can compete on their own architecture that they control.
Of course, these are extremes. But given that the current fastest supercomputer uses ARM and Apple showed that ARM is fit for the desktop, I am pretty sure that Intel is (or should be) worried about the first scenario.
The one thing that Intel has at the moment is x86 and the historic effort that has gone into generating and optimising code for the x86 instruction set. Sharing that with three other vendors (think three other AMDs all competing with Intel) would catastrophically undermine their CPU business.
In any event it's too late. They maybe had an chance of fending off Arm a few years ago - by the time any licensing now kicks in Arm will have established itself in the server / PC market.
So the only sensible strategy for Intel is to make the most of x86 whilst they can.
I don't see the point. None of them except possibly Intel themselves would have the economies of scale to put the next M1-challenging super x86_64 iteration on a bleeding edge process node, which would be required if one actually wanted to challenge M1. Also have we forgotten that there actually is a third x86 vendor? Via / Centaur's existence and dormancy suggests that having more x86_64 licensees out floating around won't really make much of a difference.
> open platform when it comes to operating systems.
That’s not a feature of x86 itself. That’s just how the computers themselves are assembled. X86 machines could be just as locked down as Apple machines, if the vendor wanted them to be (and Microsoft tried!). ARM builds for multiple OSs exist, including multiple Linux distributions and Windows.
“We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.”
> As for Windows running natively on the machine, “that’s really up to Microsoft,” he said. “We have the core technologies for them to do that, to run their ARM version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications. But that’s a decision Microsoft has to make, to bring to license that technology for users to run on these Macs. But the Macs are certainly very capable of it.”
I'm hopeful. I think it still remains to be seen if this is practically possible and not just theoretically possible. But I'm hopeful that it will be the case. Not only is it a good thing for the Linux world to have multiple architectures/more hardware to work with, but I think it would also be good for Apple to show that they are more open with their computers than phones, for example.
When it comes down to it, Apple is still (largely) a hardware company. If someone wants to buy a Mac to put Linux on it, they still sold a Mac. And I think that having the Linux community testing their hardware would do nothing but make their hardware stronger.
Has nothing to do with Intel, I guess? PC = Windows for most people, I heard them complaining about ads running in their OS. But what are you gonna do? Switch to Ubuntu?
I'm very curious about the chips with external memory and how they'll do WRT performance in the high-end. Do we have a measurement of how much M1 spends waiting for memory after an L3 miss?
The memory that the M1 uses is quite fast for LPDDR4X, but there's nothing _that_ special about it. Moving it off-package shouldn't have a significant impact.
True. Two LPDDR4X channels (at ~35GBps) would give the M1's ~70GBps memory bandwidth. I wonder if the tight packaging allows it to play with latencies being shorter.
The M1 just uses on-package memory, it’s nothing really special, it only avoids routing through the motherboard (which is convenient): instead if soldering the ram next to the SOC, it’s soldered onto the SOC.
It may have electrical benefits too - the capacitance of the line will likely be lower, and possibly the drive-strength might be lower. Both of those might figure into the power management of the chip...
But overall, yeah, it's not as though the RAM is part of the chip, it's just part of the package. Not a lot to see here.
> If they live up to expectations, they will significantly outpace the performance of the latest machines running Intel chips, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t yet public.
Yeah, it's definitely non-public that Apple's about to put best-in-class chips in their desktop machines. Totally secret. Don't tell anyone, Bloomberg!
Reminder: it was also Bloomberg who ran that very likely bogus and unsubstantiated story/psyop about the scary backdoor chips on the SuperMicro boards, and refused to retract it. When they do very obvious marketing fluff pieces like this, they lose even more credibility as a "legitimate news source" in my view, even if this ad they're running for Apple's upcoming hardware is 100% factually accurate.
> Those graphics chips would be several times faster than the current graphics modules Apple uses from Nvidia and AMD in its Intel-powered hardware.
I don't even remember the last Apple hardware with Nvidia graphics.
> Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which has been gaining market share at Intel’s expense, offers standard desktop parts with as many as 16 cores, with some of its high-end chips for gaming PCs going as high as 64 cores.
Threadripper is NOT a CPU for gaming.
> Company tests faster performing processors than Intel’s best.
Well if I'm correct AMD currently sits on top of the CPU ranking (and Intel 11th gen doesn't seem to be changing that as far as the leaks go), so AMD is the one to beat.
> Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs
Weird conclusion to draw considering the statements above. I would expect the performance to be on-par with the high end chips, but with lower energy consumption. The article seems to imply that it will outperform 280W+ CPUs.
I agree this article is sloppily written, Gurman has a strong track record of having the inside scoop on Apple's plans.
Essentially all this article is really saying is "Expect Apple to release a half-size mac pro in 2022 as the last, most powerful new product". That's it. There's no clue about discrete graphics, NUMA, power budgets etc. It could be that that new mac pro is heading back towards the non-expandable trash-can style design. All they really know is that there's going to be something in the mac pro space in 2022 and that's the last direct replacement to Intel Macs Apple are making.
> "Expect Apple to release a half-size mac pro in 2022 as the last, most powerful new product"
Even this piece of info can be extrapolated from statement's Apple has made public. They've said they were migrating their entire product line within 2 years. The Mac Pro is part of that product line. The only questions are how Apple is going to get there and on that front it's pretty clear this article is pure speculation.
Will the Mac Pro have integrated graphics or a discrete GPU? Maybe someone at AMD knows this based on order volume? Likewise, are they using external RAM, soldered on the logic board, or user-serviceable RAM?
How is performance going to compare to current top end processors?
Those are the only questions, and the answers here are pure speculation. It's likely only a handful of people at Apple even know the answers to these things.
Substantial progress on the AMD reset issue has been made recently. Many cards now reset properly and progress continues on those that aren't. No custom kernel required either.
I got really burned by AMD GPUs, had a 5700 XT for myself and rx 580 and 570 for my kids. None of them reset properly, had to build special kernel, and even sometimes then they just froze the host. Sold them all, got NVidia cards, never had issues since (7+ months).
I don't think that fact that Threadripper is capable of running games makes it a "chip for gaming PCs", at least if that term is going to mean anything useful.
You can use just two GPUs if the host is running a virtualization manager like Proxmox.
I currently run a Windows gaming VM and a bunch of Linux VMs on top of Proxmox using a single GPU. Planning to add a second GPU for transcoding in the near future.
That's pretty cool! I run one gaming VM on my 3900X but I always wondered how well it would be able to handle 2 Win10 VM's playing games concurrently. Do all the other components of the solution (both hardware and software) scale well enough for that? I assume threadripper has enough PCIe lanes and IOMMU grouping that allows for 2 passthrough GPU's + 1 for the host?
Should handle gaming fine, you can even pin VMs on specific cores (I didn't bother). My kids play No Man's Sky with me and the 12 core 2920X handles it no issues whatsoever even though the game is atrocious optimization wise. Should have gotten a 16 core so we all three could play on same box.
X<3|4|5>70 boards should allow 2 GPUs in separate IOMMU groups. My old system was a 1700X on ASUS Prime x370 Pro with 2 gaming VMs. Only issue with x?70 boards is the IOMMU groups for USB controllers. On the Prime x370 Pro, only one USB controller is in its own IOMMU group, so second VM needed a USB passthrough.
On the Threadripper, due to the vast amount of PCIe lanes, on the Asrock Taichi x399, I got two USB controllers in their own IOMMU groups and each of the 4 PCIex16 slots it's in its own IOMMU group. It's a dream virtualization motherboard.
Is it possible to swap GPU assignments from the host OS to a guest OS and back, or does it require some motherboard-level/boot-time settings that make that difficult?
Never tried, some people had success with NVidia GPUs. However, if you are willing to put your host in sleep and wake it up, then it should be much easier. Sleep usually resets the GPU and lets host drivers grab it.
I should keep this in mind when I upgrade my workstation some time in the future. I have an x470 Taichi and there the IOMMU grouping is pretty bad, it also has only a single USB controller in its own group, and all PCIe slots except the top x16 one are grouped with other stuff so it's not even possible to plug in a separate USB controller card or a second GPU for passthrough. A ThreadRipper would have been a much better choice considering I also use this machine for development and can use all the cores I can get.
Given that the (serial) compute task (only CPU/RAM) that I started before I went shopping finished in 4073 seconds on my iMac Pro, and in 2648 seconds on my Mac mini, the conclusion is not that weird (even if it is not much of a conclusion).
Depending on the workload, that's not as impressive as it sounds at first. Single threaded M1 performance is around 50-60% better than the 18-core Xeon in the iMac (which is impressive). But high-core CPUs are typically slower per core. I have plenty of programs that run faster on my dual core laptop than on the 16 and 24 core Xeon servers at work.
You are quibbing over the details. The information the journalist has is "Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs"; perhaps he was told that by a highly reliable source in the Apple Silicon team.
The rest is just him trying to make a long enough article out of one sentence of information.
Agree, this article is the best example of why one should not talk to journalist if they work for a as secretive org as Apple. A single sentence leads to a multi-page article.
I’d say Gurman’s reporting is probably, to a considerable extent, controlled leak. He usually gets salient facts straight, then mixes those with useless and sometimes subtly wrong (or just wrong) filler, and occasionally paints the wrong picture from the facts he was told. Fortunately it’s usually not hard to pick out the facts that were leaked to him, and ignore whatever conclusions he drew personally.
The details are a shibboleth for the reader to assess the writer's reliability. Noting the errors in the commentary allows others to improve article consumption efficiency.
The article itself is essentially devoid of information and I'm surprised that it is on the front page here. Regardless the source, it is asinine to consider as news a prediction that Apple plans to continue in the same direction they've been going for some time. What's next, sun will rise again tomorrow, rain is wet, or Microsoft is planning a next version of .NET?
> "The rest is just him trying to make a long enough article out of one sentence of information"
This is how I understand the article too. Bloomberg probably tried to recruit a source within the Apple Silicon team who wouldn't provide much information, but did say "well the Mac Pro will have a CPU better than any other high end PC".
Bloomberg wanted to run with that line since they have "unique" information so they could capitalize on it. So the author was told to write an article about it, with really only half a sentence of fuel to run with. So the author states the half-sentence, and then proceeds to use conjecture and speculation to fill out the requisite 500 words needed per the Bloomberg Style Guide that they are forced to file for submitted work.
The problem is when the details are incorrect it indicates that the information has been filtered through people who don't understand it. I suspect that the original sources actually revealed a lot more specific information, but since the journalist didn't understand it they didn't preserve it when they reworded everything. It's a common and frustrating problem with journalism.
I believe their point is Threadripper is even poorer at gaming than some weaker and cheaper AMD CPUs (3900X, 5900X) or those Intel craps which have one single advantage: running at 5GHz+. A disgusting number of modern games still depends on mostly single thread performance.
So, you can beat highest gaming PC at gaming, but that doesn't reflect your power at running "productivity" workloads.
Single-core performance is certainly one measure of a gaming cpu. But I would argue that "gaming" has evolved a little since. Gamers now also want to stream. They want to record. They want alt-tab to a video chat. They want to play one game while Steam is downloading updates for several others. Having extra unused cores can be useful in such situations. There is a use case for threadripper in gaming.
There are also a few games (Factorio) where ram limitations can bottleneck before cpu/gpu limitations, where Threadripper's extra memory channels can really help.
I had a 2013 iMac with Nvidia 780m graphics I replaced with a refurbished 2019 model using AMD graphics. I ended up doing so because Nvidia dropped updates a few years back and Apple never did update the drivers.
I would like to see a world class GPU from Apple but again, I repeat this often, it won't mean much more than marketing materials if they don't get developers on board. This means more than just publishing oriented developers; video, pictures, and audio. That market is not sufficiently large to pull in other software as has been proven over the decades let alone get people to pay a premium for a system; because people do shop based on $$$ outside of gamers who wont' even look if there game isn't supported.
across Black Friday there were many good windows laptops at $500 or less with SSDs, some with dGPU, and most with 16gb ram. people see that and also that they know software just works and that is what Apple still is up against, hardware superiority or not
The article is by Mark Gurman, a fairly reliable Apple leaker. [1] Regardless of the fluff, the information about the apple chips is probably on the money.
The Mac app store is a terrible platform for distributing games. People do not look there for them, and they have a bad reputation of breaking or being left unmaintained. It has awful discoverability and is filled with trash. Customers also prefer to get them on Steam anyway (or on consoles). This is especially true if a game has online support. Most other distribution platforms also give customers access to the game on any platform, rather than locking them to one. It doesn't really offer the consumer anything, and for a developer who will have to target Windows and Steam anyway to have any chance of making money, it isn't really that enticing, even with a larger revenue share.
It's so sad that all technological innovation seems to be concentrated into the few products of a single company.
Yes, we can have power-efficient phones and laptops, but what about other product categories? I think the market should be more modular so that any company can build cool stuff with top of the line CPUs, not just Apple.
As a hacker, I think with Apple's dominance computing is becoming less interesting. It's like opening a LEGO box, and all pieces are already fused together.
In some ways it's also a great time to be hacking on these kinds of projects. ARM chips are cheap and widely available to everyone as well as all kinds of other components. They maybe don't have the same kind of R&D behind them as Apple's but the building blocks are there.
I wonder how the extent of this problem could be attributed to patents that are awarded not on the basis of genuine invention but rather letting profit whoever filed their findings first.
On the other hand, without Apple pushing this innovation there was next to no chance we’d ever see anything like the M1 come from another company. Think of the standard laptop display from 10 years ago. They nearly all came with extremely low resolution screens until Apple expanded high res displays from the iPhone and iPad to its own laptops in 2012. Shortly after, all other brands followed suit. I anticipate competitors will do the same and roll out Arm-based laptops in the next few years.
The problem is there isn’t a CPU available for competitors to use in their laptops. Apple doesn’t sell their chips to 3rd parties, and no other ARM chip on the market has competitive performance. Microsoft is trying - but their Qualcomm based laptops are extremely slow compared to offerings from intel / amd.
Looks like the 5900HX is looking like it could, although we don't have all the details yet. Note that Zen 3 is still on 7 nm while M1 is 5 nm, so there's an inherent performance disadvantage.
I can't make any sense of this? Laptops have been around since the early 90s and have always used LCD screens - what else? Anything with a CRT wouldn't fit on your lap. Jeff Goldblum even used one to repel an alien invasion in 1996.
When Steve Jobs announced iPhone on stage in 2008 he said it was a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,"
That was saying the quiet thing out loud and Apple is playing it much cooler on PR around competition these days.
But Apple Silicon combined with Apple software is very likely at least 5 years ahead of the competition, because there is not currently an assembly of organizations that can integrate to offer anything like what Apple is doing _now_.
What makes this article particularly interesting is it points at beating NVIDIA and AMD in graphics and reducing the size of the enclosure by half.
I find it interesting that Apple just redesigned the Mac Pro only to have to redesign it again for Apple Silicon.
Oddly, the failed trash can Mac Pro may have actually worked for Apple Silicon designs.
I suspect that Apple will provide web services to Apple developers that breaks pricing for Intel / NVIDIA based cloud compute and further burnishes the value of building for Apple platforms.
Apple can fab at max scale if it can consume its own chips in its own data centers that can flex between serving Apple or AWS or Azure customers.
It’s going to be a rough go for the PC market because not everyone is going to make it through this—-at least not as the companies they are today.
For one Apple hasn't just gotten good, they've been working towards this for over 10 years. Secondly AMD is doing pretty well competing with Apple on performance.
Apple has made several strategic acquisitions over the last decade that put them in this position, and has a fairly unique advantage in their relationship with shareholders—basically, that they can take what would be massive risks to other companies, rather than chasing short-term quarterly profit increases, and not suffer massive backlash for it. Also note that Apple didn't just come out with the M1 out of nowhere: it's the result of iterative improvements on the A-series chips for over a decade.
That's not to say it would be impossible for another company to try to get themselves to where Apple is today—but it would be far from trivial.
It's kind of weird that one of the most valuable companies in the world has this "we're doing our own thing and we're gonna do it well, invest if you want, or don't" attitude, but that same attitude is decried by pretty much anyone else.
It's not like they're an example or anything... I mean, it obviously doesn't work for every market, but I just see it as kind of strange that someone hasn't taken a page from Apple's playbook over the years when it would suit them.
I think the reason it works is because except for their brief—and very obviously catastrophic—period in the '90s under traditional suits, Apple's management made it clear from the start that that's how they would operate.
When Steve Jobs came back as "iCEO" in the late '90s, Apple stock was roughly $8/share (pre-splits). They weren't a total nobody, but they certainly weren't interesting enough to any big fish that there was any push to put pressure on them to act like a more "traditional" company. And Jobs kept doing things his way for the next 15 years, until his medical retirement and untimely death, and those things increased Apple's stock price fairly steadily. Until the iPhone came out, of course, at which point it increased dramatically.
But by then, people were already used to the idea that Apple would do things Apple's way. (And some people were so used to the idea that Apple was Doomed that they still preach it every time there's any new Apple news.) And it's so utterly clear that Apple doing things Apple's way works—for Apple.
Any other company trying to do things Apple's way—or even its own unique way, rather than the way the markets want—would be fighting an incredibly strong current.
"Mr CEO, the board has heard word that you are working on some sort of "insanely great" product, and requires clarity on whether you're booking the revenue from this thing, whatever it is, into the current quarter, or next quarter -- and also how many quarters it will then take to invent the next insanely great product to follow. One insanely great product per year remains an acceptable cadence at least through 2022. Note that we require a launch in time for CES and we are under increasing pressure with our WalMart deal -- kindly recall your incentive package structure. Please advise."
I mean, you jest, but look at how the tech press covered Apple for years, especially after Jobs' death: "Tim Cook should be fired, he hasn't brought out anything as world-changing as the iPhone in the two/five/eight years he's been CEO!" Not to mention "The iPad doesn't do these five incredibly specific things that Android tablets do, and one Android tablet maker says they'll be making one next year that's faster than the current model iPad!"
So many people, even those who should absolutely know better, seemed to get caught in the trap of believing that a company—any company—can only be "viable" if it can constantly outdo itself and all its competitors.
Huh; for some reason, my brain always tells me that he didn't get fired till 1989. Not sure why; maybe it's because it wasn't until a few years after that that the product lines started to metastasize in a way that only a corporate suit could love (Quadra, Performa, LC, etc).
Anyway, thanks for the reminder that the period without Steve Jobs was less brief than I tend to think.
Ironically (coincidentally?) another of the most valuable companies in the world, Amazon, has been saying exactly the same thing - and acting the same way - for more than 20 years[1]:
"We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term...
Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies...
We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions..."
Vertical Integration of products, culture and functional organization. Intel, QC, AMD will never be a holistic consumer solution. MSFT or Amazon might be able to to technically and financially, but I don't know about organizationally. Perhaps if Surface/Kindle were spun off completely and had $10B and more to buy a next-gen node for a year. Google claims to be some functional matrix but the pieces just never come together that elegantly.
My 2011 $1k laptop (which I still use at times) had a full hd screen and 4 RAM slots. PCs have always offered a full range of specs, but most people just go for cheaper options. Even a couple of years back, most laptops were shipping low res screens.
When I bought it though, Macs were shipping with lower resolutions than 1080p. And not long after the Macbooks went retina, I bought a laptop with a 4k screen - which again the Macbooks don't match.
My point is that PCs have offered high end specs at affordable (but above average) price points even before Macs had them. And the fact that many PC laptops still offer low res screens point to price being the deciding factor which moves the PC industry forward, not Apple.
My 2006 Thinkpad had a 1600x1200 IPS display. It’s more that Apple cares more about the high-end than the PC market does, so of course more Macs have high-end features than Windows devices.
Well, it was 2006. There was a period of several years after that where displays actually got worse as "HD" took over, which meant going from 4:3 and 16:10 aspect ratios to 16:9, and being stuck with awful 1366x768 resolutions.
You are right. But is not Apple's fault, the long line of chip and computer makers long gone (DEC, Sun, also IBM in the PC Market, etc.) All crushed by the Wintel duopoly. Everybody trusted on x86 and specially Intel, to bring us forward, but they stopped innovating at least a decade ago.
I'm happy that Apple is showing that the king is naked, I hope that a new wave of ARM based devices (not just from Apple) will influx new life on the PC Market.
I think one problem for CPUs specifically is that people plainly just don't care as much about speed anymore. Modern processors are extremely fast.
So other metrics like power draw get more prominence. Apple managed to get both with a chip design, but I don't see it as a trend yet. I wouldn't even call it innovative in itself, it is just a very good iteration of CPU tech. I think that is awesome because it challenges other companies again.
For performance intensive applications like gaming or CAD, GPUs have become more relevant.
There is a lot of special software for physical calculations (lenses, materials, etc.) that require raw CPU power for n-th degree numerical solutions, but these are niches that cannot sustain an industry.
My main device I use in private for a lot of development has a standard intel CPU and I only looked at power usage because I knew it would be fast enough. I wanted it to be as silent as possible. Turns out it was indeed fast enough for anything I wanted to do. Maybe I buy a new one in a few years, but it didn't yet fail me in any way.
Well you’re not totally wrong but the one place where consumers care about raw single threaded performance is the web browser and these new rigs are making huge strides. The M1 browser is remarkably fast and it unlocks new territory in what you can do without bringing the browser to its knees. The new 11th gen Intel laptop part has also opened a big gap between itself and its predecessors and competitors, but it’s not as fast as the M1 and it draws way more power when it’s running. So I think this is an area they still have room to improve and consumers will really notice the benefit of it.
In many single threaded benchmarks the 11th gen is 50% faster than the 10th. I think it’s a remarkable bump. The Zen3 has also brought a significant leap in single threaded performance, but not on mobile yet.
Most consumers don't understand computer "speed," and so any of these speed claims are either 1) marketing, or 2) aimed at enthusiasts who do understand. Most people seem to think that you own a computer for a few years, and then the computer "gets slow," and then it's time to buy a new computer.
This kind of condescension isn't helpful. People understand when an app or a site is slow, or doesn't work, compared to when it works well and quickly.
I legitimately didn't intend to be condescending. In my experience people don't understand that for a computer to be "fast," you have multiple possible bottle-necks: hard drive read/write, CPU, RAM, network bandwidth, etc. My very intelligent father-in-law (I mean this seriously, he's very intelligent, and was a programmer for years.) wanted to boost his internet speed, and upgrade from DSL to cable. (something like 15mbs to 100mbs) Well, he didn't really notice much speed difference. And this was because he was seldom, if ever, saturating his 15mbs link. In fact, on a modern webpage, there are so many new TCP connections that each one can be a bit slow despite bandwidth. (and this is to say nothing of the delay incurred by actually trying to render the js and other elements on the page.)
My point was that most consumers don't understand these things, and just assume that "computer speed" is one-dimensional: it's either fast, or not fast.
> I think one problem for CPUs specifically is that people plainly just don't care as much about speed anymore. Modern processors are extremely fast.
I disagree. At least in the datacenter there are still lots of workloads that are CPU bound. And many of these workloads are not easy to parallelize. Right now there are about a bajillion startups in a Python codebase that are hitting scaling limits, where the single-core GIL limits are starting to hurt responsiveness.
Yes, they could re-write into Go and get higher performance and better concurrency at the same time. But most orgs don't have the bandwidth for re-building their software stack from scratch. They'd much rather throw money at hardware.
My guess is if you had a datacenter CPU with 2-3X the single-core threaded performance of top-level Xeons, it would sell like hotcakes.
Better solved depends under the organizational and operational calculus you’re working under.
Many companies would rather throw money at beefier hardware than play around with experimental JITs that may or may not break standard behavior in unpredictable ways.
That's taking slow software and complaining that it's slow due to hardware rather than making the software itself faster, either by rewriting it or optimizing it another way.
> I think one problem for CPUs specifically is that people plainly just don't care as much about speed anymore. Modern processors are extremely fast.
The rave reviews that the M1 Macs are getting for performance and power efficiency shows that large step improvements in CPU performance are noticed and greatly appreciated. We just didn't have anything as good as the M1 before to really understand how much better computing could be.
>I think one problem for CPUs specifically is that people plainly just don't care as much about speed anymore. Modern processors are extremely fast.
This is just not true. I do NOT have an M1 yet. I have a group of co-workers that do. This group is normally what I would call the critics that are never happy with anything. With out fail each one of them has raved about how fast and responsive their M1s are. They say it nothing like anything else and is a game changer. They also rave about the fact that they can go a day without needing to find a wall socket. This is a group of devs and hardcore networking people.
From my view, no matter how powerful of an Intel system I have running Windows, macOS or Linux, the desktop UI are not up to the speed of an iPad. Getting that in a laptop...that would be great and I plan to try it out in the form of an M1 Air.
Windows on ARM is just not particularly compelling. You have a lot more to lose compatibility wise, and likely less performance to gain given that Apple has the better chip and control over both the hardware and software.
It’s paradoxical that so many devs bemoan apples closed system, which allows you to build literally anything you want from Unix command lines up to the best pc and mobile Uis in the world, but love developing in a UX trash heap walled in by HTML.
One of the reasons is because they used the switch to ARM to lock the system down tightly. Mandatory secureboot that couldn't be disabled. A Windows system that's not as open to modification as the x64 version.
They did their level best to get maximum control and this was and is a huge turn off. If they made it as open as x86/x64, and pulled out all the stops to get software support equivalent to x86 like Apple have done with their system, then it would be a compelling proposition. As it is, it has woeful software support, and Microsoft did very little to address this.
Investing in a top end CPU is expensive and currently there is no buyer for a workstation class CPU other than Apple.
Microsoft's ARM efforts have been lackluster and sales has been lethargic. The last time Microsoft tried to jump to another architecture was an expensive failure. Who is going to invest hundreds of billions in jump starting this category with a track record like that?
Likewise, Linux. While Linux is a great development platform, Qualcomm isn't going to gamble tens of millions on developers migrating en-mass to a Linux/ ARM platform.
I agree 100%, and that's the answer to OP statement - it's not enough to just wish that the market is different. Someone needs to put their money where their mouth is.
Currently, the only company willing to bet enormous amount of money and frankly the entire Mac platform to change status quo is Apple. Maybe (and I really hope so) Apple will push other ARM processors on the desktop as a side-effects - while Qualcomm is more or less "just" the packer of ARM designed cores, and if I understand the market it's entirely out of their reach to design M1-class CPU, maybe Apple will push ARM to design more efficient desktop cores. Maybe Amazon or Google will do that with their custom ARM silicon now when Apple demonstrated that processors doesn't need to be hot to be powerful. For so long Intel sold us basically the same thing, and we cheered when AMD was just a couple percent faster. However this ends, I'm glad that someone at least rocks the boat.
I suspect Qualcomm focuses far more on their modems and integrating their modems into the CPUs because that is where their IP is. Fundamentally the reason Qualcomm can charge what they charge for their CPUs revolves around bundling their modems.
Nvidia is the most likely company to build a higher end ARM CPU to compete with the M1. With the ARM core and their GPU expertise, they could conceivably crank out something which performs much better than Qualcomm.
HP ships nearly 50% more PCs. Dell sells just a few more. I don't know that I would say they are dominant, after a release of a single low power, high performing part.
What many in the Apple ecosystem are missing is the steady, rapid improvement in performance and efficiency coming from AMD, who apparently few have heard of, because only Intel CPUs were found in Apple for 14 years (and we're not all gamers!)
In early 2020, AMD released massively dominate laptop CPUs, but OEMs have only tepidly adopted them. It looks like about 20% of notebooks are now being sold with AMD, and that number is going to grow in 2021, as the lead time for new designs using AMD will have elapsed.
I'm not saying these AMD chips are better than Apples - the battery life is at best half!
Although, I can't help but read your comment as satire! "What if PC components were modular!" I also enjoy building sets from LEGO bricks, and putting together my computer from parts!
Yet again, I feel like this will be the enduring lesson of Apple taught in business school. The art of finding and exploiting the most profitable niche of a market to take the majority of the profit while only having to serve a fraction of the userbase.
An engineer friend of mine took an MBA a while back (the company paid, so he figured why not). Apple was one of the companies under study then. I doubt it's changed.
>Although, I can't help but read your comment as satire! "What if PC components were modular!" I also enjoy building sets from LEGO bricks, and putting together my computer from parts!
Huh? They're saying you won't be able to do that with an Apple CPU.
But they said "the market should be modular", not "Apple CPUs should be part of the modular market." The market is modular - Apple CPUs are just limited to Apple laptops.
There are loads of amazing devices out there. My home security system runs on a Jetson Nano and a bespoke solution, with image processing using Tensorflow, fed via GStreamer. I'm going to replace it at some point with a Xavier NX.
Amazon has Gravitron 2. Microsoft is doing something with "their" SQ2, though at this point they're mostly faking it by putting a badge on an uncompetitive Qualcomm part, but I'm sure they'll get there.
The M1 is a wonderful chip, and it has done loads to push the industry to really adopt ARM -- possibly the greatest fat-computing transition to ARM yet -- and it should help across every market, and loads of hardware from competitors.
Hmmm...I wonder why that is. Maybe, just maybe, it has to do with the fact that high market concentrations yield subpar innovations. Apple is really the exception here because survival (by vertical control) is so ingrained into their boardroom and executive culture. Otherwise, monopoly will almost always yield minimal req’d/viable innovations. Worse yet companies will invest in frivolous projects doomed to fail (Facebook).
>"It's so sad that all technological innovation seems to be concentrated into the few products of a single company."
All technological innovation is coming from Apple? That's a mind-boggling statement.
Apple released a great CPU, which replaced the last best CPU, and some other CPU next year will be better than both (it could be another Apple chip, it might not be).
At the end of the day, the average consumer wants performance insofar as their device can run apps they want (benchmarks means squat), and battery life. Apple moved the envelope forward here, but let's not pretend they landed on mars.
“I think the market should be more modular so that any company can build cool stuff with top of the line CPUs, not just Apple.”
I think Apple just showed us that being less modular can bring huge benefits.
As an example, in a modular world, the CPU designer would add instructions that speed up encryption/video decoding/whatever, larger vector registers for speeding up ML stuff, etc.
In a M1 world, the system designer might say “we don’t need them in the CPU; the system will have custom hardware that can do that better”, or even “yes, that would speed up the system, but we better spend that transistor/heat budget on X”
We should have those system design choices but this doesn't mean one company should choose for us. Instead, we should be able to pick CPUs with a variety of different configurations (e.g. optimized for mobile, server, desktop, embedded, etc.) from different vendors.
If Microsoft doesn't go down this path for Surface, don't hold your breath any other vendors will.
PC's are not where innovation happens. Intel had USB for almost two years yet PC's still shipped with serial/parallel ports. Then the candy colored iMacs hit, and all the accessory makers started chasing them with candy colored USB accessories and then all the sudden the PC vendors woke up to USB. USB was a disaster on Windows 95, Marginally better on Windows 2000 but didn't get decent until XP.
Wifi - Apple not only released wifi on their laptop but a whole ecosystem - Access points too. One app to configure and manage everything. Push button simplicity. Wifi thrashed around on PC vendors and was relegated to PCMCIA cards with dorky external antennas before Apple baked it in and pretty much embarrassed the rest of the industry to stop nickel and dimeing everyone as an add on and just include it as base tech. Or at least bury the antennas in every laptop and still charge people for an optional internal card. How long did that continue for?
I'm sure there are some others I could think two but I vividly remember living through both of those as I had a foot in each camp at the time (actually I was more PC back then since before the iMac is was the craptastic, uninspired and overprice Performa years for the Mac - the PowerPC iMacs brought me back into the Mac fold).
PC has always been focused on high volume, low margin, least common denominator hardware. Big bins of unremarkable but functional interchangeable parts. Major Pro's of that strategy are pricing and choice. Major Con's are instability/incompatibility/driver issues and lack of moving innovation forward.
Apple has never (and will never) play in the value market. Remember how Apple was supposedly doomed because they didn't have a netbook? Who still uses netbooks (or even remembers them other than us geeks?) By not playing in the value market (or race to the bottom) it frees them up to do things like the M1.
Agreed until 2012. 2012 was the last year that Apple made improvement (Retina display) for computer until 2020 (M1). Windows PC made some improvements: Touch panel, Thin frame laptop, 2 in 1, 4G connectivity, lightweight laptop. And they keep some goodies on some models: replaceable RAM, Storage, Battery.
I built a gaming PC last year, spent ~$1,300 and nearly 40 hours researching/assembling. But I'm actually happy just gaming on my M1 Mac mini ($699). Obviously the M1 isn't great for AAA games but for most games it's great.
I'd consider an Apple laptop if I knew any game I wanted to play would work, and I never play the latest AAA games. But so far I checked and StarCraft 2 does not seem to play well, despite being a 12 year old game. (That may change with software updates?)
I was all set to replace my 2015 MBA with an M1 MBA, but in watching his (and others) Cities:Skylines performance I'm now thinking I may switch to gaming on Mac full time. Only problem is 16GB of RAM is NOT going to cut it with C:S - so I now am waiting for the next batch. 32GB should be plenty and I would be shocked if the next group of machines didn't have at least one laptop that could go to 32GB.
I'm currently strongly conflicted on whether I should bother building a PC. I had been wanting to do one for years, but now that I have the space and the money I find I don't actually have time to justify the expense for how little I play.
I'm hoping a cloud gaming service takes off that works more like a dedicated remote desktop rather than an a la carte storefront the way they all seem to be.
> It's so sad that all technological innovation seems to be concentrated into the few products of a single company.
The big advantage here is the ability to pull all of this functionality onto smaller and more highly integrated SoCs and packages. This is the antithesis of modular.
If you are looking for similar performance, the best you can hope for is a more accessible competitor. Someone like Nvidia or Qualcomm releasing a SoC with comparable features.
The big problem there is Qualcomm and Nvidia both have closed drivers so they are only marginally better than Apple. Since Qualcomm does such a lousy job supporting older CPUs, arguably worse (what's the value of a CPU with only 3 years of support?).
I think pple, under steve jobs, got to interdependent and was working in the ecosystem.
After Steve Jobs, Apple regressed to independent. Instead of using its market power to foster the ecosystem, it has regressed to teenager level and just does what is good for itself. There are no other hardware manufacturers anymore and now their software developers don't feel like partners and tread carefully.
Thing is apple can probably do well for itself independently but... It's lonely at the top especially if you've turned your back on the rest of the ecosystem.
"After Steve Jobs, Apple regressed to independent."
lol - the only reason the Apple II had slots is Woz threatened to quit if SJ won on excluding them.
The Original Mac wasn't designed to be opened by users. You had to have a LONG handle Torx screwdriver to open it. Job's was VERY much into appliance computing. Any expansion baked into any Mac was in spite of, not because of, Steve Jobs.
Many things I like/appreciate about the man - his obsession over all computers being sealed was NOT one of his more endearing characteristics. Obviously he was flexible - we had Mac's with slots back then and we do now too. But there has been no "regression" since his passing.
The more I learn about early Apple the more I wonder if maybe Jobs' greatest strength as a leader came from hiring people ballsy enough to defy him on the most important things.
> Jobs was a huge headache for Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership, who received memos almost daily complaining about his temper, his dismissive attitude toward the Apple II platform that was the only thing supporting the company, and his refusal to listen to reason when one of his sacred precepts was threatened. Jobs’s headstrong authoritarianism had been a big contributor to the debacle that was the Apple III launch. (Traditional wisdom, as well as an earlier version of this article, would have it that Jobs’s insistence that the Apple III ship without a cooling fan led directly to the hardware problems that left Apple IIIs dying on buyers’ desks by the thousands. It does, however, appear that this version of events is at least questionable; see the comments section for more about that. Be that as it may, everyone involved would agree that Jobs did an already muddled project no favors.)
I agree with you but I also think that this situation that a company is making very unique computer is exciting. I wish Apple have 10-25% market share, not above 30%.
Apple wants to be the next SGI and from the M1 is it clear where they want to make profit -- memory and storage upgrades.
I expect these monsters to have oodles of HBM, and the Mac Pro with a TB or more could approach house-levels of pricing, like SGI workstations of the past.
The seem to be aiming at keeping the base price stable, or in some cases at the low water mark for prices for recent models. The new Air starts a hair below $1k as before.
After market RAM upgrades on Mac laptops haven't been possible for quite some time now, so I don't think a strategy to try and leverage more profit that way is a change. We'll have to see how they approach that for the higher end kit.
These chips mean Apple makes more money as well. Each chip now costs them pennies, as opposed to hundreds they were paying Intel and AMD. And their design costs are basically paid off by the iOS devices.
Pretty much everything they were paying Intel and AMD (for graphics) is now profit in their pockets.
Exactly. A chip design team as large as Apple's costs hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries alone. Mask costs in 5nm are about $30 million. EDA physical design tools have list prices of over $1 million per license.
I'm pretty sure that their future higher end CPUs, especially desktop ones, will vary in the number of cores, and the higher core count ones will cost obscene amount of money, as per usual. So unfortunately not only memory and storage.
Gawd, I used to loooove SGI. It is really nice to see some variation in computer architecture come in to the mainstream. (aside from the awesome GPU tech wars)
Bloomberg are full of shit when it comes to tech news. I'm going to wait until products land before I evaluate. This last cycle I am impressed however.
> Bloomberg are full of shit when it comes to tech news.
Actually this article is from Mark Gurman who has arguably the best track record of any journalist when getting the inside scoop on future Apple products. He has worked for Bloomberg for a couple years now.
This is a leak article, not in depth tech article. Nobody can write a tech article till they get the numbers or get their hands on the product. Mark Gruman has reliable sources and can get the leak faster and more consistently true.
Bloomberg was the first outlet that reported Apple's transition to ARM, even got the timeline right [0]. So I trust them when it comes to Apple's roadmap.
Read Anandtech if you want tech details, but then it's only for tech already in the market.
Now I don't trust China with regards to hardware manufacturing of computers. I'm sure they're trying to put backdoors into all sorts of equipment that is shipped to the USA.
But Bloomberg NEVER explained how a hypothetical 0402 capacitor could contain a backdoor. They literally took a picture of the smallest chip on a motherboard and said "this could be a backdoor" in big-bold letters. Even from a paranoid anti-China perspective, that article was awful.
"Chinese Backdoor in server equipment" wouldn't be surprising news to me (especially since important groups: military, telecommunications, etc. etc. use equipment like that). But when it comes to writing security-based articles, you need to be very specific about the nature of the threat. If you take the tiniest chip (a passive capacitor) and claim that there's a backdoor in it, you deserve to be laughed off.
Occam's Razor is that the authors of that story gave an interview with some security researchers talking about the potential security flaws of some motherboard (a BMC most likely). These researchers may have even talked about hardware backdoors in the abstract (a known potential problem, but whether or not it was actually happening... well... hard to tell from the article).
They then went to a 2nd researcher to talk about "small chips", which is ambiguous. Some researcher was like... well... those 0402 ceramic capacitors are called "chips" (which they are: they're "ceramic chip capacitors").
The authors then got confused, and wrote about how 0402 capacitors were security flaws. Or something. I don't know, but that's how an article like that comes to be written in my head.
And now that the authors of the article are talking about stupid chip capacitors that can apparently take over the computer, they're completely off track and there's no reason to read the article with any level of seriousness.
-----------
> So are you implying that senior execs at tech companies were lying?
All I mean to imply, is that its bloody obvious that an 0402 chip capacitor can't hack your computer. That Bloomberg's authors couldn't understand this fact before publishing greatly diminishes the reputation of the article in question.
I suspect PC's containing AMD, and maybe even Intel, chips will be crushing Apple in terms of performance a few years from now, even with the legacy that is the x86 ISA.
Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part, it doesn't mean this advantage is inherent to ARM or sustainable once the tech cycle evens out.
The bottleneck right now for essentially all chip performance in mobile devices is heat. If you bypass the power throttling and fan control on my 10th gen 6 core Dell XPS 9500 and let it slurp 80-90 watts (and it will), and sit at 100 degrees centigrade (and it will) it will handily beat an M1 multithreaded score in Cinebench.
> Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part
Single core performance beats even Intel’s highest TDP processors, I’m pretty sure AMD’s too, in real world workloads. Yes, AMD and Intel still have an edge when you get above 8 cores, but that’s kinda to be expected, no?
The same advantage applies to Apple as well. In fact, the only difference between the different performances in the different devices Apple has added the M1 to is their cooling capabilities.
FWIW I largely agree with you. Zen is still competitive at ~7nm/12nm with separate corelets, so if they can match 5nm on a single chip, things will be back to normal.
M1 has 16B transistors on 1 "chip", a 3950X has fewer than 10B across 3. What else would you expect, for now?
Keep wondering if Apple will do some kind of NUMA multi cpu setup for Mac Pros. Say four M1 like chips splitting CPU and GPU load each with their own on package memory.
Not sure, was hoping to get some insight here. I know NUMA has many significant challenges but so does adding more cpu/gpu cores and on package memory to compete with current desktop/workstation levels on the ram and gpu sides.
Just seems elegant to do 4 M1's and get 64gb total memory and 4x gpu/cpu and seems hard to scale up a single chip to match current multi chip / discrete gpu systems.
Maybe even dimms for main memory and current on package memory acting just as a very large level of cache.
Four M1s in a NUMA configuration would get absolutely crushed in the high end market outside of niche uses because of the amount of interconnect bus stress. NUMA is most advantageous on server workloads that Apple doesn't target and for which Mac OS is poorly suited.
With all this talk of even more cores, how does binning work with SoCs? That is, CPU manufacturers can bin individual processors into different tiers depending on how they perform. What is binning like for SoCs, since they are more integrated? Do you bin the whole SoC?
At least right now, Apple only bins the M1 on graphics cores (7 vs. 8). My guess is that those have the most complex lithography, so it would make sense that those would be the biggest yield variable.
My guess is that any multivariate binning will be lowest-common denominator, e.g. an 8-performance core / 12-GPU core part with a single, second-tier bin of 6 performance cores and 10 GPU cores.
They're already binning the M1 between the two models of the Macbook Air; one has a 7 core GPU, the other has an 8 core. They haven't outright said this is due to binning, but it seems very likely. Will probably be similar for upper-end models, but more CPU variations as well.
They're fabbing with TSMC, which has a really established history in high yields. Just think about the A13/A14 CPUs, which are probably the most voluminous single CPU models every fabricated by a company, yet have never been subject to binning to other lower or higher end models. As the chips get more complicated naturally there will be more fabrication issues, so I expect we'll see more binning, but it doesn't look like there's much cause for concern.
I wonder if they do bin them though, just not for iPhones or iPads. Perhaps today's A13/A14s that have small defects are tomorrow's Apple TV or HomePod CPUs.
The good news is that different parts of an SoC can run at different clock rates, and outside of the CPU/GPU it's a much more reliable world.
Yes, you bin the whole SoC; but all the performance differences are expected to be concentrated in the CPU and GPU. Expect a high bin where all cores and all GPU subprocessors are working, a medium bin where 1 or 2 CPU cores and 10% of the GPU is either missing or running at a lower frequencey, and a value bin where perhaps half the CPU cores and up to half the GPU are downgraded.
This is not a great article, if you've followed the news and around the M1 in the last few weeks. Sure, the Bloomberg audience are not computer geeks, but still.
"If they live up to expectations, they will significantly outpace the performance of the latest machines running Intel chips, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t yet public."
It's not entirely obvious that "the latest machines running Intel chips" here probably refers only to the latest Macs running Intel chips. We already know that the M1/Firestorm beats Intel handily in single thread, so this just means they'll use enough cores to beat the 28 core Xeon-W in their current Mac Pro. This is of course completely uninteresting, since 1) they've long announced they'll be Intel-free by 2022 and 2) they're not going to release new Macs any slower than the current Intels.
Going by Geekbench they need probably a 16 to 20 Firestorm CPU to beat the current Xeon W-3275M Mac Pro. A 32 Firestorm CPU would completely obliterate it. To make a statement, they'll probably do just that.
The more interesting question to me is if they're going to go for the absolute performance crown, currently the AMD EPYC 7H12, a 64 core Zen2 CPU which benches around 60k in Geekbench5 (vs 19k for the 28-core Mac Pro). By mid-2021, that that will be probably a 64 core Zen3 EPYC at around 72k
(+20% IPC vs Zen2). Apple can probably match that with a 48 Firestorm CPU. A 32 core CPU won't do it, even with a generous IPC increase next year.
Apple will likely have HBM on the 32 core packages, which should provide a significant IPC uplift over the LPDDR4 used in the M1 Macs. I'm pretty certain a 32-core Apple Silicon machine will handily beat a 64 core Zen3, likely at half the power, especially since the AMD's chiplet designs runs into significant memory bandwidth and communication issues.
> Apple will likely have HBM on the 32 core packages
First of all, that's ludicrously expensive. You need an active interposer that's larger than the chip to do something like that. 4x HBM stacks means 4096 wires to run between your compute-device and the RAM, that's a lot of wires in a tiny area, and only possible with advanced packaging (expensive) methodologies.
Second: HBM2 based designs have poor memory-capacity: 8GB per stack means 4x HBM2 caps out at 32GBs under most reasonable configurations.
Going into 2021 with a ludicrously expensive 32GB machine seems a bit weak. I don't think anyone in the high-end market is targeting that level of memory capacity. Even if we're generous and HBM capacity doubles between now and then, I'm not sure if 64GBs is enough for workstation tasks.
HBM works for supercomputers, because when 32GB isn't enough, you just buy another node. A64FX, the current CPU-based supercomputer that uses HBM, only has 32GB/node. Then Fugaku bought 150,000 nodes.
I have a "low budget" PC with 32GB RAM and 8 cores. I don't know why anyone would want a workstation with less than 128GB RAM. Of course, the Apple world is extremely weird and you get massively overcharged for commodities like RAM.
Well... my point isn't so much "Apple is stupid", as much as "Apple would be stupid to use HBM2... and I don't think Apple is stupid".
I think Apple would want to release a 64GB or 128GB Mac Pro... but only to upsell its customers to a 256GB or higher Mac Pro. The ability to configure more RAM into a system is key for marketing (even if this RAM is soldered onto the motherboard: like LPDDR4x, it wouldn't be too expensive to make different motherboards especially in a niche $10,000 computer like the Mac Pro).
But if Apple did go with HBM2 itself... well... then its physically unable to go above 32GB (today), or maybe ~64GB (if bigger HBM2 modules come out next year).
--------
Sticking with LPDDR4x just seems like the most obvious, and best, decision for Apple. So that's my expectation. But then again: making a 8-way decoder + fat-as-heck execution pipeline wasn't part of my expectation either. So maybe Apple will surprise us again.
HBM's latency characteristics are about the same as any other DRAM however (including DDR4 or LPDDR4x).
So you have a high-bandwidth, but no better latency, L4 chip. And that's kind of hard to deal with and optimized against.
Xeon Phi had a DDR4 + HMC (where HMC was a early competitor to HBM), and getting good performance out of that was unusual. DDR4 ended up having slightly better latency, so the HMC cache would hurt some workloads.
Unless Apple intends to get into the server business, I think the market at the top is very small.
They really only have to be competitive with the lower core consumer chips to accomplish their goal.
I think they should try for the performance crown though and the server business. There's a lot of money in that. In servers power consumption is an important consideration and they have an advantage there as well. ARM based architectures are also a lot more relaxed in that they don't have to present a nearly sequentially consistent view of cache and memory between multiple cores like x86. That may give them an edge scaling the core count. It's horrible to program for if you are coding lock free algorithms, but almost nobody does that and fewer should.
Their current 28-core Mac Pro (which even has a rack version) is probably not a volume business either, that doesn't stop them from making them. It's probably much cheaper to go for the performance crown with their own CPU now than with Intel/AMD in the past. See it as Apples Bugatti Veyron/Chiron :)
They didn't have to make a special chip for it though, it can be economical to offer a small volume product made of off the shelf components. It's a losing venture to do it with custom designed chips - that's extremely expensive and I doubt the market is large enough to justify it. Unless they intend to get into servers. I'm very curious to see what they do.
They have to make a server-class chip if they want to have something like the Mac Pro on ARM too. To actually go into the server business they might have to add a bit more I/O capability like Epyc vs. Threadripper, but the basic cpu should be more than up to it, if it has 32 performance cores or more. Even just a rack-mounted M1 would be interesting for many server applications and anything above more so.
> Unless Apple intends to get into the server business, I think the market at the top is very small.
Their OS is pretty unsuitable for server tasks[1], and they've abandoned most of their server tools, so I think they don't care about that market anymore.
[1] No synflood mitigations, easy to panic by spawning threads that sleep.
There's a reason Apple don't make Time Capsules any more. Servers are usually commodities, and Apple don't make commodities if they can reasonably avoid it (anything they make that's even close to a commodity still, at least, can be turned into a fashion accessory, like the aluminum keyboards and stuff). Commodity suppliers get put into bidding wars, and operate on razor-thin margins.
Apple have basically opened the market for ARM servers by producing a workstation to go with them. Amazon is probably feeling pretty vindicated for Gravitron right now. Everybody else will catch up with them over the next five years or so, I'm sure.
Intel's server market is full of customers with proprietary x86_64 binaries that can't easily be ported to other architectures, and until recently had very little competition in that market because AMD's pre-Zen server processors were uncompetitive.
Throwing in to that market with an ARM processor would limit you to portable software, putting you into competition with not only Intel and AMD but also Amazon and potentially Qualcomm and others. Which could actually hurt Apple if it gives ARM competitors a wider market for their processors and therefore more resources to spend on development that carries down to PCs and mobiles.
> There's a reason Apple don't make Time Capsules any more. Servers are usually commodities, and Apple don't make commodities if they can reasonably avoid it (anything they make that's even close to a commodity still, at least, can be turned into a fashion accessory, like the aluminum keyboards and stuff).
Also, they can sell you a monthly subscription to iCloud storage instead. I'd rather be in that line of business than selling an overpriced and under-featured NAS. Anyone who cares that much is probably technically savvy enough to prefer a proper NAS anyway.
Apple have a vested interest in getting into the server business. They have a lot of machines in datacenters. Some in the US, some in China, some dotted at other datacenters they own around the world.
Replacing the Intel machines with something that runs (a) faster and (b) with less power, is a double-win. I'd frankly be amazed if there wasn't a N-core or N-module server setup somewhere within the spaceship undergoing tests. And it's not that far from there to selling a Mac-based server. Which they've done before, after all...
Note that the W-3275M is part of Cascade Lake, which is a really small iteration on Skylake-X, the most notable change is probably that it includes hardware mitigations. Otherwise fairly little changed about the cores themselves since 2015.
It is estimated that the M1 is 16-billion transistors on 5nm for a 4-big core + 4-little core + iGPU + neural engine SOC.
The most comparable laptop processor is AMD Renoir: Zen2 8-core + iGPU for 10-billion transistors.
As such, I'd expect a "hypothetical high end" 32-big core Mac to compete against a 64-big core EPYC in terms of #transistors. Would the high end market be interested in a lower core count computer but higher single-thread performance?
I somehow doubt that. Server / workstation loads scale well to many cores: indeed, any computer that actually scales to 32-cores would probably also scale well to 64-cores (or SIMD-compute), and the M1 is only 128-bit wide SIMD.
------------
There's also the issue of the lack of hyperthreading: the Apple M1 does NOT implement SMT in any way what so ever. Those 32-cores would likely only support 32-threads, while the 64-core EPYC supports 128-threads.
I dunno. "Just scaling up" the M1 doesn't seem like it'd be a winner in the high-end market to me. Maybe if the core gained a wider SIMD-width and SMT (2x threads/core), that'd help a lot.
There's value in having the same compute ability in fewer cores. Communication/synchronization overhead is usually growing faster than linear in the number of threads.
SMT isn't an unalloyed good, it helps for many workloads and hurts for some. That said, the very wide cores in M1 are asking for SMT to increass utilization, I'd guess it'll happen eventually. OTOH, the weaker memory consistency rules on ARM seem to allow for a lot more out of order execution, which seems to keep things busy.
I don't think we'll see Intel and AMD increase the width of their cores so much; they need their cores to scale to 5Ghz (even if it takes 1KW of cooling) for marketting and competition reasons, and wider cores are harder to clock so high.
> There's value in having the same compute ability in fewer cores. Communication/synchronization overhead is usually growing faster than linear in the number of threads.
I agree for sure. But the tradeoffs are pretty steep. Scaling within a core is traditionally sqrt(size), while scaling number of cores on a problem is also sqrt(cores).
Balancing between size-of-core vs number-of-cores is a big question. And that also depends very strongly on the task at hand. Web-servers scale better than sqrt(#cores), because each worker-thread is basically fully independent.
> I don't think we'll see Intel and AMD increase the width of their cores so much; they need their cores to scale to 5Ghz (even if it takes 1KW of cooling) for marketting and competition reasons, and wider cores are harder to clock so high.
I think there's a good argument that AMD / Intel can't scale their decoder much larger than 4-way / 6-way with uOp cache, due to the instruction set issue.
But I've seen some interesting innovations: the most recent Intel Atoms have double-decoders (2+2 decoder) on SMT-based Atoms. Such a thing would make SMT more efficient without much increase to power.
Its strange to see Apple take the single-thread performance crown. But... I don't think they've proven themselves in the high-end server / workstation market yet. Even if they do scale up, their decisions don't seem to be an obvious winner at the high end.
Is there even an API to take advantage of that yet? It looks like an impressive DSP but without an API, then that stuff is locked to Apple-only software / hardware.
> video coding acceleration
Is that really better than another 96-threads that you'd get with a 64-core Threadripper Pro? The thread-deficit of 32-core Apple vs 64-core/128-thread Threadripper is going to be pretty apparent.
When you have another +96 threads available, I'm not sure if "video coding acceleration" is even needed. Just run that in software.
Ah right... I guess whenever I look at that neural-engine's specs, I'm actually personally more interested in the VLIW DSP they got in there. VLIW-DSPs can calculate a lot of things, more than just neural-net training.
I guess that API is good enough for the deep-learning hype train however.
Metal also leverages the neural engine. It's transparent, of course. I can't find the reference but it may have been one of the original Metal Apple Developer Conference (ADC) sessions where they let that slip.
Of course other frameworks could leverage it too. As for direct access, I'm not sure. I think I did mix up API and framework in my response :)
How many M1s can Apple fit in a rack? 256? IBM should ship a water cooled rack and hook them in the same toroidal topology as Blue Gene/L and figure out a real Borg like scheduler for them.
The most interesting piece of information to me is the suggestion of Apple still going with SoC route with its Mac Pro.
i.e UMA ( Unified Memory Architecture ), GPU, NPU stay intact. You are basically getting a M1XX, where M1X is the 16 CPU Core variants.
Consider the current M1, a 32 Core High Performance CPU Core and 128 GPU core would give you roughly 300W TDP Max, excluding all the memory controller and interconnect. A rough estimate is already at 500mm2+ Die Size, excluding NPU and all other bits and pieces, of course assuming the same processing node.
The Old ( Or the recent ) Mac Pro has a Maxed out system of ~910W, that is 28 Core CPU + 2 x Radeon Vega II Duo ( That is 4 GPU ).
We are back to TrashCan Mac Pro again, except it would be even faster than the 2019 Cheese Grater Mac Pro. We would have reached the thermal ceiling again, unless Apple does Water Cooling and push that TDP allowance to 400W.
Remember this M1XX is CPU + GPU TDP. For a PC system, or workstation power users are quite used to 300W CPU + 300W GPU. So I was sort of expecting Apple to be making CPU + GPU design, purely to create a monster as a successor to Cheese Grater Mac Pro. May be they have different Goal in mind, may be they think this is good enough for Mac Pro ( Which certainly is from many perspective ), and obviously iMac.
Same Design, scaling across iPhone, iPad, MacBook, And Mac Pro.
This brings me to the final point, we only have so much uArch improvement we could do, it is now all left to process node and heat dissipation of the system.
I wonder if for bigger, desktop macs they will stay with ddr4/ddr5 memory sticks or maybe they will introduce something custom. I assume they won't go with mac pro with soldered, non-removable memory
Intel has been saying this for years, like almost 8 years. But this is just what non-innovator say. It is an excuse for mediocrity and failure and stagnation.
There is tons of uArch improvements in Apple's chips. That is why they consistently beat even the other ARMs chips on the same process nodes.
AMD also has been significantly innovating with uArch.
I love the innovation we are seeing these days. We are definitely not in an TDP era (where only TDP matters! but of course TDP is important), we are in another golden age of CPU/GPU innovation and it is beautiful. Reminds me of the 1990s and early 2000s.
We are butting up on the physical limit, but to be fair, that’s what people have been saying for over a decade, and we keep going.
According to Wolfram Alpha, 5 nanometers is ~23 silicon atoms across (~2.2 Å each). But that’s also assuming they’re actually fabricating 5 nm gates - which they’re not.
Like if you look at the rate of down scaling it has slowed some. It's also not the size of the whole transistor it's the size/thickness of the N, P and Insulator layers that will limiting factor in FET style transistors.
The oxide/insulator thickness on modern process is pretty insane. For instance for the intel 14nm++ the silicon nitride and silicon oxide layers seem to 4 to 5nm thick.
-Edit-
For instance here is 2 fins for from the intel 14nm++. The grains/spheres you see this image are the atoms. Some parts of the a modern transistors are even smaller than process number may let you know.
Although Apple has been leading edge for a while, it's actually rather unusual for Apple to buy the entire production capacity of a new node.
The A13, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, and Mediatek Dimensity 1000L were all on DUV N7P (Hisilicon Kirin 990 5G was actually on the more advanced EUV N7+). For more information on chips and their processes: https://www.eetimes.com/apple-huawei-use-tsmc-but-their-7nm-...
From the charts, it looks like particularly for single-core and browser/JS performance, the Apple designs are very strong, and beat out the Qualcomm competition even on the same process node.
You're absolutely right. People already propagating Intel's death are too fast. They may do not the innovation we like, but it maybe will help them push their smaller nodes, too.
And for many special cases and for a suckless Linux experience on new devices, Intel is still the best choice.
AMD beats Intel basically everywhere you need an x86-64 architecture. The latest CPUs beat Intel even on single core performance.
Intel is basically running a super legacy design and they are doing surprisingly well with it, but they are losing on all fronts at this time. What they have for them right now is momentum and enterprise deals.
That will hold up for a while yet, so it gives them time to get their act together.
I would love to know as well. I think it could be HBM2, something similar to Fujitsu A64FX [1], the problem with both GDDR6 and HMB2 is that are limited in capacity to ~64GB, or at best 128GB. Which is far from the 1.5 TB of memory the current Mac Pro is capable of.
Then it would make sense to have the two chip separate and not on the same Die. Which is essentially what the current PC system are doing. The whole hypotheses is built on Mark Gurman's suggestion of Mac Pro using something similar to SoC like the current M1.
Why? Clearly, I'm not a chip designer, so maybe it's a dumb question. If you can place GPU cores, CPU cores, Neural Engine, and RAM on the same die, why can't you then use a second bank of RAM dedicated for the GPU cores? Why would this not be considered similar?
Xeon Phi is actually a pretty nice system to work with but as picky about performance as a GPU while more expensive and harder to find. Combining regular tool chains for code with high core count and SMT on top of AVX512 was nice. 68 cores, 4 way SMT, and 16 way SIMD, provides 4k “threads” in the GPU sense, except the memory hierarchy isn’t nearly as harsh because of the MCDRAM.
Because Lifuka; the GPU, hasn't had any other source other than the first Taiwanese publication. And those publication has been known to pop up all kinds of rumours only to pump up TSMC's stock price. And has relatively poor track record of any Apple information, or as a matter of fact, any information.
It would be interesting if Apple did make a discrete GPU, that would means they are making a separate GPU die for their Mac Pro and iMac with volume estimated to be no more than 1M unit per year. It makes sense from a technical perspective, it surely doesn't from a cost perspective. Although Apple could happily charge $1000 just for the GPU to make up for ROI.
Whether CPU and GPU share ram is orthogonal to whether the gpu and cpu are on the same die. You can do any combination of same die same ram, different die same ram, etc etc.
The advantage of GPU having it's own memory is you can use super high throughput ram that the GPU needs, while using higher capacity/lower energy/cheaper ram for the cpu.
The downside of using separate ram is that you have to shuttle data back and forth from one ram to the other quite a bit, as well you get less flexibility in how your total memory is used.
Well, in terms of dollars per getting shit done, a GPU on ARM that only supports Metal 2 isn’t going to get any software for it in a really really long time, no matter how fast it is, perhaps so long that better conventional GPUs will come out by then.
Who do you think writes all the code for this stuff? It’s guys in tracksuits in Visual Studio C++ on Windows. The top games for iOS are also either written by a few guys in Unity or by an absolutely huge team of people porting an existing, low graphics quality PC game.
While you may well be correctly reading between the lines, you are reading between the lines -- the article doesn't say anything about future "Mac Chips," as the headline puts it, definitively being SoCs. There's nothing about a unified memory architecture that requires the GPU and CPU to be on the same die, let alone requires the RAM to be in the same package as both processing units. (People may no longer remember that Silicon Graphics was using UMA in their workstations a quarter century ago!) I expect all their portables, and probably all the iMacs to be SoCs, but I'm not sure the Mac Pro -- and the iMac Pro, if it continues -- will follow that path.
> We are back to TrashCan Mac Pro again... we would have reached the thermal ceiling again...
This is kind of drawing new lines to read between. :)
Apple almost certainly developed their current uber-expensive, trypophobia-triggering Mac Pro design knowing that they were also working on Apple Silicon processors. While it's possible they intend that whole case design to be a one-time thing, it doesn't seem likely to me -- and if that wasn't the intent, then it's also not likely they want to ship a teeny tiny Apple Silicon logic board in that huge case with the rest of the space going unused. I think they're going to do their best to make an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro that can be upgraded and expanded. (With all respect to Mark Gurman, I think that "half-sized Mac Pro" is going to be a different product entirely if it ships, with a different branding. Mac Mini Pro?)
>With all respect to Mark Gurman, I think that "half-sized Mac Pro" is going to be a different product entirely if it ships, with a different branding. Mac Mini Pro?
The ever illusive xMac, aka "the affordable Mac tower"
Somebody once said that that Apple’s business model is charging a very high markup for flash memory (currently it’s $50 per 64 GB to upgrade storage on an iPhone or MacBook). The margin on other parts is also high. The user-upgradeable Mac Pro provides an escape hatch from these expensive upgrades. Therefore the entry price has to be much higher to make up for it. An affordable tower would cannibalize Mac Pro sales by providing businesses with a cost-saving opportunity that’s too good to refuse.
This is good analysis, but there's some other effect I'm unable to put my finger on.
The iPad is at least an order of magnitude better than comparable netbooks (though chromebooks, depending on manufacturer, can be competitive thanks mainly to ChromeOS's reduced footprint). So even though the margins are high, the perceived quality, regardless of raw benchmarks, is still something. It's not just marketing to me to say the marriage of software and hardware is unique. (Gruber's observation about NSObject alloc's being a lot faster on Apple Silicon, for instance).
Now that I think about it, honestly Google is the only other company playing by these rules... ie pixelbook, pixel phone, etc. But they're much earlier in the evolution, and have less upstream control in software (especially since Fuchsia seems to be somewhat lower priority than before, though this is second hand knowledge).
That somebody is probable only partially right about a partial business unit within Apple. People tend to buy it for the package deal, not for individual specs. At volume, those are the much more valuable customers than the 'buy a single computer' crowd that often talk about their modifications they want to make.
Considering how the M1 SOCs are, the possibility of a future "affordable Mac tower" looks more remote than ever. Apple seems to be aiming towards piling as much into their dedicated SOCs as they can. I expect what "pro" capabilities they do build for it going to be in the vein of the cool stuff they were doing in the Mac Pro, like the FPGA "Afterburner" and will probably cost way more than any person with generally "consumer-level" use-cases would want to spend.
As a technology enthusiast I'm excited to see what bonkers stuff they'll be announcing. But, since I am not doing climate models or rendering hollywood movies, I don't expect I will never work on any of them since I don't want to drop a new car's worth of money on one.
> There's nothing about a unified memory architecture that requires the GPU and CPU to be on the same die, let alone requires the RAM to be in the same package
No, but unified memory does require starving the GPU of bandwidth. There's a reason high end GPUs use different types of memory than CPUs.
Either Apple will be content with Mac Pro not having the absolute graphics performance lead, or they will make a discrete GPU with dedicated memory. I'm not sure which they will choose but I suspect the latter.
The Xbox Series X (retail price $499) uses a 7nm SOC, where the GPU has 12 TFLOPS of single precision performance. The fastest single GPU Apple sells on the Mac Pro is 14 TFLOPS (with a step-up fee of $2,400!).
There doesn't seem to be any reason why Apple couldn't integrate a 16 TFLOPS GPU on an SOC using a 5nm or better process. The M1 GPU is 2.6 TFLOPS, they can x6 or more it, and obviously change the memory subsystem (HBM?).
Xbox Series X is very far from the top graphics available. GTX 3090 at 35 TFLOPS is what Apple needs to compete with for Mac Pro. Those chips are reticle limited which means there's simply no room to add a CPU, let alone 32 cores. You need separate dies.
Also, Xbox uses GDDR which trades off CPU performance for GPU performance. Apple probably wouldn't do that for a Mac Pro. The high end needs separate memory so the GPU can have bandwidth and the CPU can have low latency.
Well, depends. If they're looking to replace the low- and medium end of the Mac Pro offerings, a SOC would be fine. If they are looking to exceed it in every way, then a separate GPU with 16x the current M1 GPU cores is necessary. (The GPU on M1 takes up about 30mm2-40mm2). Put that on a TSMC N5P process, and that will be quite the setup...
Reticle limited on Samsung 8nm means plenty of room is available on TSMC 5nm.
Also, GDDR does not have appreciably higher latencies than DDR memory when measured in nanoseconds. It's just more expensive than DDR and much more limited in terms of capacity.
If Apple does go the "huge SoC" route I'd expect to see HBM2 memory with socketed DDR4 or DDR5. It'd provide the best of both worlds - extremely high bandwidth and low latency for a small portion (say 32-64GB) of the memory, and high capacity for the rest (say 1-2TB), all without compromising the unified memory concept.
This is not without precedent - recent Xeon Phis, for all their other shortcomings, have had a similar memory hierarchy.
Yeah but when discrete GPUs get to 5nm they will still be reticle limited. They're not going to stop getting bigger. If Apple maintains a process node advantage maybe they could do SoCs to compete with discrete graphics at the previous node but I think Nvidia will catch up.
I agree that a combination of HBM and DDR sounds pretty good for a unified memory architecture. Are you imagining it as just another layer in the cache hierarchy or something actively managed?
"Unified" in this case refers to the CPU and GPU having the same access to memory. This could still be true even if part of the memory is faster, as long as it's faster for both CPU and GPU.
Is there any reason the Mac Pro couldn't or shouldn't combine an SoC with upgradable components?
So you get a certain baseline level of specs, but also have the opportunity to tack on a beefier GPU (which may or may not use UMA), additional slower memory, additional slower storage, maybe even additional CPUs, etc.
> Is there any reason the Mac Pro couldn't or shouldn't combine an SoC with upgradable components?
I don't think so, with the asterisk that I don't know enough to say whether mixing higher-speed and lower-speed RAM is really feasible in that scenario. (IIRC, if you do that in computers now, all the RAM will operate at the lowest speed.)
> if you do that in computers now, all the RAM will operate at the lowest speed
That’s correct, but irrelevant in this context. In that scenario, the memory is all on the same memory controller, and the memory controller used wants to run a single speed, so it has to be the highest universally supported speed.
Apple could have multiple tiers of memory with different characteristics, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I don’t have access to such a test bed, so I can’t speak to what the experience would be like.
One thing to note here that's a bit ambiguous in your comment - an M1XX with 128 GPU cores would still have substantially fewer GPU cores than the 2x Radeon Vega II Duo.
The Radeon Vega II Due has 128 compute cores and 8192 stream processors, so that maxed out mac pro would have 256 compute cores and 16384 stream processors. I don't have any benchmarks to work off of, but I think it's safe to say that a new Mac Pro with the 32-core SoC would still be substantially far behind a current Mac Pro unless it also had a dedicated GPU.
Assuming linear scaling (which is not a good assumption), Apple would need 6x the number of GPU cores in the current M1 to get in the range of performance of the Radeon Vega II Duo.
This is interesting.. is the M1 chip's GPU a tile-based chip similar to other mobile/ARM SoCs? If so, that could be a problem for truly higher end graphics work as certain operations such as real time shadows, fullscreen shaders, etc are less efficient when applied on such a GPU
Does UMA (unified memory architecture) prevent anyone from also adding additional conventional RAM too (apart from what is integrated in the CPU)? Have today's SSD reached RAM's read / write speed?
UMA has nothing to do with the RAM sitting next to CPU, which is what half of this thread is getting mixed up with. They are two different thing. So yes you could have UMA and conventional DRAM, the problem is that there are no DRAM, even with 8 Channel DDR5, capable of feeding enough bandwidth for the hypothetical 128 Core GPU.
That is unless Apple decide to use DRAM in additional to HMB or GDDR5 as 2nd layer of Memory.
I think it's pretty interesting that only Intel is mentioned in the article. It could imply nothing, but it's odd that Intel is the benchmark since AMD has been the multi-thread king for a while. This could mean that Apple's multi-thread performance will be still below AMD.
I've wasted more life energy arguing on the internet than I care to admit to even myself, and so far, there does seem to be a common theme.
Those that herald the M1 as unequivocally the next great thing are very, very rarely in the same (anecdotal) set of internet users that acknowledge that AMD exists, and makes CPUs. (Or it exists, but the M1 outperforms it in every metric!)
I suspect that many Apple-focused journalists are similarly constrained by tunnel vision, limiting their view of the world as "things that Apple created in the past" and "things that Apple creates now."
For the already Apple faithful, it's not a bad way to go. "Is this new Apple Silicon desktop going to outperform the only option I have now, an Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro?" So it's not too surprising that Intel is their benchmark, even if it ignores much higher performing alternatives available to those outside of Apple's walled garden.
How likely is it that Nvidia will mimic the SoC approach and provide a similar unified architecture for PC vendors? Could this be the end for ATX components?
It seems to me that Apple supporting discrete GPUs is inevitable. They likely want to continue supporting external GPUs for the MacBook Pro, once they do that, supporting internal GPUs is not a huge jump. My feeling is they will ship a blazing fast GPU on the base Mac Pro and offer optional discrete GPUs for people who want that functionality.
383 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI think the grandparent means that using an M1 implies using macOS, which had its share of potential privacy issues recently (regularly phoning home on launching apps, having Apple service circumvent VPNs and application firewalls).
X86 is on a completely different level, see: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/hardware-specific...
None of the above is at the same level as phoning home or ignoring the user's firewall.
I put Windows telemetry into same bag as the Apple calling mothership.
You are really jumping through hoops to try to make a platform designed to protect your privacy equivalent to one designed to sell it.
Maybe that feature was implemented correctly after all and the objectives are different than what the marketing says.
This is not a privacy-vs-convenience battle, sadly; this is a very carefully planned circumstance where you can maintain privacy, or you can be effective in life. It's already impossible to use most mobiles in a private fashion, and within a few years, effective desktop computing will be exactly the same way. You're going to have to provide ID to do anything with a "normal" phone or computer.
Recently I learned that Apple will only give out NetworkExtension API entitlements for apps (that are required for VPN apps to work on macOS) to apps distributed via the Mac App Store. Aside from the obvious antitrust issues here (you can't self-distribute VPN apps, or run a competing app store that can distribute apps with the same functionality as Apple's), this means that you can't get access to e.g. the WireGuard app on macOS without IDing yourself to Apple to get an Apple ID and installing it via the Mac App Store.
Want privacy via a VPN? You're going to have to show ID first.
As has been discussed in various threads the last few weeks, the difference in power efficiency is not that large compared to recent AMD Ryzen APUs, accounting for a move from 7nm to 5nm node.
One could well argue that ARM/RISC is more elegant. But x86_64 besides backwards compatibility has the large benefit that it is an open platform when it comes to operating systems. Moving to ARM will be an excuse for many vendors to lock bootloaders to their blessed software (such as the iOS/Android ecosystems).
- The server and desktop markets move to ARM. The AArch64 instruction set becomes the default that people develop and deploy on. Optimizing for x86_64 CPUs becomes an afterthought. Intel only sells CPUs to organizations that have legacy systems somewhere that cannot be emulated. Intel has to enter the highly commoditized ARM market to stay competitive.
- The server and desktop markets largely stay on x86_64 as a result of Intel licensing x86_64 to three other vendors, increasing competition. The market is not commoditized, because Intel can decide who they license x86_86 to and also control extension to the instruction set. They lose market share due to the increased competition. But they can compete on their own architecture that they control.
Of course, these are extremes. But given that the current fastest supercomputer uses ARM and Apple showed that ARM is fit for the desktop, I am pretty sure that Intel is (or should be) worried about the first scenario.
In any event it's too late. They maybe had an chance of fending off Arm a few years ago - by the time any licensing now kicks in Arm will have established itself in the server / PC market.
So the only sensible strategy for Intel is to make the most of x86 whilst they can.
That’s not a feature of x86 itself. That’s just how the computers themselves are assembled. X86 machines could be just as locked down as Apple machines, if the vendor wanted them to be (and Microsoft tried!). ARM builds for multiple OSs exist, including multiple Linux distributions and Windows.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...
(In PRACTICE, you probably want to virtualise instead, because of a lack of support for the hardware.)
> As for Windows running natively on the machine, “that’s really up to Microsoft,” he said. “We have the core technologies for them to do that, to run their ARM version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications. But that’s a decision Microsoft has to make, to bring to license that technology for users to run on these Macs. But the Macs are certainly very capable of it.”
He did a demo where he virtualized an OS. That doesn't mean you can't boot another OS.
When it comes down to it, Apple is still (largely) a hardware company. If someone wants to buy a Mac to put Linux on it, they still sold a Mac. And I think that having the Linux community testing their hardware would do nothing but make their hardware stronger.
But overall, yeah, it's not as though the RAM is part of the chip, it's just part of the package. Not a lot to see here.
Yeah, it's definitely non-public that Apple's about to put best-in-class chips in their desktop machines. Totally secret. Don't tell anyone, Bloomberg!
https://www.epsilontheory.com/why-am-i-reading-this-now/
Reminder: it was also Bloomberg who ran that very likely bogus and unsubstantiated story/psyop about the scary backdoor chips on the SuperMicro boards, and refused to retract it. When they do very obvious marketing fluff pieces like this, they lose even more credibility as a "legitimate news source" in my view, even if this ad they're running for Apple's upcoming hardware is 100% factually accurate.
> Those graphics chips would be several times faster than the current graphics modules Apple uses from Nvidia and AMD in its Intel-powered hardware.
I don't even remember the last Apple hardware with Nvidia graphics.
> Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which has been gaining market share at Intel’s expense, offers standard desktop parts with as many as 16 cores, with some of its high-end chips for gaming PCs going as high as 64 cores.
Threadripper is NOT a CPU for gaming.
> Company tests faster performing processors than Intel’s best.
Well if I'm correct AMD currently sits on top of the CPU ranking (and Intel 11th gen doesn't seem to be changing that as far as the leaks go), so AMD is the one to beat.
> Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs
Weird conclusion to draw considering the statements above. I would expect the performance to be on-par with the high end chips, but with lower energy consumption. The article seems to imply that it will outperform 280W+ CPUs.
Essentially all this article is really saying is "Expect Apple to release a half-size mac pro in 2022 as the last, most powerful new product". That's it. There's no clue about discrete graphics, NUMA, power budgets etc. It could be that that new mac pro is heading back towards the non-expandable trash-can style design. All they really know is that there's going to be something in the mac pro space in 2022 and that's the last direct replacement to Intel Macs Apple are making.
Even this piece of info can be extrapolated from statement's Apple has made public. They've said they were migrating their entire product line within 2 years. The Mac Pro is part of that product line. The only questions are how Apple is going to get there and on that front it's pretty clear this article is pure speculation.
Will the Mac Pro have integrated graphics or a discrete GPU? Maybe someone at AMD knows this based on order volume? Likewise, are they using external RAM, soldered on the logic board, or user-serviceable RAM?
How is performance going to compare to current top end processors?
Those are the only questions, and the answers here are pure speculation. It's likely only a handful of people at Apple even know the answers to these things.
All of the retina generation but for the very latest (« mid 2015 »).
I run two gaming VMs for my kids on my Threadripper server.
Do you have a link on how to setup something like that?
I use NVidia video cards for VMs, AMD cards (other than BigNavi) have VM reboot issues.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/jturbd/vendorreset_ne...
I currently run a Windows gaming VM and a bunch of Linux VMs on top of Proxmox using a single GPU. Planning to add a second GPU for transcoding in the near future.
X<3|4|5>70 boards should allow 2 GPUs in separate IOMMU groups. My old system was a 1700X on ASUS Prime x370 Pro with 2 gaming VMs. Only issue with x?70 boards is the IOMMU groups for USB controllers. On the Prime x370 Pro, only one USB controller is in its own IOMMU group, so second VM needed a USB passthrough.
On the Threadripper, due to the vast amount of PCIe lanes, on the Asrock Taichi x399, I got two USB controllers in their own IOMMU groups and each of the 4 PCIex16 slots it's in its own IOMMU group. It's a dream virtualization motherboard.
While this is true for intel CPUs, this hasn't been the case for AMD Threadripper. The 2990wx has marginally higher single core performance than the 2700x (https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_threadri...), while the 3990x has only slightly lower single core performance than the 3700x (https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_threadri...).
The rest is just him trying to make a long enough article out of one sentence of information.
If you fall for privacy and security claims, you are at serious risk of having both violated.
The article itself is essentially devoid of information and I'm surprised that it is on the front page here. Regardless the source, it is asinine to consider as news a prediction that Apple plans to continue in the same direction they've been going for some time. What's next, sun will rise again tomorrow, rain is wet, or Microsoft is planning a next version of .NET?
I was told this by a highly reliable source in Apple’s executive team, Tim Cook when he declared their roadmap openly at WWDC.
This is how I understand the article too. Bloomberg probably tried to recruit a source within the Apple Silicon team who wouldn't provide much information, but did say "well the Mac Pro will have a CPU better than any other high end PC".
Bloomberg wanted to run with that line since they have "unique" information so they could capitalize on it. So the author was told to write an article about it, with really only half a sentence of fuel to run with. So the author states the half-sentence, and then proceeds to use conjecture and speculation to fill out the requisite 500 words needed per the Bloomberg Style Guide that they are forced to file for submitted work.
And a Ford Mustang isn't a sports car. It's a muscle car. Regardless, both are faster than my civic.
Threadripper might not be the best gaming CPU but any threadripper would be an improvement over my current gaming rig.
So, you can beat highest gaming PC at gaming, but that doesn't reflect your power at running "productivity" workloads.
There are also a few games (Factorio) where ram limitations can bottleneck before cpu/gpu limitations, where Threadripper's extra memory channels can really help.
The Mustang isn't a 'muscle car', either: it's a 'pony car'.
this is a really unimportant distinction
I would like to see a world class GPU from Apple but again, I repeat this often, it won't mean much more than marketing materials if they don't get developers on board. This means more than just publishing oriented developers; video, pictures, and audio. That market is not sufficiently large to pull in other software as has been proven over the decades let alone get people to pay a premium for a system; because people do shop based on $$$ outside of gamers who wont' even look if there game isn't supported.
across Black Friday there were many good windows laptops at $500 or less with SSDs, some with dGPU, and most with 16gb ram. people see that and also that they know software just works and that is what Apple still is up against, hardware superiority or not
A pure gaming PC these days doesn't need a very powerful CPU
I've never heard any game complain they had too much CPU
1: https://appletrack.org/leaderboard/
https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852?hl=en
There are more than a few games in the iOS app store....
Yes, we can have power-efficient phones and laptops, but what about other product categories? I think the market should be more modular so that any company can build cool stuff with top of the line CPUs, not just Apple.
As a hacker, I think with Apple's dominance computing is becoming less interesting. It's like opening a LEGO box, and all pieces are already fused together.
And anyone can easily beat Amazon's pricing if they can just run a data center competently too - after all the building blocks are there.
Seriously?
Zen3 looks pretty on par with the Apple stuff, maybe it's finally time for OEMs to adopt AMD in a serious way so they can invest into R&D even more.
Also at the end of the day performance oriented people aren't going to care so much about process node idiosyncrasies. Does it perform or not?
Not that I would be mad if AMD meets or heck even bests Apple. Competition is good for all of us :)
It is extremely likely other companies will step up with new offerings. But it will take 2-3 years (where Apple will reap the benefit of being early).
I remember using laptops with LCD screens in 2010, and even before. They weren't even Apple laptops.
Dell had a 2560x1600 LCD in 2007. https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-ultrasharp-3007wfp/specs/ https://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/general/ultrasharp%20300...
Dell and Sony also had laptops going as high as 4K in 13" form factors around the same time. Yes they were high end. So too was the MBP.
When Steve Jobs announced iPhone on stage in 2008 he said it was a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,"
That was saying the quiet thing out loud and Apple is playing it much cooler on PR around competition these days.
But Apple Silicon combined with Apple software is very likely at least 5 years ahead of the competition, because there is not currently an assembly of organizations that can integrate to offer anything like what Apple is doing _now_.
What makes this article particularly interesting is it points at beating NVIDIA and AMD in graphics and reducing the size of the enclosure by half.
I find it interesting that Apple just redesigned the Mac Pro only to have to redesign it again for Apple Silicon.
Oddly, the failed trash can Mac Pro may have actually worked for Apple Silicon designs.
I suspect that Apple will provide web services to Apple developers that breaks pricing for Intel / NVIDIA based cloud compute and further burnishes the value of building for Apple platforms.
Apple can fab at max scale if it can consume its own chips in its own data centers that can flex between serving Apple or AWS or Azure customers.
It’s going to be a rough go for the PC market because not everyone is going to make it through this—-at least not as the companies they are today.
Why can't others just "get better" and make their own chips that actually compete?
That's not to say it would be impossible for another company to try to get themselves to where Apple is today—but it would be far from trivial.
It's not like they're an example or anything... I mean, it obviously doesn't work for every market, but I just see it as kind of strange that someone hasn't taken a page from Apple's playbook over the years when it would suit them.
When Steve Jobs came back as "iCEO" in the late '90s, Apple stock was roughly $8/share (pre-splits). They weren't a total nobody, but they certainly weren't interesting enough to any big fish that there was any push to put pressure on them to act like a more "traditional" company. And Jobs kept doing things his way for the next 15 years, until his medical retirement and untimely death, and those things increased Apple's stock price fairly steadily. Until the iPhone came out, of course, at which point it increased dramatically.
But by then, people were already used to the idea that Apple would do things Apple's way. (And some people were so used to the idea that Apple was Doomed that they still preach it every time there's any new Apple news.) And it's so utterly clear that Apple doing things Apple's way works—for Apple.
Any other company trying to do things Apple's way—or even its own unique way, rather than the way the markets want—would be fighting an incredibly strong current.
So many people, even those who should absolutely know better, seemed to get caught in the trap of believing that a company—any company—can only be "viable" if it can constantly outdo itself and all its competitors.
1985 - 1997
Anyway, thanks for the reminder that the period without Steve Jobs was less brief than I tend to think.
"We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term...
Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies...
We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions..."
Maybe there's something to this approach?
[1] Bezos letter to shareholders, 1997 - https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/amzn_shar...
But who's fault is it? I would tend to think that it's Windows Arm port that sucks since Qualcomm chips offer good perfs for Android phones.
My point is that PCs have offered high end specs at affordable (but above average) price points even before Macs had them. And the fact that many PC laptops still offer low res screens point to price being the deciding factor which moves the PC industry forward, not Apple.
I still wish Apple would release a reasonably priced stand alone display. The Pro Display is amazing but I could never justify it :/
I'm happy that Apple is showing that the king is naked, I hope that a new wave of ARM based devices (not just from Apple) will influx new life on the PC Market.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%20influx
So other metrics like power draw get more prominence. Apple managed to get both with a chip design, but I don't see it as a trend yet. I wouldn't even call it innovative in itself, it is just a very good iteration of CPU tech. I think that is awesome because it challenges other companies again.
For performance intensive applications like gaming or CAD, GPUs have become more relevant.
There is a lot of special software for physical calculations (lenses, materials, etc.) that require raw CPU power for n-th degree numerical solutions, but these are niches that cannot sustain an industry.
My main device I use in private for a lot of development has a standard intel CPU and I only looked at power usage because I knew it would be fast enough. I wanted it to be as silent as possible. Turns out it was indeed fast enough for anything I wanted to do. Maybe I buy a new one in a few years, but it didn't yet fail me in any way.
Free dancing bears and network effects will always win.
My point was that most consumers don't understand these things, and just assume that "computer speed" is one-dimensional: it's either fast, or not fast.
I disagree. At least in the datacenter there are still lots of workloads that are CPU bound. And many of these workloads are not easy to parallelize. Right now there are about a bajillion startups in a Python codebase that are hitting scaling limits, where the single-core GIL limits are starting to hurt responsiveness.
Yes, they could re-write into Go and get higher performance and better concurrency at the same time. But most orgs don't have the bandwidth for re-building their software stack from scratch. They'd much rather throw money at hardware.
My guess is if you had a datacenter CPU with 2-3X the single-core threaded performance of top-level Xeons, it would sell like hotcakes.
Many companies would rather throw money at beefier hardware than play around with experimental JITs that may or may not break standard behavior in unpredictable ways.
The rave reviews that the M1 Macs are getting for performance and power efficiency shows that large step improvements in CPU performance are noticed and greatly appreciated. We just didn't have anything as good as the M1 before to really understand how much better computing could be.
This is just not true. I do NOT have an M1 yet. I have a group of co-workers that do. This group is normally what I would call the critics that are never happy with anything. With out fail each one of them has raved about how fast and responsive their M1s are. They say it nothing like anything else and is a game changer. They also rave about the fact that they can go a day without needing to find a wall socket. This is a group of devs and hardcore networking people.
From my view, no matter how powerful of an Intel system I have running Windows, macOS or Linux, the desktop UI are not up to the speed of an iPad. Getting that in a laptop...that would be great and I plan to try it out in the form of an M1 Air.
What I read: Desktop environment should have more UI effects like iPad.
What exactly is stopping, say, Qualcomm, to introduce "top of the line CPU"? Apart from engineering merit?
They did their level best to get maximum control and this was and is a huge turn off. If they made it as open as x86/x64, and pulled out all the stops to get software support equivalent to x86 like Apple have done with their system, then it would be a compelling proposition. As it is, it has woeful software support, and Microsoft did very little to address this.
Investing in a top end CPU is expensive and currently there is no buyer for a workstation class CPU other than Apple.
Microsoft's ARM efforts have been lackluster and sales has been lethargic. The last time Microsoft tried to jump to another architecture was an expensive failure. Who is going to invest hundreds of billions in jump starting this category with a track record like that?
Likewise, Linux. While Linux is a great development platform, Qualcomm isn't going to gamble tens of millions on developers migrating en-mass to a Linux/ ARM platform.
Someone has to put up the money and it's a bunch.
Currently, the only company willing to bet enormous amount of money and frankly the entire Mac platform to change status quo is Apple. Maybe (and I really hope so) Apple will push other ARM processors on the desktop as a side-effects - while Qualcomm is more or less "just" the packer of ARM designed cores, and if I understand the market it's entirely out of their reach to design M1-class CPU, maybe Apple will push ARM to design more efficient desktop cores. Maybe Amazon or Google will do that with their custom ARM silicon now when Apple demonstrated that processors doesn't need to be hot to be powerful. For so long Intel sold us basically the same thing, and we cheered when AMD was just a couple percent faster. However this ends, I'm glad that someone at least rocks the boat.
Nvidia is the most likely company to build a higher end ARM CPU to compete with the M1. With the ARM core and their GPU expertise, they could conceivably crank out something which performs much better than Qualcomm.
HP ships nearly 50% more PCs. Dell sells just a few more. I don't know that I would say they are dominant, after a release of a single low power, high performing part.
What many in the Apple ecosystem are missing is the steady, rapid improvement in performance and efficiency coming from AMD, who apparently few have heard of, because only Intel CPUs were found in Apple for 14 years (and we're not all gamers!)
In early 2020, AMD released massively dominate laptop CPUs, but OEMs have only tepidly adopted them. It looks like about 20% of notebooks are now being sold with AMD, and that number is going to grow in 2021, as the lead time for new designs using AMD will have elapsed.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3569437/amds-notebook-pc-sha...
I'm not saying these AMD chips are better than Apples - the battery life is at best half!
Although, I can't help but read your comment as satire! "What if PC components were modular!" I also enjoy building sets from LEGO bricks, and putting together my computer from parts!
Huh? They're saying you won't be able to do that with an Apple CPU.
Amazon has Gravitron 2. Microsoft is doing something with "their" SQ2, though at this point they're mostly faking it by putting a badge on an uncompetitive Qualcomm part, but I'm sure they'll get there.
The M1 is a wonderful chip, and it has done loads to push the industry to really adopt ARM -- possibly the greatest fat-computing transition to ARM yet -- and it should help across every market, and loads of hardware from competitors.
I find none of what you said True.
So that should make you feel better. Just your perception.
All technological innovation is coming from Apple? That's a mind-boggling statement.
Apple released a great CPU, which replaced the last best CPU, and some other CPU next year will be better than both (it could be another Apple chip, it might not be).
At the end of the day, the average consumer wants performance insofar as their device can run apps they want (benchmarks means squat), and battery life. Apple moved the envelope forward here, but let's not pretend they landed on mars.
I think Apple just showed us that being less modular can bring huge benefits.
As an example, in a modular world, the CPU designer would add instructions that speed up encryption/video decoding/whatever, larger vector registers for speeding up ML stuff, etc.
In a M1 world, the system designer might say “we don’t need them in the CPU; the system will have custom hardware that can do that better”, or even “yes, that would speed up the system, but we better spend that transistor/heat budget on X”
If Microsoft doesn't go down this path for Surface, don't hold your breath any other vendors will.
PC's are not where innovation happens. Intel had USB for almost two years yet PC's still shipped with serial/parallel ports. Then the candy colored iMacs hit, and all the accessory makers started chasing them with candy colored USB accessories and then all the sudden the PC vendors woke up to USB. USB was a disaster on Windows 95, Marginally better on Windows 2000 but didn't get decent until XP.
Wifi - Apple not only released wifi on their laptop but a whole ecosystem - Access points too. One app to configure and manage everything. Push button simplicity. Wifi thrashed around on PC vendors and was relegated to PCMCIA cards with dorky external antennas before Apple baked it in and pretty much embarrassed the rest of the industry to stop nickel and dimeing everyone as an add on and just include it as base tech. Or at least bury the antennas in every laptop and still charge people for an optional internal card. How long did that continue for?
I'm sure there are some others I could think two but I vividly remember living through both of those as I had a foot in each camp at the time (actually I was more PC back then since before the iMac is was the craptastic, uninspired and overprice Performa years for the Mac - the PowerPC iMacs brought me back into the Mac fold).
PC has always been focused on high volume, low margin, least common denominator hardware. Big bins of unremarkable but functional interchangeable parts. Major Pro's of that strategy are pricing and choice. Major Con's are instability/incompatibility/driver issues and lack of moving innovation forward.
Apple has never (and will never) play in the value market. Remember how Apple was supposedly doomed because they didn't have a netbook? Who still uses netbooks (or even remembers them other than us geeks?) By not playing in the value market (or race to the bottom) it frees them up to do things like the M1.
Fast/Good/Cheap. Pick any two
I'd consider an Apple laptop if I knew any game I wanted to play would work, and I never play the latest AAA games. But so far I checked and StarCraft 2 does not seem to play well, despite being a 12 year old game. (That may change with software updates?)
Looks like at least some people have had good luck with StarCraft II.
I was all set to replace my 2015 MBA with an M1 MBA, but in watching his (and others) Cities:Skylines performance I'm now thinking I may switch to gaming on Mac full time. Only problem is 16GB of RAM is NOT going to cut it with C:S - so I now am waiting for the next batch. 32GB should be plenty and I would be shocked if the next group of machines didn't have at least one laptop that could go to 32GB.
Hopefully still HBM too.
https://youtu.be/qkmSNtzQm-o
I'm hoping a cloud gaming service takes off that works more like a dedicated remote desktop rather than an a la carte storefront the way they all seem to be.
The big advantage here is the ability to pull all of this functionality onto smaller and more highly integrated SoCs and packages. This is the antithesis of modular.
If you are looking for similar performance, the best you can hope for is a more accessible competitor. Someone like Nvidia or Qualcomm releasing a SoC with comparable features.
The big problem there is Qualcomm and Nvidia both have closed drivers so they are only marginally better than Apple. Since Qualcomm does such a lousy job supporting older CPUs, arguably worse (what's the value of a CPU with only 3 years of support?).
Still... the Fujitsu A64FX is really interesting but I doubt we’ll ever see it outside Japan.
Ampere Altra is similarly interesting but it’s hard to convince management to put faith into a startup with its own specialty CPU.
This is how apple has lost its way.
Apple should be more "modular". (and that would lead to what you want)
What people don't realize about steve jobs was that he was the great integrator. He got different folks to work together.
The mac pro from his era had pcie slots and worked with add-in cards from lots of vendors. You could add 4 hard disks.
Another way of looking at it is to read that silly book "The 7 habits of hightly effective people" from decades ago.
Basically said the arc of maturity is:
I think pple, under steve jobs, got to interdependent and was working in the ecosystem.After Steve Jobs, Apple regressed to independent. Instead of using its market power to foster the ecosystem, it has regressed to teenager level and just does what is good for itself. There are no other hardware manufacturers anymore and now their software developers don't feel like partners and tread carefully.
Thing is apple can probably do well for itself independently but... It's lonely at the top especially if you've turned your back on the rest of the ecosystem.
lol - the only reason the Apple II had slots is Woz threatened to quit if SJ won on excluding them.
The Original Mac wasn't designed to be opened by users. You had to have a LONG handle Torx screwdriver to open it. Job's was VERY much into appliance computing. Any expansion baked into any Mac was in spite of, not because of, Steve Jobs.
Many things I like/appreciate about the man - his obsession over all computers being sealed was NOT one of his more endearing characteristics. Obviously he was flexible - we had Mac's with slots back then and we do now too. But there has been no "regression" since his passing.
Hardly!
https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/
> Jobs was a huge headache for Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership, who received memos almost daily complaining about his temper, his dismissive attitude toward the Apple II platform that was the only thing supporting the company, and his refusal to listen to reason when one of his sacred precepts was threatened. Jobs’s headstrong authoritarianism had been a big contributor to the debacle that was the Apple III launch. (Traditional wisdom, as well as an earlier version of this article, would have it that Jobs’s insistence that the Apple III ship without a cooling fan led directly to the hardware problems that left Apple IIIs dying on buyers’ desks by the thousands. It does, however, appear that this version of events is at least questionable; see the comments section for more about that. Be that as it may, everyone involved would agree that Jobs did an already muddled project no favors.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
and yes, the reality distortion field was his preferred method for that.
I had meant, based on your previous comment, that he had used the field on you :-p
I expect these monsters to have oodles of HBM, and the Mac Pro with a TB or more could approach house-levels of pricing, like SGI workstations of the past.
After market RAM upgrades on Mac laptops haven't been possible for quite some time now, so I don't think a strategy to try and leverage more profit that way is a change. We'll have to see how they approach that for the higher end kit.
Pretty much everything they were paying Intel and AMD (for graphics) is now profit in their pockets.
Actually this article is from Mark Gurman who has arguably the best track record of any journalist when getting the inside scoop on future Apple products. He has worked for Bloomberg for a couple years now.
If this is a supposed "good article" then I really don't want to see the bad ones...
This piece is written for a complete tech illiterate audience, if anything it makes me want to get an apple machine less
Read Anandtech if you want tech details, but then it's only for tech already in the market.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-...
But Bloomberg NEVER explained how a hypothetical 0402 capacitor could contain a backdoor. They literally took a picture of the smallest chip on a motherboard and said "this could be a backdoor" in big-bold letters. Even from a paranoid anti-China perspective, that article was awful.
"Chinese Backdoor in server equipment" wouldn't be surprising news to me (especially since important groups: military, telecommunications, etc. etc. use equipment like that). But when it comes to writing security-based articles, you need to be very specific about the nature of the threat. If you take the tiniest chip (a passive capacitor) and claim that there's a backdoor in it, you deserve to be laughed off.
That’s a very serious allegation.
They then went to a 2nd researcher to talk about "small chips", which is ambiguous. Some researcher was like... well... those 0402 ceramic capacitors are called "chips" (which they are: they're "ceramic chip capacitors").
The authors then got confused, and wrote about how 0402 capacitors were security flaws. Or something. I don't know, but that's how an article like that comes to be written in my head.
And now that the authors of the article are talking about stupid chip capacitors that can apparently take over the computer, they're completely off track and there's no reason to read the article with any level of seriousness.
-----------
> So are you implying that senior execs at tech companies were lying?
All I mean to imply, is that its bloody obvious that an 0402 chip capacitor can't hack your computer. That Bloomberg's authors couldn't understand this fact before publishing greatly diminishes the reputation of the article in question.
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9VdsjZLS_P...
That's a 6-pin chip capacitor, is it not? Please, explain to me how a passive noise-dampening component can hack a computer.
Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part, it doesn't mean this advantage is inherent to ARM or sustainable once the tech cycle evens out.
The bottleneck right now for essentially all chip performance in mobile devices is heat. If you bypass the power throttling and fan control on my 10th gen 6 core Dell XPS 9500 and let it slurp 80-90 watts (and it will), and sit at 100 degrees centigrade (and it will) it will handily beat an M1 multithreaded score in Cinebench.
Single core performance beats even Intel’s highest TDP processors, I’m pretty sure AMD’s too, in real world workloads. Yes, AMD and Intel still have an edge when you get above 8 cores, but that’s kinda to be expected, no?
M1 has 16B transistors on 1 "chip", a 3950X has fewer than 10B across 3. What else would you expect, for now?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
Just seems elegant to do 4 M1's and get 64gb total memory and 4x gpu/cpu and seems hard to scale up a single chip to match current multi chip / discrete gpu systems.
Maybe even dimms for main memory and current on package memory acting just as a very large level of cache.
My guess is that any multivariate binning will be lowest-common denominator, e.g. an 8-performance core / 12-GPU core part with a single, second-tier bin of 6 performance cores and 10 GPU cores.
They're fabbing with TSMC, which has a really established history in high yields. Just think about the A13/A14 CPUs, which are probably the most voluminous single CPU models every fabricated by a company, yet have never been subject to binning to other lower or higher end models. As the chips get more complicated naturally there will be more fabrication issues, so I expect we'll see more binning, but it doesn't look like there's much cause for concern.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-tha...
A quick look in ifixit's HomePod teardown (2018) reveals an Apple A8 processor, last seen in the iPhone 6 (released 2014): https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/HomePod+Teardown/103133
I wonder how long they manufacture their processor lines for.
Yes, you bin the whole SoC; but all the performance differences are expected to be concentrated in the CPU and GPU. Expect a high bin where all cores and all GPU subprocessors are working, a medium bin where 1 or 2 CPU cores and 10% of the GPU is either missing or running at a lower frequencey, and a value bin where perhaps half the CPU cores and up to half the GPU are downgraded.
"If they live up to expectations, they will significantly outpace the performance of the latest machines running Intel chips, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t yet public."
It's not entirely obvious that "the latest machines running Intel chips" here probably refers only to the latest Macs running Intel chips. We already know that the M1/Firestorm beats Intel handily in single thread, so this just means they'll use enough cores to beat the 28 core Xeon-W in their current Mac Pro. This is of course completely uninteresting, since 1) they've long announced they'll be Intel-free by 2022 and 2) they're not going to release new Macs any slower than the current Intels.
Going by Geekbench they need probably a 16 to 20 Firestorm CPU to beat the current Xeon W-3275M Mac Pro. A 32 Firestorm CPU would completely obliterate it. To make a statement, they'll probably do just that.
The more interesting question to me is if they're going to go for the absolute performance crown, currently the AMD EPYC 7H12, a 64 core Zen2 CPU which benches around 60k in Geekbench5 (vs 19k for the 28-core Mac Pro). By mid-2021, that that will be probably a 64 core Zen3 EPYC at around 72k (+20% IPC vs Zen2). Apple can probably match that with a 48 Firestorm CPU. A 32 core CPU won't do it, even with a generous IPC increase next year.
First of all, that's ludicrously expensive. You need an active interposer that's larger than the chip to do something like that. 4x HBM stacks means 4096 wires to run between your compute-device and the RAM, that's a lot of wires in a tiny area, and only possible with advanced packaging (expensive) methodologies.
Second: HBM2 based designs have poor memory-capacity: 8GB per stack means 4x HBM2 caps out at 32GBs under most reasonable configurations.
Going into 2021 with a ludicrously expensive 32GB machine seems a bit weak. I don't think anyone in the high-end market is targeting that level of memory capacity. Even if we're generous and HBM capacity doubles between now and then, I'm not sure if 64GBs is enough for workstation tasks.
HBM works for supercomputers, because when 32GB isn't enough, you just buy another node. A64FX, the current CPU-based supercomputer that uses HBM, only has 32GB/node. Then Fugaku bought 150,000 nodes.
I think Apple would want to release a 64GB or 128GB Mac Pro... but only to upsell its customers to a 256GB or higher Mac Pro. The ability to configure more RAM into a system is key for marketing (even if this RAM is soldered onto the motherboard: like LPDDR4x, it wouldn't be too expensive to make different motherboards especially in a niche $10,000 computer like the Mac Pro).
But if Apple did go with HBM2 itself... well... then its physically unable to go above 32GB (today), or maybe ~64GB (if bigger HBM2 modules come out next year).
--------
Sticking with LPDDR4x just seems like the most obvious, and best, decision for Apple. So that's my expectation. But then again: making a 8-way decoder + fat-as-heck execution pipeline wasn't part of my expectation either. So maybe Apple will surprise us again.
So you have a high-bandwidth, but no better latency, L4 chip. And that's kind of hard to deal with and optimized against.
Xeon Phi had a DDR4 + HMC (where HMC was a early competitor to HBM), and getting good performance out of that was unusual. DDR4 ended up having slightly better latency, so the HMC cache would hurt some workloads.
They really only have to be competitive with the lower core consumer chips to accomplish their goal.
I think they should try for the performance crown though and the server business. There's a lot of money in that. In servers power consumption is an important consideration and they have an advantage there as well. ARM based architectures are also a lot more relaxed in that they don't have to present a nearly sequentially consistent view of cache and memory between multiple cores like x86. That may give them an edge scaling the core count. It's horrible to program for if you are coding lock free algorithms, but almost nobody does that and fewer should.
Although I don't see why you wouldn't spin up a few VMs per server. Cheaper and (unconfirmed) more energy efficient.
Their OS is pretty unsuitable for server tasks[1], and they've abandoned most of their server tools, so I think they don't care about that market anymore.
[1] No synflood mitigations, easy to panic by spawning threads that sleep.
There's a reason Apple don't make Time Capsules any more. Servers are usually commodities, and Apple don't make commodities if they can reasonably avoid it (anything they make that's even close to a commodity still, at least, can be turned into a fashion accessory, like the aluminum keyboards and stuff). Commodity suppliers get put into bidding wars, and operate on razor-thin margins.
Apple have basically opened the market for ARM servers by producing a workstation to go with them. Amazon is probably feeling pretty vindicated for Gravitron right now. Everybody else will catch up with them over the next five years or so, I'm sure.
[1] Excepting those big enough to build their own
I don’t think Apple will do it considering how far behind they are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they start an AWS competitor using Apple Silicon.
Cloud computing is never 100% a commodity because there’s always business logic to sell.
Sure, S3 and EC2 are by this point commodities, but cloud products like Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL are not.
Businesses are plenty interested in single source cloud computing, there are tons of shops that basically can’t leave AWS without a monumental effort.
ARM chips are also commodities nowadays. I lost count of how many companies make them. Yet Apple chose to make their own.
Charging circuitry chips are also commodities and Apple bought the division of Dialog semiconductors making such chips to have in house knowledge.
Now Apple bought the modem division of Intel so we're gonna see GSM modems from them in the future.
Not in any non-Apple device, that is. The rest of the world will be stuck with with Qualcomm, Broadcom and some crap from Mediatek.
It's a high margin business, the opposite of a commodity.
Throwing in to that market with an ARM processor would limit you to portable software, putting you into competition with not only Intel and AMD but also Amazon and potentially Qualcomm and others. Which could actually hurt Apple if it gives ARM competitors a wider market for their processors and therefore more resources to spend on development that carries down to PCs and mobiles.
Also, they can sell you a monthly subscription to iCloud storage instead. I'd rather be in that line of business than selling an overpriced and under-featured NAS. Anyone who cares that much is probably technically savvy enough to prefer a proper NAS anyway.
Replacing the Intel machines with something that runs (a) faster and (b) with less power, is a double-win. I'd frankly be amazed if there wasn't a N-core or N-module server setup somewhere within the spaceship undergoing tests. And it's not that far from there to selling a Mac-based server. Which they've done before, after all...
Or, in Elon Musk speak, a "hardcore smackdown", with x86 playing the role of the gas engine.
The most comparable laptop processor is AMD Renoir: Zen2 8-core + iGPU for 10-billion transistors.
As such, I'd expect a "hypothetical high end" 32-big core Mac to compete against a 64-big core EPYC in terms of #transistors. Would the high end market be interested in a lower core count computer but higher single-thread performance?
I somehow doubt that. Server / workstation loads scale well to many cores: indeed, any computer that actually scales to 32-cores would probably also scale well to 64-cores (or SIMD-compute), and the M1 is only 128-bit wide SIMD.
------------
There's also the issue of the lack of hyperthreading: the Apple M1 does NOT implement SMT in any way what so ever. Those 32-cores would likely only support 32-threads, while the 64-core EPYC supports 128-threads.
I dunno. "Just scaling up" the M1 doesn't seem like it'd be a winner in the high-end market to me. Maybe if the core gained a wider SIMD-width and SMT (2x threads/core), that'd help a lot.
SMT isn't an unalloyed good, it helps for many workloads and hurts for some. That said, the very wide cores in M1 are asking for SMT to increass utilization, I'd guess it'll happen eventually. OTOH, the weaker memory consistency rules on ARM seem to allow for a lot more out of order execution, which seems to keep things busy.
I don't think we'll see Intel and AMD increase the width of their cores so much; they need their cores to scale to 5Ghz (even if it takes 1KW of cooling) for marketting and competition reasons, and wider cores are harder to clock so high.
I agree for sure. But the tradeoffs are pretty steep. Scaling within a core is traditionally sqrt(size), while scaling number of cores on a problem is also sqrt(cores).
Balancing between size-of-core vs number-of-cores is a big question. And that also depends very strongly on the task at hand. Web-servers scale better than sqrt(#cores), because each worker-thread is basically fully independent.
> I don't think we'll see Intel and AMD increase the width of their cores so much; they need their cores to scale to 5Ghz (even if it takes 1KW of cooling) for marketting and competition reasons, and wider cores are harder to clock so high.
I think there's a good argument that AMD / Intel can't scale their decoder much larger than 4-way / 6-way with uOp cache, due to the instruction set issue.
But I've seen some interesting innovations: the most recent Intel Atoms have double-decoders (2+2 decoder) on SMT-based Atoms. Such a thing would make SMT more efficient without much increase to power.
Its strange to see Apple take the single-thread performance crown. But... I don't think they've proven themselves in the high-end server / workstation market yet. Even if they do scale up, their decisions don't seem to be an obvious winner at the high end.
Is there even an API to take advantage of that yet? It looks like an impressive DSP but without an API, then that stuff is locked to Apple-only software / hardware.
> video coding acceleration
Is that really better than another 96-threads that you'd get with a 64-core Threadripper Pro? The thread-deficit of 32-core Apple vs 64-core/128-thread Threadripper is going to be pretty apparent.
When you have another +96 threads available, I'm not sure if "video coding acceleration" is even needed. Just run that in software.
Has been for at least three years now (maybe more): https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/core-ml/
I guess that API is good enough for the deep-learning hype train however.
Of course other frameworks could leverage it too. As for direct access, I'm not sure. I think I did mix up API and framework in my response :)
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc19/718 https://developer.apple.com/wwdc18/701
Intro of CoreML: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc17/711
Being Apple I'm (sadly) not surprised they don't expose the Neural Engine hardware more directly.
i.e UMA ( Unified Memory Architecture ), GPU, NPU stay intact. You are basically getting a M1XX, where M1X is the 16 CPU Core variants.
Consider the current M1, a 32 Core High Performance CPU Core and 128 GPU core would give you roughly 300W TDP Max, excluding all the memory controller and interconnect. A rough estimate is already at 500mm2+ Die Size, excluding NPU and all other bits and pieces, of course assuming the same processing node.
The Old ( Or the recent ) Mac Pro has a Maxed out system of ~910W, that is 28 Core CPU + 2 x Radeon Vega II Duo ( That is 4 GPU ).
We are back to TrashCan Mac Pro again, except it would be even faster than the 2019 Cheese Grater Mac Pro. We would have reached the thermal ceiling again, unless Apple does Water Cooling and push that TDP allowance to 400W.
Remember this M1XX is CPU + GPU TDP. For a PC system, or workstation power users are quite used to 300W CPU + 300W GPU. So I was sort of expecting Apple to be making CPU + GPU design, purely to create a monster as a successor to Cheese Grater Mac Pro. May be they have different Goal in mind, may be they think this is good enough for Mac Pro ( Which certainly is from many perspective ), and obviously iMac.
Same Design, scaling across iPhone, iPad, MacBook, And Mac Pro.
This brings me to the final point, we only have so much uArch improvement we could do, it is now all left to process node and heat dissipation of the system.
We are in the era of TDP Computing.
Intel has been saying this for years, like almost 8 years. But this is just what non-innovator say. It is an excuse for mediocrity and failure and stagnation.
There is tons of uArch improvements in Apple's chips. That is why they consistently beat even the other ARMs chips on the same process nodes.
AMD also has been significantly innovating with uArch.
I love the innovation we are seeing these days. We are definitely not in an TDP era (where only TDP matters! but of course TDP is important), we are in another golden age of CPU/GPU innovation and it is beautiful. Reminds me of the 1990s and early 2000s.
According to Wolfram Alpha, 5 nanometers is ~23 silicon atoms across (~2.2 Å each). But that’s also assuming they’re actually fabricating 5 nm gates - which they’re not.
The oxide/insulator thickness on modern process is pretty insane. For instance for the intel 14nm++ the silicon nitride and silicon oxide layers seem to 4 to 5nm thick.
-Edit- For instance here is 2 fins for from the intel 14nm++. The grains/spheres you see this image are the atoms. Some parts of the a modern transistors are even smaller than process number may let you know.
https://imgur.com/a/hgeSOVV
The A13, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, and Mediatek Dimensity 1000L were all on DUV N7P (Hisilicon Kirin 990 5G was actually on the more advanced EUV N7+). For more information on chips and their processes: https://www.eetimes.com/apple-huawei-use-tsmc-but-their-7nm-...
Here are some benchmarks of how the A13 and 865 (and the 2020 updates) stack up: https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-a14-vs-a13-vs-snapdrag...
From the charts, it looks like particularly for single-core and browser/JS performance, the Apple designs are very strong, and beat out the Qualcomm competition even on the same process node.
Intel is basically running a super legacy design and they are doing surprisingly well with it, but they are losing on all fronts at this time. What they have for them right now is momentum and enterprise deals.
That will hold up for a while yet, so it gives them time to get their act together.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15885/hpc-systems-special-off...
It's more likely that the future Mac Pro will use Lifuka which everyone in this thread is ignoring.
It would be interesting if Apple did make a discrete GPU, that would means they are making a separate GPU die for their Mac Pro and iMac with volume estimated to be no more than 1M unit per year. It makes sense from a technical perspective, it surely doesn't from a cost perspective. Although Apple could happily charge $1000 just for the GPU to make up for ROI.
The advantage of GPU having it's own memory is you can use super high throughput ram that the GPU needs, while using higher capacity/lower energy/cheaper ram for the cpu.
The downside of using separate ram is that you have to shuttle data back and forth from one ram to the other quite a bit, as well you get less flexibility in how your total memory is used.
Who do you think writes all the code for this stuff? It’s guys in tracksuits in Visual Studio C++ on Windows. The top games for iOS are also either written by a few guys in Unity or by an absolutely huge team of people porting an existing, low graphics quality PC game.
> We are back to TrashCan Mac Pro again... we would have reached the thermal ceiling again...
This is kind of drawing new lines to read between. :)
Apple almost certainly developed their current uber-expensive, trypophobia-triggering Mac Pro design knowing that they were also working on Apple Silicon processors. While it's possible they intend that whole case design to be a one-time thing, it doesn't seem likely to me -- and if that wasn't the intent, then it's also not likely they want to ship a teeny tiny Apple Silicon logic board in that huge case with the rest of the space going unused. I think they're going to do their best to make an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro that can be upgraded and expanded. (With all respect to Mark Gurman, I think that "half-sized Mac Pro" is going to be a different product entirely if it ships, with a different branding. Mac Mini Pro?)
The ever illusive xMac, aka "the affordable Mac tower"
The iPad is at least an order of magnitude better than comparable netbooks (though chromebooks, depending on manufacturer, can be competitive thanks mainly to ChromeOS's reduced footprint). So even though the margins are high, the perceived quality, regardless of raw benchmarks, is still something. It's not just marketing to me to say the marriage of software and hardware is unique. (Gruber's observation about NSObject alloc's being a lot faster on Apple Silicon, for instance).
Now that I think about it, honestly Google is the only other company playing by these rules... ie pixelbook, pixel phone, etc. But they're much earlier in the evolution, and have less upstream control in software (especially since Fuchsia seems to be somewhat lower priority than before, though this is second hand knowledge).
As a technology enthusiast I'm excited to see what bonkers stuff they'll be announcing. But, since I am not doing climate models or rendering hollywood movies, I don't expect I will never work on any of them since I don't want to drop a new car's worth of money on one.
No, but unified memory does require starving the GPU of bandwidth. There's a reason high end GPUs use different types of memory than CPUs.
Either Apple will be content with Mac Pro not having the absolute graphics performance lead, or they will make a discrete GPU with dedicated memory. I'm not sure which they will choose but I suspect the latter.
There doesn't seem to be any reason why Apple couldn't integrate a 16 TFLOPS GPU on an SOC using a 5nm or better process. The M1 GPU is 2.6 TFLOPS, they can x6 or more it, and obviously change the memory subsystem (HBM?).
Also, Xbox uses GDDR which trades off CPU performance for GPU performance. Apple probably wouldn't do that for a Mac Pro. The high end needs separate memory so the GPU can have bandwidth and the CPU can have low latency.
Also, GDDR does not have appreciably higher latencies than DDR memory when measured in nanoseconds. It's just more expensive than DDR and much more limited in terms of capacity.
If Apple does go the "huge SoC" route I'd expect to see HBM2 memory with socketed DDR4 or DDR5. It'd provide the best of both worlds - extremely high bandwidth and low latency for a small portion (say 32-64GB) of the memory, and high capacity for the rest (say 1-2TB), all without compromising the unified memory concept.
This is not without precedent - recent Xeon Phis, for all their other shortcomings, have had a similar memory hierarchy.
I agree that a combination of HBM and DDR sounds pretty good for a unified memory architecture. Are you imagining it as just another layer in the cache hierarchy or something actively managed?
So you get a certain baseline level of specs, but also have the opportunity to tack on a beefier GPU (which may or may not use UMA), additional slower memory, additional slower storage, maybe even additional CPUs, etc.
I don't think so, with the asterisk that I don't know enough to say whether mixing higher-speed and lower-speed RAM is really feasible in that scenario. (IIRC, if you do that in computers now, all the RAM will operate at the lowest speed.)
That’s correct, but irrelevant in this context. In that scenario, the memory is all on the same memory controller, and the memory controller used wants to run a single speed, so it has to be the highest universally supported speed.
Apple could have multiple tiers of memory with different characteristics, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I don’t have access to such a test bed, so I can’t speak to what the experience would be like.
The Radeon Vega II Due has 128 compute cores and 8192 stream processors, so that maxed out mac pro would have 256 compute cores and 16384 stream processors. I don't have any benchmarks to work off of, but I think it's safe to say that a new Mac Pro with the 32-core SoC would still be substantially far behind a current Mac Pro unless it also had a dedicated GPU.
That is unless Apple decide to use DRAM in additional to HMB or GDDR5 as 2nd layer of Memory.
Those that herald the M1 as unequivocally the next great thing are very, very rarely in the same (anecdotal) set of internet users that acknowledge that AMD exists, and makes CPUs. (Or it exists, but the M1 outperforms it in every metric!)
I suspect that many Apple-focused journalists are similarly constrained by tunnel vision, limiting their view of the world as "things that Apple created in the past" and "things that Apple creates now."
For the already Apple faithful, it's not a bad way to go. "Is this new Apple Silicon desktop going to outperform the only option I have now, an Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro?" So it's not too surprising that Intel is their benchmark, even if it ignores much higher performing alternatives available to those outside of Apple's walled garden.
It’s more likely they offer TR like performance at much lower watts, temperature and cost, like they’ve done to AMDa best mobile CPUs.
Whether it's doing well or not doesn't really factor into that. That's more a matter of market and availability.