It really depends - other ones I bought with these I actually have a motherboard for don’t even show up as engineering samples in cpu-z - they a probably qualification samples from what I’ve heard? The q-spec is also are not listed anywhere. Other I have bought show up as just Genuine Intel 0000 or some variant of that without any model name.
When Intel salespeople first started showing designs like that I asked them just this, and just like the HN crowd, they didn't seem terribly amused. I did, though.
So are you saying those people at Intel don't have any sense of awareness and consequently sense of humor leading to some of the most tone-deaf marketing communication and shady anti-consumer practices in an industry already known their shadiness?
Until Apple CPUs run on Amazon, Azure and Google clouds, it doesn't really matter how much better they are, other than 10% worldwide desktop users, and some tier 1 markets where iOS sales take place.
From anecdotal experience one big reason was always:
‘You can get the same specs in a Windows PC for 1/2 the price !!’
Now with M1 - you can’t get comparable specs/performance in a Windows PC.
Also - in the past few months I’ve seen M1 MacBook Airs at very competitive price points. There are actually cases where you get better performance at a lower price point compared to a Windows PC.
I do think the M1 / ARM pivot has been a game changer. Market share in the last 12 months seems to be on the up.
> ‘You can get the same specs in a Windows PC for 1/2 the price !!’
That was never really the argument. Even in the heyday of the PowerMac, you could get one for $2000 and it was competitive with a $2000 PC. But $500 PCs existed and were 75% as fast, whereas $500 PowerMacs did not. And then that's what everybody bought because for most people, the last 25% of the performance isn't worth four times the money.
It's the same reason $50 Android phones have higher sales volumes than $1000 iPhones. For sure the iPhone is faster, but is it $950 faster? For most people the answer is no.
Amazon ARM and Apple ARM are a class apart, and are not substitutable. Same ISA but wildly different architectural capabilities and limitations, a bit like Via x86 versus Intel x86 back in the day.
They never will, otherwise they will just be yet another OEM, instead the Ferrari/Bugati/Lamborghini of computers.
They don't want to be the computer people take for groceries, rather the one that drives slowly in the main avenue making everyone aware of their presence.
No, just that their price places them way beyond what a large percentage of people on this planet are able to afford.
I am lucky to live in Europe, in a country where most people probably wouldn't think twice about buying anything Apple.
There are plenty of the countries out there where people aren't as fortunate, most devs would be more than happy to have any kind of computer to actually work on, and that computer won't be an Apple one with a very high degree of probability.
When your path to a better life is coding via a feature phone, whatever M1 is capable of is meaningless.
> No, just that their price places them way beyond what a large percentage of people on this planet are able to afford.
1000$/€ MBA is in the same price category with similarly-performing machines. I mean, I doubt you can work as a developer without being able to run a load of tools at the same time. That phone guy example is an exception.
Not every developer is someone running UNIX with a kubernetes cluster on their laptop.
Even here in Europe, many contractors get a Windows laptop with 8 GB and a 128 HDD (yes HDD) from customer's IT with the respective tooling required for the project.
Around 50% of Windows PC are Cooperate Business PC. Those are not Apple's target customer.
But Apple is still gaining ground on the so called 90% market. And ARM M1 Chip already allow them to compete at a much more favourable price point. You see higher discount rate on M1 based Mac, and better Education Discount on M1 MacBook Air, along with SKUs hitting $799.
They have plenty of margin to play with and get an official MacBook down to $799 within the next 3 years.
They may never out sell PC in unit volume, but they still have plenty of room to grow. In an optimistic projection I would not be surprised if Apple double their Mac active user by 2031.
A typical education laptop in Portugal is around 400 euros, and there are families that still would buy them on credit, let alone countries with even worse average salaries.
There are many people in Germany, working as so called 'Aufstocker' which means their job is paying too low, so get government subisidies until they reach at least what they would get as (longtime) unemployed money. Imagine single moms, one or a few kids, working service industry. But also many other people, in low payed service industries, sub-sub-sub-contracted temp jobbing, and so on. This phenomenon is not limited to Portugal. Sometimes the kids get chromebooks, or tablets from whomever 'for free', but not everywhere. Besides that, there are other things to pay for in school, even if school itself is free. €400 is a lot for many, catastrophically so, sometimes.
The user of Macs, certainly, because there is only one playing field, where Apple places it.
Apple is entirely not represented on the AMD and Intel key playing field, datacenter-grade chips. OTOH it's very much present (and more with M1) in the Qualcomm and Samsung playing field, ARM-based mobile chips, from which AMD and Intel are both absent.
Apple CPUs have a much better energy efficiency than either Intel or AMD, in part due to the improved TSMC 5-nm process and in part because the Apple CPUs are more brainiac, doing 50% more work per clock cycle at a 2/3 times lower clock frequency than the Intel/AMD CPUs.
However, for absolute performance values, the desktop Intel and AMD CPUs remain faster than even M1 Max, both in single-thread and in multi-thread tasks.
M1 Max should be able to match the best laptop CPUs in some tasks and be faster in the tasks that are limited by the memory bandwidth.
On the other hand, when the laptop Alder Lake CPUs will be introduced in Q1 2022, they should be much faster in ST than M1 Max or M1 Pro, but while consuming a much higher power.
It's very important to remember that Apple is always in the bleeding edge of process nodes. In this case, TSMC's 5nm, which is the most advanced process in shipping products right now. AMD is still in 7nm but will be moving later, and Intel is in its own 10nm, or I guess "Intel 7" now.
Apple only just took the multithreaded performance crown on a laptop with the M1 Pro & M1 Max, neither of which are actually available yet. And neither the M1 Pro nor M1 Max are competitive with AMD's top-end consumer desktop CPUs at multicore performance (ie, Ryzen 5900X & 5950X), to say nothing of the prosumer ones (aka, Threadripper). Which given the differences in power budget isn't really that surprising, but still.
To call that "lapping" seems a bit overly extreme.
Also this article is about server CPUs, so I don't know why the M1 is being mentioned at all. It would get humiliated in a server environment by existing Xeons & Epyc CPUs, to say nothing of what Intel is demoing here.
I agree that their current products aren't competitive, but I'd disagree with your multiple years out remark. The Alder Lake platform is out Q1 next year. PCIe Gen 5, DDR5, hybrid cores, the new Xe graphics architecture, and the first new node process in over 6 years (Intel 7). From what I've seen from early leaks, it looks like it has the potential to be a flagship CPU for the first time in a long time.
Xe launched with tiger lake summer 2020. Sapphire Rapids (discussed here) is at least a year or two out. As for intels new node they could always pull a cannon lake.
What is the benefit of this for a desktop processor? I understand for mobile devices that have to conserve battery, but Intel is also making a desktop version with 8 of each core type. Most modern CPUs have the ability to turn off all but one core and throttle clock speeds way down when idle already.
I would presume because it turns out, in many cases, you have some tasks continuously running that don't require that much CPU, but a nonzero amount, and this way you can shove them on the LITTLE cores while the big core(s) go to town on single big tasks.
According to Intel's claims, the Gracemont cores have more than a half of the throughput for multi-threaded tasks of a big core in about a quarter of the area and a quarter of the power consumption.
That means that a Gracemont thread is supposed to have about the same throughput as a SMT thread on a big core.
Therefore an 8+8 cores Alder Lake with 24 hybrid threads should have about the same MT performance with a CPU having 12 big cores with 24 SMT threads, while having the area and the power consumption of only 10 big cores.
So Alder Lake is expected to have a similar MT performance with the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X, while having a much better ST performance.
Of course that remains to be seen.
Early next year AMD should counter with Zen 3+ CPUs having a much larger cache memory and probably a little higher clock frequency. Those will probably have much better MT performance than Alder Lake, but Alder Lake should retain the best ST performance until Zen 4, late next year.
It's not a matter of absolute numbers, but a question of die area, to some degree. You can either spend X amount of area on a "big core" that can clock all the way down to idle (where it will spend most time) and all the way up to its max perf, or you can spend a fraction of X on a smaller core with a much, much smaller relative surface area, and get the same performance at idle or near-idle tasks. It just won't be able to scale "up" to max perf. But the net gain is you've saved a significant amount of area, and that translates to better TDP and thermals. The goal is to reap this benefit while also having "big cores" for the throttle-up phase, so you need both.
There's a lot of talk about "background tasks" that do light, but necessary processing in asymmetric multicore setups like this; for example on macOS Spotlight performs background indexing continuously, this is a great fit for a "small core" like in the M1. There's no amount of idle clocking you can do to match the perf-per-watt here. Similarly, there is also talk of "dark silicon" and "increasing heterogenous systems", like hybrid designs. But these are all the same problem, really: modern designs are not about having the most powerful components, but the correct blend of components to maximize the work-per-watt you can achieve. You can't just throw "more transistors" at every single design anymore and get free wins on all fronts 1 year later when transistors shrink.
Yes Thunderbolt is an Intel IP. You don't pay for a license fee, although I think they still need to buy the controllers from Intel if I recall correctly.
Intel’s hope for recovery reminds me of Apple’s back in 97. They have one asset which is (greatly diminished but nonzero) momentum. An absolutely enormous number (though slowly diminishing) number of people can’t switch away from their product. So they have time to try and do something new.
Apple’s had a much shorter fuse. They really needed that $150MM from MS (who needed Apple to fend off antitrust). Talking to ppl in Intel that sense of urgency hasn’t made it through the organization (and why should it? There are tons of other jobs around). But they could pull it off.
The momentum is what allows you to avoid the (mythical?) “Osborne effect”: the only thing Intel can brag about is the future; today’s products will still be bought by a lot of people and so hopefully that will stem some of the design losses.
MS was able to do the same thing (though their situation was far from dire). Motorola and HP couldn’t.
"Shorter fuse" is a great understatement. Intel's situation in 2021 is not even remotely comparable to Apple in 1997, except in the abstract. Apple was months away from bankruptcy, losing money every quarter, and had <5% market share. Intel has >50% market share in some markets, is extremely profitable (24 billion last year), and has enough cash in the bank to ride this out for years.
Apple had to execute near perfectly immediately when SJ came back. Intel could make the right strategic decision a year from now and turn things around. Or it could probably make the right decisions two years from now and still be fine.
Intel seems more like Sun, they once produced competitive products but are now entering a period of stagnation and decline due to confusing product offerings and executive mismanagement. Most of their sales come from legacy entrenchment.
To me, Intel is starting to look more like IBM. Still showing engineering might in some areas, holding onto a huge trove of patents, making decent money, but losing growth, momentum and appeal over a long period of time.
Sure, they will exist and refuse to die, but will they be a significant part of the future? I’m not optimistic.
Confusing product offerings aren't the reason for stagnation and decline. Intel did great when they had confusing and competitive product offerings.
They're in decline because their product development pipeline for CPUs depends on their fabrication pipeline, and their fab pipeline was stalled for several years. It seems like the fab pipeline has been unblocked, maybe, as Intel 10nm products are starting to appear in bigger numbers. We'll see if that unblocks their CPU pipeline in the next year or two, I guess.
> An absolutely enormous number (though slowly diminishing) number of people can’t switch away from their product
Aren't AMD CPUs more or less drop-in replacements for Intel though, as far as software compatibility goes? Yes, you need a new motherboard. But you probably need one even if you stay on Intel.
But... between mindshare, supply constraints, and OEMs being slow to make compelling products with AMD, it takes a long time to switch large numbers from Intel to AMD.
With AMD laptops, you'll struggle to find the ideal combination of display (resolution, quality, brightness), ports (Thunderbolt) and other attributes. They only got high-end discrete GPUs and 4K screens this year. And often not in the same machine. Thunderbolt is technically available for AMD platforms now, but still exceedingly rare.
For desktop, yes... I switched to AMD fifteen years ago and I haven't looked back. That's as someone who builds their own.
In the consumer space (outside DIY), desktops are like laptops. You need to find OEMs putting things together in the right configuration. Not to mention selling them at your local Best Buy for a mainstream consumer to come across it and pick it up. And not turn away because it's missing the "Intel Inside" sticker seared into their brain from decades of marketing.
Well the people designing the boards care. Many huge enterprise companies care (for reasons I don’t completely understand but I don’t work in that space any more). And AMD’s volume is nothing like Intel’s — one of Intel’s lucky breaks.
I think AMD is mostly a consumer brand and consumers aren’t buying a lot of PCs these days (except for a small transient due to Covid).
That is partly true and they have been doing this for two years now. Regular readers would have notice a lot more leaks coming out from website and tweets than usual. And I think their sales and marketing department did an exceptional job during Intel's darkest hour.
Not that is matter much because both Intel and AMD was constrained by capacity.
I am completely not surprised by this move, HBM2 solves a major issue for quite a few applications that live and die on high speed memory and assuming sapphire rapids has enough ports to make use of it optimally will make these an absolute beast. I guess I'm only surprised AMD didn't do this first as they have more experience with HBM2 on their GPUs. Then again they might have and never made it a public SKU.
To me, it looks like Intel is playing catch up, and trying every heroic hack like HBM that they can think of in order to be competitive with AMD.
It reminds me a lot of the last days of Netburst, with heroic hacks like huge (for the time) caches, high clock speeds, and then bumping up against TDP limits.
The P4 high clock speeds were not a hack, they were the root of the problem. High clock speeds were an architectural constraint driven by the _marketing_ department. Intel's architect knew that this wasn't the way to go for actual performance but delivered what was asked of them.
> High clock speeds were an architectural constraint driven by the _marketing_ department.
High clock speeds are an architectural constraint driven by the market.
Intel and AMD can't sell chips that don't clock high in laptops and desktops and they can't afford to specialize much for mid-clocked server chips, so they need a design that can at least approach 5GHz for boost clocks. Instructions per Clock matters too, but the market would have a hard time buying an x86 chip that stopped at 3 GHz, even if it was double the IPC.
That means they can't make a super-wide processor like Apple that tops out around 3 GHz, where Apple is more comfortable providing sufficient cooling.
> Instructions per Clock matters too, but the market would have a hard time buying an x86 chip that stopped at 3 GHz, even if it was double the IPC.
AMD's response to the later-life Pentium 4's was the Athlon 64, which was clocked substantially lower but matched or beat the P4 in most tasks. The market responded positively.
Similarly, the original Pentium was clocked substantially lower than high end 486 models when it was first introduced. It was also received positively.
In modern times, the market has responded positively to the Apple M1.
Has there actually been a CPU anywhere that has outperformed its market competitor (in price and performance), but failed to gain traction because its clock speed was too low? "The market wants high clock speeds" has been a common assumption, but I've never actually seen it work out that way in practice.
This product is competing against NVidia for the deep learning space, not AMD. NV’s A100 features enormous memory bandwidth (1.4 TB/s) thanks to HBM and peak flops (300 TFlops/s) thanks to tensor cores, so using HBM and Advanced Matrix Extensions here is pretty clearly aimed at that segment.
Golden cove core highlights[1] include a 6 wide decoder (up from 4; M1 is 8), reorder buffer of 512 (up from 352 in Ice/Tiger/Rocket lake, or 224 in Skylake; M1 is estimated around 650), and 12 execution units (up from 10 in Ice/Tiger/Rocket lake or 8 in Skylake).
Still not as wide as the M1, but it looks like a huge step in the right direction on paper.
73 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 91.1 ms ] threadThe proportion of potential users priced out of owning a Mac vs. a PC is much lower than Ferrari vs. Kia
What I mean to say is - customer base for Mac vs. PC overlap alot and aren’t distinct as you seem to be alluding to.
From anecdotal experience one big reason was always:
‘You can get the same specs in a Windows PC for 1/2 the price !!’
Now with M1 - you can’t get comparable specs/performance in a Windows PC.
Also - in the past few months I’ve seen M1 MacBook Airs at very competitive price points. There are actually cases where you get better performance at a lower price point compared to a Windows PC.
I do think the M1 / ARM pivot has been a game changer. Market share in the last 12 months seems to be on the up.
That was never really the argument. Even in the heyday of the PowerMac, you could get one for $2000 and it was competitive with a $2000 PC. But $500 PCs existed and were 75% as fast, whereas $500 PowerMacs did not. And then that's what everybody bought because for most people, the last 25% of the performance isn't worth four times the money.
It's the same reason $50 Android phones have higher sales volumes than $1000 iPhones. For sure the iPhone is faster, but is it $950 faster? For most people the answer is no.
They don't want to be the computer people take for groceries, rather the one that drives slowly in the main avenue making everyone aware of their presence.
I am lucky to live in Europe, in a country where most people probably wouldn't think twice about buying anything Apple.
There are plenty of the countries out there where people aren't as fortunate, most devs would be more than happy to have any kind of computer to actually work on, and that computer won't be an Apple one with a very high degree of probability.
When your path to a better life is coding via a feature phone, whatever M1 is capable of is meaningless.
https://www.hanselminutes.com/615/developing-on-not-for-a-no...
1000$/€ MBA is in the same price category with similarly-performing machines. I mean, I doubt you can work as a developer without being able to run a load of tools at the same time. That phone guy example is an exception.
Even here in Europe, many contractors get a Windows laptop with 8 GB and a 128 HDD (yes HDD) from customer's IT with the respective tooling required for the project.
Cost-of-ownership for Apple products is usually pretty great anyway; often they're the $500 vs $50 boots.
Around 50% of Windows PC are Cooperate Business PC. Those are not Apple's target customer.
But Apple is still gaining ground on the so called 90% market. And ARM M1 Chip already allow them to compete at a much more favourable price point. You see higher discount rate on M1 based Mac, and better Education Discount on M1 MacBook Air, along with SKUs hitting $799.
They have plenty of margin to play with and get an official MacBook down to $799 within the next 3 years.
They may never out sell PC in unit volume, but they still have plenty of room to grow. In an optimistic projection I would not be surprised if Apple double their Mac active user by 2031.
Intel put itself in the same playing field by slapping their “Intel inside” stickers on every goddamn laptop that has their CPU.
Apple is entirely not represented on the AMD and Intel key playing field, datacenter-grade chips. OTOH it's very much present (and more with M1) in the Qualcomm and Samsung playing field, ARM-based mobile chips, from which AMD and Intel are both absent.
However, for absolute performance values, the desktop Intel and AMD CPUs remain faster than even M1 Max, both in single-thread and in multi-thread tasks.
M1 Max should be able to match the best laptop CPUs in some tasks and be faster in the tasks that are limited by the memory bandwidth.
On the other hand, when the laptop Alder Lake CPUs will be introduced in Q1 2022, they should be much faster in ST than M1 Max or M1 Pro, but while consuming a much higher power.
To call that "lapping" seems a bit overly extreme.
Also this article is about server CPUs, so I don't know why the M1 is being mentioned at all. It would get humiliated in a server environment by existing Xeons & Epyc CPUs, to say nothing of what Intel is demoing here.
What is the benefit of this for a desktop processor? I understand for mobile devices that have to conserve battery, but Intel is also making a desktop version with 8 of each core type. Most modern CPUs have the ability to turn off all but one core and throttle clock speeds way down when idle already.
That means that a Gracemont thread is supposed to have about the same throughput as a SMT thread on a big core.
Therefore an 8+8 cores Alder Lake with 24 hybrid threads should have about the same MT performance with a CPU having 12 big cores with 24 SMT threads, while having the area and the power consumption of only 10 big cores.
So Alder Lake is expected to have a similar MT performance with the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X, while having a much better ST performance.
Of course that remains to be seen.
Early next year AMD should counter with Zen 3+ CPUs having a much larger cache memory and probably a little higher clock frequency. Those will probably have much better MT performance than Alder Lake, but Alder Lake should retain the best ST performance until Zen 4, late next year.
There's a lot of talk about "background tasks" that do light, but necessary processing in asymmetric multicore setups like this; for example on macOS Spotlight performs background indexing continuously, this is a great fit for a "small core" like in the M1. There's no amount of idle clocking you can do to match the perf-per-watt here. Similarly, there is also talk of "dark silicon" and "increasing heterogenous systems", like hybrid designs. But these are all the same problem, really: modern designs are not about having the most powerful components, but the correct blend of components to maximize the work-per-watt you can achieve. You can't just throw "more transistors" at every single design anymore and get free wins on all fronts 1 year later when transistors shrink.
Apple’s had a much shorter fuse. They really needed that $150MM from MS (who needed Apple to fend off antitrust). Talking to ppl in Intel that sense of urgency hasn’t made it through the organization (and why should it? There are tons of other jobs around). But they could pull it off.
The momentum is what allows you to avoid the (mythical?) “Osborne effect”: the only thing Intel can brag about is the future; today’s products will still be bought by a lot of people and so hopefully that will stem some of the design losses.
MS was able to do the same thing (though their situation was far from dire). Motorola and HP couldn’t.
"Shorter fuse" is a great understatement. Intel's situation in 2021 is not even remotely comparable to Apple in 1997, except in the abstract. Apple was months away from bankruptcy, losing money every quarter, and had <5% market share. Intel has >50% market share in some markets, is extremely profitable (24 billion last year), and has enough cash in the bank to ride this out for years.
Apple had to execute near perfectly immediately when SJ came back. Intel could make the right strategic decision a year from now and turn things around. Or it could probably make the right decisions two years from now and still be fine.
Sure, they will exist and refuse to die, but will they be a significant part of the future? I’m not optimistic.
They're in decline because their product development pipeline for CPUs depends on their fabrication pipeline, and their fab pipeline was stalled for several years. It seems like the fab pipeline has been unblocked, maybe, as Intel 10nm products are starting to appear in bigger numbers. We'll see if that unblocks their CPU pipeline in the next year or two, I guess.
Aren't AMD CPUs more or less drop-in replacements for Intel though, as far as software compatibility goes? Yes, you need a new motherboard. But you probably need one even if you stay on Intel.
But... between mindshare, supply constraints, and OEMs being slow to make compelling products with AMD, it takes a long time to switch large numbers from Intel to AMD.
With AMD laptops, you'll struggle to find the ideal combination of display (resolution, quality, brightness), ports (Thunderbolt) and other attributes. They only got high-end discrete GPUs and 4K screens this year. And often not in the same machine. Thunderbolt is technically available for AMD platforms now, but still exceedingly rare.
For desktop, yes... I switched to AMD fifteen years ago and I haven't looked back. That's as someone who builds their own.
In the consumer space (outside DIY), desktops are like laptops. You need to find OEMs putting things together in the right configuration. Not to mention selling them at your local Best Buy for a mainstream consumer to come across it and pick it up. And not turn away because it's missing the "Intel Inside" sticker seared into their brain from decades of marketing.
I think AMD is mostly a consumer brand and consumers aren’t buying a lot of PCs these days (except for a small transient due to Covid).
Not that is matter much because both Intel and AMD was constrained by capacity.
It reminds me a lot of the last days of Netburst, with heroic hacks like huge (for the time) caches, high clock speeds, and then bumping up against TDP limits.
High clock speeds are an architectural constraint driven by the market.
Intel and AMD can't sell chips that don't clock high in laptops and desktops and they can't afford to specialize much for mid-clocked server chips, so they need a design that can at least approach 5GHz for boost clocks. Instructions per Clock matters too, but the market would have a hard time buying an x86 chip that stopped at 3 GHz, even if it was double the IPC.
That means they can't make a super-wide processor like Apple that tops out around 3 GHz, where Apple is more comfortable providing sufficient cooling.
AMD's response to the later-life Pentium 4's was the Athlon 64, which was clocked substantially lower but matched or beat the P4 in most tasks. The market responded positively.
Similarly, the original Pentium was clocked substantially lower than high end 486 models when it was first introduced. It was also received positively.
In modern times, the market has responded positively to the Apple M1.
Has there actually been a CPU anywhere that has outperformed its market competitor (in price and performance), but failed to gain traction because its clock speed was too low? "The market wants high clock speeds" has been a common assumption, but I've never actually seen it work out that way in practice.
Still not as wide as the M1, but it looks like a huge step in the right direction on paper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Cove