Apple Switches To ARM

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...res-report

Once the M1 hit a few weeks back, it was clear that the diminutive processor was but a sign of things to come. Reports suggest that Apple will be upping the competitive ante in short order. The company plans to launch M1 follow-ups with up to 16 high-performance cores in 2021, targeting the MacBook Pro and iMac market. In 2022, it’ll launch machines with 32 high-performance cores in systems like the Mac Pro. While the 2021 CPU might still tap the FireStorm CPU core, it’s a good bet that the 2022 CPU will be at least one generation more advanced.

All of these rumors come from Bloomberg, which has a good record when it comes to Apple CPU coverage. The same report notes that Apple wants to bring laptop chips to market with 16-core and 32-core GPUs, and that the company is eyeing chips with 64 or 128 dedicated GPU cores. Each GPU manufacturer defines a “core” somewhat differently, so the fact that Apple is talking about a “128 core GPU” compared with, say, a 4096-core GPU from AMD or Nvidia, isn’t meaningful, but the rapid plan to scale up to higher levels of GPU performance is an effort to replace AMD GPU hardware the same way Intel will be pushed out of the CPU stack.
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I expect that by 2022, both AMD and Intel will have their own new technology deployments explicitly intended to draw down x86 power consumption, improve efficiency, and boost performance per watt. The M1’s appearance will have lit a fire under such efforts at both companies. Timelines at the top of the market are also longer — if Apple launches a highly-competitive-to-superior 32-core part in 2022, it’d probably be 2023 or 2024 before said chip began bleeding off market share — but the stakes are also higher.

Intel’s entire justification for foundry self-ownership rests on the sales of high-end Xeon and Core i7 / i9 CPUs. The loss of these markets would be disastrous for the firm’s financials. AMD has much more experience operating on low margins and absolutely no interest in returning to the days where the question wasn’t “I wonder how much profit AMD made this quarter,” but “I wonder if AMD managed to lose less than $500M?”

Both companies will fight tooth and nail for their own market share. Both enjoy benefits like long-term guaranteed back-compatibility, familiarity, and customer loyalty. The sheer size of the x86 ecosystem is its own bulwark, and the final outcome of the x86 versus ARM fight, long-term, is uncertain.

But here’s one thing I am certain of: The M1 will be considered an inflection point in the history of CPUs, if only because it’s the first real challenge to x86 hegemony in decades. AMD and Intel will have to improve their own designs to meet that challenge, and even if they do so successfully, the products they build afterward will continue on a different evolutionary path than they might have taken otherwise.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...erformance

The problem here is that x86 CPUs are designed to be run optimally in 2T1C configurations, as a recent Anandtech deep dive into the performance advantages and disadvantages of enabling SMT indicates, while the M1 is designed to run optimally in a 1T1C configuration.

This may well be an ongoing problem for x86. Remember that scaling per-thread is far from perfect and gets worse every thread you add. Historically, the CPU that delivers the best per-core performance in the smallest die area and with the highest performance per watt is the CPU that wins whatever “round” of the CPU wars one cares to consider. The fact that x86 requires two threads to do what Apple can do with one is not a strength. Whether only loading an x86 CPU with one thread constitutes a penalty will depend on what kind of comparison you want to make, but the difference in optimal thread counts and distribution needs to be acknowledged.

The big takeaways of the M1 remain unchanged. In many tests, the CPU shows consistently higher results than x86 CPUs when measured in terms of performance per watt. When it is outperformed by x86 CPUs, it is typically by chips that consume far more power than itself. The M1 appears to take a 20-30 percent performance hit when running applications built for Intel Macs, and there it may consume more power in this mode. Apple’s emulation ecosystem and third-party support are still in early days and may not meet the needs of every user depending on the degree to which you are plugged into the overall Apple ecosystem. None of these is a direct reflection on the M1’s silicon, however, which still looks like one of the most interesting advances in silicon in the past few decades — and a harbinger of problems to come for Intel and AMD.