I don’t like your implication that ARM is the only way to do this. The Apple chips are fast and low power because they are good designs built on a very modern fabrication process.
It’s perfectly possible to build such chips with other designs and instruction sets, for example x86_64 or risc-v, in the same way it’s pretty common to build cheaper slower ARM processors. Plenty of folks at Intel and AMD are doing that right now.
I think that you're going a bit too far with 'far' faster - there isn't any evidence that this is the case and a lot of engineering effort has gone into making Arm fast - not least from Apple.
Apple aren't moving to Arm for no reason though so I think it's worth considering the reasons why this might be the case: power efficiency (probably the most important), price, ability to incorporate custom silicon, a single ISA to support, full control over the stack, access to best manufacturing process.
On the last point, I think Apple (Tim Cook especially) has probably lost faith and patience with a company that has overpromised and underdelivered for a number of years.
If we were to go back in time to before apple introduced it’s own SoC and before it had acquired chip design start ups, even before than ARM was on the table as that is what the iPhone ran.
RISC-V wasn’t a thing back then. So the alternatives were MIPS, Power or maybe a home grown instruction set.
So we just have to go with what the reality is now. The apple silicon has been well optimised for performance per watt. And it runs on an ARM instruction set that apple itself helped in the design of.
Not even close to true. Apple's ARM processors are unlike anyone else's, and everyone else's ARM processors are not particularly impressive. The power/performance isn't really there, and scaling performance up is not linear, either. You can't just "make it bigger" and retain the same power/performance ratio you had. The 1W power draw that the 'big' ARM cores target, like the Cortex-A78, isn't even that special. You can run x86 cores at 1W/core all day long as well. How it performs at the power level is the question, but the ARM cores don't really perform all that well. See for example the slaughtering that is the 64-core Graviton2 vs. the 64-core Epyc Rome: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-... (spoiler, the x86 chip has an overall performance lead of 50%, and they really aren't targeting that different of a power budget)
But even the M1 isn't an order of magnitude ahead on power/performance ratio. It's the leader, but it's sure as shit not 10x faster for the same power draw.
Indeed. ARM chips are not better made, they are better designed- at least in regards to low power. It's an architectural thing. This is very much like the old software rule; a good algorithm on slow hardware will often outperform a bad algorithm on fast hardware.
But until now nobody was able to build an ARM cpu as fast as apples cou. Every server arm cpu in the past was still a lot slower than intel cpus, despite packing a lot of cores on a chip.
The problem with your theory is that there are way more ARM processors in the world.
Not only that, they are striking fast at high performance. Apples top end iPad chips are close to/better than recent laptop chips at this point. And clearly Apple can do that at scale.
The x86 world is having a harder time getting more performance out of each revision, and there's enough going on on the ARM side that we could be within reach of something interesting happening. This isn't like Transmeta or the G series chips from Motorola/IBM.
Many other manufacturers had made power-efficient ARM chips, however, the mainstream computer makers (just a few years ago including Apple) did choose x86 compatibility over power efficiency.
Disagree. Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt.
The ARM universe has a flexibility advantage, but Apple might not care, since Intel will surely make them the SoC they want if it means a spot in the iPad.
I don't think the outcome here is ordained, nor would Apple want it to be: Competition for supplying them fast, efficient CPUs is exactly what they didn't have in the PowerPC days, and it nearly killed them.
Intel may maintain a performance lead on certain tasks that take advantage of things like AVX, though Apple may be able to make up with more cores. AFAIK ARM has no equivalent to the more advanced vector instruction sets of X64 chips.
I do expect ARM to have an instant heat and battery life advantage. It may be sizable if you combine a more efficient chips with smaller process nodes. I expect a bigger gap here than in raw speed.
One thing this article reminded me of is just how damned prevalent simple ARM based CPUs are in the world. Piles and piles of ARM chips running Linux, or in Apple's case some kind of Darwin derived OS. It doesn't talk about processing power, but these tiny embedded CPUs are far more powerful than a Commodore 64 or most early CP/M or DOS based systems which many small businesses relied on.
1. ARM-based CPUs have for years (decades) been much more power-efficient than Intel and AMD CPUs. This is regardless of Apple, and is not really about being ahead - it a different path in the design space.
2. If Apple were "far ahead" in terms of performance in general, they would probably have been using these chips in products which aren't smartphones.
ARM needs to make a design they can sell to a lot of different people. Apple has one customer Apple. Their chips are larger and they have more transistors to play with and they can optimize the number of cores to what they want. If you have more transistors you can add more features like decoders, alus, cache, or whatever which make your chips faster. So it isn't fair to say Apple beat ARM at their own game.
Do you think Intel and AMD could simply switch to making ARM processor and beat Apple? After all they got more experience in chip design? Why don't they just do that now?
It’s perfectly possible to build such chips with other designs and instruction sets, for example x86_64 or risc-v, in the same way it’s pretty common to build cheaper slower ARM processors. Plenty of folks at Intel and AMD are doing that right now.
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