Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

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In terms of high performance products, I’m actually really excited for the next Mac Pro. They’ve got novel design options open to them that no rival has.

The M1 costs Apple relatively little to produce per unit - I would expect them to keep the overall design for a Mac Pro but have stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has. Obviously performance would depend upon the application being amenable to a design like that but a 32 or 64 5nm core Mac Pro is not out of the question, and would be impossible to match for performance in the next few years by any Hackintosh.

Even after capacity frees up at TSMC for AMD to move to 5nm, they won’t be able to co-locate memory like the M1 does due to standards compliance with DRAM sticks.

I think the next couple of years will be really turbulent for other vendors - the M1 is likely far more significant for the PC market due to how disruptive it is than it is for the Mac market.

It might force Intel / AMD / Broadcom to get serious about hardware and at least integrate more of the components for notebooks. Maybe not go full on OEM, but a lot more than the CPU, because M1 is probably fundamentally winning with SoC design.

I would like to know if they are using fundamentally better batteries, and how much a 5nm process lead is behind this.

But I will hand it to Apple, if they finally did something to break the 4-8 hour battery life limit, a limit that always seemed to stay the same despite node shrink after node shrink after node shrink, and really about the same on-screen performance for usual browsing/productivity application use.

I was pretty distrustful of the ARM move, but if they deliver this for the Macbook Pro, I'll hop to ARM.

Associated with the CPU people "getting serious" is them pushing an OS, which would have to be Linux. Intel should have done this 20 years ago, at least as leverage to make Windows improve itself.

AMD would be able to do DRAM on package for the lowest wattage "ultrabook" chips, at the cost of producing a very different package for them vs. the bigger laptops that are expected to have upgradable SODIMMs. But I doubt that this "co-location" is that huge for performance. Whatever memory frequency and timings Apple is using are likely easily achievable through the regular mainboard PCB, maybe at the cost of slightly more voltage. DDR4 on desktop is overclockable to crazy levels and that's going through lots of things (CPU package - socket pins - board - slots - DIMMs).

> stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has

Quad or more package NUMA topology?? The latency would absolutely suck.

Yeah, I'm no kernel developer, but I've been replying to anyone saying 'just stick n * M1 in it' that even AMD has been trying to move back to more predictable memory access latency, less NUMA woes.

But in general we're moving toward even less uniform memory, with some of it living on a GPU. NUMA pretended that all memory was the same latency, because C continues to pretend we're on a faster PDP-11, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction as for how high-performance computation is progressing.

Why would latency suck? 64-cores are already only beneficial for algorithms which are parallelizable -- with the most common class of parallelizable algorithm being data parallelizable ... So -- shouldnt the hardware and os be able to present the programmer illusion of uniform memory and just automatically arrange for the processing to happen on the compute resources closest to the RAM / move the memory closer to the appropriate compute resource as required?

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