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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

The numbers say otherwise.

The numbers show that the other chips are slower, but they don't show that they are "unusable".

Put it this way: if the new Macs had the performance of the fastest Qualcomm ARM cores available today, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

x86 chips aren’t “unusable” either, and if these other ARM chips wanted to compete in the desktop space they’d be just as - or more - “hot and/or slow, clunky, noisy”. ISA just doesn’t matter half as much as microarchitecture.

And those x86 are only still usable because M1 hasn’t been out long enough for the new software, that needs the speed to be “useable”, to be written.

5nm process would help a lot.

When iPhone came out in 2007, Android was still an OS for BlackBerry like devices. It didn't take long for Android to discover touch screens once Apple made it clear that they were dramatically better. Similarly, it's not like other ARM chip manufacturers are going to have to go through all of the same R&D expense to figure out how to make chips that are comparably fast--they just need to copy what Apple did without infringing on any particular patents. Even if they did have to spend the same R&D expense to get there, Apple has already derisked it. So they have a small fraction of Apple's expense and none of the risk, so I would fully expect to see M1 competitive chips come out in a few years' time. This isn't to say that they'll catch up with Apple completely; only that they'll be able to recoup a significant amount of the gap in a relatively short period of time such that there will be a similar breakthrough in the PC market (this is effectively what TFA is predicting as well, if that lends me any credibility).

> it's not like other ARM chip manufacturers are going to have to go through all of the same R&D expense to figure out how to make chips that are comparably fast--they just need to copy what Apple did without infringing on any particular patents

Very handwaivy but the devil is in the details of that "all they have to do". Copying success is not that straight forward or else AMD would have had a response to Conroe in 2007, Intel for Zen in 2018, and Qualcomm for A-chips around 2014.

In my opinion, Apple "derisked" high-performance ARM chips with the A9-ish era five years ago. Other companies have had a long time to spend catching up to Apple mobile chips, and they haven't.

That's a completely reasonable challenge, and I might be wrong. My very amateur speculation is that, in the mobile space, Apple got incrementally better over time. Rank-and-file Android users didn't really notice the performance gap and thus didn't demand faster chips. M1 changed expectations for the laptop market virtually overnight, and rank-and-file users will expect M1 performance, battery life, etc. I think this represents an enormous market opportunity for PC manufacturers and thus chip suppliers that didn't really exist circa A9.

My key assumption is that there's some pareto principle at play--80% of the M1's performance gains over the next best generic ARM chip are due to a handful of key innovations while the remaining 20% come from a long tail of incremental improvements. This would mean that generic manufacturers could copy those handful of key innovations (modulo IP rights, which might be another fatal flaw in my speculation) and recoup 80% of that performance gap in just a few years. If that assumption is bad and the performance is entirely an accumulation of lots of minor innovations over time, then I suspect it will take chip manufacturers quite a lot longer to catch up.

There's more to it than chip design though. There is the OS work to take advantage of the chip's new features. And designing new chip features to accommodate sw bottlenecks. Apple has very close collaboration between software and hardware engineering, while in the competitive space, those two things are not under the same roof. Makes it tougher.

True, and I don’t expect generic manufacturers to completely close the gap between them and Apple, but I do expect there will be enough to copy that we’ll still see a step change in PC performance.

Qualcomm has been unable to compete with Apple's ARM phone processors for years. It's gotten to the point that the only processor that comes close to a new Apple SOC on benchmarks is Apple's previous SOC. Why do you expect the PC market will be different than the phone market?

Because now Qualcomm just use (or modifying a bit, like cache capacity) Cortex-A CPU core design. Both Intel and AMD designs own core.

> When iPhone came out in 2007, Android was still an OS for BlackBerry like devices.

When iPhone came out in 2007, Android did not even exist. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

How is that any true? From the article:

> An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007's Apple iPhone meant that Android "had to go back to the drawing board".

Your own source contradicts you.

I'm not sure how. iPhone was available in June 2007. Android went into public beta in November 2007, and reached 1.0 and was first released in a commercial device in September 2008. [1]

I guess Android, or what morphed into Android, was probably being developed, in a pre-beta state, when iPhone was announced in January 2007. Okay. It sounded to me like someone was saying that Android was released on Blackberry-like phones at the time iPhone came out. That was only thing i was objecting to. Sorry, a small point I almost didn't even bother to make, and probably not helpful to anybody, anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

If it were so easy, why are all of the other ARM manufacturers years behind?

To be clear I'm not talking benchmarks, I have no idea what the raw numbers are. I'm talking about my personal experience using ARM SoCs. Specifically I've worked with Tegra chip and they're powerhouses for instance, I could definitely see myself do my day-to-day development on such a chip.

Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing, tiny, and more close to the ARM chip than anything out there for x86, right?

I'll be interested to see if Apple can keep this up with 128GiB of RAM and a beefy GPU.

So far to me M1 is great, ARM is great, but comparing a tiny amount of RAM soldered onto the CPU compared to flexible and huge RAM potential devices seems dishonest. Unless Apple manages to squeeze 128GiB of RAM on their chip, at least.

I want to see what my Blender workstation looks like on Apple's Architecture. Where i purpose built a huge CPU, GPU, and RAM for Blender rendering and large scenes. I suspect Apple will start seeing huge falloffs in the SoC design under larger workloads.

Apple is dominant in making phones though. And this Laptop is designed like a Phone. So yea, it's amazing for that.

Architectural analysis of the chip [0] suggests it is a massive improvement as a general purpose CPU, not just because of Apple's vertical integration and streamlining.

The magnitude of extra ROB entries, having an 8x wide instruction decoder, that massive L1I cache, and such fat cores with lots of ALU and other op units while simultaneously keeping over a 3GHz clock is a phenomenal architectural improvement overall.

Apple may not need to add more RAM locally. Other silicon designers like IBM with POWER10 are moving to serial memory with massive "L4" caches, seen previously with their Centaur memory controllers. I can see Apple using OMI or a similar serial memory bus to add extra memory, using 16/32/etc GB of PoP RAM for caching reads and writes to slower off-chip memory. I expect Intel and AMD will eventually move to a similar memory model, at least in server grade hardware.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

Yea and to be clear i'm not saying it's not awesome. I'm just saying that a lot of things - like real world benchmarks of programs/etc - massively benefit from the proximity and speed of the RAM. Proximity seems to be a very difficult beast to scale. Works great in small scale, horrible in large scale.

Sidenote, even if Apple rolled out 128GiB tomorrow i probably couldn't afford it. As the OP says:

> including automobile-priced Mac Pros

That's rough.

Hypothetically, with these new memory architectures, you could get the best of both worlds. Best case, you get a huge speed up if everything fits in the high-speed RAM, worst case, you fall back to the "old" RAM.

Side note, while Apple charges ridiculous prices for their upgrades, Mac Pros are actually some of the more ""reasonably priced"" computers comparatively. I've looked at HP and Lenovo's equiv. workstations, and you pretty much get screwed by everyone at that scale.

My desktop can take up to dual 128 GB sticks but one stick costs over $1,000, so I'm stuck with my 32 GB stick :(

... OTOH, it's pretty insane you can get 128GB of RAM for $1,000 nowadays. I remember when 8GB was a lot and cost several hundred. Time and miniaturization go on I guess...

> RAM soldered onto the CPU

It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything. There are laptops that already have a shorter physical path to RAM than the M1 MacBooks, stacking the RAM right next to the CPU is common.

So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round.

> It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything.

Yea, i was just simplifying. Though in SoC i think that's a perfectly fine simplification lol.

> So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round.

Think there will be > 32GiB?

Almost certainly, although maybe not immediately.

I know I'm probably older than most people here, but the notion that 16 GiB is "a tiny amount of RAM" is tremendously amusing to someone who paid $740 in 1986 (with a developer's discount) for 2 "MB" of RAM (we didn't have MiB back then)...

To be fair, we sort of still don't have MiB even now.

Let the Pro devices come out next year.

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