back to the topic: ARM and AMD CPUs have about the same L1 instruction cache size. But don't they have a very different instruction density, giving one a noticeable advantage over the other?
Or occasionally by RISC-V "enthusiasts" who claim that none of it matters since ARM is dead and everybody is going to switch to RISC-V in the very near (but undetermined) future..
Neoverse N2 chips should have been available years ago. Once Jim Keller releases his Ascalon server RISC-V CPUs that are competitive with Zen x86 server CPUs, there is basically no room for ARM servers left since ARM couldn't manage to get their feet into the server market soon enough. So many ARM server vendors canceled their CPU projects, to the point that the safest prediction you can make about any new ARM server CPU is that it will be canceled. The thing about ARM is that it is already dead in the server market.
Not dead (yet). Just a legacy ISA.
>everybody is going to switch to RISC-V
RISC-V is inevitable.
Exactly, I find this sort of fanaticism about an instruction set (of all things) so puzzling.
Many of the comments which mention RISC-V have anything constructive to say or any meaningful arguments. All the fanboyism makes me feel a bit like I'm on reddit (or worse)...
I recognize the value of some level of coordination in marketing efforts, and as I'm no expert I just follow their recommendations, like "RISC-V is inevitable".
The A710 has a 1536-entry µop cache. That is 3/16 of the L1 cache (counting each instr as four bytes)
(Because the uop caches must fill lines aligned to real L1 cache, utilization cannot be perfect, and x86 has a somewhat harder time to achieve full utilization, while the uop cache on arm is easier to utilize because instructions are more regular, only "losing" slots when instructions are fused.)
Instruction cache sizes are not set by what you want, but by what you can get away with. The fetch path has both a lot of distance to travel and transistors to switch, and is typically a very critical path for clock speed, and while adding more pipeline stages for it helps with clocks, it also directly hurts performance near branches.
So in the end you have to limit the size depending on what clocks you target and how many stages you are willing to give the fetch path.
It's not just CPUs, feels like many discussions related to personal computing in general get hijacked into Apple discussions, likely because there's many people here desperate to rationalize their purchase of mediocre hardware at a 10x markup.
The transition to ARM will happen first in the server/cloud space, but consumer will have to wait much longer for it to reach PCs, if it ever does, as X86 is also making progress.
It's not obvious to me that this is somehow inevitable. Yeah power efficiency wise Apple is ahead currently. But are there any reasons AMD/Intel why wouldn't be able to catch up and surpass Apple in a generation or two?
Eventually the gap will narrow as Apple already picked the lowest hanging fruits with the M1 design, and as we saw the jump to M2 was no longer as impressive, so we just have to wait.
It's not inconceivable that Intel might catch up and surpass TSMC. I mean they were in a somewhat similar situation they are in now back in the early to mid 2000s.
Are silly claims like this necessary? Yes, Apple massively overcharges on memory and storage upgrades because their users obviously have no other options...
But besides Macs are pretty good value if you're prioritizing battery life, slimness and fan sound.
I guess latest XPS 15/17 are fairly competitive with MBP 14/16. Especially if you don't care about battery life and heat that much, the 13700H/ 13900H seem to be on par with the M2 Pro/Max. The base price is up to $500 lower and you get replaceable RAM (also slower) and 2 m2 slots.
However I don't think there is anything that's close the the M2 Air on the market atm?
Nah, there's been a history of poor QA and just general poor build issues. Have they fixed the coil whine yet? It's still there last I checked.
I will be "that guy"; the original M1 Macbook Air struggled to compete with the Ryzen 4800u at launch. Current Ryzen mobile chips put up very well against the M2, considering the architecture gap:
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/1604691
This is the sort of discussion the grandparent comment was lamenting though. Honest-to-god, none of this matters; dev shops will use whatever they need at the end of the day. Infecting the discussion with pedestrian "muh ARM revolution" comments always ruins it though. I like ARM for reading e-books as much as the next guy, but server use is a whole different discussion. Even mentioning Apple's consumer offerings is a punch-line like saying you want to beat OpenAI using consumer-grade GPUs. They exist in the ARM space, but they could not be any less-present in the server one. Their relationship to the topic at-hand is fraught and near non-existent if it weren't for their history of failure with Xserve.