Apple is getting amazing performance at far lower power consumption.
People have been waiting for Intel’s response. If they flub this and it isn’t good enough, that’s a huge tell of weakness. AMD, Qualcomm, and everyone else will be chomping at the bit to take advantage.
Even if the others can’t beat Intel in performance per watt, performance per dollar may sway things.
They do that also for iOS. But people still buy Android devices with weaker Qualcomm CPUs. Because not every person in this world is rich enough to pay $2000 on an iPhone. For some people, even $200 is a big effort.
And there's other reasons, too. I can afford an iPhone, but I don't think it's worth that kind of money. And the camera on my current phone is better. As I love photography, having a better camera is more important to me than crunching better scores in Geekbench 6.
On the laptop side, I finally gave up and bought a Macbook Pro for movie watching and couch browsing, because I dislike having the device plugged in. But for work I still use x86 laptops and desktops. Performance is higher than on Apple devices, for lower price, it's just the consumption that is higher. And I don't care about that aspect since I always keep my work device plugged in, hooked to external displays and docking stations.
Luckily the cheapest iPhone starts at $429 then.
The iPhone SE performs basically the same as the most expensive model you can buy. And it's not about gaming, it's about basic tasks - moving around the OS, cold starting apps, editing photos/videos, etc.
Apple made Intel look bad, Intel needs to respond. If they can’t do that by now it’s going to be a real big tell of how they’re doing.
Noting I wrote said people had to buy $2000 laptops or $1200 phones.
Intel says this is built on their Intel 4 process, which is, as I understand, their own 7nm process: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/c...
nm are meaningless marketing numbers. In terms of performance/density Intel 4 should be in same ballpark as '4nm' of Samsung/TSMC.
Any proofs to back that up?
As soon as Intel or AMD say fuck it and shoot the moon on memory Apples distinction evaporates.
I assume Intel is the most likely to do this by 2025.
That’s a bold claim conspicuously missing data. Can you cite a source?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core
from other designs in the industry is just the
sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring
an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by
far the current widest commercialized design in
the industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
By the way, I'm not knocking what Apple has achieved. I recently upgraded from an 2018 Intel MBP to a 2021 M1 Max MBP. And, holy smokes. This thing is fast and it is effortlessly fast. I have been running all 10 cores pretty hard for the job I'm currently doing. I am absolutely beyond impressed.
But, from an engineering standpoint, it's definitely worth wrapping our heads around what Apple has and has not achieved here. I don't think they have any magic fairy dust or special sauce.
The underlying challenge here is vertical integration: Apple can invest more in chip design not just on the CPU but also balancing with accelerators for things like AI or media processing, security, etc. because they work closely across the OS and app teams to see what they need & make sure it’s actually used (if they add a new coprocessor to reduce need for certain CPU features, it’s priority 1 for the next OS release). Microsoft and Intel or Samsung/Qualcomm and Google work together, of course, but they have different goals and budgets, they need to support multiple companies worth of corporate overhead on the same sale, and they can’t focus too much on any one deal because they need to hedge their bets.
This cuts the other way, of course: Apple’s stuff is best at the mobile and up to mid-range, but beyond that if you need more than a certain amount of RAM or features like advanced virtualization, they don’t have an alternative the way Google can choose between AMD and Intel for GCP with no concern about affecting the Pixel lineup. We’ll see whether Apple stumbles badly enough for this to matter.
More importantly, Apple doesn't fab its own chips. TSMC does. Everyone has access to the same vendor. Similarly everyone has access to ARM cores. Yet somehow Apple managed to build an Intel/AMD competitor and others didn't? What am I missing?
"Apple Bought All of TSMC's 3nm Capacity for an Entire Year"
Being the first to buy 3nm doesn't prove what was initially claimed.
Unlikely.
Who can pay as much as Apple - likely in advance and for exclusivity.
My guess is that Apple is financing some of the equipment (TSMC is a high capital business, and Apple has overseas retained profits it doesn't want to repatriate) and there will be contracts for the exclusive use of the new equipment nodes. With everything designed for taxation efficiency.
Using the latest process certainly helps but look at the older ones as well - it’s not like the performance gap disappeared when competing AMD processors were launched on the TSMC 5nm process, but that really highlighted the different trade offs those teams make: Zen4 CPUs certainly dusted the Apple chips, but the ones which did were desktop / server designs using far more power, too, since that’s where the money is in the PC side.
But for similar performance, like in the MacBook Air or the MacBook Pros, Intel was embarrassed. The M1s were so much faster and cooler than the Intel chips they replaced it was hilarious.
The Mac Pro is absolutely the weak spot. Apple doesn’t sell enough so it seems unlikely they will spend the money to try and keep up with Intel there. The first Apple Silicon Mac Pro is not what people wanted. And I don’t know if that machine will be coming.
M series gains aren't just to do with the node. It's also because of the unified memory architecture and most importantly the fact that custom silicon e.g. Neural Engine is taken advantage of through the OS and SDKs.