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Comment by zionic | Hacker News Reader

Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper.

I really can't wait to see what they'll do in the desktop space. For all the gushing reviews the M1 is receiving, it's worth remembering this is their entry-level machines.

As it stands right now, I have an 18 month old 27" iMac with 64GB ram and an AMD gpu - and an 8GB M1. And I'm preferring the M1 for almost any task that doesn't demand the real estate.

The M1 core is roughly on par with the Zen 3 core, so how exactly would an 8 core part manage to embarrass a 64 core Zen 2 part?

Depending on the benchmark the M1 wins at per core vs the Zen3. The threadripper is substantially behind at per core performance with the Zen2.

The apple also has twice as many memory channels (8 vs 4) and runs the memory significantly faster (4266 vs 3200).

The m1 also has about half the latency to main memory.

So for highly random workloads that aren't cache friendly I'd expect the M1 to win.

They might embarrass today's Threadripper. They don't exist yet, at least not outside an Apple lab. AMD's not sitting on their hands, either.

Then there will be 64/128 5990x parts out

>Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper.

It will not, my TR has 64 cores 128 Thread and you know whats the best thing? 128GB Ram...and imagine that..they aren't even soldered...and i even can exchange my GPU..or slap in 2 others.

And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.

Your TR is what, 280 watts TDP? nearly 20 times more than a M1. And is 30% slower in single core.

Firestorm Cores use less than 4 watts each. A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR, with a less than 70 watt TDP.

And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power. Top end ThreadRippers cost $2,000 to $3,000 each. You can bet an Apple Mx ThreadRipper killer isn’t going to cost more than $500 given it only needs 4x the cores of the $65 M1.

How does that matter though? His machine isn't sitting on his lap or running on a battery. Electricity isn't that expensive.

It matters because its not just adding electricity, its adding heat. Pretty clearly Apple can add a whole bunch of Firestorm cores to future M1 derivatives and still fit in smaller power/heat budgets that current generation Ryzen and Threadrippers operate in.

Maybe. I don't know enough about CPU design to argue with that. There are others elsewhere in this thread saying that a lot of the energy and heat goes on the communications systems and other resources you need more of when you ramp up the core count.

I suspect we'll never know. Apple have shown little interest in anything other than prosumer workloads for a long time. I doubt they'll be making an M1 server platform anytime soon.

I have to somewhat concede your last point. What percentage of AMD sales are Threadrippers in any year?

It's possible Apple just doesn't think the investment in a 30 core CPU is worthwhile and stops around 16 cores, which would still be higher than any i7 or any i9 ever made.

At scale, cores are only a small part of the equation.

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13124/IF%20Power%20EPYC.pn...

Given that scaling, you're looking at 140w between 64 cores which is right at 2w per core. The all-core turbo for TR is 3GHz. If we assume linear scaling on M1 cores, if you dropped them in to replace the x86 cores and the had to reduce from 3.2GHz at 4w down to 2w per core, the all-core turbo would be a mere 1.6GHz AND about a third less cache per core.

TSMC claims 30% less power going from 7nm to 5nm. That means those x86 cores power usage drops from 2w to 1.4w. With the same linear scaling and 4w at 3.2GHz, the M1 design is now operating at 1.1GHz competing with a part that is still 3GHz and the M1 still has only 3mb of cache per core instead of 4.5mb.

Now, I'm betting that actual power usage is 3w which bumps frequency up to 1.5GHz. Still half the frequency, but possibly close enough in performance to Zen 3 at that frequency.

EDIT: It's apparently 3.45w during cinebench according to these benchmarks.

https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1328715510100344833

I'm betting that if they didn't bottleneck on the IO that the M1 would perhaps be faster, but at that scale, interconnects are a much, much larger issue than the cores themselves.

Adding on to that

Zen 3 chiplet is 4.15B transistors. The consumer IO die is 2.09B transistors. The Threadripper IO dies is 8.34B transistors. M1 is 16B transistors. A14 is 11.6B transistors. That difference is mostly 2 firestorm cores/cache, 4 GPU cores, another DDR4 controller, and some Thunderbolt/PCIe.

Taking a ruler to a die shot and multiplying that area by transistor density (16B/119mm^2) gives us somewhere around 500M transistors per core plus 3mb of cache. Adjusting out to 4.5MB per core to match Zen 3 adds another 75-100M transistors.

Zen 3 gives 518M transistors per core, but that includes interconnects. Taking a ruler to the core reveals about 14% of the die is interconnect, SMU, and wafer tests (about 580M transistors). Subtracting that from 4.15B and dividing into even core/cache gives 446M transistors per core.

We'll assume an identical IO cost of 8.5B transistors and 150M transistors of interconnect per core. (64 * (600 + 150)) + 8500 is 56.5B transistors and 420mm^2 total area. A zen 3 chip with similar densities would be 310mm^2.

No matter how you slice and dice that, Apple's chip is going to be significantly more expensive than AMD's chip. Thinking anything different is a pipe dream.

EDIT: also note that formal verification adds a lot to chip pricing.

> Firestorm Cores use less than 4 watts each.

This is just not true. A mini going from idle to a full single-core load is a power increase of 6W. A heavy multicore load hits over 25W.

> A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR

With what fantasy math? 30% faster single core performance would be 16 * 1.3 = ~21 equivalent TR cores. It'd be less than half the performance of a 64 core ThreadRipper.

> And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119365.png

M1's single-core performance is very strong. But not enough to overcome a ~2x or greater core deficit, either, not at all.

On-die memory is pretty much their one ace in the hole that nobody else will have the guts to match. Intel can't because their fabs are behind, and AMD probably doesn't have the resources to fork their architectures and/or piss off the server integrators.

I can't live without 64GB in my desktop and would love to have more, so the new Macs are not for me.

M1 isn't using on-die memory[1]. It's on-package, and likely little more than just off-the-shelf Micron or Samsung dram modules that are just soldered instead of socketed.

1: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn (from https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet... )

Thanks for the correction, that's a big difference. Still a severe limit but seems more hopeful for larger options in the future.

"$65 m1" where are you getting this number from? You can't buy an m1 CPU from a store and slap it in a system, you have to buy it in a $1000 laptop.

It's a pretty accurate cost estimate from those tracking Ax series costs. A chip AMD sells for $300 doesn't cost AMD $300 to make, but being a public company their gross margins tell us it costs roughly $150.

But you were comparing this theoretical production cost to the retail cost of other chips, that doesn't make sense.

Hardware companies don't charge cost + some reasonable markup, they charge whatever the market is willing to pay for it. I highly doubt Apple would release some hypothetical "threadripper killer" at a price any lower than they needed to to compete.

My point is that someone building a Threadripper PC has to pay $2,000 to $3,000 just for the CPU.

Lets assume that all the other parts, high speed RAM, SSD, power supplies, cooling, motherboard, etc cost another $500, and that operations, assembly, marketing etc average 20% and the manufacturer aims for a 5% margin. So they sell their low end Threadripper PC for $3300, and their high end Threadripper for $4,700.

Then Apple comes along and makes it's own high core count versions of the M1 (lets call them the M16 and M24) for $1,000 and $1,500 with similar performance to the Threadrippers. When Apple builds high end Mac Pros out of the, they also spend $500 for other parts, giving total parts cost of $1,500 and $2,000, it marks them up 50% for their typical margins, and sell them for $3,000 and $4,000 and have the same performance as the ThreadRippers from the lowest margin manufacturers at for 10-15% less.

And on top of that, the M16 and M24 use less power and generate quite a bit less heat than the Threadrippers. They don't need any fancy cooling systems. That can lead to smaller packaging and even more cost savings.

Obviously when Apples 16 and 24 Firestorm core Mx chips come out newer Threadrippers will have evolved to smaller process as well, and that will help increase their performance, while reducing cost and heat. But there is little doubt that Apple's Mac Pros will be much more competitive price and performance-wise at that time, and if they keep leveraging TSMC first there is a significant risk that they actually take some of their laptop cost/performance advantage up to Threadripper levels.

> And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.

Based on the MacBook Air/ Mac mini/ MacBook Pro pricing, I don't think this is the case.

Apple has delivered a significantly faster MacBook Air for the same price as the previous generation. Not only did they increase the CPU speed, they essentially doubled the performance of their the SSD while maintaining their base price.

Apple dropped the price of the base mini by $100 while delivering a significantly faster Mac mini.

I suspect whatever Apple delivers for their top end machines will be equal or lower price to their current Intel machines.

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