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Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

Many people overstate Apple's achievement, in reality most credit should go to TSMC the company that manufactures the M1 chip.

The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount.

Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC in order to be the first one to use their 5nm technology.

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Did Apple not actually _design_ the chip, lay out transistor locations, do virtual testing against the future design, find bottlenecks, etc?

5nm is incredible and should not be understated; but I don't think anyone on the outside can say "most credit" should go to TSMC. A lot of credit? Absolutely. Most credit? I don't know.

Sure, the M1 chip is very good, the question here is what made the M1 perform better than a i9 and I would argue it is because of the 5nm technology. If the M1 had only 8b transistors and was using 14nm technology I really doubt that it would beat the i9.

5nm and 14nm are marketing names, not x^2/y^2 times better statistics. If you normalize them (i.e. actually look at transistor density) you'll find the difference is much smaller than you'd expect. TSMC 5nm is indeed the better process though but it alone isn't the primary driver of what makes the M1 good. Flipping it around I'm not as sure the i9 would come out on top all other things being equal between the 2.

I'm not sure there are many engineers at Apple that truly understand what makes the M1 perform better. How people think they can just boil it down to just <x> is honestly confusing.

>I'm not sure there are many engineers at Apple that truly understand what makes the M1 perform better.

Of course there are, and those people are computer engineers or electrical engineers (and I'm sure many software folks as well, there are a lot of smart people in the world).

>How people think they can just boil it down to just <x> is honestly confusing.

I would wager you a bar tab that those people are all ill-informed developers. I am no expert in software, let alone hardware, but I am always suprised how often I see professional developers bemoan the fact that their laptop 'uses 12 gigs of ram' to run the OS + a few chrome tabs. A huge amount of devs don't know how their OS manages memory, let alone the ins and outs of the design and operation of modern microprocessors.

If TSMC buys its lithography machines, why should it even get any credit for 5nm at all?

Apple's only achievement...besides the actual design of the CPU, GPU, and ML accelerator that TSMC is manufacturing. Besides that what have the Romans every done for us?

Apple's M1 basically uses the architecture used for iPhone/iPad chips. Now I don't deny that the M1 is an impressive chip. But the question is would it be as good as the i9 if it would be a 14nm chip with only half of its 16b transistors?

I'm still not sure that question matters or is valid, because it isn't a 14nm chip.

To me its like comparing two car models, one that was designed and manufactured with a v8 (and no other option) vs one designed and manufactured with an inline 4 (also with no other engine option). Then asking, well what if that v8 car had only a v4, would it still be faster?

A couple points:

1. Transistor density isn't necessarily orthogonal to node size. Intel's 10nm process has a higher transistor density than some of TSMC and Samsung's 10, 8, and 7nm processes.

2. It doesn't matter if the M1 at 10 or 14nm would beat an i9, 5nm M1's are on sale and 5nm i9's don't exist.

3. The M1 is keeping up with or beating an i9 with fewer physical cores and no use of SMT. An M1 only has 4 "performance" cores, the "efficiency" cores aren't contributing overmuch to the overall number crunching. The i9's have 8 full physical cores with SMT.

4. The M1 is a development of the A-series chips so you can compare their performance at larger node sizes to the i9, it hasn't been good news for Intel for the past few years. The A12 and A13 have been impressive and they have only 2 "performance" cores.

TSMC deserves a lot of praise for their manufacturing and process development. But the praise to go around is not zero sum, Apple deserves as much as TSMC. This is the exact same as AMD's Zen architecture being as deserving of praise for it's impressive performance over Intel's chips.

Arm cpu core designs like cortex a78 and x1 are also designed for tsmc 5nm. But their per core performance is like 30% to 50% worse than Apple's firestorm cores. The low power a55 is worse than Apple's low power. And the mali gpu is worse than apple gpu. The circuit design and placement on to the chip is part of the equation as well.

I'm not aware of any currently-available non-Apple ARM chips on TSMC's 5nm process. Can you name some?

Kirin 9000, it has 1 Cortex A77 at 3.13GHz, 3 Cortex A77 at 2.5Ghz, Cortex A55 for efficiency. ARM Mali-G78 MP24 GPU.

> Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC

So Microsoft could just fly to Taiwan, hand over a few billion and magically they have an M1 chip.

I wish we could all live in your delusional fantasy world because life sounds easy there.

My point here is not to deny the achievement of creating your own chip design, but rather demystify how the M1 achieves its performance, and I believe it has mainly to do with TSMC's 5nm technology and the huge number of transistors. If you look up here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count You'll see that the M1 is the first CPU/GPU (for computers) to use 5nm and one of the biggest by transistor count. Considering those facts I think it is very unfair to claim that the M1 is faster only because of some Apple magic. The Ryzen used in this test is also made by TSMC but using a 7nm process. According to TSMC moving from 7nm to 5nm means 84% more transistors for the same chip size with a 15% speed improvement or a 30% lower power consumption.

Note that, from what leaked from peoples' NDAs, it seems like performance by the A12Z in the devkits (made on TSMC's 7nm process, half the cores, two year old core design) was also very good. 5nm will be contributing somewhere, but probably not so much.

The A12 and A13 (also 7nm) also did very well vs Qualcomm chips on the same process.

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