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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn't thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?

I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back either. If anything, I am more focused on AMD Ryzen and Nvidia 30 series chips in MSI, Lenovo Legion and Asus offerings. There is nothing I can't do with one of those machines. Going Apple is a backward move for me as I like to program, design in CAD, play steam VR, and run blender sims. Can't do any of those well with Apple hardware.

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Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. If you buy a low-end iPad, you get an A12; the iPad Air steps you up to an A14; and the iPad Pro gets you an M1.

This is less evident on the Macintosh side of the business right now because they're just trying to get M1 silicon into as many product lines as their fab capacity will allow. They don't actually have an M2 (or even M1X) to sell high-end products with yet, which is why they're starting with low-end products first. When they release upgraded chips, they will almost be used to transition the high end models with lower-end product getting it later.

> Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning.

This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple's margins are already so high they don't care?

It seems like they do binning. For example, the M1 with 7 gpu cores vs 8 gpu cores.

That struck me as an extremely odd metric to differentiate products by, given its low relevance to non-technical users who don't know what a GPU core even is (except gamers, but they are not buying iMacs). Additionally, most people are going to think adding one more core is hardly worth the price upgrade, and its quite strange to see an odd number of cores.

It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact.

When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.

GPU schedulers are much, much more advanced than you give credit.

Nope, AFAIK the actual performance impact is < 10 % for most workloads.

Well GPU data structures aren’t always a power of two, right? There’s more than textures. For a fact, I know vertex count (vertex shaders?) and screen sizes (fragment shaders?) will rarely be exactly a power of two.

Isn't false sharing (as in all your addresses hashing onto the same cache lines) still an issue for power-of-two sizes? You'd have to mess with padding to figure out what's fastest for each chip regardless of core count.

Depends, remember that the 5nm processors overall are fairly new so we have no idea of yields. But if 1/5th of the processors are flawless, 1/5th have one faulty GPU and the rest have more errors (in either CPU or two or more GPU failures) then having twice the amount of CPU's available to sell (at a slightly lower pricepoint) might make perfect sense.

TSMC claimed last year that 5nm yields are better than 7nm.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-tha...

Apple dont bin them because of price / product differentiation as in Intel / AMD.

Apple bin them only because of yield.

I also think Apple doesn't want to use their M1 as differentiator. They use RAM and Storage instead which is an easier concept to grasp by consumers.

I believe that Apple is effectively doing some binning with the M1: The intro MacBook Air has one less GPU core than the higher-config version or the MacBook Pro.

It would make sense if those were identically-made M1s where one GPU core didn't test well and thus had its fuses blown. Between the CPU and GPU, the GPU cores are almost certainly larger anyway; the GPU cores would therefore have higher probability of defects.

It should be possible to identify this from infrared images of the cores in operation.

If you find different sets of cores in use, you can be pretty sure it was binned...

Binning requires more design work for the chip. I would guess the M1 was designed rapidly and probably they decided that hundreds of different bins for different types of defects wasn't worth the complexity if it meant delaying tape out for a few weeks. It also leads to extra product complexity (customers would be upset if some macbooks had hardware AES and others didn't, leading to some software being unusably slow seemingly at random).

> I would guess the M1 was designed rapidly

How rapidly? And so how come it has such spectacular performance? Or the shortcomings of the x86 arch were so, so soooo obvious, but nobody had the resources to reaaallly give a go to a modern arch?

Or maybe, simply the requirements were a lot more exact/concrete and clear? (But the M1 performs well in general, no?)

Apple has always binned; they just don’t publicly announce it all the time. For example, iPod Touch has been historically underclocked compared to the equivalent chip in iPhone or iPad.

So, there are a few instances where Apple does bin their products:

1. "7-core GPU" M1 Macs, which have one of the eight GPU cores disabled for yield

2. The A12X, which also had one GPU core disabled (which was later shipped in an 8-core GPU configuration for the A12Z)

3. iPod Touch, which uses lower-clocked A10 chips

It's not like Apple is massively overbuilding their chips or has a zero defect rate. It's more that Intel is massively overbinning their chips for product segmentation purposes. Defect rates rarely, if ever, fit a nice product demand curve. You'll wind up producing too many good chips and not enough bad ones, and this will get worse as your yields improve. Meanwhile, the actual demand curve means that you'll sell far more cheap CPUs than expensive ones. So in order to meet demand you have to start turning off or limiting perfectly working hardware in order to make a worse product.

Apple doesn't have to do this because they're vertically integrated. The chip design part of the business doesn't have to worry about maximizing profit on individual designs - they just have to make the best chip they can within the cost budget of the business units they serve. So the company as a whole can afford to differentiate products by what CPU design you're getting, rather than what hardware has been turned off. Again, they aren't generating that many defects to begin with, and old chips are going to have better yields and cost less to make anyway. It makes more sense for Apple to leave a bit of money on the table at the middle of the product stack and charge more for other, more obviously understandable upgrades (e.g. more RAM or storage) at the high end instead.

> The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?

Apple is iPhone-izing (for lack of a better word) the rest of their product lines. If for the last ten years, the market hasn't really cared about the speed of the phone's processor within the same generation, but rather about physical differentiators (e.g. screen size, number of camera lenses, adding facial recognition), and the non-professional market is overwhelmingly characterized by light-usage applications, then why, pray tell, should laptops and desktops be so different?

> the non-professional market is overwhelmingly characterized by light-usage applications

I'm not sure social networks and most modern sites or apps qualifies as light-usage nowadays. Browsing Reddit or Facebook put my pro to its knees. The difference of CPU speed in phones is clearly visible for consumers (but maybe you don't notice it if you only use iPhones, because an SE from 2015 is still fast, but try an Android phone from that period).

That’s because new Reddit is laden with ads and JS and crap. Try https://old.reddit.com

Or one of any third-party native iOS apps (Apollo[0] is my preference) that are both faster and feel better than the official app and mobile site.

[0] https://apolloapp.io

I love Apollo but I am very annoyed that they don't allow side scrolling between posts. I just find that much easier to do and it somehow bothers me when I don't have it.

I think this is what BMW does with cars to a large extent (maybe all car manufacturers do?) - an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_B58

They combine standard parts into a number of configurations that aren't as different from each other as a consumer might imagine, then slot those engines into a whole host of different car models.

From a production stand-point, this makes sense to me. I imagine that it makes high quality at a lower price much easier to accomplish for Apple.

> The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?

Why not? It's basically back to where we were in 1980 when "everything" had a Z80 or 6502 (or both!) in it, and the major differences were in what else was in the system.

6809.

> The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?

I think that's the point. Until now, buying a computer has always been focused on the CPU and RAM stats. If you wanted faster/bigger you had to spend more. With Apple's new strategy you almost don't even care about CPU/RAM stats. They are focusing on providing value in other ways; larger screen, lighter weight, different colors, more ports, etc. I think this is the biggest shift in computers in quite a while and makes it much more akin to purchasing a phone or tablet than specing out a computer.

In high school, I worked a retail job for an office supply store, and one of the PC brands we would sell was Packard Bell.

We sold many different models with similar specs, and the main feature many of the potential buyers would be concerned with:

Will it fit with my current office furniture?

We sold both desktops and tower configurations, and the type of desk the computer would be used with was the determining factor in which model to buy.

And essentially, why not? If I want to work on a machine, I want it to be fast. Not 1.33x of the baseline benchmark CPU when equipped with X GB RAM. Just fast enough it doesn't annoy me.

And with today's PCI-E-based SSD's, waiting for data to be written to "disk" is a non-issue, so the system feels much faster.

Apple’s goal is to eliminate technical specifications from marketing: tech specs are an excuse - make it good enough that few care what those specs are.

I can't think of a technological product where that mentality applies. Can you?

In fact, it seems that the opposite is true; as a product gets better, people care more about the specs. Whether you're buying a Wusthof knife or a luxury car, you want to know what makes the product good enough to justify its price and position in the market.

It's like how no one cares about which chip is in their smart TV, regardless of price range. They just want to watch Netflix without UI bugs.

TVs are sold on refresh rate, color accuracy, contrast, backlight localization, and panel resolution. This stuff is written on the box and promoted in marketing material. They are unavoidably differentiated on technical specs, even in the eyes of a layperson. Some of those specs depend on the panel (itself a semiconductor product) and others depend on processors/ICs.

I'm not suggesting that no parts can ever be a commodity (like capacitors in a laptop), but as I spend more, I increasingly tend to look for a technical advantage that justifies the marginal price.

I'll give you an example. If you want to buy a docking station for an Apple TB3 enabled MacBook, you have a couple of controller options at the higher end: Alpine Ridge and Titan Ridge. Better chips exist but they haven't found their way into truly well engineered consumer docks. I have a multi monitor setup with one superultrawide screen that can do 120Hz, so I opted for the Titan Ridge dock. It was buggy, so I ended up returning it and buying an Alpine Ridge dock that lacks the ability to push my big monitor at its best-looking resolution. And that's for a sub-$300 peripheral.

Like most of us here on HN, I'm one of the "few" that GP mentioned. But these are consumer products and they are mass marketed based on their technical specs.

Apple itself markets technical innovations in its 6k IPS monitors. The back is designed to dissipate heat, the monitor works with TB3 (ie, an Intel chip)...they even market the glass treatment in a deeply specific way.

Most TV customers can’t articulate the difference. Many may state a preference but only because such numbers are prevalent and associated. Were the numbers not advertised, most wouldn’t ask.

Vanishingly few people buy phones based on screen resolution, RAM, bandwidth, etc. Ditto computers used mostly for mundane email, web browsing, games (not hardcore), and such. Few buy cars based on horsepower, range, etc.

Insofar as people do consider specs, it’s usually because the specs are injected into the conversation, customers being taught to care by salesman trying to baffle them into choosing their product.

Most customers want it to just work. Apple is pursuing that.

That was the game change with the original iPad. When you strip all the other specs away and put an original iPad next to a 2010 laptop, you realize just how awful the mainstream LCD panels were at the time. It's an exciting change I think will benefit consumers. Less being upsold on questionable i7s and more nice displays please.

Why doesn't the M1 make sense in a variety of products? I don't follow the logic. It is a processor that can scale to meet the demands of mobile computers including laptops, tablets, and designer desktops (iMac). In each use case it fulfills the its computational role regardless of I/O or even operating system.

Based on your own description, you are self-selecting as an enthusiast that prefers gaming-like PCs. Isn't that exactly the sweet spot that Apple doesn't support?

> The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?

They've only replaced the lower tier of Macbooks and iMacs with the current M1 board, which suggests to me that they're working on a variant with more CPU and GPU cores that will go into the higher tiers of those machines.

I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that.

Since M1 products are selling very well, they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1.

A higher performance M1 would have a bigger die size. It would have a lower yield and get fewer dies per wafer. The same capacity would sell fewer products.

Apple probably earns more profits by simply selling more M1s, unless they can reserve substantially more fab capacity.

> they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1

Got any proof or something? This is a bold claim to make.

Some benchmark sites claim they saw performance reports. Whether they make those up to see more traffic, I cannot tell. If I worked at Apple, I would not tell :)

For example https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1x-1898 talks about a 12 Core CPU but with only 16GB RAM.

> I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that

Do you have a source for there being any fab capacity shortage for Apple (or anyone, for that matter) at 5nm? Older nodes are a different story because that's still where most of TSMC's customers are doing their high-volume production.

Plenty of people would like to die-shrink their 7nm designs down to 5nm if only capacity existed.

I think plenty of people will skip it. Even ignoring the high cost, not everything scales as well with every new node. There're plenty of customers who will have no interest in this node right now and some that will have no interest in it ever. I've not seen anything that suggests capacity shortages at 5nm yet, especially for Apple who've already booked all of 3nm for next-gen.

SRAM scaling from 7nm to 5nm is pitiful. While the CPU transistors see 50-70% increases, the SRAM is only shrinking 20-30%.

For chips with massive cache, that isn’t super cost effective (I suspect as a cost saving measure that we’ll see L2/L3 cache moving to a separate chip on a larger process while the rest shrinks down).

There’s already signs of multiple “next generation” chips in the works.

>The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product.

Would you feel better if they called it A14X?

It is basically the same thing as what Intel is doing. Same Die, different binning, different naming. Same with Core count on AMD, same die, different binning on Cores and Clock Speed.

Apple doesn't bother do any of that because well it is complicated for consumers. I call it TDP Computing. You are limited by the TDP Design of the product. Not the Chip.

I am waiting to see Apple absolutely max out their SoC approach for Mac Pro.

>I am waiting to see Apple absolutely max out their SoC approach for Mac Pro.

But they already maxed out their SoCs in the benchmarks because Geekbench doesn't care about TDP. The TDP makes a difference in real world performance but not in the benchmarks.

They are only maxed out in Single Thread Performance with its current power designed constrain per Core using current low power node.

Apple is doing binning, at least to some extent. e.g. some Macs have only 7 GPU cores rather than 8. Presumably that's done to a greater extent for the iPad Pro

I agree that the M1 doesn't look good for high performance computing right now or anything with poor ARM support. But strategically, I think Apple is in a good spot. For heavy computation these days, I always remote into another machine. With increased bandwidth and more efficient remote desktop protocols, I even do all my graphics-intensive 3d work remotely now. By focusing on low-power processors, Apple is making the laptop/tablet/phone experience better, and I could see them handling the performance issues via remote compute. It could be a very effective strategy (if it is their strategy).

I think what apple may be trying to do is reduce macOS sales and full throttle on iOS sales. It no longer makes sense for a macOS if it is going to have the same chip as iPad Pro.

How's that any different than having a single Intel generation scale all the way from low powered laptop SoCs to 12 core i9s though?

After all, the M1s across devices aren't the same either - iMacs have different configuration from iPads, those have different amount of cores and clocks from Airs and MBPs as well.

It seems like the difference is only in Apple vs. Intel marketing blurb.

Power consumption, number of cores, clock speed, etc.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say - M1s are differing in clock speed, number of cores and number of GPU cores across Apple products as well.

"M1" is basically equivalent to "Core i" designation from Intel - except that Apple just doesn't tell you about the other part.

No? That's the entire point of the article. The only difference is whether you get a 7 core or 8 core GPU.

> If you want to buy a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, Apple will sell you an M1. Want a Mac Mini? You get an M1. Interested in the iMac or the new iPad Pro? You get an M1. It’s possible that the M1 CPUs inside the iMac will have different thermal or clock behavior than those inside the systems Apple has already launched, but the company’s decision to eschew clock speed disclosures suggests that these CPUs differ only modestly.

> with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation

Exactly, so what is the point here? How exactly is that different from Intel generations?

Why does Apple put different amount of cores and clocks into different products if the choice doesn't matter? It seems like there are performance differences there if they choose to install differently configured SoCs in different devices and even split them by pricing on the iMac.

So, please, explain where's this big difference? (With more than a single sentence of your words if possible.)

There are only two different M1 versions. The 7 GPU version and the 8 GPU version. All of the cpu cores are the same. All power envelopes are the same. That's much different then the vastly different form factors and power envelopes intel has.

We have yet to see any new iPad Pro with the M1. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a difference in clock speed with those.

I don't expect so. The air has no active cooling and can run the M1. Should be doable for the ipad as well.

I have an M1 Macbook Air and this thing gets a bit hot for an iPad. I don't think the iPad Pro will be able to hold the same clock speed as long as the other machines over the long haul.

I've seen nothing to indicate different products have different clock speeds?

So far we're seeing two differentiators. One is the use of the 7-GPU bin to hit the bottom-of-the-range price point for each product family. The other is simply the different thermal characteristics of different products - the passively cooled Air & iPad Pro will thermally throttle earlier than the actively cooled MBP, iMac & mini.

The products aren't being differentiated in silicon, they're being differentiated in feature & format. My mother can tell me the difference between an iPad and a macbook without describing anything that she can't see with her own eyes.

The M1 in the macbook air throttles when it gets too hot due to the thermal characteristics of the case (no active cooling).

The M1 in the macbook pro is actively cooled, and does not throttle.

When additional cooling is applied after-market to the macbook air, it has the same performance characteristics as the macbook pro.

The M1 is the same in both products. It throttles when hotter. It's more likely to throttle if not actively cooled and under heavy workload. It's not clocked differently. There's no artificial constraints.

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