Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to being based on their phone chips Apple came out of the gate with the M1 and cleaned everyone’s clock on performance-per-watt while putting in good to great numbers in general (as a CPU).

But their rate of improvement on the A series has been slowing on general tasks. They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit.

Is it really that surprising that performance didn’t take a massive jump? You can’t keep up a 20% increase in normal stuff every release for long.

You can use accelerators like they do for video and ML to help some tasks. You can improve your GPU some and make it a little bigger.

It seems like in some places people are trying to push a “the M2 is a failure because it’s not a huge leap above the M1“ narrative. But no one exits that from Intel or AMD every year anymore. Or Apple’s A-series.

So why here?

View on HN

> They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit.

It's going from N5 to N5P, chosen by Apple over N4.

> But no one [expects] that from Intel or AMD every year anymore.

That's not accurate, a minor performance upgrade after almost 2 years is the exact thing Intel has gotten a lot of flack for in recent years. The fact that people are willing to defend it is really exclusive to Apple and their unbeatable marketing.

Zen 4 on an almost identical timeline will be ~ 30-40% performance, and people were widely disappointed by the announcement of ">15%" S/T - very close to Apple's +18% M/T. Intel will have gone from Rocket Lake to (almost) Raptor Lake, doubling performance.

Intel got criticized for minor improvements year after year. It's important to look at these on 5+ year timescales, since the improvements aren't evenly spread out. Especially since gains often depend on manufacturing process improvements.

Yeah, I'm not personally surprised by there not a massive jump in an 18 month span.

It looks as though Apple are gearing up for armv9 and smaller process node for the next round of chips which would be more of the "large jump" people are expecting. I think as long as Apple alternate the big jumps with the small jumps then they're not doing anything different from anyone else.

They needed to deliver M2 to show they're not resting on their laurels. If M3 is a similar kind of improvement then that's when to be worried.

I would agree. Third times the charm an all that. Looking at AMD, with Zen 1 that was a huge leap but their second generation Zen+ was quite small in comparison. Zen 2 showed the path forward and Zen 3 showed they could continue to deliver performance with their methods. I would hold Apple Silicon to the same test (as well as Intel’s dedicated GPUs), M3 or whatever the third iteration is will be the true test of Apple’s vision.

Actually the reason why Intel got criticized is not that their improvements were minor because Intel could not do better than that.

When studying the evolution of Intel CPUs over many years, it is obvious that most of the time they could have done greater improvements, but as long as their competition was weak they delayed the improvements that they could have done in a single year over 2 or 3 yearly CPU generations, in order to minimize their manufacturing costs, therefore maximizing their profits.

Only during the many years that have passed between Skylake and Alder Lake, Intel was no longer able to implement all the improvements that they would have wanted, due to the failures in the development of the new CMOS processes, so they were forced to make random minor improvements because greater improvements were impossible and they did not have a good Plan B as an alternative to the erroneous Plan A, which was every year that the next year will be the year when the Intel "10 nm" CMOS process will become competitive.

2015 Sky Lake i5-6600K single core 1092 [1]

2017 Kaby Lake i5-7600k single core 1157 [2]

2017 Coffee Lake i5-8600k single core 1206 [3]

2018 Coffee Lake i5-9600k single core 1233 [4]

2020 Comet Lake i5-10600k single core 1307 [5]

16% improvement over 5 years, average 4.6% improvement per release, range from 2.2% to 6% per step. didn't realize that they released 2 Coffee Lakes.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-6600k

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-7600k

[3] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-8600k

[4] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-9600k

[5] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-10600...

Those are all Skylake CPUs with very minor tweaks. The biggest change being clock frequencies steadily increasing due to 14 nm evolving into the ultra-mature 14+++ nm process.

>It's going from N5 to N5P, chosen by Apple over N4.

Any info as to why?

N4 is still (despite the name) part of TSMC’s 5nm process family and offers little to no performance/efficiency improvement over N5P.

N4 increases the number of EUV layers so the main improvements should be in cost and yield which would have been interesting to Apple, but N5P hit volume manufacturing earlier allowing Apple to ship the M2 earlier and with more capacity.

Waiting for N3 would have offered a considerable performance and efficiency boost but that’d realistically have delayed M2 to the first half of 2023.

Intel didn’t get flack because of minor improvements, they got flack because they couldn’t release 10nm or any other major improvements for the better part of a decade.

Tech journalism needs a dramatic story. So every product is either world changing or a complete failure.

To their credit, with many billions on the line, products do have a bit of a tendency to be a failure if all they can do is tread water.

Not if the rest of the market is the same. Most products get yearly updates that are completely unremarkable. No one gets hyped up for the next year edition of a car.

M1 to M1+ would be like the release of the next year edition of a car. M1 to M2 would be like the release of the next generation of a car. A lot of people get hyped up for the release of the next generation of a car.

Major car models are introduced every ~6 years with refreshes at 3 years.

Different types of products have different product cycle times, but that doesn't make the comparison between stages of the product refresh inaccurate.

The MacBook Pro M1+ Pro is just too much.

Does anyone seriously think the performance of the M2 processor will have any meaningful impact on Apple's success?

They made a big splash with the M1 macbook air, which was at the time an incredible value, and the clear best laptop on the market in terms of price/performance hands down. Apple was able to get splashy headlines, and assert their silicon was not just competitive with, but better than Intel and AMD. That's the critical goal they had to reach to validate Apple Silicon as a valid contender in the market.

This year, they're iterating on the design, and getting the market to accept a 20% price increase on the macbook air, which is their mass-market product.

Does anything they do from here on out actually depend on them continuing to win in the semiconductor space? It's not as if these chips are competing for server slots, where winning comes down to raw numbers in terms of performance/Watt.

These macbooks are going to be absolutely fine for the foreseeable future for everything anyone needs a mac to do: video editing, coding, content consumption etc. run absolutely great on these devices which have excellent battery life and great user experience.

Also Apple has lots of knobs to turn due to the high degree of vertical integration. There is a lot of slack they can pick up in OS performance (e.g. process scheduler, memory management). So their overall benchmarks can continue to trend up even if the locus of improvement varies.

SemiAnalysis may be burying the lede and underhyping the story of the decade here: head of apple arch leaves and takes 100 process engineers to start stealth risc startup and its creating a delay effect in consumer tech innovation, bombshell!

Someone will probably mention that "it's not tech journalism, but all journalism", and I would probably agree. However please keep in mind that there is a significant selection bias here itself -- non-dramatic stories will be less frequently featured here on HN, and even if they are, attract less comments.

Get that performance from where though?

The big M1 numbers came from getting ahead of the rest of the market on 5nm TSMC, and critically from packing everything into the SOC so physical distances were reduced by multiple orders of magnitude (which has already been the case for the A series). That’s been done now, so the low hanging fruit is gone there.

Performance gains from here should be expected to be identical to AMD as they’ll be moving on TSMC’s cadence (it’s AMD who might actually see similar jumps on the low end if they go the Apple route and move everything to the package).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has already started looking to stand up it’s own fab. They have large and very predictable needs now, and could likely get ahead of ASML’s queue by throwing money and scale at the problem - not least because it would help them muddy the waters as to what Apple Silicon actually is more, which fits the marketing better.

> and critically from packing everything into the SOC so physical distances were reduced by multiple orders of magnitude

I don't think that reduces chip power so much as it reduces latency. Apple's "power" here comes entirely from using the 5nm node and refining a stupid-high IPC.

> it’s AMD who might actually see similar jumps on the low end if they go the Apple route and move everything to the package

No? Again, making everything an SOC has advantages/disadvantages, but your raw performance metrics are almost never significantly influenced by distance of the components (unless the distance is significant enough). AMD's real advantage will be jumping ahead 1.5 generations at TSMC, and then later it will be an architectural change (eg. big.LITTLE). I think Apple is the only one interested in shipping computers with SOCs.

You can’t keep up a 20% increase in normal stuff every release for long.

But this chip is literally 18% faster “in normal stuff”

When M1 came out, I remember a lot of excitement around the past progress of performance in the A* core line; people extrapolated future performance and thought they were going to get +20% (ST) every 18 months on top of M1.

I think this expectation of sustained performance gains was a part of some of the more glowing reviews, rather than a narrow evaluation of M1 itself.

Anyway, it wasn’t a reasonable expectation. But I think people expected it anyway.

And yet, the M2 has 18% performance improvement in about 18 months. Presumably also single-threaded, since the CPU core configuration is the same as the M1. 18% is close enough to 20%.

>So why here?

99.999999% of internet comments on M2, or even anything hardware related are pretty much junk. Anandtech used to do some explanation into these sort of things, but as it turns out people aren't interested in in-depth analysis, they just want benchmarks. You end up having them drifting towards mass / mainstream media or LinusTechTip type of content. RealWorldTech doesn't do any these anymore, partly because there is very little money to be made on the consumer side of things. You have other site which talks about Semiconductor Engineering and Business type of content. Unfortunately every time they were posted on HN, no one has shown any interest or complaining about how the content looks too "Enteprisy or Cooperate" because they were intended for B2B settings.

It also isn't just consumers or enthusiast. When viewed from the outside most people would have expected programmers, or what they now called Software Engineers to have some sort of High Level understanding on hardware. But most developers, especially Web Developers, are so abstracted from hardware they dont know or do not care about it.

Broadly speaking this isn't just with hardware, but also every other subject.

> But no one exits that from Intel or AMD every year anymore.

I've been hearing that since Skylake, at every single processor generation that the gains are too modest. That's more than a decade at this point.

Skylake (6th) came out in 2015. It's just that due to the 10nm delay we then had Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Comet Lake all being refreshes of Skylake on the same process until we got to Rocket Lake (11th) - a backport of a 10nm uarch to 14nm with the somewhat predictable power issues. Only with Alder Lake (12th) we actually got the first real new uarch on the process it was designed for since Skylake.

ya but you have to look at it in terms of the consumer. not everyone is buying a new iphone every year. most wait two years and two years of 18%+ improvements leads to a phone that feels like a substantial upgrade especially for mobile games, 4k video and computational photography

AMD, releases CPUs every 2 years, so it's still impressive that in just 1 year Apple can have these gains.

Apple announced M1 in November 2020 and the new MacBook Air M2 isn’t currently available to order in June 2022. It’s not accurate to say M-series iterations are annual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com