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Comment by tyrfing | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

>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.

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