It's crazy how even X3 is still so much behind M1 in most raw performance metrics.
The M1/M2 is an amazing chip, however you need to consider that these chips are in different price brackets hence the performance discrepancy.
The new Qualcomm Oryon chips are more powerful but also much more expensive. So the X lineup is actually quite reasonable if you want smartphones to be "affordable".
https://www.androidauthority.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-8-gen-4...
E.g. Wikipedia says X3 has 512-1024kB of L2 cache per core, M1 has 3MB.
[Edit] + Buying up all state of the art production capacities so competition is one node behind.
There is no Apple secret sauce.
As long as the others don't want to go that route - and they seem not to be in need to cut into their margins (AMD shows how X3D helps with performance).
I think what is interesting especially for Intel/AMD is that Xiaomi drops legacy 32 bit ARM and translates apps to 64bit.
Dropping 16/32bits can reduce die size which can be used for larger caches for the same price.
This is such a funny statement. Do people think Apple is dumping wafers into the ocean? Or buying the capacity and not using it?
The economic reality is that Apple can pay more for cutting edge process because they have higher prices and margins. So, people paying a premium for hardware get more advanced hardware.
How is this in any way surprising? Is the theory that if only Apple wasn’t willing to pay a premium, TSMC would sell the same wafers cheaper to other manufacturers? Wouldn’t that make TSMC 1) dumb, and 2) less profitable and therefore less able to invest in the next process?
One of Apple's actual secret sauces is they can make their big caches fast. Typically latency increases with cache size so it's a tradeoff. Apple trades off less here. And it's not some "only fast because tsmc" it's just really solid engineering at both the architectural and physical design level.
"The memory is not inside the package"
vs.
"The SoC and RAM chips are mounted together in a system-in-a-package design." [0]
Every mobile SOC does the same? All Intel SOCs do this? Which one? Can you point out the 16Gb of RAM in this Meteor Lake SOC?
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/20046/Meteor_Lake_Hotchips...
The Wikipedia article on Meteor lake doesn't even mention memory at all [1]
The drams on an apple chip are still bog standard lpddr. Most benchmarks find the actual memory middle of the road at best.
Critically they aren't magically on the die or any more inside the package than most other high end mobile chips.
2. "It is in a package like no other vendor, but it's not changing performance"
3. ???
ram is ordinary POP, you got lied to by Apple marketing. If you acted on this marketing and spend money then re-programming will be very difficult with brain actively fighting on every step to prevent cognitive dissonance.
It is cool to live in the future where 243 GB/s is middle of the road.
It is still impressive that Apple pulled it off 2 years ago, IMO.
Anyway the point is, this is not a meaningful performance benefit as it's still just off the shelf LPDDR5. In fact the M SoCs tend to underperform in memory latency tests.
"Anyway the point is, this is not a meaningful performance benefit"
Do you have a benchmark to read? This "Still LPDDR5" is hand waving.
From what I read, before that, there’s “paying billions to get state of the art production capabilities built”
Chances are that capacity wouldn’t be there without Apple’s money, so if Apple didn’t exist, it still wouldn’t be available to others as rapidly as it is now.
> There is no Apple secret sauce.
They didn’t always have loads of money, so, historically, there must have been something else than “they have loads of money and large margins, so can afford to buy the best”.
I think there still is something more than that. For example, it also is about having the courage to decide that milled aluminum is a better way to build laptop chassises, so spending billions on buying/creating the capacity to build millions of such chassises is a good idea, or to decide that, at their size, building your own CPUs is worth doing.
I think part of their secret sauce also is that they have higher standards for what they want to sell. Take for example foldable screens. They must have prototypes with them, but don’t have a product because they don’t deem them good enough.
But the Apple that stayed alive in the 90’s-early 00’s is pretty different from modern Apple. Modern Apple makes some of the best chips out there. Old Apple stayed afloat by selling a Unix clone on commodity x86.
Except for secret sauce like super wide instruction decode and enough registers to keep all their execution units filled[0], sure I guess there's no secret sauce.
Caches are only useful when they're serving execution units and Apple packed their chips with them. That's special sauce. If it wasn't special then every ARM chip would have the same levels of performance. It's not like the M1 was Apple's first chip. The A-series have been kicking the shit out of other ARM chips for almost a decade. If Apple didn't have any special sauce in their chip designs this wouldn't have been the case. It's not like Qualcomm doesn't have good chip designers and hasn't tried to compete with Apple's chips.
Coincidentally, both of those caches in Apple M design are unusually large - 192KB for instruction cache size and 128KB L1 data cache size - per core (!). The same goes for L2 cache size - 3MB per (performance) core.
When compared to bleeding edge _server_ CPUs from AMD and Intel, it's crazy to see that those figures are by several _magnitudes_ larger in the Apple M design. E.g. Zen3 Epyc - 32KB of instruction cache size, 32KB of L1 data cache size and 512KB L2. Intel Xeon Gold - 32KB of instruction cache size, 64KB of L1 data cache size and 1.25MB of L2.
M2 is a 5nm (N5P) chip, AMD laptops already use 4nm.
I don't think that's quite true. It's clearly a combination of better microarchitecture (very wide decode, 128 byte cache lines, etc), and also massively bigger area budgets. Maybe more the latter, but it's pretty clear that Apple is right at the top of the "good microarchitecture" leader board.
So just like every other non-server ARM SoC?
Edit: this is the benchmark I’m basing my comment on finding it a bit slower than the 2022 A16.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alleged-Snapdragon-8-Gen-3-Gee...
Xiaomi 14 ( using Snarpdragon Gen 3 ) is announced and reviewed. Pre-Order started and shipping in November.
>being almost as fast as one which shipped several years earlier
The A16 has been shipped for a little more than a year. I could have compared it to A17 Pro and the answer would still be the same. Since A17 Pro is only slightly faster with a Clockspeed improvement. And that is comparing in Cortex X4 vs A17 Pro Clock to Clock, X4 would be landing within 10% range.
>is … crazy?
Considering 99.99999999% of the internet said Apple will always be 3-5 years ahead and ARM ( or Snapdragon or any other non Apple CPU design ) will never be able to match Apple, despite being shown how X3 is the proof and X4 finally shown it. Yes. I find it pretty crazy.
> Considering 99.99999999% of the internet said Apple will always be 3-5 years ahead and ARM ( or Snapdragon or any other non Apple CPU design ) will never be able to match Apple
Serious citation needed on that. Most people said Apple did a good job and that Qualcomm needed to step it up considerably to stay in the game. If they have, that’ll be great for many millions of buyers so competition will have worked exactly the way we wanted it to.