Additionally, both Intel and AMD manufacturer CPUs for HEDT and servers which are far beyond anything Apple is fabricating at the moment. Apple has no response to Epyc, Threadripper, or higher end Xeon. Similarly, Apple has no equivalent to Intel, AMD, and Nvidia discrete GPUs.
Apple made a quality cell phone chip, and managed to exploit chiplets and chip-to-chip interconnects to double and quadruple it into a decent APU. But it's still an APU, just one segment addressed by current x86 designs.
I don't think that was deliberate. Apple has a long history of not cooling their computers enough.
Of course, but the average Joe does not want to wear ear protection when running their laptop. Nor do they want the battery to last 40 minutes or have it be huge brick, or have to pour liquid nitrogen on it to not get it to not thermal throttle.
Apple innovated by making chips that fit the form and function most people need in their personal devices. They don't need to be the absolute fastest, but innovation isn't solely tied to the computing power of a processor. It make sense that Intel excels in the market segment where people do need to wear ear protection to go near their products. If they need to crank in an extra 30 watts to achieve their new better compute then so be it.
We don't know the specifics of the conversations between Apple and Intel. Hopefully for Intel it was just the fact that they didn't want to innovate for personal computing processors and not that they couldn't.
I wouldn't call what Apple did innovation - they followed predictable development trajectories - more integration. They licensed ARM's instruction set, Imagination's PowerVR GPU, most of the major system busses (PCIe, Thunderbolt, USB 3, Displayport, etc), they bonded chiplets together with TSMC's packaging and chip-to-chip communication technologies, and they made extensions (like optional x86 memory ordering for all ARM instructions which removes a lot of the work of emulation). Incidentally, Apple kicked off it's chip design efforts by purchasing PA Semi. Those folks had all the power management chip design expertise already.
But again, it's been a good first showing for Apple. I think they were smart to ship on-package DRAM in a consumer device. Now is about the right time for the CPU to be absorbing DRAM, as can be seen by AMD's 3D VCache in another form. And it's cool for Apple folks to have their own cool thing. Yay y'all. But I've run Linux for 20 years, I've run Linux on every computer I can get my hands on in that time, and through that lens, Apple silicon performs like any x86 APU in a midrange laptop or desktop. And as regards noise, I never hear the fans on my 7800x3D / 3090Ti, and it is very very noticeably faster than my M1 Mac. Apple Silicon's great, it's just for laptops and midrange desktops right now.
By this yardstick, nobody in semiconductors has ever innovated.
That's how technology proliferates. The point is if the M1 wasn't innovative, that rules out pretty much everything AMD, Intel and potentially even NVIDIA have done in the last three decades.
I'd say a lot more innovation happens on the process side. Manufacturing.
All the architecture changes look like things mainframes did decades ago.
Do you have source for this other than Cinebench R23, which is hand optimized for x87 AVX instructions through Intel Embree Engine?
From all sources, Apple Silicon has 2-3x more perf/watt than AMD's APUs in multithread and a bigger gap in single thread.
It's absurd to point out that apple could have gotten higher perf from x86 at higher power as if it's some kind of win for intel. Yes, obviously they could have, that's true of every chip ever. They could take it even further and cool every macbook with liquid nitrogen and require lugging around a huge tank of the stuff just to read your email! They don't, because that's dumb. Apple goes even further than most laptop manufacturers and thinks that hissing fans and low battery life are dumb too. This leads them to low power as a design constraint and what matters is what performance a chip can deliver within that constraint. That's the perspective from which the M1 was designed and that's the perspective from which it delivered in spades.
I'm not sure what's so upsetting about the assertion that chips composed of a similar number of transistors, on a similar process node, cooled similarly, might function similarly. Because when all variables are controlled for, that's what I see.
The one place I agree with you is in the > ~16 core space (Server style) with TBs of RAM, where total performance density is more important than power, they don't bother to really compete. Where I differ slightly is I don't think there is anything about the technical design that prevents this, just look how Epyc trounced Intel in the space by using a bunch of 8 core chip modules instead of building a monolith, rather they just don't have interest in serving that space. If Apple was able to turn a phone chip into something with the multicore performance of a 24 core 13900k it doesn't exactly scream "architectural limitation" to me.
This is such an uncharitable and adversarial interpretation of parent. Sandbagging intel =/= juicing M1.
The fact that the exact same laptop designs absolutely soared when an M1 was put in them with no changes tells you everything you need to know about how Intel dropped the ball.
Rough recent history for Intel.
I agree that Apple figured if they were going to switch, they should just go ahead and switch to themselves. But the choice was really to switch to either themselves or AMD. Sticking with Intel at the time was untenable. 14nm is certainly a big part of that story, and I'm glad you at least finally recognize there was a serious problem.
If Intel had been able to deliver on their node shrink roadmap, perhaps Apple never would have felt the need to switch--or may have at least delayed those plans. Who knows, that's alternate history speculation at this point.
The article in question is about Intel potentially getting back to some level of process parity, perhaps even leadership. I'm looking forward to that because I think a competitive market is important.
But pretending Intel's laptop processors weren't garbage for most of the last 8 or so years is kind of living in an alternate reality.
It remains to be seen if Apple is willing or able to scale their architecture to something workstation class (the last Intel Mac Pro supported 1.5TB of ram, it's easy to build a 4TB Epyc workstation these days).
Apple "sandbagging" was them desperately trying to get a poor Intel product to work in laptops they wanted to be thin and light.
Even today though their designs haven't really changed all that much--in fact the MacBook Air is actually just as thin and now even completely fan-less. It just has a chip in it that doesn't suck.
Even if Intel makes a thing that doesn't mean it's actually any good.
I had some of those Intel ULV parts back in the day. They sucked.
Apple switched to their own silicon, and life for their customers has radically improved.
Maybe Intel has a great E Core now. Good for them if they do.
Maybe they were worse than they needed to be, but the best they could have been with Intel would have still left so much to be desired.
Simply false brand-oriented thinking.
You leave no room for nuance here, friend. And somehow I doubt you're familiar with every single one of Intel's tens of thousands of SKUs over decades. Intel has made a lot of CPUs. They're in lots of laptops. You might consider your wording if you're not trying to be corrected.
Just the first example I grabbed. Intel made quite a few more chips in the 15W and higher envelopes, still under M1's ~20W TDP.
I didn't check their embedded SKUs yet. Nor enterprise.
It doesn't support your contention that Intel was making comparable chips at the time to the M1, I'll say that at the least.
Anandtech has talked about some of Intel's TDP shenanigans before, even for Tiger Lake: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...
TDP doesn't seem to be the whole story - the datasheet is one thing, but I've yet to see a reviewer get 30 hours from an Intel laptop.
Screen backlight usually has as much to say about battery life as the CPU does. And it's hard to deny Apple's advantage of being fully vertically integrated. Their OS only needs to support a finite number of hardware configurations, and they are free to implement fixes at any layer. Most of my PC laptops make choices which use more power in exchange for modularity and upgradeability as well, like using SODIMMs for ram, and m.2 or SATA removeable storage, all of which consume more power than Apple's soldered on components.
Your very own source gives the M1 a 75 vs 59 score on power efficiency. They don't seem to provide a benchmark for it, but it should have been a clue regardless.
Here's the first result on M1 power efficiency I found https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... :
"In single-threaded workloads, Apple’s showcases massive performance and power advantages against Intel’s best CPU. In CineBench, it’s one of the rare workloads where Apple’s cores lose out in performance for some reason, but this further widens the gap in terms of power usage, whereas the M1 Max only uses 8.7W, while a comparable figure on the 11980HK is 43.5W.
In other ST workloads, the M1 Max is more ahead in performance, or at least in a similar range. The performance/W difference here is around 2.5x to 3x in favour of Apple’s silicon.
In multi-threaded tests, the 11980HK is clearly allowed to go to much higher power levels than the M1 Max, reaching package power levels of 80W, for 105-110W active wall power, significantly more than what the MacBook Pro here is drawing. The performance levels of the M1 Max are significantly higher than the Intel chip here, due to the much better scalability of the cores. The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this."
(as if we all didn't already know this)
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-15-inch-mid-2...
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-9980h...
Even if Nvidia also wants TSMC's latest process, that could work to Apple's advantage. Right now it's looking like Apple might end up with TSMC's 3nm process for 18 months. If Apple and Nvidia split the initial 2nm capacity, it could be 3+ years before AMD and Qualcomm can get to 2nm.
If Nvidia launches the RTX 50 series in late 2024 or early 2025 on TSMC's 3nm (which seems to be the rumor), what does that do for availability for AMD and Qualcomm? Maybe what we'll see going forward is Apple taking the capacity for the first year and Nvidia taking the capacity for the second year leaving AMD and Qualcomm waiting longer.
That would certainly benefit Apple. Apple isn't competing against Nvidia. If Nvidia uses up TSMC capacity leaving Apple's actual competitors at a bigger disadvantage, that's pretty great for Apple.