That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back?
All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, because it needs to be behind the restrictive iPad OS AppStore walled garden where only code blessed by Apple can run.
Until it's put in a machine that can run Linux, it's more of a benchmarking flex than actually increasing productivity compared to previous M generations or the ARM/X86 competition that allows you to run any OS.
Why is Linux the arbiter of what is “useful”? Why would it still be a benchmark flex if it was on macOS, an Os where millions of people do professional work everyday?
And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well?
For my family, the iPhone and other Apple devices are the ultimate productivity machines. The App Store, fantastic.
Why? Because they are (rightly) terrified of installing apps on Windows. Or any “computer.” They’ve been burned too many times, warned too many times. Unless it’s Microsoft Office, it doesn’t happen. “Programs” are a threat.
But apps? Apps don’t hurt you. iPhones and iPads turn on every day when you want them to, they act predictably, it feels consistent in a way a laptop is not. As for the speed of the chip only being useful for “consumption” - technology advances. That A10 Fusion powered iPad from 6 years ago stings to use now, even though it was plenty comfortable at the time. 5 years from now, nobody will regret an M4.
Sorry, I've been around for too long to believe this. :)
No matter how big of a milestone, a jump in performance anything ever brought, it never stopped software from eventually using up all the resources available. Just another layer of abstraction, just another framework, just another useless ui gimmick and you'll see that the M4 isn't immune to this either.
I never said people can't use iPads for profesional applications, I was asking what professional tasks are people doing with the iPad that necessitated the M4 to be in that closed platform vs the M3 or M2, instead of being put in a more open one like the Mac where it can be put to better use at more generic compute tasks similar to what X86 and Nvidia chips are used for, instead of being stuck in a very restricted platform mostly targeted towards content consumption.
And so far nobody has provided an answer to that question. All the answers are either repeating Apple's marketing or vague ones like "you can use the iPad for professional applications too you know, it's not just a Netflix machine". OK, but what exactly are those professional iPad applications that mandate the M4 being in the iPad instead of the Mac?
I'm bringing this up, because commenters bring up the M4 as the holy grail of chips in discussions about the latest X86 and Qualcomm chips, so if you compare a chip that can currently only run AppStore apps vs chips that can run most SW ever then we're comparing Apples and Oranges.
Edit: this person keeps ignoring any responses that don’t align with their world view and acting like they don’t exist. When challenged they have called multiple people names instead.
I’m not responding to them further to prevent dragging this out further.
And it's not just "my use case" that I'm referring to since I don't do any of those, it's generic use cases that I'm talking about in examples, since X86/Qualcomm are also generic chips being used for a shit tonne of use cases and not restricted to certain AppStores like the M4 is in the iPad, so if you bring M4 in comparison with those generic chips then you'd better provide argument on how they're comparable given the current SW platform restrictions, and so far you haven't.
Your argument cuts both ways.
I’m making the argument that “usefulness” extends outside of Linux use. I’m not saying it only extends to a specific group. Point me to where that is even implied.
maybe the most powerful / watt - desktop CPUs like the 9950X are still way more powerful.
Apple's also has lower memory latencies by virtue of being a SoC design. Memory speed is increasingly becoming the bottleneck compared to computing power. However this is done at the cost of other features, like repleacable/upgradable RAM and CPU, which the other desktop processors support. This is not to say that one is better than the other, but there are surely tradeoffs involved.
You don't, though. Unless you only care about single core performance and/or power usage.
Apple's chips are not even close to AMD/Intel value wise when it comes to MT performance on desktop. The $6,999 Mac Pro somehow losses to the $400 14700K (of course you still need a GPU/etc. but unless you care about niche use cases i.e. very high amounts of VRAM, you can get a GPU equivalent to the M2 Ultra for another $300-400 or so)
That helps (perhaps a lot, hard to say), but note that moving your design from 4 nm to 3 nm pitch isn’t as simple as recompiling your Verilog. So this is still a significant engineering achievement.
Apple is chasing a different design point from the desktop folks: low power and optimized more for single core workloads. Works for them but not of course for everyone.
The Mx machines aren’t SoCs in the sense a MediaTek part is: the main chip has a lot of integrated functional units, yes, but so do the Intel and AMD design. They do have multiple dice in a single package though.
Personally I don’t lose any sleep over the non-upgradability of RAM or mass storage. I started computing when you could add instructions by adding wires to the backplane, and later by writing your own microcode; you could build our own IO devices and wire them into the machine. Gradually we have had more and more integration, and RAM and mass storage are just the latest to go…and in exchange we get better performance and reliability.
I don’t hear people complaining that they can’t upgrade their disk drive’s write cache, or CPU’s cache for that matter. This is the way of the world.
The low end models are so cheap that Apple is definitely subsidizing them with revenue from the higher end models. If RAM upgrades were priced based on RAM stick costs, the base model would have to be much more expensive and less people would have access to it.
Professional workstations have always cost an arm and leg - both arms and both legs usually, for example a SGI workstation used to cost 50K dollars! I think it's great that Apple also produces a subsidized low cost model so more people can get access to it.
* for laptops and desktops, storage pricing tiers also give me this feeling; however in the case of tablets and phones, the way they're used — for most people they are the primary computing device in their lives — less so.
Any (even the slimmest) evidence that this might be the case? Because it seems like an extremely far fetched claim... And year RAM/Storage upgrades seem like a clear example of market segmentation.
Otherwise who would selling laptops at a loss increase the sales of higher-end laptops, most people don't buy both.
> I cannot rule out the possibility
That seems like an extremely high-bar.
Ironically, it was an attempt to avoid an argument about that point :P
I think it's at least possible for this scenario, given they make more from services than from macs: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2024-q1/FY24_Q1_Consol...
I'd still be on the surprised side if so, but it would be mild surprise rather than shock.
Almost all of that comes from iPhones/iPad/etc. services. Also IIRC 1/4 of their services revenue is just the $20 billion Google is paying them every year.
> but it would be mild surprise rather than shock.
Alright, you might be right. However, while I'm not shocked but still more than mildly surprised that there are people who think that this might be possible.
Depends what do you mean by "subsidizing".. Obviously their margins on entry level models are lower but I would still bet than they are much higher if not several times higher than the industry standard. They are certainly not selling them at or below cost, they can probably upgrade the base config to 16GB and still make more per unit sold than Dell/HP/etc.
Even MS get rid of 8GB with the new Surface: 13.8, Snapdragon, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD is $1000, the equivalent 13.6 M3 Air is $1,299 (8GB is $1100). So if Apple is subsidizing their lower-end Macs what on earth is MS doing? Surface is already a premium(ish) tier device and I'd assume their are paying more to Qualcomm than it costs Apple to make an M3 chip.
> the base model would have to be much more expensive
Why? I don't really get this logic. They are pricing their base models at what the market will bear, it wouldn't make sense to sell them at a discount just because they have more expensive models, they'd hike their prices even more if they could.
What they are making from memory/storage upgrades is basically free money on top of already presumably very reasonable margins (by industry standards).
Source? I find that quite unlikely, considering their brand has strong recognition and demand, and design+manufacturing costs are probably not wildly different from other laptop makers.
They could be trying to get more people on board via lower prices, but the prices I've seen, although accessible to many people, seem similar to other brands, and seems quite compatible with making a profit.
But if we compare the difference between M3 and the 9950X in Cinebench and Geekbench and assume the ratio stays comparable it would still be slightly faster
I would venture to guess that for most people, they would be more productive on a Mac or an iPad versus Linux.
Pedantry: To my knowledge, there was no M3 iPad.
And since people keep bringing up the M4 as the yardstick in discussions on generic X86 and Qualcomm chips, then my productivity metric for comparison was also meant in a global generic way, as in the general purpose compute chips like x86 and Nvidia have unlocked new innovations and improvements to our lives over decades being able to run code from specialty aerospace, CAD, earthquake prediction, to protein folding for vaccines and medical use because you could run anything on those chips from YouTube to Fortnite to mainframes and supercomputers. What similar improvements to humanity does the M4 iPad bring when it can only run apps off the AppStore compared to M3, most used iPAd apps being YouTube and Netflix?
As long as the most cutting edge MX chips are restricted to running only Apple approved AppStore apps because Apple is addicted to the 30% AppStore tax that they can't charge on their laptops running MacOS/Linux with the same chips, then they're relatively useless chips for humanity in the grand scheme of things in comparisons with X86 and Arm who make the world go round, power research and innovation because they can run anything you can think of despite scoring a bit lower benchmarks.
> The question was whether the M4 makes you more productive on the iPad vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was
Nonetheless, tech must and is advancing, regardless. Every platform is releasing newer and faster versions, and only a tiny fraction will make use of that power year over year.
As to the rest of your comment, I see what you're saying, but those are your opinions. However, the vast majority of the user base would probably disagree with you, because they are not technical people.
They are productive on these closed platforms. they have different workflows than you or I. I'm not very productive on these platforms. These are consumption devices for me. I need things like a development toolchain and a command-line interface to be productive.
By and large, non-technical people are Apple's target audience, not technical people. In raw numbers, these people outnumber technical people by an order of magnitude.
This dinosaur (me) recognizes that what constitutes a computer has evolved and shifted away from what I think of as a computer. And this shift will further continue.
I never said otherwise, I asked what's the point of commenters bringing up the M4 performance in comparisons with X86/Qualcomm when due to the open vs closed nature of the platforms they're not directly comparable because the M4 is much more restricted in the iPad vs the other chips.
That's like comparing a Ferrari to a van saying how much faster Ferraris are. Sure, a Fierari will always be faster than a van, but you can do a lot more things with a van than with a faster Ferrari, and just like M4 iPad Pros, Ferraris are lot less relevant to the function of society than vans which deliver your food, medicine, kids to school, etc. Is the M4 good for you and an improvement for your own workflow? Good for you, just don't compare it to X86 until it can run the same app as those chips.
Like you said, it's mostly a consumption device, and as such, the M4 is mostly wasted in that, until they bring it into a device with a more open OS that can run the same SW as the other X86/ARM platforms, which Apple delays intentionally because they're trying to nudge users off the open Mac platform towards the closed iPads OS platform for that sweet 30% AppStore cut they can't get on their devices running MacOS/Linux.
Hardly. Or rather to a much lesser extent, at least pro/power users benefit a lot more from performance improvements on open general purpose platforms.. since well.. you can actually do stuff on them. What (performance sensitive) use cases does the iPad even have? I guess video/image editing to an extent but pretty much all of those apps on iOS are severely crippled and there are other limitations (storage and extremely low memory capacity).
Except that they're not. You can install apps from the open web or run Asahi Linux on Apple's machines.
Why is that? Because of different UI? Guessing, since you're comparing hardware(Mac/iPad) with operating systems (Linux distributions)...
The fact that you can't imagine a device being useful until it can compile the Linux kernel etc., that you dismiss it as a "Netflix machine", says more about you than about Apple.
AI inference. Editing, not merely watching, video. Ditto audio. Gets more done before the battery runs out.
I cannot emphasise strongly enough how niche "compile the Linux kernel" is: to most people, once you've explained what those words mean, this is as mad as saying you don't like a Tesla because you recreationally make your own batteries and Tesla cars don't have a warranty-not-void method to let you just stick those in.
And you haven't answered my question. For video and audio editing, were the M3 IPads being held back compared to M4 for it to unlock new possibilities that couldn't have been done before and convince new users to switch to iPads?
Correct.
How many million youtube channels are there, and how exactly do you think that stuff gets made? Magic?
New chip aimed at them, to make their work lives better.
> And you haven't answered my question
Yes I have. So have others who have replied to you.
Performance.
> were the M3 IPads being held back
Disingenuous. "Held back" implies Apple could have made M4s a year sooner.
Since you asked, they're using Macs and PCs mostly, sometimes Linux too. Rarely iPads though. That's more of a strawmen your building here.
And I'm bringing in arguments that X86 and ARM improvements are more important that the M4 chips, because they power the world innovations, and you're bring up editing YouTube videos on iPads as an argument for why the M4 is such a big deal. I rest my case.
>Disingenuous. "Held back" implies Apple could have made M4s a year sooner.
I never said or meant such a thing, you're just making up stuff up at this point to stoke the fire and that's why I'll end the conversation with you here.
You're arguing as if everyone changes production mode in one go when new hardware arrives. This chip was only released 50 days ago.
Your example of "power the world innovations" included "compile Linux kernel" and "play the latest Steam/GOG games".
YouTube is more valuable to the world than endlessly recompiling the Linux kernel.
Let me rephrase via metaphorical narrative:
--
"This internal combustion engine is very good, isn't it. I don't know why people keep saying they're a dead-end."
"That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful engine is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest carriage, lol. Was the previous horse-drawn carriage holding anyone back? Can't use car exhaust as manure!"
"Obviously it held people back, just look at all the things horseless carriages let people do faster, how the delivery of goods has been improved. And honestly, most people have moved on from organic manure."
"What, manure is niche compared to trucks?"
"Very much so. I mean, how do you think we get all the stuff in our shops?"
"But most of the stuff is delivered by horses! And also, you're talking about trivial things like 'shopping', when horses power important things like 'cavalry'. I rest my case."
--
> I never said or meant such a thing, you're just making up stuff up at this point to stoke the fire and that's why I'll end the conversation with you here.
I copy-pasted from your own previous comment, and at the time of writing this comment, the words "were the M3 IPads being held back" are still present. I cannot see how they could mean something else. Just in case you edit that comment (you've edited a few others, that's fine, I do that too), here's the whole paragraph:
> And you haven't answered my question. For video and audio editing, were the M3 IPads being held back compared to M4 for it to unlock new possibilities that couldn't have been done before and convince new users to switch to iPads?
This is a bad faith argument. You should assume compile Linux kernel = doing any software development if you expect to have a rational discussion with anyone.
You can replace that with compile pretty much any software in general or do any real software development on it which isn't even remotely niche...
I want to say it's also way behind the number of YouTube channels, but I can't find a citation for the 3rd party claim of "114 million" active channels, though obviously most are not professionals and there's not a 1-1 requirement between channels and people.
Even if we focus on video editing the apps available on the iPad and they are crippled by having very low amounts of memory which also makes "professional" usage rather difficult. The iPad Pro is mainly a luxury product for people who just want the "best" iPad and don't really care about the cost.
> 114 million" active channels
You should be comparing this to the number of active Github accounts or something like that which seems to be about the same.
But if you’re talking compared to the M2, it has a number of updates
1. Significant performance and efficiency gains
2. New GPU with raytracing and mesh shading , and much higher performance.
3. AV1 decode
4. New display controllers required for the new tandem OLED
5. Huge upgrade to the neural engine
I’m sure I’m missing stuff, but the M4 iPad Pro is a legitimate step up from the M2 for capabilities. Unless you fall in the camp of it being just a media consumption device
People like faster and snappier things. Along with that the new hardware unlocks the use of tandem oleds which is a big change for HDR creation and color accuracy. They go hand in hand.
A lot of people create on iPads. I used to work in film and almost all my concept art friends have shifted over to iPad. A lot of my on set friends use it for on set management of content, visualization and rushes.
The reviewers you mentioned don’t use the device that way. Would I similarly be right in taking their opinion about how niche it is to run Linux?
Like this argument you’re proposing just boils down to “it doesn’t solve my needs and therefore I can’t imagine it solving other people’s needs”
I never said that. I asked what needs does the M4 solve that the M3/2 couldn't? I asked that because people keep bring up the M4 in discussion, arguing against X86/Qualcomm chips, how they're slower than Apple's latest M4 chips, and for that I counteract with the fact that for a lot of cases the M4's extra performance over x86/Qualcomm is irelevant since X86/Qualcomm chips solve different and a lot more diverse problems that the highly restrictive and niche problems the iPad solves.
And it's not me, because those are not my needs, I don't compile the linux kernel or doe CAD/CAE, or microbiology simulations but those to me (and to society and humanity) those are still more important than movie writers having a slightly faster iPad for drafts, since it's not like that was the reasons most movies suck nowadays.
If you think one brand of "chips solve different and a lot more diverse problems" than another, it sounds like you don't know what "Turing machine" means.
All chips can always do what other chips can do — eventually.
M4 is faster. That's it. That's the whole selling point.
Faster at what exactly? Where can I buy these M4 chips to upgrade my PC with to make it faster as you claim? Oh, it's only shipped as part of a very locked down tablet OS and restricted ecosystem with totally different apps than those running on the X86/generic ARM chips which can run anything you write for them? OK, fine, but then what's the point of it being faster than those other chip if they can't run the same sw?
Like I said, you're comparing a Ferrari to a van. It's faster yes, but totally different use cases. And the world runs mostly on people driving vans/trucks, not on people driving Ferraris.
So first of all, your entire argument hinges on YOUR belief that the iPad is just a consumption device. So you don't believe the M4 is a significant jump over the M2, even when I give you reasons that it is.
Then your argument hinges on the comparison to Qualcomm SoCs, but isn't the use of the iPad irrelevant unless you also believe it'll not make its way to other devices? Which feels unfounded.
Those are two distinct arguments that IMHO have no bearing on each other unless you also make the two assumptions that I think you're erroneously making.
I've not seen that quote anywhere.
Google no longer actually finding quotes no longer means the quote isn't present on the internet, so do you have a citation for that?
You might have "overpriced if used as a", but not "it's overpriced and only a".
* Assuming "What" is a typo for "watch"; gosh, isn't auto-corrupt an annoying part of this era…
Another thing is you’re comparing apples to oranges. iPads aren’t meant to be used in that way and if you want to do it anyway you have to hack your way there. You should be perfectly capable of compiling the Linux kernel on their more general purpose machine - the Mac.
* within the limitations of the iPad AppStore
Correct, and if they're only meant to be used within the restrictive limitation of the AppStore then who cares about them, other than the small market of iPad OS AppStore users, most of which don't even used the full potential of the M3/M2 on their iPads let alone need the M4?
Chips from Intel, AMD, NVidia, etc are big news because since they're generic compute chips, so they unlock new uses cases and research that can improve or even change the world, not just run IOS apps a bit faster.
For example, do you think those Apple EEs are using iPads to design the M4 chips or X86/Mac computers?
It already happened: Windows + WSL2. Windows is the best linux distro.
All in all, I'm moving away from it to linux, as I don't like the direction Microsoft is taking, and learning to fix the rough edges of Linux will serve me better in my career than trying to keep up with and fight the dark pattern frog that Microsoft keeps boiling slowly.
Mutahar on YouTube did a review of a leaked copy of Windows 11 Chinese Government edition which is Windows 11 Enterprise with everything non essential stripped out of it: no AI, no telemetry, no OneDrive, no ads, no news, no Edge, no media player, no web search in star menu, no defender, nothing, just the kernel, drivers, window manager and explorer, that's it, kind of like lightweight linux distros. If Microsoft would sell that to us consumers I would buy that in a heartbeat. But no, we get the adware and spyware version.
But yeah, Windows 11 was a bit of a downgrade compared to Windows 10 in terms of how much needless shit has been added to it.
> learning to fix the rough edges of Linux will serve me better in my career than trying to keep up with and fight the dark pattern frog that Microsoft keeps boiling slowly.
Yes, but pretty much everything desktop related is completely useless in non-desktop use-cases. I'd rather go back to macOS.
"fun story": couple weeks ago I had to do something that was not possible in WSL2 due to how esp32 devboard I had worked. I've decided to add linux vm to my freebsd server, and passthrough usb controller that conveniently was plugged in (unused). Simply because I knew that the moment I reboot to linux I might get sidetracked into fixing my linux on desktop instead of working.
Unless we are talking about installing it on a classical desktop PC tower, or some embedded device like the Raspeberry like boards with the OEM custom distribution, I am not bothering with it, it goes into a desktop VM and that is it.
Too many wasted weekends throughout the years, always sorting out the same issues.
The nice part of it, is coming in the box.
In any case, I do agree, Linux on the Desktop will stay packaged in a VM, without the hurdles of dual boot, or lack of the hardware support OEMs will never care about.
Even on devices that ship the Linux kernel like Chromebooks, running the Crostini GNU/Linux distribution is done inside of a VM, WSL2 style, and to this day there are several issues regarding hardware support that Google never bothered to improve.
For battery powered devices, race to sleep is the current meta, where once you have some bit of heavy compute work, you power up a big core, run it fast to get through all of the work as quickly as possible, and get back to low power as quickly as possible.
I believe I’ve read that Apple’s chips run under 3GHz unless their job runs longer than 100-150ms. I suspect that’s their peak race to sleep range.
It's not exponential; P = C V^2 f, so power is something between O(f) and O(f^3), depending on how voltage scaling works. It follows that efficiency (energy per instruction) is something between O(1) and O(f^2).
VMWare Fusion (now free beer) and Podman.
Still running the beta of Fusion which I have literally had zero issues with. I have not benchmarked podman.
https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2024/05/fusion-pro-now-a...
Linux not supporting your hardware perfectly is just the nature of the beast. Asahi on Apple hardware meets [very low linux user] expectations.
Since I carry a laptop and an ipad, the lighter the better (I use them for different things, and often in concert). That MacBook Air is so powerful and so light that I sometimes have to check my bag to make sure I haven’t forgotten one or both.
That’s definitely worth it to me.
I think...you?
I read the article in full a few hours ago and didn't see anything like that.
I skimmed it again, and also gave it a go of grepping TFA "lost", "talent" "trouble": 0 results (Chrome, command F).
They’re a tech news blog mixed with heavy doses of dramatized conjecture.
The primary author has written multiple times that Apple has lost lots of their key talent but has never been able to back it up beyond “I keep tabs on LinkedIn”.
End of the day, tech folks like drama as much as the next person. Sites like that are the equivalent to celebrity focused tabloids.
i.e. more practicing rhetoric than contributing content, and/or, leaning on rhetorical strategies to do a more traditional definition of trolling circa early 2000s Slashdot. i.e. generate tons of replies by introducing a tangent that'll generate conversation.
And also why people should use the downvote button more often on post that shouldn't be sitting at the top.
Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most.
They did't lost it all at the same time either.
Many of them have been working on M2 and M3, some later ones may be on M4 before they left.
Apple has a node advantage, which is in itself a separate discussion. This article is straightly about IPC.
We didn't even go into Die Size and cost analysis.
> Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most.
The last that I knew/read, Johny Srouji was the key senior executive in the Apple CPU division. It looks like they continue to expand his R&D labs in Israel (according to a Wiki source).
Basically some media make a big deal out of some people left the Apple's CPU design.
Why are you saying this? The article doesn't seem to imply that?
Apple isn't in any kind of trouble. But the gap between Apple and the competition does appear to be closing. Right now Apple's biggest advantage is they buy up all of TSMC supply for the latest node. They're always a little faster because they're always a node ahead.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is reasonably impressive from a CPU and x86 emulation perspective. The GPU hardware seems kinda sorta ok. But their GPU drivers are dog poop. Which is why they suck for Windows gaming.
I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year. That could get interesting fast. All hail competition!
Apple bet big that we hasn’t hit the limits of how wide a machine can go. They created ARM64 to push this idea as it tries to eliminate things that make this hard.
Everyone wrote off iPhone performance as mobile only and not really representative of performance on a “real” computer.
M1 changed that and set the clock ticking. Once everyone realized it was possible, they needed to adjust future plans and start work on their own copy (with companies like Nuvia having a head start in accepting the new way of things due to leadership who believed in M1 performance).
In the next few years, very wide machines will just be the way things are done and while they won’t be hyper common, they won’t be surprising either.
Or AMD / Intel could just make more power efficient x86 core? What would they gain by switching to ARM?
Also developing a competitive ARM core in less than a year is pretty much impossible, it took Qualcomm several years to catch up with ARMs cores (hence the title...). They even had to buy another company to accomplish that.
I mixed some thoughts in rewrites. I hope Nvidia releases laptop/desktop SoC. AMD is getting better at x86 mobile, Steamdeck is pretty decent. I hope they keep getting better.
I'd like to see high-end integrated GPU on a SoC from AMD for laptops/desktops. That doesn't exist yet. It requires a discrete GPU and there's a kajillion issues that stem from having two GPU paths. Just give me one SoC with shared memory and a competitive GPU. I don't care if it's ARM or x86.
> Also developing a competitive ARM core in less than a year is pretty much impossible
What makes you think they'd just be starting? Nvidia has been shipping ARM cores for years. Nintendo Switch is an Nvidia Tegra.
Here's an article from October 2023 claiming that Nvidia is working on CPUs for Windows to ship in 2025. Qualcomm has an "ARM for Windows" exclusive that expires at some point in 2024. https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-make-arm-based-pc-...
Does that require them to design a custom CPU and not use an ARM design? I don’t know. I also don’t really care. Either way is fine!
Not that I dont want Nvidia to have their own CPU design again. But judging from current trend and trajectory and very likely their perspective it doesn't make any sense. The future isn't in CPU but GPU or HSA.
I think "consumer" literally means people who consume things, instead of people who create things. Before detouring into "content creators", people who create things are frequently engineers and scientists, who apple does not target.
Unfortunately, I think apple doesn't do general purpose computing. sigh.
...he writes, on his Snapdragon Surface tablet.
(Also, I find it hella entertaining that a snapdragon is a cute little flower, martial naming notwithstanding)
People were absolutely sure that apple made basically no real advancement but just were running up the TDPs and that’s where all their M2 and M3 gains came from. That was the narrative for the last 2 years. But then you look at geekerwan and apple is making 20, 30% steps every gen, and with perf/w climbing upwards every gen too. Mainstream sites just didn’t want to do the diligence, plus there’s a weird persistent bias against the idea of apple being good. It’s gotta just be the node… or the accelerators… or the OS…
Reminder that we sit here 3 years later and even giving AMD a node advantage (7940HS vs M2/M3 family) they’re still pulling >20W core-only single-thread power (even ignoring the x86 platform power problems!) to compete with a 5W M2 thread. And yes, you can limit it but then they lose on performance instead.
https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=928
https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=1000
https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=708
But yeah, anyway, that’s where it came from. People completely dismissed M2 and M3 as having any worthwhile advancement (even with laptops they could objectively analyze!) and were in the process of repeating this for M4 yet again. So why wouldn’t you think that three generations of stagnation indicates apple has a problem? The problem is that apple hasn’t actually stagnated - there is an epistemic closure issue and a lot of people won’t admit it or aren’t exposed to that information, because it’s being proxied through this lens of 25% of the tech community being devout apple anti-fanboys.
It's a problem with every single apple/android thread too. People will admit with the ML stuff that apple does a much better job handling PII (keeping it on-device, offering e2e encryption between devices, using anonymizing tokens when it needs to go to a service), and people intellectually understand they use the same approaches and techniques in other areas too, but suggest that maybe apple isn't quite as bad as the literal adtech company and you'll get the works. People don't want to think of themselves as fanboys but... there is a large contingent that does all the things fanboys would do and says all the things fanboys would say, and acts how fanboys would act, and nevertheless thinks they're the rock of neutrality standing between two equally-bad choices. False balance is very intellectually comforting.
I've been waiting for an upgrade to my M1 and I still haven't seen one worth spending that much money on. I'd rather just sink that into upgrading my Windows tower.
Single core performance went from 2300 with the M1 to 3800 with the M4. That is a huge improvement for my workflow (large TypeScript mono repositories) which is dependent a lot of single core performance (even with parallel builds, because one rarely re-builds everything, rather hot reloads.)
I think quite a bit more. Meteor Lake seems to have faster ~100% multicore and ~25% single core performance and better battery life.
To be fair desktop Macs these days are just laptops without a screen so it's not that surprising. Of course they are significantly more power efficient but also much slower than high end AMD/Intel chips (if you don't care about heat/power usage that much like a lot of desktop users).
Also even on mobile 165H seems to be not that far from M3 e.g. 10-20% worse battery life, slightly slower single core but faster multi-core. Not ideal but considering where Intel was when M1 came out not that bad either.
10th gen was horrible and now they have almost caught up with the M series.
I believe 38 W is what you see under your personal "full utilization workload" but it's just that's not comparable to "peak workload" numbers. To be honest the peak numbers are relatively useless anyways, you'll never hit them unless you go do something akin to running purpose written CPU and a GPU benchmark at the same time, specifically designed to utilize all of the hardware capabilities at once rather than do something useful with them. The idle and typical wattage numbers are much more useful and much lower.
Also keep in mind some CPU models (even of the same family) are pushed to e.g. double the wattage for a 25% multicore gain or the like. It doesn't mean the CPU family is complete shit for power efficiency it just means there was a market for a SKU which wasn't very concerned with power consumption.
All that said the M* line is definitely still better efficiency/Watt but I concur with qwytw the difference between Intel and Apple now vs 4 years ago is massively improved and the gap isn't as anywhere near as big as you've been listing.
Even ignoring the word generation, For the past 20 years how many times did we see a successful uArch bringing 20% IPC improvement over the current leading IPC?
Where did that 20-30% per gen coming from.
The worst part about Apple, its media is that it seems we have a whole generation of people who were never interested in CPU performance suddenly coming up with these expectation and figures.
I remember there was even a period Moore's law was commonly conflated with "a doubling in performance every 2 years" (implies people being used to an increase of at least 41% per year) instead of a doubling in transistor count. Because Intel's tick-tock model started ~5 years prior to the great stagnation people commonly claimed it's the end of Moore's law and that's why we have tick-tock's now. Of course these days it's common knowledge that Moore's law (the actual transistor count version) has been holding steady all these years still and that the performance lull wasn't related to hitting and innate technical scaling barriers.
Marketing departments are definitely going to be marketing departments but they aren't the origin of the idea CPUs can have more than minor increments in performance each year.
[1] https://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png
[2] https://preshing.com/images/float-point-perf.png
[3] https://i.imgur.com/HlGbJE9.png (note this chart is linear not log)
One of the big advantages the M chips have is the insanely fast integrated memory, since it’s all right on the die. It’s much closer to ultra high spec GPU ram than PC ram.
My M1 studio has 200GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Extant DDR5 modules are under 50GB/sec
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj...
For M1 - M3 the IPC improvement were minimal. Absolute performance came from Node and Clock Speed improvement. And for M4, most of the single core improvement actually came from floating point improvements. If we look into each test results and in terms of Integer I remember last time I checked it was less than 5%. In total, M1 to M4 has less than 10% of IPC improvement in terms of integer performance.
This is not to say I am disappointed or surprised like all others. A lot of the CPU improvement went from A12 to M1 / A14 which was barely showcased by Apple developer toolkit during ARM transition. The ultra wide design which Apple were perfecting for many years before it reached M1, has reached a plateau.
I am now wondering if there could be some other Integer IPC improvement, but judging from M4 we will likely have to wait until 2026 before we see anything new in terms of CPU uArch design.
M1 released in November 2020. In almost the exact time frame AMD went from Zen3 -> Zen 5 (so one less generation) with a total gain of ~34% multicore and ~59% multicore gain. Intel went from ~10900k to ~14900k for a total of 76% single core and 128% multicore gain (i.e. more than double).
Two disclaimers before the conclusion: This is just from one lazy benchmark (Geekbench 6) and of the high performing model. That doesn't necessarily tell the whole story on both accounts, but it at least gives some context around general trends. E.g. passmark is going to say the differences on Intel are a little smaller, comparisons between Max and non-Max generations confuse multi core growth, and changes in low-mid market chips may follow a different slope than the high end products. Also there are other considerations like "and what about integrated graphics performance, which eats up a huge amount of die space and power budget?"
Anyways, my conclusion is that Apple is doing reasonably well with generational improvements vs the competition. Maybe not the absolute best, but not the worst. Being on top in the single core realm with a mobile passively cooled device makes equivalent gains all the more difficult but they're still doing it. Apple may be a victim of its own success in that the M1 from 2020 is still such a performance powerhouse that a 50% gain 4 generations later just isn't that interesting whereas with Intel a catchup of ~doubling multicore performance in the same time seems more impressive especially when M*'s story isn't as tantalizing on that half of things.
+59% in 4 years is equivalent to 12% every year. percentages compound exponentially.
59% from M1->M4 = 1.59^⅓ = 16.7% increase per generation
No one said "years" either...
I'm anchored on those historical performance gains, so I'm naturally (and, I recognise, unreasonably) disappointed by "only" 20-30% improvements from Apple.
Snapdragon X Elite + Windows ARM is getting there, but their GPU perf leaves a lot to be desired.
Is Apple a victim of their own success? Idk, but diminishing returns are a thing you know.