Re:M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
by ghaff on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:02AM
(#25289452)
>How much of the M1's advantage is due to a trillion dollar company buying up every last bit of TSMC's 5nm production capacity?
Yes, it's very hard to separate process from architectural (and implementation) design. And, as an industry, we're probably sticking our fingers in our ears more than we should about what happens when process shrinks really truly stop happening. And they will. There are still a variety of options but there's very little evidence they have anything like the legs of CMOS process scaling even if we do dump a big part of the problem on developers who don't get to develop for a largely unified architecture any longer or lean as heavily on high-level abstractions.
Yes, it's very hard to separate process from architectural (and implementation) design. And, as an industry, we're probably sticking our fingers in our ears more than we should about what happens when process shrinks really truly stop happening. And they will. There are still a variety of options but there's very little evidence they have anything like the legs of CMOS process scaling even if we do dump a big part of the problem on developers who don't get to develop for a largely unified architecture any longer or lean as heavily on high-level abstractions.