Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by vizzier on Sunday December 20, 2020 @04:27AM (#25485023)

I believe this is the only consumer 5nm chip currently available as well. Ryzen gen 3 is still on 7nm. I'd be interested to see how well general purpose compute on the m1 vs ryzen gen 3 mobile will be.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by simonh on Sunday December 20, 2020 @05:56AM (#25485384)

The thing is M1 performance isn't really the point in itself though. This is the lowest performance core architecture Apple will ever produce for MacOS, aimed at their lowest end cheapest hardware. It's only one data point towards what we can expect when they take the gloves off and go after the performance end of the market for real.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by bloopernova on Sunday December 20, 2020 @06:37AM (#25485574)

I hope so, I'd love to see a more heterogeneous chip market, with x64, ARM, M1+, RISC-V all competing with each other.

Maybe compilers would be default spit out binaries that run on all of them, like Apple's Rosetta or whatever it's called.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by mbreese on Sunday December 20, 2020 @10:03AM (#25486652)

> binaries that run on all of them

Universal binaries. Apple calls those binaries “Universal binaries”. Rosetta is more like running different arch binaries through qemu. A brief look through Google says that there was a FatELF specification created years back, but never really went anywhere. Presumably because Linux users tend to know what arch they are using.

Fat binaries would make distribution easier, but would double (or triple) the size of a binary. I doubt it would be worth the size trade off.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by sitkack on Sunday December 20, 2020 @12:08PM (#25487698)

Binary size is a small percentage of the overall asset bundle.

Docker also supports multiarch images.

Given how easy it is to JIT or BT RISC ISAs, the future is good for binary portability.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by mbreese on Sunday December 20, 2020 @02:15PM (#25488754)

I’m thinking of all of the small utilities and small command line programs that make up a stock Linux distro. Those don’t have many resources other than the binaries. Sure, the size of each is not much in absolute scale, but combined, you have a pretty significant increase if they were all fat binaries.

That said, I don’t know what Apple does. For example, in the main download for Big Sur, is (for example) zsh a universal binary, or are there a specific x86/M1 downloads. I haven’t looked.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by musicale on Sunday December 20, 2020 @03:33PM (#25489284)

Looking at /usr/bin, /usr/lib/ etc. it's not quite as big as I expected. Going fat might be feasible, especially considering how large storage is at this point.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by sitkack on Sunday December 20, 2020 @06:31PM (#25490630)

My /usr/bin is 800M

    /usr/bin$ du -schL .
    813M total

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by leecb on Sunday December 20, 2020 @04:59AM (#25485129)

The Huawei Mate 40 came out two months ago, and uses the Hisilicon Kirin 9000, which is also on TSMC's 5nm. It has about 30% more transistors and a higher clockspeed than the A14.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by 1123581321 on Sunday December 20, 2020 @09:10PM (#25491476)

Would you say that the comparison to the A13 from this article is fair? https://www.notebookcheck.net/HiSilicon-Kirin-9000-Processor...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by AsyncAwait on Sunday December 20, 2020 @08:20AM (#25486044)

AMD has substantially more CPU/Microarch design experience.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V by molszanski on Sunday December 20, 2020 @05:27AM (#25485241)

"still on 7nm" :)

[ Parent | on HN ]