A node shrink gives you a choice of cutting power, improving performance, or some mix of the two.

Apple appears to have taken the power reduction when they moved to TSMC 5nm.

>The one explanation and theory I have is that Apple might have finally pulled back on their excessive peak power draw at the maximum performance states of the CPUs and GPUs, and thus peak performance wouldn’t have seen such a large jump this generation, but favour more sustainable thermal figures.

Apple’s A12 and A13 chips were large performance upgrades both on the side of the CPU and GPU, however one criticism I had made of the company’s designs is that they both increased the power draw beyond what was usually sustainable in a mobile thermal envelope. This meant that while the designs had amazing peak performance figures, the chips were unable to sustain them for prolonged periods beyond 2-3 minutes. Keeping that in mind, the devices throttled to performance levels that were still ahead of the competition, leaving Apple in a leadership position in terms of efficiency.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14...

That seems like a pretty good trade off for mobile devices. They usually don’t have sustained performance needs, you aren’t going to render a movie or do other long running computational tasks. But mobile has a lot of bursty power demands: Launch dozens of app many times a day for example. You want your short-ish interactions with your phone to be snappy.

From a customer's perspective it's not my problem. Everyone had the opportunity to bid on that fab capacity and they decided not to.

Yeah, totally agreed. But if you read these comments, they seem to be in total amazement about the performance gap and not acknowledging how much of an advantage being a fab generation ahead is.

Customers don't care, but discussion of the merits of the chip should be more nuanced about this.

It also implies that the gap won't exist for very long, as AMD will move onto 5nm soon

> It also implies that the gap won't exist for very long, as AMD will move onto 5nm soon

... yes, if there is any capacity left. Capacity for the new process is a limited resource after all.

People keep pointing this out but has Intel had such significant performance improvements since sandy bridge? With x86 it seems that lately you would be foolish to upgrade less than once every 3-4 years because the difference is just not that significant

The i7-2600K (Sandy Bridge) benchmarks at ~5000 on Passmark, and the i7-10700K at about 20,000. So it seems they've had quite a bit of improvement. Note this is going from 32nm to 14nm.

Intel is in a really bad place now (in a forward-looking sense), primarily due to their fab process falling behind TSMC and others. You can't design your way ahead while using old manufacturing technology

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600K...

Over the last decade or so Apple has gone from 10x slower than Intel to parity, mostly by implementing techniques that were already known. Surpassing the state of the art may be harder to do consistently.

A node shrink is going to help AMD by 15% at best, they are much farther behind than that on performance per watt.

AMD has done mobile CPUs that look as if they are close to or even ahead of the M1 in performance, but they all use 2x to 4x as much power. When higher core count versions of Apple Silicon are available, they will be able to have double the core counts of AMD chips at the same power levels.

And each those cores are significantly faster than individual AMD cores.

AMD's mobile chips are still on Zen 2 cores, so they are behind the M1 on single core performance in both integer and floating point.

It's their desktop chips running Zen 3 cores that trade blows on single core integer math, depending on which benchmark you look at.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

Of course, on multi-core performance you can buy a desktop chip with a much higher Zen 3 core count than Apple offers.

The Ryzen 5950x has 135 watt TDP in actual use. That’s roughly 8x the M1.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

And Ryzen chips are offered with more cores, but that’s an extremely temporary advantage (reminds me of the friend who told me not to buy Apple stock because they didn’t have big screen phones).

When Apple fits 32 Firestorm cores in a 135 watt TDP package, AMD isn’t going to have an answer.

Power consumption is not linear as it relates to performance. CPUs designed for the desktop are going to use excessive power by design. They'll often use many times more power than mobile equivalent, but only have slightly better single core performance.

Here's a great example, Intel Core i9 (Desktop, 125w TDP) vs Intel Core i7 (Laptop, 15W). Huge power difference, only ~10% difference in single core clock speeds. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-10900K-v...

It might not be linear in terms of single core performance, where Apple already dominates, but it sure has a nearly linear relationship to multicore performance.

Ok, but their multicore score is only on par, not better than equivalent class chips on older fab generations. Where is the huge gap?

https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-x86-mobility-cpus-destroy...

Or check multicore scores here: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

m1 is better by 20% or so, but is 2 fab generations ahead of the intel chips

The M1 only has 4 Firestorm cores and 15 watts TDP. It’s other four cores are Icestorm cores offering roughly 1/10th the performance and 1/3rd the power draw.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2

The Ryzen 4900H is a 55 watt TDP part with eight performance cores. Despite that it’s far behind the M1 in GeekBench single core and multicore scores.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=4900H

Now as you shown it’s way ahead in Cinebench 23 Multicore benchmark. Let’s assume that’s more representative of real world use, and that being a process behind it will add 15% higher performance when AMD makes a 5 nm successor. That would increase its Cinebench Multicore to roughly 12,700, roughly 60% higher than the M1.

But all Apple has to do is come out with an M1X with eight Firestorm cores. That’s a multicore performance in the same range as the best possible 5 nm AMD CPU, and a TDP barely half of the AMD CPU. And far higher Cinebench single core, and GeekBench single/multicore ratings.

Obviously to swap Firestorm for IceStorm cores they need more transistors or something else has to go (on chip GPU?).

And Apple won’t be making 20 hour MacBook Airs out of this M1X, but they will be able to make 14 hour MacBook Pros with faster discrete GPUs.

And they are about 6 months from doing exactly that. Which is likely going to before AMD 5 nm, so top of line 4900H laptops get smoked on all Cinebench and GeekBench scores while using nearly double the power.

Apple M1 is fully optimized for efficiency because it's delivered from mobile SoC and still aimed for portable laptop, meanwhile Zen3 (or Willow Cove) arch is aimed for all laptop/desktop/server category so they optimized for both efficiency and max performance.

Even though M1 is designed for efficiency, it sometimes outperforms AMD/Intel for performance. That confuses the story.

The 5nm vs 7nm vs 10nm vs whatever nm narrative is highly reminiscent that of clock rate flame wars raging in the tech bubble over a decade ago. Back in the early aughts, when the great engineering was still a thing, alternative CPU designs (DEC Alpha 21264, MIPS 10k/12k, PA RISC, POWER and later UltraSPARC designs) were consistently outperforming any x86 design by at least an order of magnitude or more whilst being clocked at 30% to 50% less of the x68 designs, especially in FP operations. The alternative designs explored and utilised wider and deeper pipelines, bigger L1 caches and various optimisations across the entire CPU arch. Every alternative CPU design had something unique to offer, and that was a great thing to read about and study.

The commoditisation of the PC hardware has driven great CPU designs into an extinction. Heck, even Oracle, that are now in the business of litigation for fun and a massive profit, with its prodigious cash war chest has discontinued the UltraSPARC architecture due to it requiring extraordinary investments on multiple fronts. PC users have long been forced to be content with whatever bone the CPU architecture coloniser would throw at them. There appears to be a resurgence of the great engineering with M1, and, hopefully, that will lead to more of the thoughtful engineering in medium to long term.

M1 is fast due to: a solid, single vision of what a modern CPU should be like, continuous investment into R&D over an extended period of time, a well concerted effort of the engineering, design ideas reuse across multiple product lines, supply chain management, and, of course, the manufacturing process. Nanometers do not make for a great CPU design but rather play a supporting role. If the nanometers were so important, the 2017 POWER9 design manufactured at a 14 nm process with a smaller L1 cache would not have been able to outperform any existing x86 design in 2020 in both, single core and multi core (with 25% to 50% lesser number of physical cores) setups? Ryzen 3 has narrowed the gap, but POWER9 still takes the lead and POWER10 is around the corner.

There is a great quote by Michael Mahon, a principal HP architect, in the foreword to the PA RISC 2.0 CPU architecture handbook from 1995:

The purpose of a processor architecture is to define a stable interface which can efficiently couple multiple generations of software investment to successive generations of hardware technology. Stability and efficiency are the goals, and the range of software and hardware technologies expected during the architecture’s life determine the scope for which the goals must be achieved

...

Efficiency also has evident value to users, but there is no simple recipe for achieving it. Optimizing architectural efficiency is a complex search in a multidimensional space, involving disciplines ranging from device physics and circuit design at the lower levels of abstraction, to compiler optimizations and application structure at the upper levels.

Because of the inherent complexity of the problem, the design of processor architecture is an iterative, heuristic process which depends upon methodical comparison of alternatives («hill climbing») and upon creative flashes of insight («peak jumping»), guided by engineering judgement and good taste.

To design an efficient processor architecture, then, one needs excellent tools and measurements for accurate comparisons when «hill climbing,» and the most creative and experienced designers for superior «peak jumping.» At HP, this need is met within a cross-functional team of about twenty designers, each with depth in one or more technologies, all guided by a broad vision of the system as a whole.

Well executed holistic approach is the reason why the entry level M1 is fast. We need more of «holistic-ism» in engineering everywhere.

Sorry, but alternate CPU designs were never outperforming x86 by an "order of magnitude", especially not at a lower clock speed. That is a complete exaggeration. I was around during that time period and can find nothing that supports this. The Alpha was fast, yes, but you're talking 2 to 3x best case with floating point compared to a 2 to 3x cheaper Intel system. I did find some old benchmarks: http://macspeedzone.com/archive/4.0/WinvsMacSPECint.html

UltraSPARC was not very competitive. Those machines were very, very expensive and you didn't get much bang for the buck. They weren't even that fast. The later chips had tons of threads but single threaded performance was pretty bad...