Re:Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
by justsid on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @08:27PM
(#25666001)
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.
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...