Yeah, you're talking about 20% performance changes on the same node.
Meanwhile, advancing a process from 7nm to 5nm TSMC is something like 45% better density (aka: 45% more transistors per mm^2) and 50% to 100% better power-efficiency at the same performance levels, and closer to the 100%-side of power-efficiency if you're focusing on idle / near-zero-GHz side of performance. (Pushing to 3GHz is less power of a power difference, but lower idles do have a sizable contribution in practice)
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Oh right: and TSMC N5P is 10% less power and 5% speed improvement over TSMC N5 (aka: what TSMC figured out in a year). There's the bulk of your 17% difference from A15 and A14.
Yeah, process matters. A LOT.
The bulk of efficiency gains has been, and for the foreseeable future will be, the efficiency of the underlying manufacturing process itself.
There's still a difference in efficiency above-and-beyond the 15.5% from the A14 to the A15. But its a small fraction of what the __process__ has given.
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Traditionally, AMD never was known for very efficient designs. AMD is more well known for "libraries", and more a plug-and-play style of chip-making. AMD often can switch to different nodes faster and play around with modular parts (see the Zen "chiplets"). I'd expect AMD to come around with some kind of chiplet strategy (or something along those lines) before I expect them in particular to take the efficiency crown.
NVidia probably would be better at getting high-efficiency designs. They're on a weaker 8nm Samsung process yet still have extremely good power/efficiency curves.
I like AMD's chiplet strategy though as a business, and as a customer. Its a bit of a softer benefit, and AMD clearly has made the "Infinity Fabric" more efficient than anyone expected it could get.
Not really. Apple's A15 and A14 phone chips are on the same process node.
>Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here – usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17%
The efficiency cores of the A15 have also seen massive gains, this time around with Apple mostly investing them back into performance, with the new cores showcasing +23-28% absolute performance improvements
https://www.anandtech.com/print/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perf...