M1 Ultra About 3x Bigger Than AMD's Ryzen CPUs

Re:M1 Ultra About 3x Bigger Than AMD's Ryzen CPUs by GeekyBear on Sunday March 20, 2022 @02:49PM (#30745405)

> Not sure that applies to M1 Ultra that's clearly marketed as a desktop SoC, not a mobile device or laptop SoC.

The M1 Ultra is using the same CPU cores and GPU cores as an iPhone, just more of them.

It's long been their strategy across the board. Throw silicon die area at tons of execution units and run the chip at a lower clock speed for power efficiency.

For example, the 2012 A5X iPad chip had about the same die area as 4 core Ivy Bridge, which was huge for a mobile device SOC.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-review/4

Since they are selling the whole widget, they aren't as dependent on minimizing die area to maximize their profit margin.

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Re:M1 Ultra About 3x Bigger Than AMD's Ryzen CPUs by addaon on Sunday March 20, 2022 @03:03PM (#30745542)

> The M1 Ultra is using the same CPU cores and GPU cores as an iPhone, just more of them.

Not only that, but it's running them at basically the same clock speeds as the rest of the M1 family, and even as the iPhone. This suggests that they're running at not far above a best efficiency point, rather than way past the elbow of the voltage curve as is traditional for desktop chips.

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