[n7pdx]

"Dunno why every comment implies there's some design gap that leads to M1 or AMD being more powerful or efficient."

That is because there is a huge design gap. Intel architecture and design teams have always assumed on the inevitability of their own manufacturing superiority and process advantage and thus never had to really consider where to place transistors for the most benefit, or think really hard on better ways to improve single-thread performance instead of just turning a knob that was invented two decades ago.

In any case, your statement is just plain wrong. Dennard scaling has been dead for a decade now. Planar area decreases with new processes come with increased power density, i.e. new process nodes reduce die sizes but the transistor performance does not improve the way they used to.

source: worked at Intel for CPU design for a decade, then worked on the same things elsewhere using TSMC process

[toast0]

It also doesn't help that their design pipeline and their process pipeline were tightly linked. When Intel's "10 nm" process pipeline stalled, their design pipeline did as well. Alder Lake/Golden Cove is (or seems) to be the first really new design since Skylake, and it uses a lot of watts to compete. We'll see if they get their grove back with the next couple releases, I guess.

[adam_arthur]

Intel's chip is more powerful than M1 on an older process node. So where is the design gap?

[n7pdx]

LOL yeah. More powerful, i.e. it consumes more power. Fun fact: the M1 big core caps itself around the same wattage where most Intel SKU consider the core to be below stock wattage. As in, in order to achieve your “more powerful” claim, it takes Intel cores 2-7x the watts, depending on the workload, to eek out a marginal performance uplift… or sometimes just to match the M1.

Nobody in CPU design cares about unconstrained power performance. Even at Intel, they never use the PL2 power level as the design landing zone. All modeling is done at much lower power target, even below PL1.

That is to say: unconstrained power performance is not an engineering effort, it is a marketing and SKU differentiation effort. Your “more powerful” statement is a matter of how much power Intel/Apple/AMD/whoever is willing to shove into their piece of silicon, which in turn dictates the form factors and customers they can try to satisfy.

Apple only needs a few watts per big core and still get the peak perf it needs, and put that chip in all the form factors it sells. Obviously if M1 sucked down the kind of power as any Intel chip, it cannot go into an iPad, or a fanless macbook air, without totally compromising performance.

Intel on the other hand needs grossly more watts to hit that same performance, and therefore is losing badly on form factors that care about power: laptops and servers. Some form factors/customers just don’t care, which is why Intel cooks up marketing targeting the gamer market, or the 8-pound laptop market. That’s all fine, just don’t pretend Intel is not getting absolutely hammered on the CPU technical specs for the money-making markets that matter.

BTW, the DIY gamer CPU market does not matter. The 8-pound laptop market does not matter.

[adam_arthur]

Ok, so when Intel and AMD get on 5nm equivalents and their chips are both more powerful and efficient than the 5nm Apple chips, you'll issue a mea culpa here, right?

The fanboyism runs so deep it's amazing. Let's compare PS5 to GameCube next and talk about Sony's great engineering advantage

[n7pdx]

And when it doesn’t, will you apologize for calling everyone else a fanboy because they don’t buy into your excuses?

Go compare the perf/power curves of the alder-lake cores (both P/E) versus the last-gen Apple cores from TSMC n7+. TSMC n7+ is roughly comparable to Intel 10nm ESF in transistor performance, so it is a fair comparison.

Do your research then get back to me about how the process is entirely responsible for every perf/power difference and we (the silicon design teams) are just identical robots doing the same thing across the board in every company.

I do like how you claim there is no design magic sauce, but then Apple will lose big when Intel/AMD come out with their 5nm equivalents, as in, they found some magic sauce? WTF?

[adam_arthur]

Yes, if Intel on 5nm does not meet or exceed M1 on both perf and efficiency I will come back here and apologize