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by mschuster91 1411 days ago
> Apple or some other vendor cannot make an ARM chip so fast at a competitive cost that beats an x86 chip in emulation mode.

This reminds me of Iron Man 1... "Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps! - Well, I'm sorry. I'm not Tony Stark."

Apple has managed to pull it off so well that the M1 blasted an i9 to pieces [1]. The M1 is just so damn well more performant than an Intel i9 that the 20% performance loss compared to native code didn't matter.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-b...
2 comments
WkndTriathlete 1411 days ago
And for 99.9999% of users the M1 performance benchmarks vs. i9 _don't matter one bit._

The use case for the vast majority of laptops include I/O- and memory-bound applications. Very few CPU-bound applications are run on consumer laptops, or even corporate laptops, for the most part. CPU-bound applications should be getting run on ARM or GPU clusters in the cloud.

The use case for an M1 in laptops is the power benchmarks vs. an i9.

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mschuster91 1411 days ago
> The use case for the vast majority of laptops include I/O- and memory-bound applications.

Where the M1 just blows anything desktop-Intel out of the water, partially because they integrate a lot of stuff directly on the SoC, partially because they place stuff like RAM or persistent storage extremely close to the SoC whereas on desktop-Intel RAM, storage and peripheral controllers are all dedicated chips.

The downside is obviously that you can't get more than 16GB RAM with an M1 and 24GB RAM with the new M2's and you cannot upgrade either memory at all without a high-risk soldering job [1]... but given that Apple has the persistent storage so closely attached to the SoC to swap around, it doesn't matter all that much.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgr...

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khitchdee 1411 days ago
That performance difference is not due to architecture but process technology. Intel is on Intel' best node and Apple is on TSMC's.
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spookie 1410 days ago
No. The architecture is the biggest factor. Damn, even Jim Keller talks about how most programs use a very small subset of instructions. It isn't like RISC makes miracles, but sure helps them when your power budget is small.
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khitchdee 1410 days ago
That comparison is Intel 14nm vs. TSMC 5nm nodes. Please verify from the link. That's appx a one node difference. Intel fumbled the ball on EUV intro.
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