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by acdha 677 days ago
That appears to be an unconfirmed rumor and it’s exciting if true (and there aren’t major caveats on power), but did you notice how they mentioned extra work by ARM? The argument isn’t that Apple is unique, it’s that the performance gaps they’ve shown are more than simply buying premium fab capacity.

That doesn’t mean other designers can’t also do that work, but simply that it’s more than just the process - for example, the M2 shipped on TSMC’s N5P first as an exclusive but when Zen 5 shipped later on the same process it didn’t close the single core performance or perf/watt gap. Some of that is x86 vs. ARM but there isn’t a single, simple factor which can explain this - e.g. Apple carefully tuning the hardware, firmware, OS, compilers, and libraries too undoubtably helps a lot and it’s been a perennial problem for non-Intel vendors on the PC side since so many developers have tuned for Intel first/only for decades.
2 comments
AnthonyMouse 676 days ago
> for example, the M2 shipped on TSMC’s N5P first as an exclusive but when Zen 5 shipped later on the same process it didn’t close the single core performance or perf/watt gap.

That was Zen 4, but it did close the gap:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/R9-7945HX3D-vs-M2-Max_15073_14...

Single thread performance is higher (so is MT), TDP is slightly lower, Cinebench MT "points per watt" is 5% higher.

We'll get to see it again when the 3nm version of Zen5 is released (the initial ones are 4nm, which is a node Apple didn't use).

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cubefox 677 days ago
Since it's unclear whether Apple has a significant architectural advantage over Qualcomm and MediaTek, I would rather attribute this to relatively poor AMD architectures. Provisionally. At least their GPUs have been behind Nvidia for years. (AMD holding its own against Intel is not surprising given Intel's chip fab problems.)
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acdha 677 days ago
Yes, to be clear I’d be very happy if MediaTek jumps in with a strong contender since consumers win. It doesn’t look like the Qualcomm chips are performing as well as hoped but I’d wait a bit to see how much tuning helps since Windows ARM was not a major target until now.
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