To your main points, they have yet to fully utilize advanced packaging (TSMC 3D for example) to get much more RAM in the SOC. They could also go off package at the expense of power, a good tradeoff for a desktop system. The die size is also small compared to competitive processors (120 mm^2) so they can certainly add more cores. I think with a larger cost budget they'll make the high end sing.
I don't mean to pick on you as you're not alone in what is a very natural skepticism. However, it is somewhat amusing to watch the comments about the M1 over time. When Apple announced the M1 based products many critics were crying impossible, faked, rigged benchmarks, etc... Now that the products have proven to have performance at least as good as claimed, lots of people are suggesting this is some kind of low end fluke result and the higher end systems won't be so great. Just wait. I think we are seeing a tipping point event where RISC (fueled by great engineering) is finally fulfilling its promise from many years ago.
> To your main points, they have yet to fully utilize advanced packaging (TSMC 3D for example) to get much more RAM in the SOC.
The big problem is as you get larger and larger amounts of RAM, the demand drops precariously. The number of people who need 16GB of RAM? Very large. The number who need 32GB is at least an order of magnitude smaller. The number who need 64GB another order of magnitude smaller. The number who need 256GB of RAM or more is likely in the low thousands or even hundreds.
Making a custom package for those kind of numbers becomes prohibitively expensive.
> I don't mean to pick on you as you're not alone in what is a very natural skepticism. However, it is somewhat amusing to watch the comments about the M1 over time. When Apple announced the M1 based products many critics were crying impossible, faked, rigged benchmarks, etc
I've figured from the start that Apple wouldn't make this transition unless there were a significant win here. In my above comment, I think I made it quite clear that I expect Apple's upcoming CPUs to outperform Intel.
I'm just not as certain the delta between Apple's top end CPUs and Intel/ AMD will be as great as the delta between the M1 and the Intel CPU it replaced. So for example, the M series chip might be 20-30% faster than the Intel in the 16" MacBook Pro, not double the performance as it was in the MacBook Air.
> The number of people who need 16GB of RAM? Very large. The number who need 32GB is at least an order of magnitude smaller. The number who need 64GB another order of magnitude smaller. The number who need 256GB of RAM or more is likely in the low thousands or even hundreds.
"need" can be a combination of objective and subjective takes, but I would posit that the amount who would at least purport to need 256GB+ is radically, radically higher than the low thousands.
In a laptop, low thousands might be about right. And for RAM, need captures it pretty well. Either you will once in your life need to do something that uses 256GB ram, in which case you need it, or you don't.
As for need, as alluded to in my previous reply generally I agree in an objective sense (although uses 256GB does not necessarily mean it needs it either). On the subjective side, I have long-observed that people will blindly assert that more memory is better even when they don't profile their peak physical usage and may easily never make use of the amount they have outside of disk caching. Even if folks don't need incredible amounts of memory, that doesn't necessarily stopping them from wanting it even if it provides little to no benefit.
Yes, I expect an ARM MacBook Pro not to be that massively faster in the peak pearformance, but it should run considerably cooler. This means sustained peak performance and overall less fan noise. If I have anything to critisize about the MB Pro, it is that there is just too much fan noise with even not so big loads and the machine just getting very hot. Adding more battery lifetime would also be a welcome improvement.
(Though, 8 high performance cores would also deliver a quite impressive speed)
I've had problems with MB Pros getting too hot for at least a decade. My 2008 model was actually too hot to use on my lap. Sun-burn level of hot if I wore shorts, or even something like pajama pants.
This is kind of what I expect of the 16" MBP and the higher end 13" MBP, cooler running with low/ no fan noise, tremendous battery life, 20-50% better performance than the M1, drop 8GB RAM and offer 32GB, better video performance (support dual 5k displays).
It's possible they will launch the iMac with the same chip as the MBP 16 as well.
Fair enough. I may have projected a number of other comments onto yours a bit. Sorry about that. If the delta is similar it would certainly be crazy fast.
As far as the packaging, I agree with your general assertion. However, they ship about 20 million computers and about 240 million iOS devices per year, all of which require custom SOC packages. Needless to say, they are a very large customer with their packaging suppliers. I could be wrong, but I think the leverage they get will keep the costs in line even for a smaller slice of their premium priced products.
Apple has always billed their big selling point in terms of performance per watt. That narrative might change.
I suspect even if the 16" Pro has more modest performance gains than the Air, it will still have massively better battery life. The iMac and Apple's bigger devices have a lot of thermal and power headroom to make up for the shortcomings of Intels CPUs.
It seems like Apple walked away from a bad PowerPC situation into Intel's arms only until they could do something like this... Especially after the past few years where Intel can't execute on the fab process and forced Apple to switch vendors when Intel couldn't execute on 5g.
> To your main points, they have yet to fully utilize advanced packaging (TSMC 3D for example) to get much more RAM in the SOC.
The M1 is using off the shelf LPDDR4 modules on the package but not on the die. 3D stacking is possible for denser DRAM modules but wouldn't make much sense compared to just adding 2 more DRAM modules and spending the physical space on it - there's more than enough room especially in devices like the Mac Mini. A boring ol' daisy chain setup would work perfectly fine here.
Interesting, where do you find the size of these dies? I was really curious about how large the Firestorm cores are compared to say Zen3 or Intel cores.
How many cores do you think Apple can realistically add? Can they get up to something like threadpiper. or are we talking more about something along the lines of a 12 core upper limit?
The Zen 3 is interesting. It has a separate IO chip coupled with one or two 8 core processors. The 8 core version has a total die area of about 80 + 125 = 205 sq mm. The 16 core is 285 sq mm.
Intel chips are all over the place depending on core design and number of cores. As an example from the reference above, a 6 core i7-8700K is about 154 sq mm. The i9-9900K is 180 sq mm and the 10 core is 206 sq mm.
How many cores can they add? From the die photograph of the M1, a very rough estimate of area dedicated to the 8 cores and associated cache is maybe 40 percent or 48 sq mm. Compared to the 205 sq mm for the 10 core i9, they could add about 16 more cores. Seems unlikely of course because of all the other things you have to do to support that. It is reasonable though to imagine a 180 to 200 sq mm Mx chip with maybe 16 CPU cores and perhaps a few more GPU cores. Fun.
The fundamental limit to die size is what's known as the reticle size. That's the maximum size of the stepped design that is repeated over the wafer. This is a limitation of the lithography equipment. That limit is around 850 sq mm, but no one builds a high volume chip anywhere close to that big because the yield and therefore the cost would be atrocious. Instead, several repeats of the design are included in the reticle and then that is stepped over the entire wafer.
More interesting is comparing core size, I think. Just spitballing in MS Paint, if we chop off the FP the Zen 3 core plus 1MB L2 is probably ~ 3 sq mm. The M1 seems to be about 2 Firestorm complexes high and 4 wide, so a complex would be 15 sq mm, or ~ 3.75 sq mm for a core plus 3MB L2.
I don't mean to pick on you as you're not alone in what is a very natural skepticism. However, it is somewhat amusing to watch the comments about the M1 over time. When Apple announced the M1 based products many critics were crying impossible, faked, rigged benchmarks, etc... Now that the products have proven to have performance at least as good as claimed, lots of people are suggesting this is some kind of low end fluke result and the higher end systems won't be so great. Just wait. I think we are seeing a tipping point event where RISC (fueled by great engineering) is finally fulfilling its promise from many years ago.