Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

[Eug]

M1
5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LP-DDR4
16 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 12 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache
(Apple claims the 4 high-effiency cores alone perform like a dual-core Intel MacBook Air)

8-core iGPU (but there is a 7-core variant, likely with one inactive core)
128 execution units
Up to 24576 concurrent threads
2.6 Teraflops
82 Gigatexels/s
41 gigapixels/s

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Products:
$999 ($899 edu) 13" MacBook Air (fanless) - 18 hour video playback battery life
$699 Mac mini (with fan)
$1299 ($1199 edu) 13" MacBook Pro (with fan) - 20 hour video playback battery life

Memory options 8 GB and 16 GB. No 32 GB option (unless you go Intel).

It should be noted that the M1 chip in these three Macs is the same (aside from GPU core number). Basically, Apple is taking the same approach which these chips as they do the iPhones and iPads. Just one SKU (excluding the X variants), which is the same across all iDevices (aside from maybe slight clock speed differences occasionally).

EDIT:



M1 Pro 8-core CPU (6+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 16-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 24-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 32-core GPU

M1 Pro and M1 Max discussion here:

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M1 Ultra discussion here:

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M2 discussion here:

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Second Generation 5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LPDDR5, up to 24 GB and 100 GB/s
20 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 16 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache

10-core iGPU (but there is an 8-core variant)
3.6 Teraflops

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Hardware acceleration for 8K h.264, h.264, ProRes

M3 Family discussion here:

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M4 Family discussion here:

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[name99]

Intel and Apple are not exactly the same type of company. Intel is a processor company that tries to ship as many processors as they can at the highest margin possible. They also happen to make GPUs and a shrinking number of other things. Apple is a technology lifestyle company that makes a broad range of technical devices and provides a platform for software distribution as well as their own software products. As part of what they deliver, they also happen to make their own in-house silicon.

Intel is under much greater pressure to maximize the ASP of each piece of silicon that they sell. For that goal, they have to aggressively bin each item, which results in the massive number of SKUs that they have historically sold.

Aggressive binning and lots of SKUs sounds like a great plan IF there isn't a cost to these behaviors. Problem is that there is. The most obvious (though not the only) such cost is how many intel initiatives have been sunk over the pats few years because they were not supported by developers, because they are not common enough across Intel chips.

AVX-512 is the obvious case. The various off-CPU accelerators that are limited to (some) Xeons remain up-in-the-air with it being unclear how valuable they actually are given how much they are (or are not) supported. And of course the whole Optane as DRAM extension thing died because Intel insisted on locking it to a few high-end Xeons.

I think the sort of behavior you describe provides a local optimum (local in time and space) for the product manager of the product in question.
But it usually doesn't provide a global optimum for *the company as a whole*...

 

[LightningZ71]

Oh, I don't disagree that the practice has it's issues. And Intel certainly took things a bit too far with Optane and the Xeon accelerators, though, I do think that there is likely an IP licensing issue at play there that would make them too costly to have enabled on every Xeon in that family. I'm just pointing out that, for Intel, at that time, it was important. They do seem to have fewer SKUs for each processor family on the consumer side lately, and they TEND to be less similar to one another as well.

 

[Doug S]

Aggressive binning and lots of SKUs sounds like a great plan IF there isn't a cost to these behaviors. Problem is that there is. The most obvious (though not the only) such cost is how many intel initiatives have been sunk over the pats few years because they were not supported by developers, because they are not common enough across Intel chips.

AVX-512 is the obvious case. The various off-CPU accelerators that are limited to (some) Xeons remain up-in-the-air with it being unclear how valuable they actually are given how much they are (or are not) supported. And of course the whole Optane as DRAM extension thing died because Intel insisted on locking it to a few high-end Xeons.

Intel was fine when they mainly had SKUs based on speed & power, and later on number of cores. Oh there were times like 486sx/486dx where you had important features like the FPU cut out in a cheaper SKU but they'd always rectify it in the next iteration (i.e. all Pentiums having an FPU, the Pentium/Pentium MMX split then all PPro and derived cores having MMX)

When they started binning on feature flag level stuff like not only AVX512 vs no AVX512 but different levels of AVX512 instruction support, different levels of virtualization support and so forth that's where it all went off track. They'd announce these new things but at the time of announcement no one knew what their product lines would look like, the price points they would be selling at, the markets they would be selling into etc. so how were developers supposed to be able to guess the size of their potential addressable market? But most importantly the old expectation that "everyone will get this feature in the next generation" was out the window. Sometimes the next generation would REMOVE the feature (e.g. SGX) so it was utterly predictable that developer support for newly introduced features has trended lower and lower outside of the enterprise server market where the old "next generation gets the stuff that's optional this generation" has remained mostly intact.

I suppose Apple has it easier since they don't have an enterprise market and don't really take the needs of business in general much into account. It is on the enterprise/business market where Intel has been playing all these games hoping to extract the maximum price for SKUs going into non-consumer markets from HPC to POS, and the consumer market is the worse for it. With Apple you get the same ISA feature set at the low end in Macbook Air and Mac Mini that do you at the high end in Mac Pro. You just get "more" of everything in the higher end.