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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[Eug]

Dude literally caved to the market and added USB to the ipod in a year, where as our current apple is more hardlining people into buying usb hubs and extra power bricks. He never pushed for firewire or thunderbolt because they were more expensive, it was because they were much faster and better. And IMO thunderbolt failed and became USB because without steves pressure on his suppliers, nobody wanted to keep innovating.

Side note: macOS 26 Tahoe finally kills off FireWire. I wasn't even aware it was still supported, considering the last Mac with it built-in was in 2011 or 2012.

Ironically though, I still have FireWire drives full of clean installs of old OS X versions. Makes repurposing ancient equipment much easier.

Right. I know that Apple always had an internal Intel build of Mac OS X from the start of development of that OS - starting a decade before they switched, and long before they knew they would switch. It was insurance, and it was a way to gauge where they were.

I'm sure Apple did have Mac OS X running on A series for long before the M series design, but don't overlook my statement here: "shifting MacOS not only to ARM, not only to preferentially ARM, but to preferentially Apple Silicon"

Yeah, and the SoC in the pre-M series Mac dev box was even called an A12Z too.

 

[johnsonwax]

So you're saying we can all blame Apple for the immense delays and mobile failure of the G5?

No but you're revealing the point that others are trying to make here. Apple could design the ISA, but they couldn't manufacture the product, and that was the problem. They were dependent on Moto and IBM to do that, as well as dependent on those two parties finding a market to provide the necessary scale for PowerPC, and they largely failed on that front, leaving Apple to carry most of that load, particularly after the G3. I don't think anyone but Apple used G5, and almost nobody else used G4. Apple didn't have enough control over the product to make it work. Now, that doesn't mean they would have made it work, but Motorola's financial struggles at that time and IBMs shifting focus meant that their partners were increasingly not partnering.

No it isn't. Its a continuation of Apples motives to ship good products but the idea that they need to make their own chips isn't really the full picture. In fact the only reason they make their own chips stems out of the iphone, and their angle for maximum battery life. Intel was literally working with apple to make a chip for the iphone but ultimately they couldn't do it.

Source for that? Everything I've ever read here and been told by insiders isn't that Intel couldn't make the iPhone chip, it's that they decided that it was going to take too much focus off of their x86 desktop business and were skeptical Apple could turn it into a viable product that they abandoned it as a business decision.

And you saw a lot of this at that time. Apple believed in the product, but Intel didn't and wouldn't commit to it. Apple had to get their 5 year exclusive deal with AT&T for similar reasons - Apple has to sweeten that pot to a huge degree to get a major carrier on board. This was the preceding problem they had with their retail channel - CompUSA didn't believe it would become a large enough revenue driver to train their staff and provide a good retail experience. Only Apple was willing to invest in that and had to create their own stores to do it. Apple was selling their product in Sears prior to the Apple Store launch. The former was the largest retailer in the world, and now doesn't exist, the latter is now the 14th largest retailer in the US. Apple was proven right in their belief in the product and their commitment to that paid off.

I really like Apple as a company but I have to completely disagree with your thinking here. Apple silicon isn't a direct result of steve job's ideology, but rather a result of the companies he has/had to work with at the time, and the people he would hire in the company. Steve's legacy is really knowing timing. Knowing when to make the ipod and working with industry vendors for the tiny HDDs, knowing to delay the tablet and give it a custom OS, knowing not to jump on the phone too early and wait for touch screen tech. He knew what made a good product and he did his best to make it happen.

But that doesn't explain why Apple has gone so strongly vertical. All of those things are true, but Apple could simply have operated as an integrator, being a step ahead of the rest of the industry. Instead they pulled every scrap of IP in-house, from sensors, to languages, to retail, to silicon, to services and in some cases to assembly. When Apple decided to move from stamped metal frames to aluminum unibody, they didn't wait for the industry to catch up to that - they designed mills specifically for their need and hired DMG Mori and Fanuc to manufacture them and for a period of a couple of years there Apple was buying roughly half of all the CNC mills being manufactured on the planet - and they were largely built to spec. Apple didn't time the market, they created it. DMG Mori built a secret factory that ONLY made mills for Apple. When HP execs asked their engineers for a similar product, they came back and said it would take 2-3 years in order to secure enough mills to do it - Apple had locked up the entire industry.

Apple had the only reliable fingerprint tech in the consumer space, in part because they bought the company that made the sensors, but also because they designed silicon to be able to process the sensor fast enough to work. Apple understood that in time that would become standard and commonplace, but they forced the timetable forward by several years by engineering it into existence. And in the process, Apple held ALL of the IP. They owned the sensors that nobody else could buy, they designed the silicon that nobody else could buy, they designed the software that nobody else could buy. That wasn't just a 'we're going to time the market' it was them controlling the market entirely and that happened because they recognized that they needed to own those elements.

Apple silicon is a very logical iteration from its origins (iphone) but ultimately I think the apple we have today isn't being run at all on the vision steve jobs had. Like, if he were alive, I think he would abhor the idea of apple trying to sell peripherals and adapters. Dude literally caved to the market and added USB to the ipod in a year, where as our current apple is more hardlining people into buying usb hubs and extra power bricks. He never pushed for firewire or thunderbolt because they were more expensive, it was because they were much faster and better. And IMO thunderbolt failed and became USB because without steves pressure on his suppliers, nobody wanted to keep innovating.

What the f even are you talking about? Steve didn't 'cave' on USB. One year later is when Apple shipped both the iTunes Music Store and iTunes for Windows. Apple had Firewire as a generally standard feature, but PCs didn't. In order for iPod to be a viable product for Windows, it had to be USB. That's why they switched.

Apple has explained why they don't ship a power adapter with every iPhone - everyone already has one, if not 10. I've got a drawer full of lightning and USB to AC adapters. Most people I know do.

But part of the reason why iPod prices fell under Jobs is that Apple didn't lose overall revenue on those sales. For every dollar they dropped the price they made up a dollar in the sale of peripherals and adapters. Watch this video and tell us again with a straight face that Jobs abhorred selling peripherals. This was a real product that Apple sold, and which Jobs pitched.

Thunderbolt failed because PC users would rather have cheap stuff than move their platform forward. It's why the iPhone got PCIe before most PCs did and why most PCs had to label their USB ports because they were too cheap to just make all of them good ones.

 

[Eug]

No but you're revealing the point that others are trying to make here. Apple could design the ISA, but they couldn't manufacture the product, and that was the problem. They were dependent on Moto and IBM to do that, as well as dependent on those two parties finding a market to provide the necessary scale for PowerPC, and they largely failed on that front, leaving Apple to carry most of that load, particularly after the G3. I don't think anyone but Apple used G5, and almost nobody else used G4. Apple didn't have enough control over the product to make it work. Now, that doesn't mean they would have made it work, but Motorola's financial struggles at that time and IBMs shifting focus meant that their partners were increasingly not partnering.

I thought the G4 was popular in embedded, but just not in the speeds and performance that Apple wanted. Embedded wanted low power low to mid performance G4s for not too much money. Apple wanted mid to high performance G4s.

Anyhow, my Synology NAS from 2013 runs on the G4.

What the fuck even are you talking about? Steve didn't 'cave' on USB. One year later is when Apple shipped both the iTunes Music Store and iTunes for Windows. Apple had Firewire as a generally standard feature, but PCs didn't. In order for iPod to be a viable product for Windows, it had to be USB. That's why they switched.

My understanding from that time was that Jobs did not want the iPod on Windows at all. It was designed as a halo product for Apple. If you wanted an iPod, you had to get a Mac. However, they then quickly realized the money that could made if it was Windows compatible so then they built iTunes for Windows and iPods for Windows.

BTW, iTunes for Windows had the same interface as iTunes for Mac, complete with the same Aqua buttons, etc.

 

[Doug S]

So yeah, Apple could do that, but there would need to be significant benefits. Essentially, Apple is already doing that but maintaining ARM compatibility, probably because it benefits them to be able to run most open source software, and almost everything out there has an ARM branch being maintained. That's not something Apple can just replace, and there's no reason to believe those maintainers would add an Apple ISA branch quickly, which would almost certainly require buying Apple hardware/software to compile, at least for a while.

I don't think that matters. Most software doesn't have an "x86" and "arm" branch, it has a Windows branch, a Linux branch, and a macOS branch. If there might be a handful of ifdefs for x86 or ARM even that would be pretty rare unless it doing something pretty low level (or the programmer isn't that smart) The CPU ISA rarely makes a difference for garden variety user mode C or C++ source code, let alone higher level languages.

Plus most Mac users aren't downloading and compiling stuff from source anyway. They're getting binaries that were specifically compiled for macOS, and if Apple still used x86 or had invented their own ISA from scratch that would be the compiler target used for those binaries.

I just don't think Apple depends all that much on the software infrastructure of the rest of the world. Certainly not an extent that it would influence their decision whether stick with ARM or invent their own ISA. There just isn't any gain for Apple to invent their own ISA. They already have the ability to add custom instructions under their license, as AMX showed. Unless they decided some type of profoundly new ISA (not just another RISC, but something that's not RISC or CISC at all) was the future. And who knows maybe there were guys deep inside the spaceship campus putting the first concepts of that on a whiteboard this week and it'll be shipping in 2037 lol

Don't underestimate how much Apple uses a bunch of tiny hidden ARM cores to manage stuff behind the scenes. If they counted all of them the iPhone might have over a dozen cores in total. They benefit from using ARM designed M0 etc. cores in places where performance isn't a factor and it isn't worth their designers time to roll their own. If they went their own way I suppose they could continue to use little ARM cores but there probably are some benefits having everything from top to bottom standardized around one ISA (or family of ISAs since some of those little cores are still 32 bit)

 

[Doug S]

What the f even are you talking about? Steve didn't 'cave' on USB. One year later is when Apple shipped both the iTunes Music Store and iTunes for Windows. Apple had Firewire as a generally standard feature, but PCs didn't. In order for iPod to be a viable product for Windows, it had to be USB. That's why they switched.

Its even simpler than that. When the iPod was designed USB 1.1 was the fastest there was. 480 Mbit USB 2 wasn't officially standardized until 2000, too late to make the first iPod design. So while they had USB available to them on those early Macs it just wasn't fast enough for a device with a 10 GB drive in it. Syncing would have been painful at 12 Mbps!

Even if the iPod had shipped with USB from day one it wouldn't have worked that well for Windows PCs since they were only just getting USB ports. Any PC older than a year or two wouldn't have USB ports at all and it wasn't until a couple years after USB 2.0's standardization that any of them had USB 2.0 ports.