[HN Gopher] Arm Unveils Next-Gen Flagship Core: Cortex-X3
___________________________________________________________________
Arm Unveils Next-Gen Flagship Core: Cortex-X3
Author : rbanffy
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-06-29 11:06 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fuse.wikichip.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (fuse.wikichip.org)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This is still a mobile chip. The real "flagship" cores should be
| in the Neoverse line.
| Veliladon wrote:
| Neoverse is a mobile chip based on putting massive amounts of
| aggregate power vs die area. It's not a flagchip architecture
| because it's very conservative as far as execution goes. It
| just lumps stacks of cores on a single die and lets the
| OS/workload dictate the performance.
|
| In comparison an X3 is a much faster chip clock-for-clock per
| watt on a per core basis because it's built for ultimate ST
| performance on a power budget. X3 has a full 6-way decoder vs 4
| on Ares. So straight off the bat you can decode 1.5x as many
| instructions. X3 has a 320 entry ROB vs 128 on an N1 so you can
| keep over twice as many instructions in flight. An N1 has 3 ALU
| pipes, an ALU with MAC and DIV, and two FPU pipes. X3 on the
| other hand has 4 ALU, an ALU/MUL pipe, and an ALU/MAC/DIV pipe.
| On the FPU side it has two FMAC pipes and two FDIV pipes.
|
| The X3 is a much larger and more powerful core than an N2
| little alone an N1 and deserves to be called a flagship core in
| every sense of the word.
| [deleted]
| kramerger wrote:
| Everytime CPU stuff is discussed it is quickly hijacked into
| praising Apple.
|
| Can we have a discussion about this CPU instead of talking about
| others? M1/M2 are not even the current top performing CPUs...
| babypuncher wrote:
| Probably because the M1/M2 are kings of the roost as far as
| consumer hardware goes. No consumer ARM chip comes close, and
| Intel needs 3-4x more power draw just to match Apple on
| performance.
|
| The M1 is the stick by which all new ARM chips are going to be
| measured for a while.
| tensor wrote:
| Discussing chip design in contrast to other chips is useful for
| discussion.
| chasil wrote:
| "Perhaps more critically, the new core offers exclusive support
| for only AArch64 - dropping 32-bit support altogether."
|
| I don't understand why ARM wants to throw away
| AArch32/Thumb/Jazelle et al.
|
| This really shouldn't be in a phone - a lot of Android apps
| bundle 32-bit binaries for various purposes, and they won't run
| on this CPU.
|
| I can see why Fujitsu mandated AArch64, but my phone isn't
| going to be on the Top 500, and there were benefits to these
| old instruction sets.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| There are also benefits to cleaning up silicon. Eg: less
| transistors per core can mean more cores or less power or
| both.
| chasil wrote:
| If this were the case, then it would be better still to
| design a totally new instruction set.
|
| Why cling to any remnant?
| msbarnett wrote:
| AArch64 is, effectively, a totally new instruction set.
| It was designed to allow for fully regular decoding,
| unlike AArch32 & Thumb, which is a big part of why
| getting those off of the chip is a big win - it's not
| just the decoders you clean up, you can now make your
| pipeline and speculation deeper because you can peek N
| instructions into the future without having to decode the
| N-1 instructions in front of it first to figure out where
| the Nth instruction lies. That's part of why you see
| AArch64-only designs like this and the A12+ cores with
| much larger reorder buffers.
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| Binary compatibility is no longer a huge concern. By now only
| very old programs will require arm32 support and most current
| offers on any app store will have been recompiled for the
| latest and greatest (because software writers also want to
| look better on newer CPUs). Plus, if the new hardware is that
| much faster, you may not even need to pack native blobs.
| chasil wrote:
| Of the Raspberry PIs, only the 3rd generation is capable of
| AArch64.
|
| Because of this, very few Linux distros supporting the PI
| are 64-bit (Oracle Linux is the only one that comes to
| mind).
|
| There does indeed remain a large AArch32 community that
| cannot move, and they will never, ever cross this gulf.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A new chip not supporting arm32 does not prevent software
| for being built for the platform. While there are enough
| users, the distros will be maintained.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Emulation ought to suffice for support of programs compiled
| for 32 bits.
| iasay wrote:
| You're right but they are the only ones shipping in something
| that isn't a turd.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > M1/M2 are not even the current top performing CPUs...
|
| What are?
| monocasa wrote:
| They're the top performing Arm CPUs.
| homerowilson wrote:
| Maybe? There exist some extreme-performance ARM CPUs like
| A64FX from Fujitsu.
| monocasa wrote:
| I would be shocked if an A64FX core could go toe to toe
| with a Firestorm on general code. It just doesn't make
| sense for Fujitsu's use case to spend nearly as many gates
| on general improvements versus more vector ALUS.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They are the top performing ARM computers you can go to a
| store and buy. I'd love to have an HPE Ampere or a POWER
| tower under my desk, but it's not easy to get anything like
| those, and certainly not for a price competitive with
| generic x86.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Are we confusing things?
|
| They're both RISC, but P9/P10/etc is based on IBM's own
| Power microarchitecture (possibly open sourced / open
| standard), I wasn't aware it had anything to do with Arm?
| I could be hopelessly wrong...
|
| Or do you mean something different with "POWER"?
| rbanffy wrote:
| There are other interesting ISAs that are not arm64.
| Sadly, the only ones that still could be viable desktop
| (more like deskside) are either server-grade ARM or IBM's
| POWER (and none of them makes Mac Minis).
| mhh__ wrote:
| Owning an IBM Power system is a daydream of many nerds
| apparently.
|
| And power is open in that the ISA is open. Power10 is a
| bang up to date CPU so the internals are all closed.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The A64FX is a very specific microarchitecture that's aimed
| at big core counts rather than being a single threaded
| monster.
| akmittal wrote:
| I hate Apple for lots of things. But they have done exceptional
| work with M1/M2. Imagine that power efficiency on servers.
| Saving so much energy.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| It is exceptional work, but the system-on-a-chip design is a
| form of compromise, especially with regard to the
| availability and pricing of RAM configurations. The current
| MacBooks ship with the same amount of RAM as my Android
| phone.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Imagine that power efficiency on servers. Saving so much
| energy.
|
| There's no magic in those chips. Power efficiency is a design
| parameter you may optimize for or not, and ARM server chips
| dissipate more power because they have a lot more cores, more
| memory controllers, more cache, more IO, and, in general, a
| lot more stuff than a personal computer CPU would make sense
| to have. Computation per computation, they are not far from
| each other.
|
| Intel's x86 ISA mandates a more computation to happen per
| amount of useful computation served - lots of memory write
| reordering, lots of instruction alignment (instructions can
| have from 1 to 15 bytes, IIRC) and other operations that do
| not translate into anything useful for the user beyond a
| higher IPC if your instruction stream is just right, but,
| also dissipate a lot of power for that.
| izzydata wrote:
| But is Apple ever going to allow their CPUs to be used for
| anything other than their own products? If it isn't even an
| option then it is mostly irrelevant. I can't get a Windows
| laptop with an Apple M2 so it isn't worth checking how
| efficient of a CPU it is compared to Intel and AMD.
| Sakos wrote:
| My workplace gave me a choice between an M1 Macbook or an
| Intel-based Lenovo. Even though I'd never used a Mac full-
| time before, it was a no-brainer and I picked the Macbook.
| It absolutely does matter.
| klelatti wrote:
| Actually it's not irrelevant. Lots of people choose between
| a Mac and Windows and the M chips up the competitive
| pressure on Intel and AMD to improve their offerings.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Dropping the M2 into the same entry level Macbook Pro they
| sold last year gains you a couple of hours of battery life as
| well as a performance increase.
|
| https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-
| pro-2022-battery-l...
|
| That's pretty impressive for staying on the same process
| node.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| That battery life test is understating the advantage Apple
| has over x86, probably because it's idling too much. The
| gap in a more CPU intensive web browsing test is more like
| 2x more than competing x86 ultralights [1].
|
| [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-
| Pro-13-2022-M2-L...
| [deleted]
| akmittal wrote:
| Truly amazing, most people (including me) thought after M1
| perf gains will be marginal
| undersuit wrote:
| When I first loaded this article your comment was on top and
| had no comments. It's still on top and the comments are talking
| about M1/M2. You applied the Streisand Effect to yourself.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Top performance CPUs in whose laptops?
|
| My alder lake is faster than an M1, my alder lake needs 4 fans
| akmittal wrote:
| I feel Mobile CPUs are fast enough from last 5-6 years. Its the
| battery tech which is lagging.
|
| On Laptop/Server side Qualcomm need to catch up to AMD/Apple.
| usrn wrote:
| After my experiences with Android I will never ever buy
| another device with a Qualcomm SoC again.
| arifmeticus wrote:
| Could you explain why?
| akmittal wrote:
| I had totally different experience, One i bought with
| Exynos was Battery hog, Mediatek ones generally have bad
| performance.
| danielEM wrote:
| I'm also curious what were your experiences with android
| that were affected by Qualcomm?
| uni_rule wrote:
| Maybe they had an 810 crap out on them
| rbanffy wrote:
| After my experiences with Android, it'll be really
| difficult to make me buy an Android phone.
|
| Compared to iOS, everything is slightly clunkier.
| karamanolev wrote:
| I'll take "slightly clunkier" before "extremely locked
| down and limited in unthinkable ways" any day, and not
| just for Android, but in general.
| frostwarrior wrote:
| IMHO that's because Apple was the first to bother optimizing
| an ARM CPU for performance instead of battery life.
|
| The performance per watt in ARM exceeded x86 since long ago,
| but most manufacturers used that feat to create mobile CPUs
| instead of cranking up the power to see if it catches up to
| high performance x86
| akmittal wrote:
| I think reason is that Qualcomm need to sell to Phone
| makers so they can't make their SoC very expensive.
|
| On the other hand Apple can make expensive SoC without
| worrying about sales
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Apple has a big advantage over Microsoft in terms of
| building PCs.
|
| Apple can decide that it is switching from Intel to ARM
| and not looking back so it not only realizes costs from
| investing in ARM but it ultimately will realize savings
| from not having to support Intel.
|
| There is no real unity behind Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo and
| all the other vendors, plus the motto of Windows users is
| "who moved my cheese?" You don't use Windows because
| Windows is the best operating system, you use Windows
| because it has the most software, and that software is
| written for and optimized for the x86 platform. Microsoft
| is always floating ARM-based systems as a hobby but it
| cannot make the commitment that it is going "all in" so
| it has to support Intel as the primary processor for the
| foreseeable future, so the ARM transition costs Microsoft
| but never saves them anything.
|
| On top of that Microsoft is dependent on vendors like
| NVIDIA and AMD to supply drivers for graphics cards and
| all the other parts for their machines and getting them
| all to supply good drivers for ARM is yet another big
| ask. Apple can say "here is the supported hardware" and
| not have to fight with vendors who have the power to
| torpedo their ambitions.
| K0SM0S wrote:
| Thank you for a rather enlightening perspective. That
| explains a lot of big tech behaviors around the x86/ARM
| frontier that I had failed to grasp.
|
| I find it somewhat ironic that in wanting for a few CEO's
| to _" Embrace... Extinguish"_ Linux in favor of Windows,
| Microsoft eventually created a world where Windows is a
| sink on their resources they yet can't axe because though
| not anymore a money-maker in its own right, Windows
| remains the basis for pretty much all their money-makers.
| In becoming a "software-first" company, they pretty much
| followed if not provoked the very paradigm that makes
| Windows a non-monetizable entity next to as-good-as-
| embedded MacOS and ever-free Linux.
|
| Linux which, incidentally, is also THE basis for money-
| makers worldwide and the OSS model means nobody using it
| today had to fork even 1% of the real cumulative cost of
| that kernel + ecosystem since the 1990's. How's that for
| a win, _Linux 1:0 Microsoft_ -- that the winner did not
| even seek, busy doing its own thing, while the other
| pretty much dug its own commercial grave out of
| 'relevance debt' (not sure how to word what Windows has
| become)...
|
| TL;DR: it's like this big item taking all your inventory
| yet that you can't ditch _ever_ because it 's required to
| do all your quests. In games, you wish devs forgot about
| that crap and just made the inventory that much smaller.
| In real life, Microsoft can't kill Windows without
| closing business overnight. sad_pikachu_face.jpg
|
| [Note that IMHO, MS is incredibly strong nowadays, so
| they'll find a way, and this is a fantastic learning
| experience for the industry.]
| _ph_ wrote:
| At minimun, Microsoft could try for real. In 2019 Samsung
| announced the Galaxy Book S with an ARM processor. Looked
| like a nice compact laptop. I would have been interested
| in it, but it was basically never available and limited
| to Windows for ARM. Which isn't even officially sold by
| Microsoft, you can run it fine on the new Macs in a VM,
| but only as a part of the beta test access. Even if
| Microsoft cannot force the whole market to ARM - and
| might not even desire to do so - at least they could
| treat Windows 11 for ARM as a full product.
| bombcar wrote:
| If Microsoft wanted to really try an ARM push they could
| do worse than releasing a Surface laptop _with amazing
| out-of-the-box Linux support_ ; it might not sell a ton
| to Windows users, but they could get something moving.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Speaking of battery-tech and mobile. I wish I can get "today
| phones" but with a "thick option". i.e add 2-3mm in thickness
| for greater battery capacity ?
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Apple has made the last few generations of iPhones thicker
| to do exactly that.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| How much do you want? Motorola has a couple of 6000 mAh
| battery options, and I think even Samsung has a few 5500
| mAh models.
| danielEM wrote:
| Yes, they are so fast that I would be happy to use my phone
| as a computer if the industry didn't make it close to
| impossible
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| try to use ffmpeg on termux and on a regular laptop. beyond
| some slight timing difference, my tests on a random file
| gave me similar results which is amazing
| MR4D wrote:
| My gut tells me that if we could, there would be phones
| catching on fire all over the place.
|
| Although a phone has tons of power, and can probably
| function as a low-end desktop, the lack of a sizeable
| cooling solution, or even just a plain heatsink, would
| cause it to throttle pretty quickly.
|
| I have to believe this is the reason, or otherwise someone
| would have done it already (successfully that is) for such
| an obvious use case.
| aszantu wrote:
| Missed opportunity to call it coretex
| rekoil wrote:
| Core-Tex(tm)
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| Don't mess with Core-Tex.
| frostwarrior wrote:
| 8 High performance CoreTex cores and 2 low performance
| CoreMex cores
| phlipski wrote:
| CoreChex - for that extra crunch!
| johnebgd wrote:
| Intel would file a "crash" lawsuit.
| varispeed wrote:
| They could call it Cortex-Vapour. I mean very much every popular
| MCU is out of stock anywhere. Throwing new cores into broken
| market will only exacerbate problems - the production lines will
| be clogged by new cores while businesses still wait for the older
| cores.
| picture wrote:
| Here lies an unique property of semiconductor fabrication:
| unlike other resources like grains where you can just feed in
| different raw materials to a factory and get your desired
| output, it is very difficult to reconfigure a fab workflow to
| use even a slightly different process, and downright impossible
| to switch between generations (5 nm to 22 nm) without near
| complete replacement of every equipment.
|
| You won't be able to directly increase production of what's
| actually really hard to get at the moment (microcontrollers and
| small functional devices using "ancient" process nodes) by
| decreasing production of cutting edge processes
| kache_ wrote:
| Cooler. Faster. This is the decade of low wattage CPU chips :)
| rekoil wrote:
| Finally. CPUs have been _fast enough_ for a while now, about
| time the industry starts pushing efficiency and battery life
| instead.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Not if you ask electron devs
| mech422 wrote:
| Gotta admit that made me snort :-D
| rekoil wrote:
| Shiiiiet. :(
| rbanffy wrote:
| For them, memory volume and bandwidth are probably more
| important than single-thread performance.
| sceadu wrote:
| emacs - electron making apps constantly swap
| rayiner wrote:
| Pretty underwhelming considering the current delta between
| Apple's A15 and the X2. I wonder if ARM is hampered by having to
| release a design that has to work on more than just the most
| cutting edge TSMC process.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Given that Apple's CPUs aren't available in cloud deployments,
| I couldn't care less other than when doing iDevices projects.
| ksec wrote:
| ~20% Pref Increase ( Clockspeed + IPC ) gives you a Single Core
| GB5 score close to A14. Considering the transistor and power
| budget, and the IP cost of X3 I actually think this is pretty
| damn impressive.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Apple has an architectural license that allows them to build
| their own compatible processor [1] purely targeted to what they
| need.
|
| [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319968-google-
| microsof...
| MikusR wrote:
| So does Applied Micro, Broadcom, Cavium, Huawei, Nvidia, AMD,
| Samsung, Marvell, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel, Faraday
| monocasa wrote:
| Apple has something deeper than the architectural license
| the others listed have. They've gone further with changes
| than others are allowed to.
| kramerger wrote:
| This is not true.
| monocasa wrote:
| Which part? I could come up with a half dozen ways off of
| the top of my mins that the M1 cores don't comply with
| the Arm ARM. Not being able to turn of VHE in EL2 is one
| example. And Arm has stated widely that architectural
| license holders have to comply with the Arm ARM still.
| kramerger wrote:
| You are assuming that no other company has this type of
| license or has done this type of architectural changes.
| That is not true.
|
| See monocasa's comment.
| monocasa wrote:
| I am monocasa; that was my comment.
|
| And the reason that I'm assuming that no one else has the
| same 'special relationship' is that it's a not well kept
| secret that Apple designed large parts of the base
| AArch64 with ARM and simply owns the IP on large parts of
| the ISA, similar to how at this point both AMD and Intel
| practically own x86 due to their different contributions
| over the years. Qualcomm, et al can not say the same.
| kramerger wrote:
| Huh, I meant MikusR :(
|
| Anyway, I think my comment is still valid.
|
| The "special relationship" is just fanboy fantasy.
| Qualcomm and Marvell have both in past done ground up
| designs that significantly differs from any ARM silicon.
|
| If you don't believe me, fell free to provide actual
| proof of this special license.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| I've yet to see QC add custom instructions to their
| cores.
| monocasa wrote:
| It's been posted elsewhere, diverging from the ARM
| Architecture Reference Manual in ways that other chips
| have not. New instructions in spaces like ML,
| decompression, new privilege modes, features that are
| fixed on that are specficed to be optional at runtime,
| etc.
|
| Particularly the new instructions are damning as ARM has
| said they are specifically disallowing custom
| instructions this go around in order to combat
| architecture fragmentation.
| kramerger wrote:
| https://www.arm.com/technologies/custom-instructions
| monocasa wrote:
| If you read that link, it's specifically for ARMv8-M
| microcontroller class cores. ARMv8-A has no similar
| program.
| MikusR wrote:
| I have seen comments saying that but no sources.
| monocasa wrote:
| It's widely been stated including by Arm that
| architectural license holders must still fully comply
| with the Arm Architecture Reference Manual. Apple's Arm
| cores do not.
| dagmx wrote:
| In what way are they non conforming?
| monocasa wrote:
| Dozens of different ways. New instructions, new privilege
| modes, VHE mode in EL2 can't be turned off, etc.
| msbarnett wrote:
| Obviously some of those are intentional architectural
| deviations, but is there a good reason to believe the
| stuck HCR_EL2.E2H bit isn't just an errata?
| jeffbee wrote:
| AppliedMicro's architectural license is now held by Ampere.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Another way of saying this that I think is somewhat more
| accurate is that they're constrained by designing for an
| acceptable transistor budget, which sort of correlates to a
| particular node. IIRC, Apple's chips are _significantly_ larger
| in terms of transistor count than their competitor's chips. A
| design that uses an equivalent # of transistors - a very messy
| and inaccurate proxy for a requirement for perf parity - would
| likely price it out of the range of most phone manufacturers
| unless built on the newest process. Frankly, it may not be an
| acceptable cost even at the newest node - Apple seems willing
| to spend a bit more on their chips than most, and likely gets
| better prices in any case due to the size of their orders.
| pdpi wrote:
| > A design that uses an equivalent # of transistors - a very
| messy and inaccurate proxy for a requirement for perf parity
|
| At some point it got twisted into "double the speed", but
| Moore's Law as originally formulated was precisely about this
| - doubling transistor count.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It wasn't really a matter of twisting. The phrase "Moore's
| Law" got coined in an interview at the same 1975 conference
| where Dennard presented on his scaling laws and has never
| referred just to the first periodic doubling Moore noted in
| his 1965 paper.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Back then, the transistor switching speed was 1:1
| correlated with size and the sizes we're talking about
| then the size dominated (capacitance between gate &
| source). That decoupled in the late 90s / early 00s (if
| my recollection of news is correct) & kept getting more
| decoupled. These days you can have a switching speed of
| 604 Ghz but that doesn't translate to overall clock speed
| (dominated by critical path latency of your pipeline) +
| there's thermal issues.
|
| Disclaimer: Not an EE / HW designer. Going off of memory
| from tech news + some university courses (info may be
| incorrect / stale).
| Symmetry wrote:
| It was more that leakage current (i.e. thermal issues)
| and velocity saturation suddenly becoming constraints on
| how much you could increase switching speed along with
| the difficulty of high frequency clock distribution. Your
| individual transistor switching speed is always going to
| be a lot faster than your clock speed because a pipeline
| stage has to be made up of many layers of transistors to
| get anything useful done (including latch the signal at
| the clock edge!) and each transistor will typically drive
| multiple others.
|
| I was seriously considering being a chip engineer for a
| while and did my master's thesis on adder design.
| tyingq wrote:
| Another example might be this Cortex-X3 being the first in
| ARM's X line to drop the 32 bit ISA, where Apple had dropped
| that in the A11. That gave Apple several iterations to take
| advantage of whatever simplifications or reclaimed transistor
| budget came from dropping it.
|
| Edit: Small miss above...Cortex-X2 dropped aarch32, though
| that's 2021 versus Apple doing it in 2017 with the A11, so
| the overall point is the same.
| kramerger wrote:
| Hasn't aarch32 always been optional in armv8? I mean,
| technically you can emulate it in software.
|
| It was simply no market for solo aarch64 before, since a
| lot of costumers wanted the backup of having aarch32
| compatibility.
| gsnedders wrote:
| Cortex-X2 dropped A32 & T32.
| tyingq wrote:
| Ah...yep, I was was wrong there. Though still much later
| than the Apple/A11...2017 vs 2021.
|
| What the article says on this topic:
|
| _" The process of eliminating 32-bit and optimizing for
| the 64-bit ISA exclusively has been a 2-step process.
| With the Cortex-X2, the underlying circuitry used for
| handling 32-bit architectural-related elements was
| removed, saving on transistors and simplifying some
| structures. With the new Cortex-X3, the design team took
| the time to start optimizing specifically for AArch64."_
| mkj wrote:
| Do Apple's chips keep 32bit compat? That seems a big win in the
| x3.
| msbarnett wrote:
| No, like the X3 they dropped 32-bit compatibility (Apple
| dropped it in the A11, ARM dropped it for Cortex-X in the X2)
| gchadwick wrote:
| > I wonder if ARM is hampered by having to release a design
| that has to work on more than just the most cutting edge TSMC
| process.
|
| They're constrained by what their customers want. Yes it's nice
| to have the highest performing chip but plenty of space in the
| mobile market for less than best CPUs. Anyone buying arm CPUs
| doesn't have the A15 as an option so in a sense it's not a
| competitor. Someone selling premium phones is trying to out-
| compete apple but how much does the raw performance stats
| matter to the consumer markets?
|
| I think there's also a tendency for everyone to want to do
| their own CPU now. Qualcomm and Samsung might want their arm
| micro-architecture to be the A15 killer and only buy the lower
| performance cores off arm for instance.
| gumby wrote:
| > I think there's also a tendency for everyone to want to do
| their own CPU now.
|
| I wonder how many of these are actually vanity projects?
| Apple spent billions for more than a decade on ARM
| development before using their own design as a central
| processor.
|
| OTOH MediaTek et all don't worry about any of that.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Apple spent billions for more than a decade on ARM
| development before using their own design as a central
| processor.
|
| For their computer platforms. Apple has been using ARM
| since the Newton.
|
| Anyone who wants to differentiate from competition building
| x86 boxes will have to use a non-x86 design. Viable ones
| these days are mostly POWER for workstations and servers,
| and ARM for everything between mobile and midrange servers.
|
| If you build a commodity computer based on the same
| components everyone else has access to, your margin will be
| squeezed. If your product has different characteristics
| than your direct competition and that difference is
| advantageous on a given segment, your competitors will have
| trouble moving in. That's why Apple M-series and IBM
| mainframe CPUs are not available to anyone without a full
| computer attached.
| gumby wrote:
| > For their computer platforms. Apple has been using ARM
| since the Newton.
|
| The Newton used a regular ARM design (that was back when
| Apple owned a huge chunk of ARM). They used 3P ARMs for
| the main processor of other devices for years (e.g. time
| capsule or some video dongles).
|
| That one sentence of mine you referred two made two
| points: 1 - it took a long time for apple to get to the
| point where they could replace external designs as the
| core processor for a device (starting with the phone) and
| 2 - that they _had_ by that time quite a bit of
| experience for using their own designs for subsidiary
| processors inside their devices. All of that is a pretty
| complex undertaking.
|
| > If you build a commodity computer based on the same
| components everyone else has access to, your margin will
| be squeezed. If your product has different
| characteristics than your direct competition and that
| difference is advantageous on a given segment, your
| competitors will have trouble moving in.
|
| Well, it's all about where your locus of differentiation
| is; all else you want to commoditize. It's not like Apple
| makes their own DRAM, and _those_ suppliers are the ones
| that get their margins squeezed (especially by Apple --
| look at who their CEO is).
|
| And the lack of a CPU design team is a competitive
| _advantage_ for the MediaTeks of this world, even if it's
| not exclusive to them. Instead the very lack of
| exclusivity in cpu has a network effect value for them.
| This is what killed arm competitors like MIPS.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It took a long time for ARM to dominate the low-power
| space (MIPS and POWER were contenders for a long time).
| ARM started as a desktop processor and died on the
| desktop before there was a space for low-power 32-bit
| RISC devices.
|
| In 2008 Apple acquired PA Semi and two years later they
| released an iPad powered by the A4, their first in-house
| design. Many acquisitions and designs later, their
| performance started to approach the performance of Intel
| chips used in their desktops and laptops. It was a very
| complex undertaking and they nailed it on every step.
|
| All Apple computer ISA transitions were driven by
| external factors. Motorola gave up on the 68K family (a
| dead end for them) in favor of the 88K RISC processors
| (where they thought they had a chance), Motorola and IBM
| gave up on PPC and never delivered a low power G5 (they
| offered Apple Cell instead). Finally, Intel didn't give
| Apple the special treatment it needed to differentiate
| from other laptops and, since by then Apple had phone and
| tablet SoCs that were competitive with Intel parts and
| there was lots of commonality between macOS and iOS, that
| last choice was easy. Depending on a third party for the
| component more easily usable to set you apart from your
| competition is never great. If Apple moves their Macs and
| mobile devices away from ARM, it'll be the first time
| Apple decides that without a "catastrophic" event from
| outside.
| dagmx wrote:
| For Intel, they also missed a lot of targets in terms of
| both delivery and thermals throughout the x86 Apple era.
|
| As a company, they don't like being at the mercy of
| someone else if they can help it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > For Intel, they also missed a lot of targets in terms
| of both delivery and thermals throughout the x86 Apple
| era.
|
| True. Up until now, it was always betting the company on
| someone else's silicon roadmap. Now they control it
| completely.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > I think there's also a tendency for everyone to want to do
| their own CPU now.
|
| I mean... I think it's the opposite. There was a time when
| Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia had their own microarchs which
| they used in most things. Increasingly they're back to ARM-
| supplied designs now.
|
| I suspect this is partly because the ARM designs are adequate
| these days, but also because phone CPUs just aren't that
| competitive anymore; the iPhone is enormously faster than any
| other phone, and consumers do not care about this at all,
| because the other phones are, generally, Good Enough.
| gchadwick wrote:
| > I mean... I think it's the opposite. There was a time
| when Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia had their own microarchs
| which they used in most things. Increasingly they're back
| to ARM-supplied designs now.
|
| Indeed but I'm wondering if we'll see a swing back, if
| they're all selling SoCs with the same set of arm IP in
| varying configurations what's the differentiating factor? I
| suspect there's an aspect of 'arm never builds what we
| want' as arm needs to satisfy multiple people that would
| drive them to build their own design at the high end. That
| said I've only got a hunch and can't recall concrete
| evidence for this.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| I think there is a lot of room for competition in the
| accelerator space e.g. GPUs, ML inference engines, video
| encode/decode.
|
| It seems to me like modern core design is expensive and
| high risk/low reward for most of these companies.
| Remember, Apple has a ton of R&D and the margins to put
| massive cores into just about everything they sell, upto
| and including putting a CPU faster than most desktops
| into their "budget" monitor. Fabbing costs keep going up
| and the extra revenue from larger+faster CPUs would get
| gobbled up by TSMC and Samsung Fab. Setting out to build
| something faster at the same size and R&D is what eats
| your profit.
|
| For Qualcomm, Samsung, Google (for Pixel at least), and
| NVidia, ARMs balance of performance/die size/efficiency
| is aligned well with their market positions and the
| opportunity cost of rolling their own is just too high
| even in the face of thinning margins from competition.
| throw34 wrote:
| This has been a popular topic for some time in the
| computer architecture space.
|
| " The End of the Road for General Purpose Processors &
| the Future of Computing - Prof. John L. Hennessy"
|
| https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/end-road-general-purpose-
| proc...
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