Comment by masklinn
5 years ago
> Or is it the specific Apple customizations tailored to their use case?
Apple's use case is "run applications". It's not like there's any magic or they have some sort of ultra specific workload they improved by 10x while the rest sat there.
Apple's customisations are largely "throw hardware at the problem", which I'm reasonably sure Intel would do if that worked for x86. So sounds like something you can do with ARM, which you can't with x86.
The more magical customisations are workload specific, but then they would only trigger for these workloads, both of which are pretty much opt-in: running emulated x64 code on ARM, and performing matrix computations (which AFAIK will only be used through the Accelerate framework).
As far as I understood, some of the reasons M1 is fast are in fact specific to ARM. For Instance, the advantages given by the width of the decode depend partly on the uniformity of AMR instruction size, and M1 also benefits from looser ordering of memory operations
Intel would do that if they could shrink their transistors. But because they are still at 14NM they are heavily constrained. It's actually amazing they are competitive at all given they are now 3 generations behind in manufacturing.
> So sounds like something you can do with ARM, which you can't with x86.
There's not reason why Intel couldn't, but they don't have the incentive to hyper-optimize frequently used Apple workloads like Final Cut Pro.
> There's not reason why Intel couldn't
If Intel could they would, for years now they’ve been spending billions to get fraction of a pc improvements on benchmarks. You really think if they could increase die size by 10% and get 30% better perfs they’d say no? Come on.
> they don't have the incentive to hyper-optimize frequently used Apple workloads like Final Cut Pro.
Except M1’s performance improvements show up across the board including software which has no relation to Apple, so this is just complete nonsense.