Comment by The_Colonel
10 months ago
A lot of it is simply AMD getting on newer TSMC nodes. Most of the Apple's efficiency head start is better process (they got exclusive access to 5nm at first).
10 months ago
A lot of it is simply AMD getting on newer TSMC nodes. Most of the Apple's efficiency head start is better process (they got exclusive access to 5nm at first).
That's my understanding as well, as soon as the node exclusivity dropped they were ballpark equal.
Many ARM SOC are designed to run on battery only so the wireless packages and low power states are better, my AMD couldn't go below 400mhz.
But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
I hope to be able to run ARM on an unlocked laptop soon. I run a Chromebook as extra laptop with a MediaTek 520 chip and it's got 2 days battery life, AMD isn't quite there yet.
> But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
It's more nuanced than that. Apple effectively pulled a "Sony A7-III" move. Released something one generation ahead before everybody else, and disrupted everyone.
Sony called "A7-III" entry level mirrorless, but it had much more features even when compared to the higher-end SLRs of the era, and effectively pulled every other camera on the market one level down.
I don't think even they thought they'd keep that gap forever. I personally didn't think it either, but when it was released, it was leaps and bounds ahead, and forced other manufacturers to do the same to stay relevant.
They pulled everyone upwards, and now they continue their move. If not this, they also showed that computers can be miniaturized much more. Intel N100 and RaspberryPi/OrangePi 5 provides so much performance for daily tasks, so unimaginable things at that size are considered normal now.
I like the Sony story, but I don't think Apple did "pull everyone along" like that, they had an exclusivity deal with TSMC to be first on a good manufacturing node improvement. They took their high-quality, high-performance iPhone SoC, gave it more juice and a bit better thermals.
It's just another "Apple integrating well" story.
Their SoC is huge compared to competitors because Apple doesn't have to make a profit selling a SoC, they profit selling a device + services so they can splurge on the SoC, splurging on the SoC plus being one node ahead is just "being good", the team implementing Rosetta are the real wizards doing "revolutionary cool shit" if anything
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>But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
Compared to the incremental changes we've seen the previous 10 years before it arrived on AMD/Intel space, it was revolutionary.
Was Intel switching from the Pentium 4 to the Core architecture considered revolutionary at the time? Was AMD's bulldozer architecture? I don't recall.
We must have different definitions of the word "revolutionary". They put a high-end mobile chip in a laptop and it came out good, what's revolutionary? The UMA architecture has advantages but hardly revolutionary.
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