Comment by aurareturn
3 months ago
Just price, I'd say.
I don't think it is price. Intel has had a bigger R&D budget for CPU designs than Apple. If you mean manufacturing price, I also doubt this since AMD and Intel chips are often physically bigger than Apple chips in die size but still slower and less efficient. See M4 Pro vs AMD's Strix Halo as an example where Apple's chip is smaller, faster, more efficient.
I have not seen any evidence that Apple's chip is smaller, faster and more efficient.
Apple's CPU cores have been typically significantly bigger than any other CPU cores made with the same manufacturing process. This did not matter for Apple, because they do not sell them to others and because they have always used denser CMOS processes than the others.
Apple's CPUs have much better energy efficiency than any others when running a single-threaded application. This is due to having a much higher IPC, e.g. up to 50% higher, and a correspondingly lower clock frequency.
On the other hand, the energy-efficiency when running multithreaded applications has always been very close to Intel/AMD, the differences being explained by Apple having earlier access to the up-to-date manufacturing processes.
Besides efficiency in single-threaded applications, the other point where Apple wins in efficiency is in the total system efficiency, because the Apple devices typically have lower idle power consumption than the competition, due to the integrated system design and the use of high-quality components, e.g. efficient displays. This better total system efficiency is what leads to longer battery lifetimes, not a better CPU efficiency.
The Apple CPUs are fast for the kind of applications needed by most home users, but for applications that have greater demands for computational performance, e.g. with big numbers or with array operations, they are inferior to the AMD/Intel CPUs with AVX-512.
You say you've never seen evidence that Apple's chips are smaller, faster, more efficient but you confidently proclaim that Apple CPU cores are typically bigger on the same node.
Where is your source?
There's plenty of die shots showing that Apple P cores are either smaller or around the same size as AMD and Intel P cores. Plenty of people on Reddit have done the analysis as well.