Your Intel mac was stuck in the past while everyone paying attention on PCs were already enjoying TSMC 7nm silicon in the form of AMD Zen processors.

Apple Silicon macs are far less impressive if you came from an 8c/16t Ryzen 7 laptop. Especially if you consider the Apple parts are consistently enjoying the next best TSMC node vs. AMD (e.g. 5nm (M1) vs. 7nm (Zen2))

What's _really_ impressive is how badly Intel fell behind and TSMC has been absolutely killing it.

▲ jeswin 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Your Intel mac was stuck in the past while everyone paying attention on PCs were already enjoying TSMC 7nm silicon in the form of AMD Zen processors.

This is basically it. Coming from dated Intel CPUs, Mac users got a shockingly good upgrade when the M-series computers were released. That amplified Apple's claims of Macs being the fastest computers, even when some key metrics (such as disk performance) were significantly behind PC parts in reality.

Yes, they're still better in performance/watt - but the node difference largely explains it like you were saying.

▲ gigatexal 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

that ryzen laptop chip perform it'll just do it at a higher perf/watt than the apple chip will... and on a laptop that's a key metric.

▲ tracker1 4 days ago | parent [-]

And 20% or so of that difference is purely the fab node difference, not anything to do with the chip design itself. Strix Halo is a much better comparison, though Apple's M4 models do very well against it often besting it at the most expensive end.

On the flip side, if you look at servers... Compare a 128+core AMD server CPU vs a large core ARM option and AMD perf/watt is much better.

▲ gigatexal 4 days ago | parent [-]

Wait are you saying the diff in perf per watt from apple arm to x86 is purely on fab leading edge ness?

▲ Jensson 4 days ago | parent [-]

Basically yeah, if you compare CPU from same fab then its basically the same.

Its just Apple buys next gen fabs while AMD and intel has to be on last gen, so the M computers people compare are always one fab gen ahead. It has very little to do with CPU architecture.

They do have some cool stuff about their CPU, but the thing most laud them for has to do with fabs.

▲ addaon 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's another difference -- willingness to actually pay for silicon. The M1 Max is a 432 mm^2 laptop chip built on a 5 nm process. Contrast that to AMD's "high end" Ryzen 7 8845HS at 178 mm^2 on a 4 nm process. Even the M1 Pro at 245 mm^2 is bigger than this. More area means not just more peak performance, but the ability to use wider paths at lower speeds to maintain performance at lower power. 432 mm^2 is friggin' huge for a laptop part, and it's really hard to compete with what that can do on any metric besides price.

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MindSpunk 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Comparing the M1 Max to a Ryzen 7 8845HS is not a fair comparison because the M1 chip also includes a _massive_ GPU tile, unlike the 8845HS which has a comparatively tiny iGPU because most vendors taking that part are pairing them with a separate dGPU package.

A better comparison is to take the total package area of the AI Max+ 395 that includes a 16 core CPU + a massive GPU tile and you get ~448mm^2 across all 3 chiplets.

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tracker1 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple's SOC does a bit more than AMD's, such as including the ssd controller. I don't know if Apple is grafting different nodes together for chiplets, etc compared to AMD on desktop.

The area has nothing to do with peak performance... based on the node, it has to do with the amount of components you can cram into a given space. The CRAY-1 cpu was massive compared to both of your examples, but doesn't come close to either in terms of performance.

Also, Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is top dog on the AMD mobile CPU front and is around 308mm^2 combined.

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addaon 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The area has nothing to do with peak performance... based on the node, it has to do with the amount of components you can cram into a given space.

Of course it does. For single-threaded performance, the knobs I can turn are clockspeed (minimal area impact for higher speed standard cells, large power impact), core width (significant area impact for decoder, execution resources, etc, smaller power impact), and cache (huge area impact, smaller power impact). So if I want higher single-threaded performance on a power budget, area helps. And of course for multi-threaded performance the knobs I have are number of cores, number of memory controllers, and last-level cache size, all of which drive area. There's a reason Moore's law was so often interpreted as talking about performance and not transistor count -- transistor count gives you performance. If you're willing to build a 432 mm^2 chip instead of a 308 mm^2 chip iso-process, you're basically gaining a half-node of performance right there.

	▲	tracker1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Transistor count does not equal performance. More transistors isn't necessarily going to speed up any random single-threaded bottleneck. Again, the CRAY-1 CPU is around 42000 mm^2, so I'm guessing you'd rather run that today, right?

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gigatexal 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

True the M1 Pro and Max chips were capable of 200GB/s and 400GB/s of bandwidth between the chip and the integrated memory. No desktop chips had such at the time I think.

▲ aurareturn 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  Basically yeah, if you compare CPU from same fab then its basically the same.

This isn't true. If you compare N5 Apple to N5 AMD chips, Apple chips still come out far ahead in efficiency.

▲ gigatexal 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Man that either hella discounts all the amazing work Apple’s CPU engineers are doing or hyping up what AMD’s have done. Idk

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Jensson 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't it you who is hyping up Apple here when you don't even compare the two using similar architecture? Compare a 5nm AMD laptop low power cpu to Apple M1 and the M1 no longer looks that much better at all.

	▲	gigatexal 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Why are we talking about the M1 that came out eons (in computer time) ago? That the M1 is a benchmark is just sad when the M4 is running circles around competing x86 processors and the M5 is on the horizon which who knows what that has in store.

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tracker1 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I wouldn't discount what Apple has done... they've created and integrated some really good niche stuff in their CPUs to do more than typical ARM designs. The graphics cores are pretty good in their own right even. Not to mention the OS/Software integration including accelerated x86 and unified memory usage in practice.

AMD has done a LOT for parallelization and their server options are impressive... I mean, you're still talking 500W+ in total load, but that's across 128+ cores. Strix Halo scaling goes down impressively to the ~10-15W range under common usage, not as low as Apple does under similar loads but impressive in its own way.