You’re making a bit assumption that may or may not be true: that M1 will scale well to 8 performance cores. x86 vendors (and POWER) and Linux have put a lot of effort into multi core scaling in the last 15 years or so. Building a fast and efficient core is not the same thing as building one that scales well. I’m sure that Apple is capable of making an effective 8- or 16-core machine, but it may not be as simple as just adding cores. Look at the recent AMD machines’ complicated core organization for examples.
As far as I know, other than Graviton and other very new N1 designs, there haven’t been many big ARM systems at all.
But this is an exception. Fujitsu has a long history building supercomputers, and before adopting ARM they were building their own high performance SPARC machines with their custom Tofu interconnect.
Re: thermals, they’ve been pushing those limits since the PowerPC era and that includes high-TDP systems like the XServe and Mac Pro packed with CPUs, GPUs, and custom accelerator chips. The big problem was that Johnny Ives kept wanting to make ultra-thin showpieces - if they’ve learned from that debacle they’ll produce something 30% bigger with a robust safety margin.
The M1 mac mini is air cooled and I believe that's the setup most are benchmarking against? The proc pulls just over 20W max load IIRC(best on estimates because Apple never talks about it so everyone just assumes all m1s perform at the Mac mini level but draw the air power).
Yeah, but what about having it pull 120W to get better performance? It’s always plugged in. They don’t have experience there (but will hopefully figure it out quickly). This is the right example, thanks.
First, many of these benchmarks are single threaded. Secondly, in the same power envelope as the 5800X you can also find the 16 core 5950X. So perhaps Apple would have to add even more cores.
Finally, in a core count war AMD has an easier task. They scale up their designs with multiple chips. A Zen 3 CCD is about 80mm^2 on 7nm, which is already much smaller than the M1 SoC on 5nm. If Apple adds 4 more cores, their chip size will increase. Meanwhile AMD can add more cores without increasing chip size like Apple's current integrated approach. This is why AMD is already shipping 64 core CPUs (EPYC 7763) using multiple of the Zen 3 CCD as these desktop CPUs.
Yeah and since Ryzen with 8 and 16 cores and Epyc with up to 64 exist it is an obvious loss because Apple has yet to release products in these categories.
How many times does it take for people to understand this...
Comparing single core performance between laptops and desktops is an apples to apples comparison. The Ryzen uses 20W on a turbo boosted core, it uses less when you utilize all cores. Same for Apple which needs 10W for a single core and the whole package is 35W. There is way enough headroom to turbo boost to 20W.
The reason why there is a 20W vs 10W difference between the Ryzen and Apple chip is that Apple uses 5nm and the Ryzen clocks way higher (and thereby performs better). There is no free lunch where Apple can double their performance and mop up anything because AMD can just manufacture with 5nm and reduce their clock boost to reach the same per core power consumption. And it turns out this is exactly what they do on their laptop chips. Just reduce the clock speed and watch the power efficiency pour in.
If anything it's Apple that is backed into a corner because they are in a local optimum from which they can only escape by sacrificing their primary competitive advantage. Ramping up the clock speed ruins power efficiency.
The original test linked at the beginning of the article is telling that multicore is not that relevant for the tested performance. The article is mentioning the power envelope and the fact that 5nm is temporary exclusive to Apple, but not for long - AMD will utilize it and that would be a closed test. In the end, if you want to compare performance before you buy, you care less about the internal and more about performance and price.
The first test listed is Renaissance, which, from https://renaissance.dev/resources/docs/renaissance-suite.pdf, is a concurrency benchmark. It likely benefits from multiple cores. All in all I'm not sure the author has the relevant expertise.
I look forward to an M1 processor comparison to something with a similar core count, similar total power envelopes, and similar cost. The Ryzen processor benchmarked here costs more than the entire Mac Mini M1 system.
They're 2 different CPU with the different market. The only reason I think that this comparison is being made is that it is a response to an avalanche of articles claiming that M1 beats everything speed wise and is the best thing since sliced bread.
