{"id":30650,"date":"2020-11-11T20:02:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-12T01:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30650"},"modified":"2021-01-06T16:18:50","modified_gmt":"2021-01-06T21:18:50","slug":"the-apple-silicon-m1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/11\/the-apple-silicon-m1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Apple Silicon M1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrei Frumusanu<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The new processor is called the Apple M1, the company’s first SoC designed with Macs in mind. With four large performance cores, four efficiency cores, and an 8-GPU core GPU, it features 16 billion transistors on a 5nm process node. Apple’s is starting a new SoC naming scheme for this new family of processors, but at least on paper it looks a lot like an A14X.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

A +-630 deep ROB is an immensely huge out-of-order window for Apple’s new core, as it vastly outclasses any other design in the industry.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Exactly how and why Apple is able to achieve such a grossly disproportionate design compared to all other designers in the industry isn’t exactly clear, but it appears to be a key characteristic of Apple’s design philosophy and method to achieve high ILP (Instruction level-parallelism).<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Apple’s usage of a significantly more advanced microarchitecture that offers significant IPC, enabling high performance at low core clocks, allows for significant power efficiency gains versus the incumbent x86 players.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Robert Graham<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In short, Apple’s advantage is their own core design outpacing Intel’s on every measure, and TMSC being 1.5 generations ahead of Intel on manufacturing process technology. These things matter, not “ARM” or “RISC” instruction set.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Howard Oakley<\/a>:<\/p>\n

GPUs are now being used for a lot more than just driving the display, and their computing potential for specific types of numeric and other processing is in demand. So long as CPUs and GPUs continue to use their own local memory, simply moving data between their memory has become an unwanted overhead. If you’d like to read a more technical account of some of the issues which have brought unified memory to Nvidia GPUs, you’ll enjoy Michael Wolfe’s article<\/a> on the subject.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Apple<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Learn how developers updated their apps for Apple silicon Macs and began taking advantage of the advanced capabilities of the Apple M1 chip.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Apple<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Discover the advances in Metal performance and capability delivered with the Apple M1 chip on Apple silicon Macs. Apple M1 unites the top-end graphics and compute abilities of discrete GPUs with the features and power efficiency of Apple silicon, creating entirely new opportunities for developers of Metal-based apps and games on macOS. We’ll explore the Metal graphics and compute fundamentals of Apple M1, then take you through four important Metal features to make your Mac apps really shine on Apple silicon: tile shading, memoryless render targets, programmable blending, and sparse texturing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n