Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 403 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Eug

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
24,046
1,675
126
M1
5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LP-DDR4
16 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 12 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache
(Apple claims the 4 high-effiency cores alone perform like a dual-core Intel MacBook Air)

8-core iGPU (but there is a 7-core variant, likely with one inactive core)
128 execution units
Up to 24576 concurrent threads
2.6 Teraflops
82 Gigatexels/s
41 gigapixels/s

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Products:
$999 ($899 edu) 13" MacBook Air (fanless) - 18 hour video playback battery life
$699 Mac mini (with fan)
$1299 ($1199 edu) 13" MacBook Pro (with fan) - 20 hour video playback battery life

Memory options 8 GB and 16 GB. No 32 GB option (unless you go Intel).

It should be noted that the M1 chip in these three Macs is the same (aside from GPU core number). Basically, Apple is taking the same approach which these chips as they do the iPhones and iPads. Just one SKU (excluding the X variants), which is the same across all iDevices (aside from maybe slight clock speed differences occasionally).

EDIT:

Screen-Shot-2021-10-18-at-1.20.47-PM.jpg

M1 Pro 8-core CPU (6+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 16-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 24-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 32-core GPU

M1 Pro and M1 Max discussion here:

Page 78 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 78 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
forums.anandtech.com forums.anandtech.com

M1 Ultra discussion here:

Page 109 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 109 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
forums.anandtech.com forums.anandtech.com

M2 discussion here:

Page 127 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 127 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
forums.anandtech.com forums.anandtech.com

Second Generation 5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LPDDR5, up to 24 GB and 100 GB/s
20 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 16 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache

10-core iGPU (but there is an 8-core variant)
3.6 Teraflops

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Hardware acceleration for 8K h.264, h.264, ProRes

M3 Family discussion here:

Page 215 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 215 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
forums.anandtech.com forums.anandtech.com

M4 Family discussion here:

Page 263 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 263 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
forums.anandtech.com forums.anandtech.com
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Ginger_d, toplistkyherzbrunarl, Praj and 12 others
J

johnsonwax

Senior member
Jun 27, 2024
205
341
96
Mopetar said:
Apple seems to have a view of the Pro (and the people who buy it) that it doesn't need regular updates. The performance uplift they can achieve on a yearly basis isn't enough to justify dropping the five figure cost that those models demand once customized.

Ages ago when I worked in video production I used some of the first Mac Pros that were running dual Xeon processors. Even back then when technology was advancing far more rapidly those machines stuck around for a while. The capital investment means you can't just replace them next year when the new model is 15% faster.
Click to expand...
I think there's a misplacement of value here. Everyone here is focusing on the CPU performance because (points to the subform we're in) but the MacPro isn't about CPU performance. You can get that performance in the Studio. You buy MacPro because you need a certain amount of performance as well as slots and bays, and those don't upgrade from year to year, and often their needs don't upgrade from year to year.

I come from an environment where there were a shitload of PCs floating around still running Windows 95 because some piece of equipment needed a certain piece of software and driver and interface that that PC could provide and upgrading that machine made things worse. The critical element there was not how fast the CPU was, but whether the box could accept a RS-232 connector, run this driver from 20 years ago, and not release the magic black smoke that allowed it to work. That was it.

A lot of this space is governed by enabling tech, not scaling tech. That is, when you jump from editing HD to 4K video, it's entirely possible that your HD rig cannot process 4K at all. It may lack interfaces, or drivers or whatever. It's not a question of 'I need to do it 8% faster' It's a question of I need to do a new thing and I need a system that can do that new thing. And these tend to plateau a lot because they are expensive transitions. Once you have a rig for 4K editing that allow you to edit a feature film inside a certain time constraint and budget, doing that 8% faster is nice, but your old reliable still makes sure you hit it in that time constraint and that budget. Its only when you need to compete and do it faster or cheaper and you can't solve that problem by just buying a 2nd rig that you start calling up Apple VPs and saying 'yo, we can't do our job any more'.

AND given the large degree to which Apple has a lot of control in this space, odds are there's no benefit to a new shiny until Apple comes out with a new ProRes RAW format, which they're not going to do until they have hardware to ship that can handle it. That is to say, the new hardware comes bundled with the need to buy the new hardware, and the old hardware will likely suffice until that day comes. My understanding on the audio side is that Apple Silicon dropped the latency so low that nobody really expects them to be able to improve much upon it, and the new silicon can handle effectively infinite number of tracks (that is, more than anyone want to work with) so for them, new silicon is icing on the cake, but the cake is still drivers, bays, slots, TB versions, etc.

All that aside, I'd love to see Apple treat the Pro like an F1 race car. Just make something obscenely powerful even if it's not practical or profitable. Make it the ultimate halo product for the top 1% of Mac users who really do need something more than a Mac Studio. Make a Mac that starts at $10,000, but is completely worth it for the customers who need it.
Click to expand...
Every time they've done this we've looked back at it as a bit of a disaster. TAM, the solid gold Apple Watch, etc. It's really not how Apple rolls. If you want the overclocked, water cooled, LED, disco ball PC, there's a whole market for that which Apple cannot compete with and is not interested in competing with. If you need to edit the next Best Picture film, Apple has you covered. If you need to train ChatGPT, that's Nvidia's market. If you just want to win Reddit, there's a whole ecosystem for that.
 
  • Like
Reactions: name99
J

johnsonwax

Senior member
Jun 27, 2024
205
341
96
Doug S said:
Isn't that what it already is? It starts at $7K but that's pretty close. What's different from the Intel Mac Pro days is that you could configure that up to $50K or more by maxing out the RAM, but the RAM choices are now a bit spartan by comparison. Maybe they could add some expansion options via LPCAMM to juice up that ASP lol
Click to expand...
Right, but why someone needs 2TB of RAM matters. Nobody needs it just because they want it, they need it because they're trying to do a job. What's the job? If you answer that, you'll see who they are customers of. If you're some rando in a lab doing something weird, Apple is not about to steer a $3T company toward your need. Apple is in the business of selling a large nations worth of phones. Not only are they willing to lose you as a customer, they would prefer you leave and stop bothering them - they have an unfathomably large business to run.
 
poke01

poke01

Diamond Member
Mar 8, 2022
3,726
5,057
106
Eug said:
View attachment 127162
View attachment 127160
View attachment 127161

:D
Click to expand...
Jobs Apple was interested. If Apple still had a Jobs-like CEO, the Mac Pro would not be stuck with M2 Ultra. Tim Cook optimised Apple's supply chain for the mainly for iPhone and iPad.
Yes, Apple is the leader in mobile and has the fastest CPU core for now. But in GPUs, foldables, workstations and AI, Apple is behind. It seems Tim only cares about iPhone and as far the Mac is concerned video editing and some LLMs that it thanks to its unified memory. Steve cared about the Mac being used in niche education like sciences and engineering, the space where Nvidia rules now.

Lastly, Apple can R&D a modular Mac Pro with Apple Silicon if Tim wills it, Ternus has to follow his orders. Tim Cook is a person who thought the future of computing where actual work will get done is on iPad with its limited OS. That may be true for artists, teachers, some musicians and high school students but the time and time again advanced computing is done on workstations and high end laptops.
 
J

johnsonwax

Senior member
Jun 27, 2024
205
341
96
poke01 said:
time and time again advanced computing is done on workstations and high end laptops.
Click to expand...
Apple owns the high end laptop market. But what inroads can Apple make on the workstation market? You know where 99% of the workstation code is running? Nvidia GPUs. Need a lot of compute, you go to AWS, or you buy what AWS uses and deploy on prem.

I did data science in my job. I owned a lot of Mac Pro level hardware. AWS ate all of that because I could spin up as much capacity as I needed and immediately spin it down when I was done. It was great. And a lot cheaper than trying to provision discrete hardware. AI hadn't really taken off yet so GPU/NPU compute was just getting going, and had I not retired I might have a workstation with a bunch of 4090s in it, but I'd still be interfacing it from a MBP. I'm a 40 year Apple user that wrote code, did workstation compute, made a load off AAPL - you won't find someone more biased in favor of buying Apple gear than me - and I can't see a scenario where a MacPro would've make sense for me.

The clue to understanding the MacPro market was the Afterburner. That was an engineering lift to solve a single problem - video encode. That is the primary market for the product, and without pretty major architectural changes to M series to allow for Nvidia scale GPU/AI compute via expansion, that's mainly going to be its market. Maybe you could turn it into an engineering workstation - but none of that software runs on ARM and isn't going to. The only way Ansys gets ported to MacOS is if Apple buys them. I worked with those vendors all the time. Their codebases are hot garbage. The codebases that aren't let you run in the cloud, so AWS again...
 
  • Like
Reactions: oak8292
M

mvprod123

Senior member
Jun 22, 2024
272
302
96
poke01 said:
Jobs Apple was interested. If Apple still had a Jobs-like CEO, the Mac Pro would not be stuck with M2 Ultra. Tim Cook optimised Apple's supply chain for the mainly for iPhone and iPad.
Yes, Apple is the leader in mobile and has the fastest CPU core for now. But in GPUs, foldables, workstations and AI, Apple is behind. It seems Tim only cares about iPhone and as far the Mac is concerned video editing and some LLMs that it thanks to its unified memory. Steve cared about the Mac being used in niche education like sciences and engineering, the space where Nvidia rules now.

Lastly, Apple can R&D a modular Mac Pro with Apple Silicon if Tim wills it, Ternus has to follow his orders. Tim Cook is a person who thought the future of computing where actual work will get done is on iPad with its limited OS. That may be true for artists, teachers, some musicians and high school students but the time and time again advanced computing is done on workstations and high end laptops.
Click to expand...
I don't think Apple is that far behind in GPUs. Their architecture, especially RT, is already better than Intel and AMD. With the new Metal 4, things are getting even better.
 
M

Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
8,436
7,630
136
Doug S said:
Isn't that what it already is? It starts at $7K but that's pretty close.
Click to expand...

Kind of, but it's not meaningfully different than a Mac Studio in a way that matters. I can get an Ultra in both and the same (technically the Pro has less total available due to only having the M2 Ultra whereas the Studio can use an M3 Ultra) RAM and built-in storage. Right now the only thing the Pro gets you is the bigger case and PCIe slots. Alternatively the Mac Studio is just a Pro without the PCIe slots.

I'd like to see Apple go wild by making the Pro a 2P or even up to an 8P box. They already sell a rack mount option for the Pro so why not lean into the server box approach even more? Maybe there are some other crazy things they could add on top of that to target other niches, but fancy case and extra PCIe slots aren't really doing it.

It's probably not worth the time they would put into something like that for the sales they could expect, but I could say the same about the Pro already since there's little reason to buy one over a Mac Studio.
 
fastandfurious6

fastandfurious6

Senior member
Jun 1, 2024
586
735
96
  • Like
Reactions: Io Magnesso
M

Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
8,436
7,630
136
fastandfurious6 said:
what is the secret sauce making M cpu so powerful at single core?
Click to expand...

Wide design with a large cache. Backend is probably good at keeping all the execution ports fed as well. Only having soldered RAM means it can more easily operate at higher bus speeds as well which shaves a few cycles off memory requests when the cache misses. Not chasing higher clock speeds at the cost of IPC to enable them no doubt helps.
 
D

Doug S

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2020
3,297
5,730
136
Mopetar said:
Kind of, but it's not meaningfully different than a Mac Studio in a way that matters. I can get an Ultra in both and the same (technically the Pro has less total available due to only having the M2 Ultra whereas the Studio can use an M3 Ultra) RAM and built-in storage. Right now the only thing the Pro gets you is the bigger case and PCIe slots. Alternatively the Mac Studio is just a Pro without the PCIe slots.

I'd like to see Apple go wild by making the Pro a 2P or even up to an 8P box. They already sell a rack mount option for the Pro so why not lean into the server box approach even more? Maybe there are some other crazy things they could add on top of that to target other niches, but fancy case and extra PCIe slots aren't really doing it.

It's probably not worth the time they would put into something like that for the sales they could expect, but I could say the same about the Pro already since there's little reason to buy one over a Mac Studio.
Click to expand...

If you don't need PCIe slots then yes they're the same, but that's a huge differentiation for the customers who need them. I'm not in that world so I don't know exactly what they use them for, but I've seen people in that world mention video capture cards, 100GbE NICs, fancy storage adapters...

I have no idea how many Mac Pro buyers are using the PCIe slots, or at what point faster TB/USB ports erode the demand for PCIe slots to where Apple could be forced to choose between dropping Mac Pro or making changes that put it in a performance tier above Studio.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Mopetar and Io Magnesso
poke01

poke01

Diamond Member
Mar 8, 2022
3,726
5,057
106
fastandfurious6 said:
basically big L2 cache all accessible fast for 1 core? so not very useful in tense multicore workload hence why its benefits fall off in multic benches
Click to expand...
Show me where it falls off in multicore benchmarks?
Use M4 Max which has 12P+4E as reference.

It’s also excellent in nT tasks too..
 
N

name99

Senior member
Sep 11, 2010
610
506
136
fastandfurious6 said:
basically big L2 cache all accessible fast for 1 core? so not very useful in tense multicore workload hence why its benefits fall off in multic benches



please speak english to me sir I don't understand github
Click to expand...
If you go to that web page (just click the link) you will see a list of files, 7 of which are PDFs. Option-click a pdf to download it, and then read it. The first PDF covers the primary function of the M-series CPUs. Later PDFs cover other things including the GPU and the NPU.

I'm also not a great fan of github. If anyone else has an alternative suggestion for where to publish long PDFs that are occasionally updated, I'd love to hear it...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Mopetar, Io Magnesso and igor_kavinski
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom