Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

[Eug]

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:



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:

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M1 Ultra discussion here:

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M2 discussion here:

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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:

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M4 Family discussion here:

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[StinkyPinky]

That seems a very US-centric view of the world. I would think Android phones have a bigger gamer base. Firstly in raw units sold, and second because a lot of iphones are sold to businesses where gaming on them clearly shouldn't be a thing.

As for me, the only game I play is Bejeweled Blitz. You can run that game on a 2012 era budget phone.

 

[Eug]

yes. but console is still ''bigger'' and PCs are right there.

2024.

92.5 billions mobile. iOS 47.7b and Android 33.7b.

Consoles 50.3b

PCs 41.5b

The Gaming Industry in 2024 by the Numbers — A Review by GamesIndustry

GamesIndustry released an extensive infographic featuring key figures for the gaming industry as 2024 draws to a close. Here are some observations.

wnhub.io

Consoles are making a ton of money with only 300m units.

According to this report:



Mobile Gaming Market Share
Let’s answer an important question – how much revenue is attributed to mobile games?

Out of $187 billion generated in 2024 by all types of games, the mobile game market share is 49% or $92 billion. (Newzoo)
In other words, almost half of all gaming is mobile.

Console games had a 28% revenue share, generating $51 billion. PC games had a 23% revenue share, generating $43 billion. (Newzoo)

Nothing has changed from previous years – mobile games still have the biggest market share.

—-

Where did you get the $47.7 and $33.7 numbers for Apple vs Android? It wasn’t listed in that article, and it only adds up to $81.4 million, not $92.5 million. Is $11 million going to other mobile platforms? I’m not sure exactly how much of that mobile gaming revenue is iOS/iPadOS and how much is Android but in general iOS/iPadOS app revenue represents approx. 70% of mobile app revenue with most of the remaining 30% going to Android.

That would suggest that iOS/iPadOS has about 34% of overall game revenue share, which would be higher than the game revenue share of all of the consoles combined.

However, even if your $47.7 billion number is accurate for iOS/iPadOS, that still means that it’s way, way higher than any individual console, and significantly higher than PC too, meaning that iOS/iPadOS is the biggest gaming platform on earth.

 

[DZero]

yes. but console is still ''bigger'' and PCs are right there.

2024.

92.5 billions mobile. iOS 47.7b and Android 33.7b.

Consoles 50.3b

PCs 41.5b

The Gaming Industry in 2024 by the Numbers — A Review by GamesIndustry

GamesIndustry released an extensive infographic featuring key figures for the gaming industry as 2024 draws to a close. Here are some observations.

wnhub.io

Consoles are making a ton of money with only 300m units.

Time to divide which generates each part. I suspect that Nintendo does the most ammount, but compared to Apple, it is a clear defeat.

Android is decent with 33.7b

And the PC is interesting... 41.5b, considering that before the PC was the top.

 

[Eug]

That seems a very US-centric view of the world. I would think Android phones have a bigger gamer base. Firstly in raw units sold, and second because a lot of iphones are sold to businesses where gaming on them clearly shouldn't be a thing.

As for me, the only game I play is Bejeweled Blitz. You can run that game on a 2012 era budget phone.

Android has a bigger installed base, but iOS gets a lot more app revenue than Android. For overall mobile app revenue, in previous years iOS/iPadOS has gotten around 70%. However, as mentioned in the other post, I don’t know if that 70% applies to mobile game revenue as well. @Antey’s numbers suggest the iOS:Android split for mobile game revenue might be closer to 60:40, but either way, it’s still way more for iOS than Android.

 

[ITHURTSWHENIP]

Gaming on mobile is 99% gacha games. Eventually the hammer is gonna drop atleast in the EU.

 

[johnsonwax]

Do have any data to back this up?

There's been loads of studies showing that iOS is about twice the size of PC, Android, and individual consoles for game revenue. Those micro transactions really add up. Last years to 10 revenue games, only Roblox wasn't exclusively a mobile game. Candy Crush still pulls down a billion a year. #1 is Honor of Kings, a mobile MOBA at $2B. Those have always skewed iOS over Android despite the marketshare differences because iOS skews much higher in terms of owner income - basically if you can afford to regularly drop money on a mobile game, you can afford an iPhone, and some of these games are pretty performant and iPhone runs them faster than even dedicated Android gaming phones. Also iPhones stay in use quite a bit longer so even though they are lower in terms of sales, they close that gap up quite a bit in terms of installed base. There's actually a sizable secondhand market for iPhones - not so much for Android. That's why Apple's services revenue is higher than you'd expect.

As to the "how many people play with their iPhones?" that's a very western question to ask. I do play some, but I also have a PC and a PS5. I can choose where to play. Starting in the iPhone 6 era or thereabouts my uni started to hit sizable populations of people in the US that didn't have the money for a PC and a phone, so they didn't own a PC, they dumped their home internet and operated exclusively off of their phone and its data plan - this is when PC sales started to drop off. It wasn't uncommon for the kids to have to borrow mom's phone to do online assignments, etc. because it was the only device they owned. (My uni had a high percentage of low income students). Go outside the US and that's actually the norm. Most people in Vietnam live off of their phone. Most of China still does, most of India still does, pretty much all of Africa does. MOBAs like Honor of Kings and Mobile Legends Bang Bang are pretty commonly played in the break room with coworkers in places like China. I'm guessing pretty much nobody in the US is gaming with their coworkers. US culture is pretty different from the rest of the world. You don't get $2B a year in MOBA microtransactions off of US players. You get that off of the other 7 billion people who live on earth.

 

[Antey]

There's been loads of studies showing that iOS is about twice the size of PC, Android, and individual consoles for game revenue.

No? i mean, not even close? which studies?

Numbers are there, ios revenue is 47.7 billons. android, PC and individual consoles are 125,5 billions.

It's close to a 1/3 the size... it's a good amount, respectable, a lot of money... but not twice.

 

[mvprod123]

 

[name99]

They use different bands for their mmwave meaning a lot more components would be required if you wanted to support them all in the same device. I could see Apple (especially for China) add mmwave support specific to the country/region it is purchased but I'm skeptical they (or anyone, really) will support all mmwave deployments throughout the world in a single phone.

I'm only interested in the digital side

 

[name99]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1969831388095647929

BTW, for people who keep complaining that "Apple is behind in ML", Apple has their own equivalent of Whisper, accessible by an API called SpeechAnalyzer.

argmax test it here: https://www.argmaxinc.com/blog/apple-and-argmax

General consensus is that it's pretty good, not quite at the level of Whisper but good enough for many purposes. (It is worth being aware that many of the 100 languages that Whisper supports are supported poorly; the actually useful number of languages is probably closer to Apple's 10). The one probably useful feature that argmax supports (but you have to pay for...) is Speaker Diarization, which is essentially giving a distinct label to each speaker, so you don't just get a stream of speech, but a stream that says speaker 1 said X, speaker 2, said Y, speaker 3 said Z.

The other interesting element is, again for all the uninformed complaints, ANE continues to show its value, being much faster than GPU (at least on the phone; of course a Max GPU probably matches ANE, but at much more power).

Another app people might want to play with is "Locally AI" which can be downloaded from the app store for free. It's just a simple front-end wrapper around Apple's AFM, so it allows you to experiment with the model.
My experience has been that, for a LOCAL model, on a PHONE, it's reasonably good and fast. You can quibble about many things (IMHO the whole spoken speech side kinda sucks, not nearly as smooth as Siri's voice, but I don't know if that's a flaw in the app itself, that they used some quick and dirty open source code to handle the speech output rather than Apple API's).

Update: Yes I'm correct. They're using a model called Kokoro for voice mode.
Maybe with some time they'll give an option to hook into Apple's API's for this which strike me as rather superior.

 

[johnsonwax]

Have a bit of a lead on why the N1 exists. I'm told that Apple has taken some tasks that were highly I/O bound but would have to keep the CPU awake and shifted some of that CPU compute work to the N1. Hotspot is given as an example - if N1 and C1 can do the whole task without having to involve the CPU in whether the connection is valid or should remain active (hasn't depleted the battery such that power saving should be kicked on, etc.) then they can keep the CPU asleep - and that's where the real power savings comes from - not having to poll the CPU on various matters. I understand there's opportunities with Watch and AirPods there as well.

 

[johnsonwax]

No? i mean, not even close? which studies?

Numbers are there, ios revenue is 47.7 billons. android, PC and individual consoles are 125,5 billions.

It's close to a 1/3 the size... it's a good amount, respectable, a lot of money... but not twice.

Why are you comparing iOS to all consoles combined rather than treating them as individual platforms, which they are? 'PC' is a bit tricky in the last 2 years due to whether the steam deck counts as a PC (since Steam revenues are generally considered 'PC') or whether that's a new category, etc.

How you segment these things matters. Android has closed the gap somewhat with iOS due to China so twice may not hold there any longer, but iOS is still the largest single game platform by a pretty decent margin.

 

[MS_AT]

There's been loads of studies showing that iOS is about twice the size of PC, Android, and individual consoles for game revenue.

First it would be nice to specify we are talking about the revenue. Second if you have those studies available link them.

But if it is so great platform for games I wonder why Rockstar has not announced GTA VI for iOS yet. Revenue wise it would have been a better move right?

 

[johnsonwax]

First it would be nice to specify we are talking about the revenue. Second if you have those studies available link them.

But if it is so great platform for games I wonder why Rockstar has not announced GTA VI for iOS yet. Revenue wise it would have been a better move right?

Yes, if Disney Kids is such a great platform, why can't I watch Game of Thrones there. Don't be stupid.

 

[name99]

No? i mean, not even close? which studies?

Numbers are there, ios revenue is 47.7 billons. android, PC and individual consoles are 125,5 billions.

It's close to a 1/3 the size... it's a good amount, respectable, a lot of money... but not twice.

Whenever something becomes about identity, expect the nonsense to start – weird definitional games, tortured statistics, even outright lies and faked data.

There are some people for whom "gamer" is not just an identity but there primary identity.

You have all been warned...

 

[name99]

Have a bit of a lead on why the N1 exists. I'm told that Apple has taken some tasks that were highly I/O bound but would have to keep the CPU awake and shifted some of that CPU compute work to the N1. Hotspot is given as an example - if N1 and C1 can do the whole task without having to involve the CPU in whether the connection is valid or should remain active (hasn't depleted the battery such that power saving should be kicked on, etc.) then they can keep the CPU asleep - and that's where the real power savings comes from - not having to poll the CPU on various matters. I understand there's opportunities with Watch and AirPods there as well.

Very nice!
Apple love this sort of thing. One of my favorites is (quite a few years ago) they added a small engine to the L1 and L2 cache, so that when the CPU powers down (and the cache has to be flushed back to DRAM) it's this tiny engine that's moving the data out, rather than the much more energy expensive CPU doing that work.
And of course there are similar examples when playing video and audio.

 

[name99]

argmax has posted a nice page of general info about the various AI-relevant improvements to the A19/Pro

https://www.argmaxinc.com/blog/iphone-17-on-device-inference-benchmarks

 

[Eug]

argmax has posted a nice page of general info about the various AI-relevant improvements to the A19/Pro

https://www.argmaxinc.com/blog/iphone-17-on-device-inference-benchmarks

From that article:

Workload 2: Sustained Real-time Transcription

This workload requires transcribing the first 30 minutes of this YouTube video in real-time with sub-second latency using Nvidia Parakeet v3 on the Argmax Playground app. This workload is continuously dissipating heat and drawing energy from the battery at near peak compute utilization, making it an ideal benchmark for testing the new cooling system in the iPhone 17 lineup.

iPhone 17 Pro GPU (left)
iPhone 16 Pro GPU (centre)
iPhone 17 Neural Engine (right)

 

[DZero]

Gaming on mobile is 99% gacha games. Eventually the hammer is gonna drop atleast in the EU.

Hard gachas will be deleted for sure, but others like the Hoyoverse or Kuro ones, might sell the characters as DLCs and can continue their operations. They have some strategies to not to lose the market.

USA is another story.

 

[adroc_thurston]

might sell the characters as DLCs and can continue their operations

That's just not a very profitable business model.

They have some strategies to not to lose the market.

No one does because how do you run a casino when gambling gets banned?

 

[DZero]

That's just not a very profitable business model.

No one does because how do you run a casino when gambling gets banned?

Indeed, but better than lose a whole market on there.

 

[adroc_thurston]

but better than lose a whole market on there.

Indeed but that's effectively losing a whole market since you can no longer force people to gamble.
Traditional DLC models are nowhere near skinnerboxed enough.

 

[DZero]

Indeed but that's effectively losing a whole market since you can no longer force people to gamble.
Traditional DLC models are nowhere near skinnerboxed enough.

That's true too. Let's wait to see how they can manage to deal with it.

 

[poke01]

After seeing the C lineup. No one is going to beat the M5 series in early 2026.

 

[adroc_thurston]

No one is going to beat the M5 series in early 2026.

oh no QC will be fine