Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-architecture

by yurisagalov • 4 years ago

237 192 4 years ago

semianalysis.substack.com

daguava• 4 years ago

There's a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] "Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars"

How true is this? If they're on the money it's an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.

bombcar• 4 years ago

I suspect we're looking at Apple implementing tick/tock, whether because they're forced to or because they want to - they've already been doing something similar on the iPhones, and supply constraint may make them do it on the chips, too.

Few people are going to upgrade from the M1 to the M2 anyway, so it makes sense to keep powder dry for the M3.

innocenat• 4 years ago

Intel tick-tock was alternating microarchitecture change with process optimization every other year.

It looks like M2 is neither of those, and it's already 2 year.

dhanna• 4 years ago

The youngest, strongest RTL engineer I know jumped from Apple to Rivos.

exhilaration• 4 years ago

I'm still amazed at how jumping to a rival firm like this is possible in California, those of us in pretty much the rest of the country are locked behind non-competes.

ksec4• 4 years ago

Rivos

[1], I hope that is not him.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-...

InvaderFizz• 4 years ago

Looking at another article from the same author[0], we'll have a pretty solid answer to the impact in September with the release of the A16. Apparently the A15 had very minimal CPU gains clock-for-clock over the A14.

To quote from that article:

"SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now."

I was very optimistic on Apple on the CPU front until I read this today. Now I'm waiting to see how the A16 pans out for them to see if it's a two generation loss of progress, or just a single generation stumble.

0: https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to...

skohan3• 4 years ago

Reads like FUD to me

AgentOrange1234• 4 years ago

I don’t know Apple’s turnaround, but processors are released in products only long after their design is completed. Think at least several months, even likely a year+ between design and release.

Nuvia started early enough to be a factor here. But Rivos wasn’t even founded until June 2021. To release now, M2 would already have been at finished with design by then.

dijonman2• 4 years ago

Chip manufacturing is difficult, this reminds me of the Japanese entry into the semiconductor market.

There is an excellent video on this for anyone interested in Japanese culture and the war against USA via semiconductors:

https://youtu.be/bwhU9goCiaI

dagmx3• 4 years ago

The author has been pushing this conjecture for a year over the past year or so, and has been repeatedly called out on the Hardware reddit.

I would recommend not taking their business conjecture without a giant pinch of salt. Just today they were claiming Apple has lost hundreds of engineers in the chip division. The idea that a single division somehow lost hundreds without the industry noticing is ridiculous.

wmf2• 4 years ago

Why do you think the industry hasn't noticed? If it's not hundreds, how many Apple employees have moved to Nuvia and Rivos?

Josteniok• 4 years ago

I wondered about this too and I like your advice about salt but apparently Apple is suing Rivos about this very thing: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-...

skohan3• 4 years ago

I agree, reading this it just seems like this author has found a market for people who want read news about how AAPL is going to drop tomorrow

somethoughts2• 4 years ago

Likely its a bit of hyperbole to get views.

I think there's always a desire to work at a startup in SV and in a low/zero interest rate environment - VCs could probably fund something in the chip design space.

But now that interest rates are going up, I think that will be a lot tougher and Apple will be a better position due to their direct access to free cashflow - to either compete or acquire them at a later date.

Its also an observation that w.r.t. chip design and consumer electronics, the pay is general lower than say Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Web 2.0 based startups (i.e. AirBnb, Uber, DoorDash), etc.

My presumption is that this is because as a chip designer or embedded software/hardware engineer, the capital costs to do anything interesting on your own as a startup (i.e. tape out a chip, mass production in Asia, etc.) are very very high and very fixed and very up-front. Even fabless semiconductors and factory-less product design companies that outsource manufacturing to Asia would need to go find outside capital for IC masks or HW prototypes. You also need a cadre of supply chain, biz dev, marketing, ad spend, channel sales distribution.

Compare that to AirBnb, Dropbox where you need a good idea, a handful of 10x SW engineers and an AWS account that can scale as you grown and a free tier for onboarding customers. Therefore, Google/FB etc. need to pay more to prevent these folks from going off and starting their disruptor (i.e. Insta, WhatsApp, SalesForce).

Sirened• 4 years ago

++, totally. I think a lot of people are linking CPU engineering with SW engineering because they both work with the same product at the end of the day, but the industries are radically different both from a business and culture standpoint. The "go fast and break things" mentality that pervades the SV software startup scene is, in my experience, no where to be found in hardware because it's both incredibly costly to make any mistakes and because most CPU divisions are lead by people with decades of experience (rather than the mishmash that is startups).

The author's argument here about talent leaving after having "gotten Apple off x64" is such an odd take. It's not as if Apple started designing these chips after the M1 launched—the pipeline for even small SoCs is often five or more years. The bit about Rivos is especially bizarre because that company was founded in 2021, well after this chip must have been taped out.

modeless5• 4 years ago

Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. Apple M2 disappoints on CPU performance, is it because of their designs? No, it's because TSMC's next fab isn't ready yet so they're still using the same fabs as M1.

These days I care more about which TSMC process node my chips came from than which company designed them. I need a new computer but I'm waiting until next year because there will be a wave of new CPUs and GPUs coming out with much better performance. Better designs? Maybe a little, but it's really because they're all moving to TSMC N4.

I really hope Pat Gelsinger can save Intel's fab business because we really need another company that can compete in fabs and Samsung isn't doing too hot either.

iosystem• 4 years ago

I thought AMD succeeded because they managed to get Jim Keller and other great engineers? Unsure why you're placing your hope on a CEO.

inkyoto6• 4 years ago

No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs.

The fixation on the fab process is bewildering. Yes, it does help, but it is also an optimisation step that is decoupled from and that bears no relevance on the chip design. Yes, the smaller node size also brings the increased density along and an increased number of things that can be whacked into the same sized piece of silicon, but it will not magically improve the overall system performance or result in the linear architecture scalability.

The article is specifically calling out a potentially decreased ROB size in M2 cores, and ARMv9 also potentially not arriving until M3 which are crucial to the speed or software performance. There is absolutely nothing the fab process can do to make SVE2 and matrix instructions automagically appear in lithographic chip designs – those are the «silicon» design time decisions. As we have recently been seeing more and more practical, mainstream use cases of the advanced use of the SIMD instructions at the C/C++/Rust runtime level that bring an order of magnitude level performance gains, having the SVE2 implementation at the ISA level is becoming somewhat critical.

Sakos• 4 years ago

Key talent is incredibly important. If you lose enough senior engineers, it doesn't matter how talented the rest are. You've lost so much institutional knowledge that is either extremely difficult or impossible to regain. And Apple is notoriously under-staffed for a lot of their projects. With the staffing losses to Nuvia, I wouldn't be surprised if they lost enough key talent that it's going to take them a long time to recover and be able to deliver significant performance improvements again. That's what happens when you treat software developers/engineers like commodities.

matwood2• 4 years ago

Work culture can mean a couple of things though. Building and delivering the M1 was probably a great experience. Maybe like the hardware equivalent of greenfield development. The M1 is out, and now it's about continual refinements. The people who love going from 0->1 are not always the same people who enjoy going from 1->100.

And while Apple isn't the max payer in SV, I'm sure they pay fine compared to other big tech. The issue is, chips are big right now and no existing big tech can compete compensation wise with shares in a growth chip startup. With VC drying up, I expect this to change back in Apple (and other big techs) favor.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

The bleeding hasn’t stopped in recent years as Apple’s work culture simply isn’t the best and other firms, namely the hyperscalers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, are paying more than Apple was to poach talent.

I really hate that word “poach”. Using “attract” works much better in that sentence.

I find it appalling how entering into a free contract with someone to give them more money for their work is called “poaching”.

Words matter, and how we describe something has an impact in how it is viewed (“piracy” is another example).

dymk2• 4 years ago

Seems like quibbling over words that everybody understands the meaning and intention of

GoOnThenDoTell• 4 years ago

Words matter. Apple failed to retain these employees with cash, its not some hunting game where you catch some unsuspecting engineer

ulfw• 4 years ago

So what is it? Work culture or pay?

How many really move from Apple to Amazon for the work culture?

ianai• 4 years ago

It’s corporate America. “Performance improvement plans” and “at will states” are also part of the same lexicon. (Judge that as you will.)

On poaching though, Apple could choose to respond to the market signal by improving their work culture and policies to retain talent. I do wonder about the supply for these highly skilled hardware engineers though.

walterbell3• 4 years ago

Poaching expresses a specific viewpoint that was challenged by the U.S. Department of Justice, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/should-tech-work...

A group of big tech companies, including Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel, recently settled a lawsuit over their "no poach" agreement for $324 million. The CEOs of those companies had agreed not to do "cold call" recruiting of each others' engineers until they were busted by the Department of Justice, which saw the deal as an antitrust violation. The government action was followed up by a class-action lawsuit from the affected workers, who claimed the deal suppressed their wages.

hemantv• 4 years ago

Apple generally pay very poorly for quality of talent.

I would love to live in world where 10x engineers are rewarded 10x. Right now it's 25% better pay than median.

999900000999• 4 years ago

Most 10xers aren't constantly 10x. You might have a 10x year and then a 1.1x year.

With tech it's a bit of a catch 22, most engineers really become effective after 18 to 24 months. At this point you know how to really get things done in your org.

But after 2 years you can job hop and make significantly more, so your interest might not align 100% with the company's

hunterb1232• 4 years ago

This. I'll make a product for someone in a few weekends, working 18 hours a day for a few weeks straight,

Then I won't have the energy for a few months.

Probably evens out to an employer, but imo you do better when the snowball is rolling longer without breaks.

That's the secret to 10x. ADHD and don't stop. Stopping is the enemy, you can't see the forest.

I hear regulation is nice, but tell my mind that.

Been at my employer for 10 years making cool shit if that matters.

koonsolo2• 4 years ago

If you want 10x pay you need to start your own company. No other way to get a 10x.

thimkerbell• 4 years ago

As a casual reader, I notice the "die shot bleeding" and wonder if that was intended. I hope it wasn't, but I also hope not to have to wonder this about the posts here.

ganbatekudasai• 4 years ago

What do you mean? "die shot bleeding"?

dylan522p3• 4 years ago

Author here. What do you mean die shot bleeding?

brokencode2• 4 years ago

Why does the biggest and richest company in the world ever have to suffer from talent leaving because they don’t get paid enough? It just doesn’t make any sense.

walterbell3• 4 years ago

New companies offer an absence of technical and cultural debt.

Nuvia was purchased for $1.4 billion by Qualcomm, a couple of years after being started.

jltsiren• 4 years ago

Why would compensation be the decisive factor for top talent in a highly compensated field? They have probably already made enough money that they don't have to work for living, and they are probably genuinely interested in their work because they made it to the top. Apple processors are already in the market, so the most interesting work is done, and it may be time to start looking for new challenges.

lostlogin• 4 years ago

The article specifically lists culture and money as the reasons people are leaving. It also adds that there is a need for a challenge amongst a successful and accomplished group.

“ The bleeding hasn’t stopped in recent years as Apple’s work culture simply isn’t the best and other firms, namely the hyperscalers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, are paying more than Apple was to poach talent.”

riffraff2• 4 years ago

If you consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you have "esteem" at a high place. Money becomes a proxy for that.

Big management negotiate higher pay all the time not because there is a difference between earning 30 or 40 millions, but because they need to feel their own "value" go up.

This is discussed at length in "thinking fast and slow", iirc.

marcinzm• 4 years ago

Spending goes up with compensation in general. Then it becomes the norm and you don't want to lose it. Sure you can retire but probably not at a level where you can fly first class everywhere, stay in five star hotels and stay on private islands.

That aside once people have kids the sky is the limit for giving them the "best life possible." Nanny, private tutors, private schools (and/or a house in Cupertino since it's Apple), college funds, house with good amenities nearby, etc. I probably missed some costs in there.

postalrat2• 4 years ago

Well they aren't the richest and certainly aren't the biggest.

rowanG077• 4 years ago

Depending on how you define richest Apple could very well be the richest. It has something like 200 billion dollars in cash in hand. I would be surprised if any company could match that.

TylerE• 4 years ago

Things don't become the "est" anything by being wasteful.

29083011397778• 4 years ago

Not even the poorest?

riffraff2• 4 years ago

My dad used to tell a story when as a kid he worked at a gas station. Guy shows up with a Ferrari, asks for a full tank, pays with a large note and my dad asks him to keep the change. The guy replied

- boy, I got a lot of money Really, a lot. You know how I got them? I never gave anything away for free. Hand that change over.

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

That’s such a contradictory statement given the facts I don’t even know where to begin.

KerrAvon2• 4 years ago

Steve was notoriously and sometimes arbitrarily cheap. Apple retains some of that.

jsiaajdsdaa2• 4 years ago

Shame that the market is slow to punish and inertia continues to reward.

pdnell• 4 years ago

Yet they’ll buy their own quarry or glass factory…

prvc2• 4 years ago

They lack a culture of advancing technology per se, as opposed to making use of it.

green-eclipse2• 4 years ago

Jony Ive would call it courage.

smcleod• 4 years ago

Also their push to try and make people work from the office again went down like a lead balloon.

Jyaif• 4 years ago

There are a downsides to paying a lot:

* you attract/retain more people that are interested in money/status.

* the employees become entitled.

Also, just like Apple's customers are OK with paying a premium price because it's Apple, employees are OK with paying a premium price to be an employee of Apple (by accepting lower salaries).

gnicholas• 4 years ago

Economists call it 'psychic income'; it's often cited as a reason why salaries for teachers are not higher.

koonsolo2• 4 years ago

So you claim that 10 well paid engineers are better than 15 average paid engineers?

brokencode2• 4 years ago

Apple has enough money that they don’t have to reduce headcount to be able to afford higher salaries.

drawingthesun2• 4 years ago

A few comments here about how Apple is losing a lot of top talent to rival Rivos, a stealth startup.

What would Rivos business model be? I’m genuinely interested seems interesting to me.

Would they be positioning themselves as the next Qualcomm?

Or perhaps sell a superior chip to Apple at some point?

ece• 4 years ago

They could open up documentation and invite others to build an ecosystem around a RISC-V socket and variety of motherboards. I don't know what their plans might be, but this is the kind of RISC-V ecosystem I'd like to see, like early-x86.

ksec4• 4 years ago

What would Rivos business model be? Would they be positioning themselves as the next Qualcomm?

Realistically speaking, most likely to be ARM, IMG or CEVA type of IP companies.

But since it is RISC-V, and we are on HN, I wont be surprised if some people expect them to give out their design for free.

MBCook• 4 years ago

Thanks to being based on their phone chips Apple came out of the gate with the M1 and cleaned everyone’s clock on performance-per-watt while putting in good to great numbers in general (as a CPU).

But their rate of improvement on the A series has been slowing on general tasks. They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit.

Is it really that surprising that performance didn’t take a massive jump? You can’t keep up a 20% increase in normal stuff every release for long.

You can use accelerators like they do for video and ML to help some tasks. You can improve your GPU some and make it a little bigger.

It seems like in some places people are trying to push a “the M2 is a failure because it’s not a huge leap above the M1“ narrative. But no one exits that from Intel or AMD every year anymore. Or Apple’s A-series.

So why here?

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

Tech journalism needs a dramatic story. So every product is either world changing or a complete failure.

jsiaajdsdaa2• 4 years ago

To their credit, with many billions on the line, products do have a bit of a tendency to be a failure if all they can do is tread water.

ArtWomb• 4 years ago

SemiAnalysis may be burying the lede and underhyping the story of the decade here: head of apple arch leaves and takes 100 process engineers to start stealth risc startup and its creating a delay effect in consumer tech innovation, bombshell!

AshamedCaptain• 4 years ago

Someone will probably mention that "it's not tech journalism, but all journalism", and I would probably agree. However please keep in mind that there is a significant selection bias here itself -- non-dramatic stories will be less frequently featured here on HN, and even if they are, attract less comments.

tyrfing• 4 years ago

They’re on the same process node, and only increased frequency a bit.

It's going from N5 to N5P, chosen by Apple over N4.

But no one [expects] that from Intel or AMD every year anymore.

That's not accurate, a minor performance upgrade after almost 2 years is the exact thing Intel has gotten a lot of flack for in recent years. The fact that people are willing to defend it is really exclusive to Apple and their unbeatable marketing.

Zen 4 on an almost identical timeline will be ~ 30-40% performance, and people were widely disappointed by the announcement of ">15%" S/T - very close to Apple's +18% M/T. Intel will have gone from Rocket Lake to (almost) Raptor Lake, doubling performance.

uluyol• 4 years ago

Intel got criticized for minor improvements year after year. It's important to look at these on 5+ year timescales, since the improvements aren't evenly spread out. Especially since gains often depend on manufacturing process improvements.

prvc2• 4 years ago

It's going from N5 to N5P, chosen by Apple over N4.

Any info as to why?

bin_bash• 4 years ago

Intel didn’t get flack because of minor improvements, they got flack because they couldn’t release 10nm or any other major improvements for the better part of a decade.

highwaylights• 4 years ago

Get that performance from where though?

The big M1 numbers came from getting ahead of the rest of the market on 5nm TSMC, and critically from packing everything into the SOC so physical distances were reduced by multiple orders of magnitude (which has already been the case for the A series). That’s been done now, so the low hanging fruit is gone there.

Performance gains from here should be expected to be identical to AMD as they’ll be moving on TSMC’s cadence (it’s AMD who might actually see similar jumps on the low end if they go the Apple route and move everything to the package).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has already started looking to stand up it’s own fab. They have large and very predictable needs now, and could likely get ahead of ASML’s queue by throwing money and scale at the problem - not least because it would help them muddy the waters as to what Apple Silicon actually is more, which fits the marketing better.

smoldesu• 4 years ago

and critically from packing everything into the SOC so physical distances were reduced by multiple orders of magnitude

I don't think that reduces chip power so much as it reduces latency. Apple's "power" here comes entirely from using the 5nm node and refining a stupid-high IPC.

it’s AMD who might actually see similar jumps on the low end if they go the Apple route and move everything to the package

No? Again, making everything an SOC has advantages/disadvantages, but your raw performance metrics are almost never significantly influenced by distance of the components (unless the distance is significant enough). AMD's real advantage will be jumping ahead 1.5 generations at TSMC, and then later it will be an architectural change (eg. big.LITTLE). I think Apple is the only one interested in shipping computers with SOCs.

epolanski4• 4 years ago

But no one exits that from Intel or AMD every year anymore.

I've been hearing that since Skylake, at every single processor generation that the gains are too modest. That's more than a decade at this point.

formerly_proven2• 4 years ago

Skylake (6th) came out in 2015. It's just that due to the 10nm delay we then had Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Comet Lake all being refreshes of Skylake on the same process until we got to Rocket Lake (11th) - a backport of a 10nm uarch to 14nm with the somewhat predictable power issues. Only with Alder Lake (12th) we actually got the first real new uarch on the process it was designed for since Skylake.

matthewmacleod• 4 years ago

You can’t keep up a 20% increase in normal stuff every release for long.

But this chip is literally 18% faster “in normal stuff”

ip26• 4 years ago

When M1 came out, I remember a lot of excitement around the past progress of performance in the A* core line; people extrapolated future performance and thought they were going to get +20% (ST) every 18 months on top of M1.

I think this expectation of sustained performance gains was a part of some of the more glowing reviews, rather than a narrow evaluation of M1 itself.

Anyway, it wasn’t a reasonable expectation. But I think people expected it anyway.

microtonal• 4 years ago

And yet, the M2 has 18% performance improvement in about 18 months. Presumably also single-threaded, since the CPU core configuration is the same as the M1. 18% is close enough to 20%.

awill• 4 years ago

AMD, releases CPUs every 2 years, so it's still impressive that in just 1 year Apple can have these gains.

nixgeek• 4 years ago

Apple announced M1 in November 2020 and the new MacBook Air M2 isn’t currently available to order in June 2022. It’s not accurate to say M-series iterations are annual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon

jti107• 4 years ago

ya but you have to look at it in terms of the consumer. not everyone is buying a new iphone every year. most wait two years and two years of 18%+ improvements leads to a phone that feels like a substantial upgrade especially for mobile games, 4k video and computational photography

ksec4• 4 years ago

So why here?

99.999999% of internet comments on M2, or even anything hardware related are pretty much junk. Anandtech used to do some explanation into these sort of things, but as it turns out people aren't interested in in-depth analysis, they just want benchmarks. You end up having them drifting towards mass / mainstream media or LinusTechTip type of content. RealWorldTech doesn't do any these anymore, partly because there is very little money to be made on the consumer side of things. You have other site which talks about Semiconductor Engineering and Business type of content. Unfortunately every time they were posted on HN, no one has shown any interest or complaining about how the content looks too "Enteprisy or Cooperate" because they were intended for B2B settings.

It also isn't just consumers or enthusiast. When viewed from the outside most people would have expected programmers, or what they now called Software Engineers to have some sort of High Level understanding on hardware. But most developers, especially Web Developers, are so abstracted from hardware they dont know or do not care about it.

Broadly speaking this isn't just with hardware, but also every other subject.

Invictus0• 4 years ago

If the author had taken the time to define some acronyms, this would have been way more accessible to a layman. Had to give up halfway through.

GeekyBear• 4 years ago

From Anandtech's deep dive into the performance and efficiency cores in the A15, which are reused here in the M2.

Performance Cores:

Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here – usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17% on the peak performance states versus the A14. If we had been able to measure both SoCs at the same performance level, this efficiency advantage of the A15 would grow even larger. In our initial coverage of Apple’s announcement, we theorised that the company might possibly invested into energy efficiency rather than performance increases this year, and I’m glad to see that seemingly this is exactly what has happened, explaining some of the more conservative (at least for Apple) performance improvements.

Efficiency Cores:

The A15’s efficiency cores are also massively impressive – at peak performance, efficiency is flat, but they’re also +28% faster.

The comparison against the little Cortex-A55 cores is more absurd though, as the A15’s E-core is 3.5x faster on average, yet only consuming 32% more power, so energy efficiency is 60% better.

Conclusions:

In our extensive testing, we’re elated to see that it was actually mostly an efficiency focus this year, with the new performance cores showcasing adequate performance improvements, while at the same time reducing power consumption, as well as significantly improving energy efficiency.

The efficiency cores of the A15 have also seen massive gains, this time around with Apple mostly investing them back into performance, with the new cores showcasing +23-28% absolute performance improvements, something that isn’t easily identified by popular benchmarking. This large performance increase further helps the SoC improve energy efficiency, and our initial battery life figures of the new 13 series showcase that the chip has a very large part into the vastly longer longevity of the new devices.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...

sushicat• 4 years ago

This is a really great article from Anandtech with benchmarks and analysis, it explained a lot of things.

The overall performance gains are quite disappointing when you factor in the raw cost increase that comes with this new M2 and the fact that it has been nearly 2 years since the M1’s introduction.

Also the logic of article in the title is little weird to me. M1 was introduced in the same year as A14, they use the same core; while M2 uses the same core as A15, which introduced 1 year after M1. So technically M2 increased the performance by 18% in one year, not two years.

Though I'm curious why Apple didn't use A16's core in M2.

BackBlast3• 4 years ago

Phones are the flagship product. They will always get the latest and greatest first, including cores, die shrinks, etc etc.

dylan522p3• 4 years ago

M1 2020, M2 2022?

hjnilsson• 4 years ago

It is looking like A16 will be on a smaller node. Likely manufacturing it on the current node would be too expensive due to increased transistor count.

Available volume on the new node will be much smaller, so they had to prioritize. This is likely why only the iPhone pro will get the A16.

chippiewill2• 4 years ago

Though I'm curious why Apple didn't use A16's core in M2.

Probably the smaller process node. There's low capacity and low yields for the first year or two of the smaller node. It might not be an issue for the base-level M2s, but they'll be expected to update the Pro/Max/Ultra line up as well in the next 8 months which have much larger die sizes and they'd end up throwing away most of the wafer.

kristianp• 4 years ago

Given that M2 is available in a week or two, and the A16 isn't, I would say it's a scheduling thing. In order to have the M1 to M2 cadence not blow out, they have to make decisions about what can go into the product.

ksec4• 4 years ago

Though I'm curious why Apple didn't use A16's core in M2.

We will know soon enough. My guess is that A16 is designed with TSMC 3nm in mind, that is why ( rumour ) only the new iPhone Pro will get A16, and iPhone 14 will stick to A15.

travisgriggs• 4 years ago

It’s dated, and the subject has shifted to processor design, but

The Apple Product Cycle (https://misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle.html)

still sums it all up pretty well.

kzrdude• 4 years ago

What does the M2 mean for linux support, any porting needed?

ParadisoShlee• 4 years ago

Excellent read into the realities of making a SOC.

Every SOC I continue to keep my eyes open for MTE being used in a mainstream ARMv8.5 processor... If we're to believe that M3 is marked to be using ARMv9 as well. Maybe 2024 is the year?

butterisgood• 4 years ago

My thoughts are it doesn’t even matter that much. Apple is not selling me a CPU - they’re selling me a laptop. Yeah it’s a critical piece but Apple is all about your overall outcome.

If they were a CPU “arms dealer” like Intel or AMD it’d matter more I think.

Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP

Related Stories