
Ask HN: Why can Apple out CPU Intel? - raasdnil
Seems Apple are moving to their own chips for many reasons, but commercial ones aside, I see reports of Apple chips operating at 25-30% better thermal efficiency than their Intel counterparts.<p>My question is, why is it that Apple can achieve such massive jump in the heat&#x2F;performance ratio? And why couldn&#x27;t Intel? Is it just that Intel can not embrace ARM or is it an issue of backwards compatibility forced on Intel that makes their chips so inefficient in comparison?<p>Seems like building a CPU is a very non trivial task and seems this current situation would be similar to Intel making it&#x27;s own laptops.
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Traster
It does seem insane that a company would be able to just decide to start doing
chip design and could do it better than Intel. But you can see how it
happened. Apple obviously went for ARM in the first iPhone using a Samsung
chip. It quickly became apparent that Samsung were going to be a competitor,
and that the CPU is going to be a differentiator for the iPhone. So in 2008
Apple bought PA Semi, and started building that team up to produce a custom
version of the iPhone chip - and that was a massive success, releasing their
first chip in the iPhone 4 in 2010.

So Apple have been designing their own CPUs for a decade now. Over that time,
they've been massively focused on performance through efficiency - because
they're concerned about battery life, power dissipation etc. Whereas Intel has
been making bank by designing more and more powerful processors for the data
centre.

Of course Apple don't fabricate their own chips - they go to fabs like TSMC to
actually manufacture the chips. Whereas Intel does that themselves. It's worth
noting that TSMC is more of a direct competitor to Intel (they fab AMD chips
too) and they've been executing their road map better than Intel have for a
few years now.

~~~
cgb223
So if AMD or Intel wanted to wreck Apple Silicon they could just acquire TSMC?

Or are there a lot of other TSMC-like companies?

~~~
samfisher83
TSMC has a bigger market cap than intel, amd, nvdia etc.

Even though Intel generates more cash than all those companies.

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johnklos
Intel is a one-trick pony. When all you have is x86, then x86 becomes the
answer to everything.

CISC offered an interesting advantage to RISC - if you have instructions for
everything, then given a long enough time frame, you could optimize the heck
out of each and every instruction, so the advantages of RISC would be minimal.

However, x86 is purely ugly hackery with such ridiculously variable
instruction lengths, a paucity of registers and enhancements which have been
made more in the interest of marketing than in actual progress (see Linus'
recent comments about AVX-512).

x86 still could be optimized, but you end up over a long enough time with what
we have now - so much extra silicon handling so many edge cases and making
attempts to eek tiny performance gains out of an ugly, horrible ISA that even
the best of what 2020 has to offer can't compete with a clean architecture
like ARM that doesn't have all that crappy legacy.

The fact that AMD has outperformed Intel is also telling - AMD went back to
the drawing board, probably not just proverbially, and reinvented ways to get
that horrible instruction set to perform better, which is probably something
Intel has wished they had the foresight to start to do ten years ago.

It's also telling that Intel's security has been as bad as it has - it shows
that Intel has cared about performance to the precise detriment of security.
It doesn't matter how many billions of dollars of legacy you have pushing the
architecture if you're constantly operating at a pronounced disadvantage.

Even now, Intel is pretending that their big / little x86 cores is something
new. ARM has been doing that for almost a decade.

~~~
rayiner
x86 has nothing to do with this. x86 decode is a tiny portion of the area on a
modern x86 chip. It’s all mapped onto fixed length ops early in the pipeline
(and these days, cached in that form) and registers are remapped using
hardware you need for out of order execution anyway. The fact that AMD
outperformed Intel isn’t “telling”—it disproves your point.

Intel’s recent setbacks are due to its process engineering. Intel counts on
being one or two steps ahead in the process front. They stumbled with 10mm and
that caused the whole development pipeline to seize up. They have a next gen
architecture (Sunny Cove) that is stuck on a bad 10nm process, and a prior-gen
architecture that’s stuck on a very good but dated 14nm process.

------
wmf
It's mostly because TSMC's fabs are curently better than Intel's fabs. If
Intel's fabs catch up their processors will likely have very similar
efficiency to Apple's.

~~~
perl4ever
So, dumb question, why can't Intel contract with TSMC then?

~~~
exmadscientist
Intel locked their designs not just to their own fabs, but to specific
processes. Most other companies don't do this. It buys you better, more
optimized performance, but completely prevents design transfer. This really
bit Intel when their P1274 ("10nm") did not work for years, leaving
manufacturing stuck on P1272 ("14nm")... with microarchitectures designed for
P1274 and unable to be easily ported. They could have invested in porting --
it's not impossible, only resource-intensive -- but the manufacturing group
kept insisting P1274 was about to enter HVM... for years... so the designs
were never ported.

In hindsight, this appears to have been a serious blunder.

~~~
kungato
Is there any a bit bigger writeup/interview about this? Did they abandon this
approach or are they still sticking with it?

~~~
wmf
Intel announced that future cores will be portable to multiple processes,
although it's not clear whether that includes non-Intel ones. It is rumored
that the upcoming Rocket Lake is a 14 nm backport of Willow Cove that was
originally intended for 10 nm.

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anthony_barker
They have a lot of cash are and are looking for growth. The best way is to go
up the supply chain.

Using arm you tapping into a huge industry of people who know how to make
chips. Plus as others said TSMC are ahead of Intel and will actually be making
the chips.

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ksec
Tl;DR, It is TSMC, not Apple.

I have been thinking starting a blog on the topic considering how often this
question keeps popping up. From a very high level overview.

1\. Apple is partnering with TSMC. TSMC is now the leader in leading edge
semiconductor manufacturing. A title that used to belong to Intel.

2\. TSMC is now a generation ahead of Intel, meaning those thermal efficiency
you see comes from using a better node. Nothing much to do with ARM or x86.

3\. Both ARM and TSMC has dramatically change the Industry, you can now buy
Designs / Blueprints from ARM, ( Or any other IP vendors such as Img PowerVR )
and Fab ( meaning producing them ) them with a Foundry.

4\. TSMC is a Pure Play Foundry, meaning the Foundry does not produce their
own chip and sell in the market to compete with its customers. A Non Pure Play
Example would be Samsung or Intel, where Samsung produce their own Mobile SoC
Exynos, and Intel with their x86 Chip. If you were Qualcomm producing your
chip in Samsung's Fab, you are directly competing with them.

5\. Apple now has the volume, or economy of scale to produce CPU themselves.
Apple makes more silicon in unit volume than Intel per year.

So the inevitable Question:

Why Doesn't Intel go to TSMC then?

Intel would earn more margins by producing it themselves. Second being moving
these designs take years, especially for Intel which have their own design
tools in house. Intel cares about margins, and you can tell from their
investor meetings.

~~~
ekr
While TSMC is cleary a big part of the reason, it still doesn't explain why
there's such a big performance gap between Apple's SoCs and the rest of the
competitors in the ARM smartphone SoCs field. Apple is often leading the likes
of Samsung, Qualcomm, Huawei, MediaTek by a whole generation in IPC or single
threaded performance.

~~~
ksec
Apple's has much better CPU core budget than Qualcomm's counterpart. Before
5G, All Qualcomm's SoC has integrated Modem within. Mean while Apple has Modem
as separate piece of Silicon.

ARM has been very up front about it. It is not that they cant design much
higher IPC CPU Core, they are designing around the transistor budget that
their customers are focusing.

------
devxpy
There's a lot of contribution here from Jim keller, a.k.a. the silicon ronin.

He was the one who designed A4/A5 - the very first apple silicon, that I
distinctly remember having performance on par with other offerings at the
time.

~~~
devxpy
Hmm, maybe am I wrong on this? Can the down-voter educate me?

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techiefreak21
its all about architecture of chips . apple has technology to achieve it &
that doesnt mean intel is not having thier technology to make it possible its
all about company usp . if they will get their ROI then they will continue
otherwise

just take an example if intel will make performance base chip same price as
apple ? which one you will prefer ?

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pjbster
Intel could become dominant as a cloud service provider. They have the
engineering resources and the facilities to build bespoke datacenters running
servers built on their own SoC's running their own ISA on their own Linux
kernel. Scrap the idea of selling cpus on the open market; they can optimise
their silicon for cloud operations and make the margins on services.

If AWS or Microsoft decide they need to have an in-house fab capability, I
wonder if Intel will become a takeover target?

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tinus_hn
It helps if you don’t have to drag along compatibility with 40 year old
obsolete technology.

~~~
flohofwoe
42 years old obsolete technology isn't that much different than 35 years old
obsolete technology though ;)

~~~
spacedcowboy
Apple’s ARM is 64-bit only. And it’s an internal-to-Apple design that doesn’t
have to be compatible to ARM in general.

Apples burden of backwards compatibility is essentially zero at this point,
it’s a totally new architecture.

~~~
wmf
_doesn’t have to be compatible to ARM in general_

It does now because of Linux VMs. They added back 4K pages, for example.

------
totalZero
They can't out-CPU Intel.

They can out-CPU Intel's 10nm.

------
coldtea
> _My question is, why is it that Apple can achieve such massive jump in the
> heat /performance ratio?_

25-30% is not what I'd call a "massive jump".

~~~
2fast4you
That’s pretty big...

~~~
raasdnil
And more to the point, its in the area of their achilles heel, "heat per
performance"... my macbook pro gets pretty toasty.

------
magicmouse
Intel saw the ARM juggernaut coming years ago after they trounced AMD, which
was their only serious competition. They knew their chips were faster, but
they took too much power for mobile devices. So they have been concentrating
exclusively not on performance improvements, but in lowering power
consumption, which they have done an excellent job at doing.

They have deliberately slowed down their tick/tock speed of development
because they know they are reaching the end of the road, and will nothing to
improve upon because the physical limits of silicon as a material are being
approached. Other materials are possible, but very costly.

Apple wants to bring their huge iOS software library to their laptops. OSX has
been declining for years as a software market, and fewer products are being
made for it. In contrast, Apple has millions of excellent titles in IOS, but
they all use ARM instruction set. So this allows them to unify the software
availability.

The laptop computers Apple sells are a small part of their business, they know
that in the future computers are a commodity and won't be profitable, but
software will be, and they want to capitalize on their iTunes App Store which
is the largest employer of independent software developers in the entire
world. It is a bigger publishing entity than all of the US book publishers put
together. With a 70% royalty rate paid to authors, it is also the highest
paying publisher in the history of the world. It is common in Music and Book
publishing to pay around 5% royalties. Steve Jobs really disrupted that
industry with a new economic model! Hooray for Jobs! We sure miss him. I bet
he would be opening his own bank and credit card, as that industry is ripe for
revolution; the credit card companies are still ripping off businesses by
taking 3% on a transaction, when 0.3% would be more reasonable given modern
technology.

The ARM chips, just like intel chips, will be thermally limited in all these
laptops. Its very hard to extract the heat without going to water cooling
which nobody has the nerve to do.

