Reduced power consumption. Longer battery life - more environment friendly - cheaper to own.
The supercomputers have already moved to ARM and the top spots in TOP500 are all with ARM-based ones.
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Apple M1 CPU
- Thread starter benparker
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Reduced power consumption. Longer battery life - more environment friendly - cheaper to own.
The supercomputers have already moved to ARM and the top spots in TOP500 are all with ARM-based ones.
None of these is specific to ARM, as for being "RISC", you can run any workload and count instructions that x86-64 and Aarch64 require for those tasks, the results do come up within 10% of each other. Anandtech did run this benchmark a while back as well.
Since late 1990s almost all x86 processors have been internally RISC. In simple terms, x86 processors have an instruction cache that creates a queue, which are fed into micro-ops decoders (simpler ones are decoded directly, more complex ones are decoded through a microcode engine), and these are passed onto buffers and run through the internal RISC processor. This process generally is responsible for about 10-15% of the power consumption in the CPU. ARM CPUs do similar things as well, btw. This isn't to say ISA does not matter, it does, and certain x86 design decisions have contributed towards the stagnation that we're currently seeing by making progress more difficult, but they're only a minor aspect of modern CPUs.
10 years ago, CPUs with ARM ISA had no Performance Per Watt advantage over Intel/AMD ones with x86, in fact, they were behind by a good margin. 5 years ago, they caught on and became on par. Now with Apple (and ARM's own designs), ARM-based ones are significantly ahead, this is not inherent to ARM or x86 ISAs, but because Intel stagnated for a decade and AMD has just woken up in the last few years and has only completely surpassed Intel in the latest Zen 3 generation.
Some extra reading material:
https://community.arm.com/developer...rinsically-more-power-efficient?pi353792392=2
Edit:
In case someone is still somehow concerned by the CISC vs RISC stuff that haven't been relevant for decades, this is from Andrei (of Anandtech) on Twitter:
Basically comparing instruction counts of A12 (Aarch64) versus 9900K (x86) across SPEC subbenchmarks, and instruction counts are only 9.84% higher on AAarch64.
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Hmmm, https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2020/06/ looks like mostly x86 and Power.
Associate
My job is to build supercomputers, only notable arm system is in China as they're banned from having x86 systems of that level of power. The Chinese system is also only good at linpack, not real world tasks.
So you're not right with this claim.
What about Fugaku?
According to them, it's not a supercomputer
In the real world, though:
"Arm’s new Neoverse disclosures were made as the company claimed significant progress in the data center market, with four of the world’s top seven hyperscalers adopting Arm-based processors for deployments and with Arm-based Fujitsu processors powering Fugaku, the newly minted fastest supercomputer in the world. Arm’s V1 design has already been provided to silicon partners, and the N2 design is already sampling with some partners, though full delivery won’t happen until next year.
“The emergence of Arm in the data center is being powered by many factors: customization, efficiency, ecosystem diversity, but all of that builds on top of performance,” Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s infrastructure business, said in a pre-briefing with journalists and analysts. “If Neoverse wasn’t delivering a significant measurable value proposition you would not see the market adoption and momentum that we are achieving.”"
https://www.crn.com/news/components...verse-v1-n2-server-cpus-faster-than-intel-amd
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That is a really beautiful piece of data. What is striking to me is the better branch prediction of the A12 over the 9900k, which wobbles about but probably accounts for a lot of those ~10% extra cycles.
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Now the M1 graphics out perform.
"M1 processor often surpasses the graphics performance of desktop GPUs, including the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 560."
Really!
"M1 processor often surpasses the graphics performance of desktop GPUs, including the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 560."
Really!
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Don
Easy to state that though as again there's no macos edition of most well known "pc" 3d benchmarks.
No doubt it probably outperforms almost everything in Mobile phone OpenGL ES and metal benchmarks though
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Yeah, it was under Metal.
Phew.
Phew.
All macOS games are based on Metal as well, so metal performance is what you need to measure for M1's GPU. Since Metal is not available on Windows, we can't really compare Apple and Nvidia directly. AMD is a bit different, as they can run Metal on macOS too, but the CPUs will always be different.
Either way, some extrapolation is necessary.
Either way, some extrapolation is necessary.
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M1 CB23 Scores here:
https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/146878-apple-m1-cinebench-r23-benchmark-scores-revealed/
Cinebench R23 test
Apple M1
Single thread
990
Multi-thread
4,530
https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/146878-apple-m1-cinebench-r23-benchmark-scores-revealed/
Cinebench R23 test
Apple M1
Single thread
990
Multi-thread
4,530
Don
Seems somewhat more realistic
That's the exact A12Z scores from DTK that's been circulating around for days. Hexus quoted a troll on Twitter for the scores:
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Boooo!
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I would so be onboard for one of these ... but the new macs can only drive a single external display. Gonna have to wait for that to change before I jump. Need at least two.
They can drive two displays, one internal and one external for Macbooks, or two external for Mac Mini.
https://www.apple.com/uk/mac-mini/specs/
Reviews are not out and some people began getting their macs.
This is a Cinebench R23 a random user on Twitter, on the 13-inch Macbook Pro:
1,500 single-core.
7,500 multi-core.
For comparison:
Ryzen 4900H (8-core):
This is a Cinebench R23 a random user on Twitter, on the 13-inch Macbook Pro:
1,500 single-core.
7,500 multi-core.
For comparison:
Ryzen 4900H (8-core):
- Single-core: 1,300
- Multi-core: 11,000
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Is that using a native ARM version or is it using Rosetta 2?