Really ? Apparently everyone said the same about Intel, that they also have an unlimited budget.
Apple is AFAIK the highest valued company on the planet, and the one with the biggest cash hoard too. Intel has never been even close to that. So while Intel's R&D budgest might have been "unlimited" in terms of the tech industry at the time, Apple's R&D budgets are likely only limited by how many people it's possible for them to hire, how many concurrent projects it's possible for them to run, and what they are interested in doing.
They are doing things nobody else have an interest in doing. The segments in which Apple and Intel/AMD operate have little overlap actually, Apple is basically an exclusively mobile silicon company and Intel/AMD are ... not. Their designs are first and foremost meant for servers where the goal is to fit as much compute as possible on a single package, what we get on desktops and even on mobile is a cut down version of whatever that is and at core are basically the same architectures just configured differently.
Intentionally or not, you are completely misunderstanding what I said. I was referring to the
A14/M1 Firestorm "big core" microarchitecture and its features, and not mobile-specific features at that, just ones that massively increase the throughput of the core. An 8-wide decode block compared to 4-wide in x86; a re-order buffer 2-3x the size of Intel and AMD's newest architectures, 4x/2x the FP/clock throughput of current Intel architectures/Zen 3, dramatically deeper load/store queues than any other architecture, L1 caches
6x the size of current X86 architectures (seemingly without a latency penalty!) ....and the list goes on. These aren't mobile-specific features, these are common features across all modern CPU architectures. And somehow Apple is able to massively beat the competition on several fronts, doing things that seems to be impossible for the others. Some of it can be blamed on the X86 ISA (decode block width, for example), but not everything. And if you're trying to tell me that AMD and Intel could grow their L1 caches 6x without increasing latency by a single cycle, yet are choosing not to, then you need to provide some proof for that, because that's an outlandish thing to even suggest. If AMD and/or Intel could do what Apple is doing here to increase IPC without tanking performance through either killing power efficiency, introducing massive latency, etc., they would very clearly do so.
The thing is, this design is likely to scale
extremely well for servers and workstations, as the clock speeds they are reaching are the same as the ones hit by current top-end multi-core server chips, just at much lower power. They'd obviously need to tweak the architecture in various ways and find a way to couple together more than 4+4 cores efficiently without introducing bottlenecks or massive latency, but ... given what they've already done, that should be doable. Whatever silicon Apple makes for the next Mac Pro, it's looking like it'll be extremely impressive.
Luckily we now have proper tests.
Yes, it's very fast in single threaded workloads, no it's not what Apple claims overall.
No, you still don't want to game on Apple hardware.
www.anandtech.com
I would really, really like to see what RotTR performance would look like if it was compiled for this architecture rather than run through a translation layer. Even if gaming performance is lacklustre overall, that is
damn impressive.
