<story><title>Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V</title><url>https://erik-engheim.medium.com/apple-m1-foreshadows-risc-v-dd63a62b2562</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noizejoy</author><text>With all the discussion about what the “big trick” is that makes the M1 seem to be such a breakthrough, I can’t help but wonder, if the M1 is more like the iPhone: The sum of a large number of small engineering improvements, coupled with a lot of component integration detail work, topped off by some very shrewd supply chain arrangements.&lt;p&gt;Analogous to the iPhone being foreshadowed by the iPod without most experts believing Apple could make a mobile phone from that, the M1 was foreshadowed by the A1 for mobile devices with many(most?) experts not forecasting how much it could be the base for laptops and desktops.&lt;p&gt;It seems, the M1 includes numerous small engineering advances and the near term lockup of the top of the line fab in the supply chain also reminds me of how Apple had secured exclusivity for some key leading edge iPhone parts (was it the screens?).&lt;p&gt;So the M1 strikes me as the result of something that Apple has the ability to pull off from time to time.&lt;p&gt;And that is rather hard to pull off financially, organizationally and culturally. And it more than makes up for some pretty spectacular tactical mis-steps (I’m looking at you, puck mouse, cube mac, butterfly keyboard).&lt;p&gt;EDIT for typo</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gchadwick</author><text>&amp;gt; The sum of a large number of small engineering improvements, coupled with a lot of component integration detail work, topped off by some very shrewd supply chain arrangements.&lt;p&gt;I think the vertical integration they have is a major advantage too.&lt;p&gt;I used to work at arm on CPUs. One thing I worked on was memory prefetching which is critical to performance. When designing a prefetcher you can do a better job if you have some understanding or guarantees as to the behaviour of the wider memory system (better yet if you can add prefetching specific functionality to it). The issue I faced is the partners (Samsung, Qualcomm etc) are the ones implementing the SoC and hence controlling the wider memory system. They don&amp;#x27;t give you detailed specs of how that works, nor is there an method where you can discuss with them appropriate ways to build things to enable better prefetching performance. You end up building something that&amp;#x27;s hopefully adaptable for multiple scenarios and no one ever gets a chance to do some decent end to end performance tuning. I&amp;#x27;m either working with a model of what the memory system might be and Qualcomm&amp;#x2F;Samsung etc engineers are working with the CPU as a black box trying to tune their side of things to work better. Were we all under one roof I suspect we could easily have got more out of it.&lt;p&gt;You also get requirements based upon targets to hit for some specific IP, rather than requirements around the final product, e.g. silicon area. Generally arm will be keen to keep area increase low or improve performance &amp;#x2F; area ratio without any huge shocks on overall area. If you&amp;#x27;re apple you just care about the final end user experience and the potential profit margin. You can run the numbers and realise you can go big on silicon area and get where you want to be. With a multi-company&amp;#x2F;vendor chain each link is trying to optimise for some number they control, even if that overal has a negative impact on the final product.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V</title><url>https://erik-engheim.medium.com/apple-m1-foreshadows-risc-v-dd63a62b2562</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noizejoy</author><text>With all the discussion about what the “big trick” is that makes the M1 seem to be such a breakthrough, I can’t help but wonder, if the M1 is more like the iPhone: The sum of a large number of small engineering improvements, coupled with a lot of component integration detail work, topped off by some very shrewd supply chain arrangements.&lt;p&gt;Analogous to the iPhone being foreshadowed by the iPod without most experts believing Apple could make a mobile phone from that, the M1 was foreshadowed by the A1 for mobile devices with many(most?) experts not forecasting how much it could be the base for laptops and desktops.&lt;p&gt;It seems, the M1 includes numerous small engineering advances and the near term lockup of the top of the line fab in the supply chain also reminds me of how Apple had secured exclusivity for some key leading edge iPhone parts (was it the screens?).&lt;p&gt;So the M1 strikes me as the result of something that Apple has the ability to pull off from time to time.&lt;p&gt;And that is rather hard to pull off financially, organizationally and culturally. And it more than makes up for some pretty spectacular tactical mis-steps (I’m looking at you, puck mouse, cube mac, butterfly keyboard).&lt;p&gt;EDIT for typo</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_ph_</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The sum of a large number of small engineering improvements, coupled with a lot of component integration detail work, topped off by some very shrewd supply chain arrangements.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think you precisely have it. There is no single magic reason the M1 is so good, just a lot of things coming together. They start with a better instruction set than x86, have of course the best process available, and perhaps the largest part, they have built up an increadible team over a decade. And they are extremely focussed in what they target.  If anything, that is Apples &amp;quot;magic&amp;quot;. They are not making a chip which is built in an abstract manner to be sold to random customers. They have exactly their needs in mind and execute towards those. 
In a sense AMD did that with the chips for the Playstation&amp;#x2F;XBox. Like the M1 it is basically a SOC. There optimized for great graphics performance. Unfortunately, those chips are not sold separately for building your own PC.</text></comment>