<story><title>Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-and-m1-max-the-most-powerful-chips-apple-has-ever-built/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Unklejoe</author><text>The M1 still uses DDR memory at the end of the day, it&amp;#x27;s just physically closer to the core. This is in contrast to L3 which is actual SRAM on the core.&lt;p&gt;The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow the memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas the M1 uses 4266.&lt;p&gt;The real advantage is the M1 Max uses 8 channels, which is impressive considering that&amp;#x27;s as many as an AMD EPYC, but operates at like twice the speed at the same time.</text></item><item><author>PaulKeeble</author><text>400GB&amp;#x2F;s available to the CPU cores in a unified memory, that is going to really help certain workloads that are very memory dominant on modern architectures. Both Intel and AMD are solving this with ever increasing L3 cache sizes but just using attached memory in a SOC has vastly higher memory bandwidth potential and probably better latency too especially on work that doesn&amp;#x27;t fit in ~32MB of L3 cache.</text></item><item><author>fotta</author><text>I think the higher memory is also a huge win, with support for up to 64gb.</text></item><item><author>bla3</author><text>This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they&amp;#x27;re the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it&amp;#x27;ll be interesting to see what they&amp;#x27;ll do for their desktops.&lt;p&gt;Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the efficiency cores on the M1 became performance cores. So CPU-bound things like compiling code will be &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; 20-50% faster than on the M1 MacBook. The big wins are for GPU-heavy and codec-heavy workloads.&lt;p&gt;That makes sense since that&amp;#x27;s where most users will need their performance. I&amp;#x27;m still a bit sad that the era of &amp;quot;general purpose computing&amp;quot; where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end.&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, impressive chips, I&amp;#x27;m very curious where they&amp;#x27;ll take it for the Mac Pro, and (hopefully) the iMac Pro.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sounds</author><text>Just to underscore this, memory physically closer to the cores has improved tRAS times measured in nanoseconds. This has the secondary effect of boosting the performance of the last-level cache since it can fill lines on a cache miss much faster.&lt;p&gt;The step up from DDR4 to DDR5 will help fill cache misses that are predictable, but everybody uses a prefetcher already, the net effect of DDR5 is mostly just better efficiency.&lt;p&gt;The change Apple is making, moving the memory closer to the cores, improves unpredicted cache misses. That&amp;#x27;s significant.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-and-m1-max-the-most-powerful-chips-apple-has-ever-built/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Unklejoe</author><text>The M1 still uses DDR memory at the end of the day, it&amp;#x27;s just physically closer to the core. This is in contrast to L3 which is actual SRAM on the core.&lt;p&gt;The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow the memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas the M1 uses 4266.&lt;p&gt;The real advantage is the M1 Max uses 8 channels, which is impressive considering that&amp;#x27;s as many as an AMD EPYC, but operates at like twice the speed at the same time.</text></item><item><author>PaulKeeble</author><text>400GB&amp;#x2F;s available to the CPU cores in a unified memory, that is going to really help certain workloads that are very memory dominant on modern architectures. Both Intel and AMD are solving this with ever increasing L3 cache sizes but just using attached memory in a SOC has vastly higher memory bandwidth potential and probably better latency too especially on work that doesn&amp;#x27;t fit in ~32MB of L3 cache.</text></item><item><author>fotta</author><text>I think the higher memory is also a huge win, with support for up to 64gb.</text></item><item><author>bla3</author><text>This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they&amp;#x27;re the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it&amp;#x27;ll be interesting to see what they&amp;#x27;ll do for their desktops.&lt;p&gt;Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the efficiency cores on the M1 became performance cores. So CPU-bound things like compiling code will be &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; 20-50% faster than on the M1 MacBook. The big wins are for GPU-heavy and codec-heavy workloads.&lt;p&gt;That makes sense since that&amp;#x27;s where most users will need their performance. I&amp;#x27;m still a bit sad that the era of &amp;quot;general purpose computing&amp;quot; where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end.&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, impressive chips, I&amp;#x27;m very curious where they&amp;#x27;ll take it for the Mac Pro, and (hopefully) the iMac Pro.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GeekyBear</author><text>Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the industry.&lt;p&gt;They put a 32 megabyte system level cache in their latest phone chip.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;at 32MB, the new A15 dwarfs the competition’s implementations, such as the 3MB SLC on the Snapdragon 888 or the estimated 6-8MB SLC on the Exynos 2100&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.anandtech.com&amp;#x2F;show&amp;#x2F;16983&amp;#x2F;the-apple-a15-soc-performance-review-faster-more-efficient&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.anandtech.com&amp;#x2F;show&amp;#x2F;16983&amp;#x2F;the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It will be interesting to see how big they go on these chips.</text></comment>