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New cores (A15)

Lemon Olive said:
YOU DON'T SAY. I've only been telling you this for months.
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And you may be right, or you may be wrong. There’s just as much evidence the other way. The fact that the new cores appear to be similar to the old, but optimized for N5P, suggests that Apple would use those instead (no way these new chips, whatever they are, are N5, and Apple is not going to optimize twice).
 
Here's my wild speculation. The current top end MBP 16" has an 8 core i9. So the forthcoming Apple Silicon MPB 16" will have at least 8 performance cores, maybe even 10 or 12, together with (most likely) 4 energy efficient cores.
Could Apple be focusing on reducing the power consumption of this years cores, since there could be quite a few of them in the next MPB's. More cores = quicker battery drain and they might be focusing on battery life.

I've no idea if this is anywhere near the mark, but it would seem to fit the observed facts.
 
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I'm just curious...I assume that most of Apple's CPU design budget is oriented towards iPhone SoCs. So I'm wondering how much of the budget is spent on the Mac SoCs. I expect that it's (relatively) nothing, because all of the heavy lifting handled by the main design team. Or, to put it more bluntly, how much did it cost Apple to develop the M1, ignoring the costs associated with the A14, etc? My WAG is that Apple is spending a couple of billion on chip design, but less than 5% of that goes to Mac-specific SoC design. Am I anywhere in the ballpark?
 
I wonder if Apple might have a SoC, for notebooks, that uses a clock splitter for the P cores, so that a few of them could run at a lower speed in order to act as semi-E cores. That might make a 6+2 configuration more sensible if pairs of the P cores could just run down-clocked instead of the whole CPU.
 
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Hey people, I have a question about the cache.

The new A15 has doubled the system cache from 16 to 32MB.
What’s the cache of the M1? Is it 16MB? 32MB? Is there a system cache on the M1? Do you expect Apple to double it on the next M2 as well?

Those were several questions but the topic is the same: The system’s cache. I’ve only found data about L1 and L2 caches on the M1, not about a system’s cache.

Thank you
 
Populus said:
Hey people, I have a question about the cache.

The new A15 has doubled the system cache from 16 to 32MB.
What’s the cache of the M1? Is it 16MB? 32MB? Is there a system cache on the M1?
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As far as I know, it’s 16MB, same as A14
Populus said:
Those were several questions but the topic is the same: The system’s cache. I’ve only found data about L1 and L2 caches on the M1, not about a system’s cache.
Click to expand...

L1 and L2 caches are CPU(cluster)-specific, LLC is shared by all the clusters on the SoC (it’s basically the shared cache before the RAM). This is the cache that allows quick data transfers between CPU, GPU, ML accelerators etc.
 
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cmaier said:
And you may be right, or you may be wrong. There’s just as much evidence the other way. The fact that the new cores appear to be similar to the old, but optimized for N5P, suggests that Apple would use those instead (no way these new chips, whatever they are, are N5, and Apple is not going to optimize twice).
Click to expand...
Funny thing is, I now feel the opposite way, because the increased GPU performance of the A15 makes me think this chip is what is being fabbed for the MBP.
 
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Looking at Metal Score leak that was posted on MacRumors news, it seems like there is a clockspeed increase. From ~3.0 Ghz to 3.23Ghz.
 
leman said:
As far as I know, it’s 16MB, same as A14


L1 and L2 caches are CPU(cluster)-specific, LLC is shared by all the clusters on the SoC (it’s basically the shared cache before the RAM). This is the cache that allows quick data transfers between CPU, GPU, ML accelerators etc.
Click to expand...
Thank you for your explanation.
Hopefully the M1X or the M2 will jump to 32MB of system cache as well.
 
cmaier said:
I don’t trust clock speed leaks until the benchmark people have a chance to debug with the new chip, but an interesting data point at Least.
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I agree with you but with iPhone 13 being really close to launch at this point, I think it is safe to assume that may end up being true.
 
Mr. Bear said:
I'm just curious...I assume that most of Apple's CPU design budget is oriented towards iPhone SoCs. So I'm wondering how much of the budget is spent on the Mac SoCs. I expect that it's (relatively) nothing, because all of the heavy lifting handled by the main design team. Or, to put it more bluntly, how much did it cost Apple to develop the M1, ignoring the costs associated with the A14, etc? My WAG is that Apple is spending a couple of billion on chip design, but less than 5% of that goes to Mac-specific SoC design. Am I anywhere in the ballpark?
Click to expand...
Well the M1 replaced what would have been the A14X in the iPad Pros so the incremental cost over what would have been the A14X was probably not that great. However, the M1 has replaced the Intel CPU in the lower end consumer Macs. To replace the Intel CPUs in the higher end Macs (in particular the desktop Macs), Apple is going to have to invest a lot more time and money. They need to support a lot more RAM, more high performance CPU cores and a lot more GPU cores.

I suspect the reason the A15 may not be a huge improvement over the A14 and the reason the CPU in the Apple Watch 7 is the same as last years is Apple's SoC team is focused on the new Mac SoCs.
 
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