this is not the future of the pc
this is if the enthusiast in you screams that no you can't just replace gpus and
cpus with integrated socs i am here to
tell you that apple silicon gober apple
obviously knows it and make no mistake Intel AMD and NVIDIA all know it too the
writing is on the wall and now it's just a matter of time pcs need to change
and i'm going to tell you how and why right after i tell you about our
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a lot of you really liked our how to build a pc the last guide you'll ever
need and i'm really glad that you do because it took so much effort to make
but look at that run time and it could have been even longer
think about how many components go into a typical pc build and then look at this
unassuming little box the mac studio in
our testing the m1 ultra variant pulled a grand total of
223.4 watts from the wall under the
heaviest load that we could give it and the m1 max version didn't even break
three digits if we ignore the rosetta results they achieved 88 and 61 percent
respectively of the core i9 12900k and
rtx 3090 bench's overall performance in our productivity testing at just 34 and
15 of the total system power at most the
12 900k the CPU alone can draw more power than
the whole m1 ultra mac studio and
developers are still figuring out how to optimize for apple silicon now
look at that pc and all its components again all the raw materials that go into
making it what it is it's wasteful right in almost every way except economically
it's not that x86 is inherently bad but it has limitations that even Intel have
tried to overcome themselves with projects like titanium while extensions
have given it more life its complex instruction set design is at its core an
old one that dates back to the late 1970s literally every x86 based CPU
boots up in 8086 compatibility mode and
can in theory run software made for the
og ibm pc precious die space and
transistors are used for supporting instructions and modes that might be
redundant or not even remotely useful today but must be there to maintain
compatibility with the architecture and now if i'm Intel or AMD looking at my
options i'm sweating a little and weighing a switch to ARM while neither
currently sells an armed CPU both hold
armed licenses and AMD is on record saying that they're willing and able to
do it it wasn't that long ago even that
Intel had their own reduced instruction set CPU called the i860 and i-960 and
you'd be kidding yourself if you thought they weren't prototyping stuff on the
side like apple was when they were suffering through 14 nanometer plus plus
plus a change in the pc industry would of course have a teething period like
apple silicon is currently experiencing but it could eventually be a good thing
and not just for efficiency think about it Intel and AMD are alone in the CPU
race right now just like AMD and NVIDIA are currently alone in the GPU race and
if Intel had their way in the 90s or in 2015 there'd be only one
thanks to Intel's control over performance and efficiency enhancing
extensions used on modern cpus like sse and avx and AMD's control over the
64-bit extensions that every desktop CPU
since core 2 has used we don't have any other desktop CPU manufacturers anyone
entering the x86 market would have to reverse engineer those extensions to
compete because AMD and Intel have a technology sharing agreement that
forbids sub licensing and expires if either company changes hands by contrast
ARM doesn't sell anything directly they develop the base specifications and then
they license that to other companies who then have the option of tweaking and
adding to those designs to tailor them to suit their needs this is how apple
silicon came to be and if ARM took off on the desktop we could see not only
mobile players like qualcomm samsung and mediatek enter the ring but maybe google
or even hp they used to make their own cpus once too and we can't forget NVIDIA
whose last consumer ARM soc uses GPU cores from 2014 and lives on in the
nintendo switch and shield tv plus actually it's kind of bizarre that
NVIDIA hasn't continued to produce consumer socs like perhaps contractual
obligations within and outside of NVIDIA's control had something to do
with it because not only were they close to straight up buying ARM a sign that
they knew times were changing but they're also still actively developing
ARM socs just not for consumers their grace data center soc for ali
acceleration has a surprisingly similar level of integration to apple silicon on
paper and is just begging to be scaled down so that consumers can use it just
like the tesla's and not quadro gpus do with g-force but let's back up a sec
duopoly aside if x86 is so bad and ARM
is so good why is x86 still the king of
the pc well prior to apple silicon
you'd be forgiven for thinking that ARM
chips simply can't perform like Intel and AMD qualcomm has a
virtual monopoly over non-apple ARM pcs
and a literal monopoly in the Windows ecosystem thanks to an exclusivity
agreement with microsoft when that deal was penned it probably did make some
sense qualcomm was the third biggest chip maker even as of mid-2020 and
there's still a giant who's recently been eyeing a slice of the ARM pie for
themselves so assuming qualcomm would become the biggest supplier of desktop
ARM chips it made sense for microsoft to want to optimize for that hardware
unfortunately for microsoft and for us there is no polite way to put this even
qualcomm's latest chips suck which recently prompted google to follow
samsung and apple and going their own way with tensor and may eventually
prompt microsoft to do the same qualcomm's utter failure to compete in
the pc space so far has given Intel AMD and especially NVIDIA precious breathing
room and we're not saying that the pc as we know it is dead today it definitely
still has some life left and they'll first probably try to integrate x86 socs
more tightly before they consider switching over Intel for example could
very well be working on an soc that combines alder lake's efficiency cores
with a larger number of xc graphics cores and ai engine blocks taking the
dye space that would otherwise have been allocated to the bigger performance
cores even so reduced instruction set architectures proved their worth in the
late 90s with early ARM licenses and with power pc which was famously used in
the first imax clock for clock power pc tended to outperform x86 by a wide
margin though this did depend on the task and eventually powerpc hit a
performance and efficiency wall just like x86 is today Intel's titanium for
its part was supposed to be a sort of successor to risk as a concept by using
one hp termed explicitly parallel instruction computing or epic yes
naming has always been bad unlike our swag it from ltdstore.com it describes
exactly what it is a sweater and a jacket as we know today titanium didn't
work out so well still even Intel saw that the x86's days were numbered their
plan for pentium 4 was more or less to just clock it as high as it would go and
hope that the numbers kept going up and now that we're back to this phase again
where we can't physically fit more cores on a die because new process nodes are
providing less additional density something's got to give
the current solution stacking dies will only get you so far when you're already
pushing 241 watts by comparison a lot of
ARM's advantages today come not strictly from its reduced instruction set but
from how it's typically bundled into a system-on-chip configuration where
virtually the entire computer is super close to the CPU cores why does this
matter when we already have apus it's all about density and power draw simply
expanding the size of the die isn't normally a good idea from power and
thermal perspective but ARM cores are typically much smaller than x86 and sip
far less power so not only can you fit more of them into the same space
you're also not as limited in terms of die size in general m1 ultra's die area
is bigger than the rtx 3090 ti let's do
a case study AMD's 8 core ryzen 7 5700g desktop apus
are somewhere between an m1 and m1 pro in terms of die size the apu dedicates
just over a quarter of the utilized die space to CPU cores and cache alone and
just 10 to the GPU for thermal management there's also a fair amount of
unused white space even within the cores themselves meanwhile even m1's big
performance CPU cores are tiny by comparison with all cores taking just
over 20 percent of that smaller die area
the GPU takes up double the relative die space as the apu which means there's way
more GPU horsepower on tap and still room for other functions like the
massive media engine neural engine and storage controller there's very little
white space by comparison not only are those ARM cores efficient enough to
handle such a compact layout but when so much of the system is contained within
it significantly less energy has to be used for signaling which also happens to
be much faster if we tried to push an x86 processor to these densities in
proximity with this many GPU cores it would quickly become a thermal
meltdown event sort of like the opposite of how alex had to save a frozen core i9
12900 ks literally frozen go check it out on flow plane along with more
exclusive when you're done here and it's scales m1 max sports a larger die than
the rtx 3070 and m1 ultra is about a
third again bigger than the rtx 3090 ti
with the die that large the computy bits of the 3090 ti would take up roughly
half the m1 ultra's die area while apple currently dedicates just over a third
that means that if apple built a dedicated big chip design and weren't
using their own metal API separate from the rest of the industry they
legitimately could reach high-end GPU levels of real world performance a shame
that apple had to go their own way but imagine if NVIDIA were to build such
a thing they could corner the ARM desktop or notebook space very quickly if
developers were on board especially it's not as simple as gluing them together
obviously and that GeForce power consumption is still a problem but it's
also not an impossible hurdle and with the success of apple silicon despite its
growing pains it's impossible for the industry to ignore the advantages to
this approach you can have excellent performance coupled with incredibly low
power draw on a much more open architecture that allows for bigger or
more aspirational system integrators to tweak things as they see fit this
potential future will suck for enthusiasts who like getting their hands
dirty but the alternative is laid bare before us power targets shooting up at
record pace to the point where we're looking at new connectors to help
deliver all the juice this generation of hardware now is already incredibly power
hungry with Intel and AMD squeezing higher and higher frequencies out of
their cores and NVIDIA rumored to require up to 600 watts for their
next-gen top-end GPU there's really no backing down we have to ask ourselves
is it worth it and at what point does it stop being worth it
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backblaze.com LTT thanks for watching guys this one's a
bit more philosophical than usual so maybe go check out something more down
and dirty for a palette cleanser like our 6.9 gigahertz GPU released on six
nine it's nice