Monday, September 18, 2023

CPUs: Performance Cores, Efficiency Cores, And All That Jazz -- September 18, 2023

Locator: 45692AAPL.

Holy mackerel: AAPL is up almost $3.00 today, trading near $178. Scratch that. That was earlier. AAPL has now gained $3.28 so far today. I'm glad I'm not short AAPL. Scratch that -- AAPL is up almost $4.00 today. ARM is down 7%. Scratch that, AAPL now trading up over $4.00 / share. CNBC: "S&P 500 rebounds Monday [today] after two weeks of losses; AAPL leads the gain."

When I say Apple is so far ahead of the competition ... I'm not exaggerating. The moat widens.

The best of the best: link here.

Last week, Apple became the first company in the world to offer a mobile SoC made with the most advanced technology currently availableTSMC's 3nm manufacturing node.
The tech world has been eagerly anticipating this node from TSMC for several years, so hopes were high at Apple's launch that it would deliver stunning performance and efficiency.
However, Apple poured some cold water on those hopes at the keynote by stating its CPU is just 10% faster than its predecessor.
Although that number is lower than expected, the first Geekbench results are in for the A17 Pro, and it shows it is indeed quite powerful, at least in single-core performance.
A pre-release Geekbench 6 score has appeared in the benchmark's online database, and it shows the A17 Pro cranking out a score of 2,914 in single-core performance. Tom's Hardware notes that that's within 10% of the Intel Core i9-13900K and the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, which score 3,223 and 3,172, respectively. That's impressive, considering the difference in core counts and clock speeds between the three chips.
Intel's CPU has 24 cores (8P+16E), and AMD's chip has 16 Zen 4 cores. The A17 Pro has just six: two performance and four efficiency cores.

Wow, wow, wow. Just wait until Apple - TSM crank out an A17 Pro with 48 cores. LOL. 

More from the linked article:

Also, Apple's SoC tops out at 3.77GHz, with the CPUs from both Intel and AMD running at 5.8GHz and 5.7GHz.
There's also a power consumption disparity here, with both desktop chips running at 125 and 170W, while we can guess Apple's chip is sipping around 10W. Holy mackerel.
The A16 Bionic was rated at 8W, so we're just spitballing here.
Apple has increased the clock speeds of the A17 Pro compared with its 3.46GHz predecessor, so it seems like the increase in performance comes from clock speeds alone, though it's possible architectural changes are also under the hood.
Apple was not embellishing when it said it had increased CPU performance by 10%. We also owe the company an apology, as we scoffed at its remarks during the keynote about how the A17 Pro could go toe-to-toe with the fastest desktop PCs. It turns out that is indeed true, at least in single-core performance.
In multi-core tests, however, the little A17 Pro can't hold a candle to the 32-thread chips from AMD and Intel, which isn't a surprise.
The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max phones with the A17 Pro will land on peoples' doorsteps later this week, so we're expecting an avalanche of new benchmarks shortly.
To nobody's surprise, it will likely earn the title of the world's fastest mobile chip, as it has roughly a year's head start on the entire industry in 3nm adoption. Its biggest rival, the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, is expected to use TSMC's N4P manufacturing node, which Apple used on last year's iPhone 14 Pro.

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Background

Tech: CPUs, GPUS, cores, threads and all that jazz --

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Today

All I can say is that analysts completely misunderstood the A17 chip:

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them.  

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.

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