Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

Eug · Nov 10, 2020

M1
5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LP-DDR4
16 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 12 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache
(Apple claims the 4 high-effiency cores alone perform like a dual-core Intel MacBook Air)

8-core iGPU (but there is a 7-core variant, likely with one inactive core)
128 execution units
Up to 24576 concurrent threads
2.6 Teraflops
82 Gigatexels/s
41 gigapixels/s

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Products:
$999 ($899 edu) 13" MacBook Air (fanless) - 18 hour video playback battery life
$699 Mac mini (with fan)
$1299 ($1199 edu) 13" MacBook Pro (with fan) - 20 hour video playback battery life

Memory options 8 GB and 16 GB. No 32 GB option (unless you go Intel).

It should be noted that the M1 chip in these three Macs is the same (aside from GPU core number). Basically, Apple is taking the same approach which these chips as they do the iPhones and iPads. Just one SKU (excluding the X variants), which is the same across all iDevices (aside from maybe slight clock speed differences occasionally).

EDIT:

M1 Pro 8-core CPU (6+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 16-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 24-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 32-core GPU

M1 Pro and M1 Max discussion here:

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M1 Ultra discussion here:

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M2 discussion here:

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Second Generation 5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LPDDR5, up to 24 GB and 100 GB/s
20 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 16 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache

10-core iGPU (but there is an 8-core variant)
3.6 Teraflops

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Hardware acceleration for 8K h.264, h.264, ProRes

M3 Family discussion here:

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M4 Family discussion here:

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The Hardcard · Nov 8, 2024

FlameTail said:
The consolation for Intel/AMD is that Apple uses their chips only in their own products, which isolates them from the broader market due to the walled garden.

The real bloodbath will begin when other ARM vendors such as Qualcomm and Nvidia bring their next gen ARM cores into the broader PC market.

Qualcomm and Nvidia won’t create a bloodbath. Slightly better performance and somewhat better efficiency will get them passable marketshare, but neither can upend x86.

Apple’s cores have opened a real gap that other ARM cores aren’t matching. M4 SOCs are more than slightly faster, more than somewhat more efficient. They remain in a different league than other ARM designs.

It is unfortunate that higher device configurations remains a central way for Apple hit their return on investment goals. Linus Tech Tips claims that fixed industry costs mean that no lower capacity SSD can be made more cheaply than a 1 TB drive. If true, that gives Apple two tiers of pure profit higher storage configurations.

The M4 cores could easily allow Apple to take more than 15 percent of the market. The ability of competitors to far more cheaply offer large amounts of memory and storage is the only thing keeping Apple from surging on marketshare.

Despite that fact, and I am so sorry Igor, Apple is nevertheless going to have great success their current business model. Especially since they made the base configuration much more tolerable. The M4s are creating performance lust and a lot of people will eat higher configuration costs. The number of people who get their mouths foamed up to pay for the top configuration amazes me, as easy and effective it is to connect Thunderbolt storage. No they must pay Apple for 8 TBs.

Mac Minis will be everywhere.

Meteor Late · Nov 8, 2024

The Hardcard said:
Qualcomm and Nvidia won’t create a bloodbath. Slightly better performance and somewhat better efficiency will get them passable marketshare, but neither can upend x86.

Apple’s cores have opened a real gap that other ARM cores aren’t matching. M4 SOCs are more than slightly faster, more than somewhat more efficient. They remain in a different league than other ARM designs.

It is unfortunate that higher device configurations remains a central way for Apple hit their return on investment goals. Linus Tech Tips claims that fixed industry costs mean that no lower capacity SSD can be made more cheaply than a 1 TB drive. If true, that gives Apple two tiers of pure profit higher storage configurations.

The M4 cores could easily allow Apple to take more than 15 percent of the market. The ability of competitors to far more cheaply offer large amounts of memory and storage is the only thing keeping Apple from surging on marketshare.

Despite that fact, and I am so sorry Igor, Apple is nevertheless going to have great success their current business model. Especially since they made the base configuration much more tolerable. The M4s are creating performance lust and a lot of people will eat higher configuration costs. The number of people who get their mouths foamed up to pay for the top configuration amazes me, as easy and effective it is to connect Thunderbolt storage. No they must pay Apple for 8 TBs.

Mac Minis will be everywhere.

I agree about x86, the difference has to be big enough in the Windows ecosystem for ARM to take over.
However, it remains to be seen what Qualcomm can do with the Nuvia team, it's Apple talent in CPU design and that could mean higher performance uplifts YoY, though it remains to be seen. Also, Oryon L core is considerably smaller than Apple M4 or A18 P core, so I see some decent headroom there. I see some indications that lead me to believe Qualcomm could approach Apple in CPU with some time, depending on execution and ambition.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

The Hardcard said:
It is unfortunate that higher device configurations remains a central way for Apple hit their return on investment goals. Linus Tech Tips claims that fixed industry costs mean that no lower capacity SSD can be made more cheaply than a 1 TB drive. If true, that gives Apple two tiers of pure profit higher storage configurations.

The M4 cores could easily allow Apple to take more than 15 percent of the market. The ability of competitors to far more cheaply offer large amounts of memory and storage is the only thing keeping Apple from surging on marketshare.

Despite that fact, and I am so sorry Igor, Apple is nevertheless going to have great success their current business model. Especially since they made the base configuration much more tolerable. The M4s are creating performance lust and a lot of people will eat higher configuration costs. The number of people who get their mouths foamed up to pay for the top configuration amazes me, as easy and effective it is to connect Thunderbolt storage. No they must pay Apple for 8 TBs.

While I hear where you and Linus are coming from, it leaves out some real world considerations that many people fail to realize. I've been going through this myself and there is a distinct difference between Apple SSDs and third party SSDs in real world use.

Yes, Apple uses the same NAND from companies like Samsung, Sandisk, and Micron, but the real world implementation is vastly different than what you get with third party NVMe SSDs. As you know, the controller is not put on the same card as the NAND, but regardless Apple NAND/SSDs runs super cool, despite running at the same speeds competitive with other SSDs out there. It's interesting to see Apple NAND running at these very low temps with no heatsink, while something like a Western Digital SN850X with a thermal pad in an average USB 4 / Thunderbolt enclosure doing a long video file transfer may eventually hit 75C+. PCIe Gen 4x4 NVMe high performance drives are notorious for high temps and then throttling in many if not most third party USB 4 / Thunderbolt enclosures, partially because of the poor cooling of the NAND in these enclosures and partially because of the high power utilization of the controller chipsets (eg. ASM2464PD). One can partially attribute this latter point to poor firmware compatibility for Macs (since the power utilization may be lower on Windows systems), but nonetheless, that's the reality of the situation. This will likely only get worse with PCIe Gen 5x4 drives.

For this specific reason, the only USB 4 / Thunderbolt SSD enclosures I have been considering have been designed as giant heatsinks, like the Qwiizlab ES40UR and the OWC 1M2. These still have the problem of high power utilization by the controller chipsets and high idle power consumption by the NVMe drives but at least the heatsink-type design is good enough dissipate all that heat. (BTW, I just saw that one guy bought a different aluminum enclosure that didn't dissipate heat as well, but solved the problem by strapping it to his metal table leg. )

The other factor is reliable connectivity. Again, I think it is a firmware compatibility issue, but third party enclosures often disconnect at sleep, not consistently, but just occasionally, enough to be really annoying, and sometimes concerning. They may reconnect just fine after wake, but it still throws up an error and sometimes causes weird software bugs. This is especially true with USB 3.x enclosures but is also common amongst popular external drives like the Samsung T7. It also happens with some Thunderbolt drives as well, albeit less commonly. Obviously this never happens with Apple's internal SSDs.

To put it another way, for those who need the space for their work and can afford it, I'm not surprised if they hyper-spec their storage on their Macs, particularly if they are running laptops. Apple understands this, and unfortunately is more than happy to gouge these customers.

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

Base M4 Mac mini review from Geekerwan

mvprod123 · Nov 8, 2024

igor_kavinski · Nov 8, 2024

The Hardcard said:
Despite that fact, and I am so sorry Igor, Apple is nevertheless going to have great success their current business model.

Mac Minis will be everywhere.

I think this is Apple's experiment with pricing to see how many units they can sell if they lower the price. Nothing more. Once they think they have sold enough, they can easily raise the price again. They don't care about consumers. They pretend they are giving the equivalent of a high profile French or Italian restaurant's meal at the price of a hotdog. But both of those statements are not true. They ruin the meal with their "special" MacOS sauce and the price of the hotdog is the one that they sell inside their own campus, which is probably 3 times higher than in the real world.

Here's what's Apple's gotta do:

Support at least one branch of Linux distro (debian, gentoo whatever) with optimized drivers for everything including GPU and NPU.
Offer a barebones Mac Mini in which the user can use their own RAM and SSD, even if that results in lower bandwidth and speed and even capacity (they can cap it at 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD if they want, to lure users to their higher capacity non-upgradable offerings).
Sell the barebones for $550 max.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
I think this is Apple's experiment with pricing to see how many units they can sell if they lower the price. Nothing more. Once they think they have sold enough, they can easily raise the price again. They don't care about consumers. They pretend they are giving the equivalent of a high profile French or Italian restaurant's meal at the price of a hotdog. But both of those statements are not true. They ruin the meal with their "special" MacOS sauce and the price of the hotdog is the one that they sell inside their own campus, which is probably 3 times higher than in the real world.

I guess I need to point out that the base price hasn’t changed. It was the exact same price before, just with 8 GB RAM.

Here's what's Apple's gotta do:

Support at least one branch of Linux distro (debian, gentoo whatever) with optimized drivers for everything including GPU and NPU.
Offer a barebones Mac Mini in which the user can use their own RAM and SSD, even if that results in lower bandwidth and speed and even capacity (they can cap it at 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD if they want, to lure users to their higher capacity non-upgradable offerings).
Sell the barebones for $550 max.

Meh.

Meteor Late · Nov 8, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
I think this is Apple's experiment with pricing to see how many units they can sell if they lower the price. Nothing more. Once they think they have sold enough, they can easily raise the price again. They don't care about consumers. They pretend they are giving the equivalent of a high profile French or Italian restaurant's meal at the price of a hotdog. But both of those statements are not true. They ruin the meal with their "special" MacOS sauce and the price of the hotdog is the one that they sell inside their own campus, which is probably 3 times higher than in the real world.

Here's what's Apple's gotta do:

Support at least one branch of Linux distro (debian, gentoo whatever) with optimized drivers for everything including GPU and NPU.
Offer a barebones Mac Mini in which the user can use their own RAM and SSD, even if that results in lower bandwidth and speed and even capacity (they can cap it at 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD if they want, to lure users to their higher capacity non-upgradable offerings).
Sell the barebones for $550 max.

I prefer the AMD way, pricing Strix Point more than two times higher than Hawk Point, that shows us how they do care about consumers!

igor_kavinski · Nov 8, 2024

Meteor Late said:
I prefer the AMD way, pricing Strix Point more than two times higher than Hawk Point, that shows us how to treat consumers the right way!

Once production goes up, prices will come down <<< takes years to happen in the fruit garden.

M1 is only NOW affordable.

Glo. · Nov 8, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
Once production goes up, prices will come down <<< takes years to happen in the fruit garden.

M1 is only NOW affordable.

You do realize that Apple was manufacturing roughly 150-200 million of M1 chips per year?

M1 chips were not only in Macs, but also iPads.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

M4 Mac mini complete teardown

igor_kavinski · Nov 8, 2024

Glo. said:
M1 chips were not only in Macs, but also iPads.

That's another waste of good silicon. Create a dock with its own storage with a desktop OS installed and let people use the iPad as a PC if they so choose.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

BTW, the D8DNV memory chips are the same ones found in the 1 TB M4 iPad Pro.

defferoo · Nov 8, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
Here's what's Apple's gotta do:

Support at least one branch of Linux distro (debian, gentoo whatever) with optimized drivers for everything including GPU and NPU.
Offer a barebones Mac Mini in which the user can use their own RAM and SSD, even if that results in lower bandwidth and speed and even capacity (they can cap it at 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD if they want, to lure users to their higher capacity non-upgradable offerings).
Sell the barebones for $550 max.

good thing you don't run Apple, otherwise they'd spend a bunch of resources catering to a non-existent audience.

Doug S · Nov 8, 2024

Eug said:
Yes, Apple uses the same NAND from companies like Samsung, Sandisk, and Micron, but the real world implementation is vastly different than what you get with third party NVMe SSDs. As you know, the controller is not put on the same card as the NAND, but regardless Apple NAND/SSDs runs super cool, despite running at the same speeds competitive with other SSDs out there. It's interesting to see Apple NAND running at these very low temps with no heatsink, while something like a Western Digital SN850X with a thermal pad in an average USB 4 / Thunderbolt enclosure doing a long video file transfer may eventually hit 75C+. PCIe Gen 4x4 NVMe high performance drives are notorious for high temps and then throttling in many if not most third party USB 4 / Thunderbolt enclosures, partially because of the poor cooling of the NAND in these enclosures and partially because of the high power utilization of the controller chipsets (eg. ASM2464PD). One can partially attribute this latter point to poor firmware compatibility for Macs (since the power utilization may be lower on Windows systems), but nonetheless, that's the reality of the situation. This will likely only get worse with PCIe Gen 5x4 drives.

What process is used for making controller chips like the one you referenced above? Apple's are made on the most advanced process since they are part of the SoC - and benefit from that SoC's cooling, which depending on the model of Mac may have a fan. The "standard" SSDs that include DRAM would have another source of heat Apple does not, since they can use system DRAM/SLC for any caching needs.

Are the NAND chips themselves getting hot in those SSDs that hit 75C, or is it the controller getting that hot? If the NAND chips themselves are getting hot but Apple's aren't then something else is going on. i.e. Apple buying "special" NAND chips in some way - either a low power bin (never heard of that for NAND) or customized to Apple's specs in some way.

Doug S · Nov 8, 2024

defferoo said:
good thing you don't run Apple, otherwise they'd spend a bunch of resources catering to a non-existent audience.

I think @igor_kavinski must be very young, because he still believes the world owes him something.

johnsonwax · Nov 8, 2024

Gideon said:
Nobody in Mac ecosystem is going to buy a x86 machine. The other way around it happens much more frequently, but there are caveats and dealbreakers there as well.

That's not true. Lots of Mac people would buy a SFF x86 box, throw linux on it, etc. A lot of the things I'm looking at a Mini for I previously just had my Synology NAS do (slowly). If you've ever seen the prevalence of MBPs at an open source conference, you're looking at a relatively large market of people that are fairly hardware agnostic but are more anti-Windows than they are pro-Mac.

johnsonwax · Nov 8, 2024

Doug S said:
I think @igor_kavinski must be very young, because he still believes the world owes him something.

My 79 year old uncle refuses to pay federal taxes because he believes as a vet he shouldn't have to. Hardly a property of young people. <insert political observation here>

oak8292 · Nov 8, 2024

Glo. said:
You do realize that Apple was manufacturing roughly 150-200 million of M1 chips per year?

M1 chips were not only in Macs, but also iPads.

Actually there are only about 20-30 million Macs and about 40 million iPads and not all of them are M1.

The CPU core designs are reused a lot.

oak8292 · Nov 8, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
Once production goes up, prices will come down <<< takes years to happen in the fruit garden.

M1 is only NOW affordable.

Apple doesn’t pay an Intel ‘tax’ but the still have engineering costs to develop processors. Apple doesn’t pay a Microsoft ‘tax’ for a Windows license but they still have to develop an OS. The OS is ‘free’ for life based on paying for hardware. Apple actually has a line item for future costs of upgrades to the OS in their finances. This is a liability for a business.

MS_AT · Nov 8, 2024

Eug said:
partially because of the poor cooling of the NAND

You don't want to cool NAND during the operation. What you want to cool down is the controller.

Eug said:
partially because of the high power utilization of the controller chipsets

Because those chipsets are not made on N3 but equivalent of 16nm or 22nm processes. That is why they are cheaper and hotter.

Eug said:
The other factor is reliable connectivity. Again, I think it is a firmware compatibility issue, but third party enclosures often disconnect at sleep, not consistently, but just occasionally, enough to be really annoying, and sometimes concerning. They may reconnect just fine after wake, but it still throws up an error and sometimes causes weird software bugs. This is especially true with USB 3.x enclosures but is also common amongst popular external drives like the Samsung T7. It also happens with some Thunderbolt drives as well, albeit less commonly. Obviously this never happens with Apple's internal SSDs.

Well, if it would happen to any internal SSD it would simply be broken

Eug said:
To put it another way, for those who need the space for their work and can afford it, I'm not surprised if they hyper-spec their storage on their Macs, particularly if they are running laptops. Apple understands this, and unfortunately is more than happy to gouge these customers.

I think Apple is simply targeting people who want nothing to do with HW after they buy it. I doubt non-replaceable storage or memory is an issue for their target market.

The Hardcard · Nov 8, 2024

igor_kavinski said:
I think this is Apple's experiment with pricing to see how many units they can sell if they lower the price. Nothing more. Once they think they have sold enough, they can easily raise the price again. They don't care about consumers. They pretend they are giving the equivalent of a high profile French or Italian restaurant's meal at the price of a hotdog. But both of those statements are not true. They ruin the meal with their "special" MacOS sauce and the price of the hotdog is the one that they sell inside their own campus, which is probably 3 times higher than in the real world.

Here's what's Apple's gotta do:

Support at least one branch of Linux distro (debian, gentoo whatever) with optimized drivers for everything including GPU and NPU.
Offer a barebones Mac Mini in which the user can use their own RAM and SSD, even if that results in lower bandwidth and speed and even capacity (they can cap it at 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD if they want, to lure users to their higher capacity non-upgradable offerings).
Sell the barebones for $550 max.

It is not remotely an experiment. Apple has had the same pricing for more than 2 decades.

Outside of a few $100 bumps, all Apple base machines have been the same price since Steve Jobs came back in 1997. They are far and away the most deliberate companies in tech, one of most deliberate in all of capitalism. They don’t bend. They don’t bow. They don’t crack.

Everyone is throwing out reasons why they went to 16 GB base (“It was consumer pressure,” “It was the Qualcomm threat,” “It was because of Apple Intelligence.” No say the the most obvious and likely reason. It was just the time to do it in general.

And again, why would Apple stray away from success. I was thinking about their opportunities to increase marketshare, but they know that better than I do. They choose not to. And it works.

Apple prefers to satisfy lucrative tech lust over the thrill of extending the life of products consumers already have. I know both joys. I bought a TRS-80 Color Computer with 4K of RAM in 1982. I went to Rainbowfest in 1983 and bought 64K RAM kit, got a soldering iron and solder wick and desoldered the 4K and soldered in the 64K. I was over the moon! I played with that upgrade for 3 days straight no sleep until I collapsed onto the keyboard. I love upgrading.

But I am willing to spend on my M4 tech lust. I am currently working on getting the $5500 for a 128 GB M4 Max to get into high parameter generative AI.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

Doug S said:
What process is used for making controller chips like the one you referenced above? Apple's are made on the most advanced process since they are part of the SoC - and benefit from that SoC's cooling, which depending on the model of Mac may have a fan. The "standard" SSDs that include DRAM would have another source of heat Apple does not, since they can use system DRAM/SLC for any caching needs.

MS_AT said:
Because those chipsets are not made on N3 but equivalent of 16nm or 22nm processes. That is why they are cheaper and hotter.

I don't know the process node for ASM2464PD for example. I might have guessed 14/16 nm, but if it's 22 nm, that's even worse than I expected. I'll note the surface of the ASM2464PD controller chip packaging is nickel plated for improved heat dissipation.

Doug S said:
Are the NAND chips themselves getting hot in those SSDs that hit 75C, or is it the controller getting that hot? If the NAND chips themselves are getting hot but Apple's aren't then something else is going on. i.e. Apple buying "special" NAND chips in some way - either a low power bin (never heard of that for NAND) or customized to Apple's specs in some way.

MS_AT said:
You don't want to cool NAND during the operation. What you want to cool down is the controller.

FWIW, the NVMe SSD blades with pre-installed heatsinks have the heatsinks cover both the NAND and the controller. Also, the enclosures come with separate thermal pads, little square ones for the controller and big rectangular ones for the NAND (& DRAM).

Also, these same SSDs have higher idle power utilization when installed in Macs (eg. older Intel machines), than when installed in Windows PCs. They don't seem to set the ASPM states correctly. There are third party macOS patches that attempt to address this, but I don't like doing that on my Macs. However, the issue also applies to the drives inside enclosures. At least anecdotally, I've seen several reports of the same enclosures running higher temps connected to Macs than to Windows PCs.

Anyhow, the original point is that running an external fast USB 4 / Thunderbolt SSD in 2024 with a Mac isn't quite as simple as some people make it out to be.

BTW, I had originally spec'd a 1 TB internal drive for my M4 Mac mini. However, it turns out that for my setup, 1 TB is either too little or too much. Depending upon how I configure my stuff, 1 TB wouldn't be enough storage to house everything. If I re-jig things to remove the image database, then 1 TB is overkill, since in that scenario I would need less than 250 GB total. So the real options that would help me would either be 512 GB or else 2 TB, but 2 TB costs WAY too much money from Apple. The upgrade from 512 GB to 2 TB would be $675 / US$485. Ouch. That's almost the cost of an entire base Mac mini on the education store.

P.S. On another note, as mentioned earlier in the thread, I eventually caved and got 10 GbE, because as so many people mentioned, the state of third party USB 10 GbE adapters is a disaster. They often run very hot, and may be unreliable. But luckily that upgrade was only CA$112.50 / US$81 so it was easier to stomach that.

EDIT:

I just saw this post:

"this thing SIPS power. I plugged it into a killawatt, during setup it was using like 6-8 watts, right now as im typing this its using between 1-2 watts. unreal. thats like sleep mode on anything else i've ever used."

At those power levels, the external USB 4 drive could actually use as much power at idle as the entire Mac mini during setup.

Eug · Nov 8, 2024

Mac mini (2024) Repair Manual

Some small differences between M4 (top) and M4 Pro (bottom).

The heat pipe is aluminum for M4 and copper for M4 Pro.
The NAND cards for the SSD are in different locations, and the M4 Pro card is larger.
The heatsink for the M4 Pro is larger, to accommodate the large SoC footprint.
It looks like the fan assembly is the same though.

dr1337 · Nov 8, 2024

The Hardcard said:
They are far and away the most deliberate companies in tech, one of most deliberate in all of capitalism.

The Hardcard said:
Everyone is throwing out reasons why they went to 16 GB base (“It was consumer pressure,” “It was the Qualcomm threat,” “It was because of Apple Intelligence.” No say the the most obvious and likely reason. It was just the time to do it in general.

lol these two points kinda exclude each other, if Apple is the most deliberate company in tech, it definitely was NOT a choice for them "in general".

Personally I do think steve jobs may have been the most deliberate CEO, but idk that we see that at apple now. On many occasions jobs admitted live on stage that prices were too high, or specs were too low, and he always was great at spinning that into a consumer win instead of the fact that at times they sold macs with meh specs for a year straight.

Steve cared more about tech, cared more about the product itself than just money IMO, ruthless as he was. That why in all the old powermac demos he really goes out of his way to do live benchmarking and even having engineers come up on stage and explain what CPU pipelines are and other deep details.

Feel free to disagree with me but I see tim cook as being way more capitalist and stingy when it comes to money. I think if steve were around we'd have moved to 16gb long ago. Especially with the immense power of apple silicon. Steve would have been able to hype up going from 8gb to 16gb and make it seem meaningful. But instead we only got the blandest marketing apple has done to date.

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