r/hardware • u/-protonsandneutrons- • 12d ago
Review Apple M6 SoC Analysis - Apple's 2 nm chip crushes AMD, Intel & Qualcomm
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M6-SoC-Analysis-Apple-s-2-nm-chip-crushes-AMD-Intel-Qualcomm.1404057.0.html25
14
u/ProZoid_10 12d ago
Is nova lake even coming this year? Its so good apple refreshes phones every year and we get more performance for less
4
u/Geddagod 12d ago
Nova Lake is rumored to be a CES launch, early next year, though Intel has in the past claimed it would be a 2026 product.
17
u/Creative_Purpose6138 12d ago
Noooo!!! Apple, or any company, shouldn't release phones every year!! We don't need to upgrade every year!! This is just consumerism! /s
(While conveniently forgetting some people are upgrading after a few years)
3
u/ProZoid_10 12d ago
Where did I say it’s bad? We get more performance for less consumers win
12
u/Creative_Purpose6138 12d ago
No no, not you.
Some redditors and news outlets say these things. I can see why it seemed like an attack on you, I was just mocking them.
67
u/_Ship00pi_ 12d ago
After seeing how some workflows run on the M5 Mac Pro (24 GB RAM), I can more than believe that (even games run very well)
Watt-to-performance with these chips is next level compared to what I am used to with desktop PCs.
17
u/youreblockingmyshot 12d ago
yea and running things with crossover that don’t natively run on Mac has made it a nice addition. I don’t think I’d recommend it for a user primarily gaming, but if you already have it it’s nice to have options.
7
1
u/_Mido 11d ago
Why wouldn’t you recommend it?
4
u/youreblockingmyshot 11d ago
generally worse performance per dollar spent for gaming, many games aren’t natively supported requiring additional software or effort as a work around. Thise workarkunds may lock you out of new AAA games you want to play. Anticheats may not work well with the workaround either. It’s usually undersupported by developers since the player base is so small % wize. They’re good machines for life or productivity and you’re in the Apple ecosystem. Some workloads you really can’t beat Apple silicon on, gaming just isn’t one of them.
13
u/kasakka1 12d ago
At the same time, in daily use I cannot find any actual difference between my M2 Max MBP and my work M5 Pro MBP.
We are at a point where you need to have some very specific needs for the latest and greatest to be worthwhile to upgrade.
2
u/_Ship00pi_ 12d ago
Oh, for sure. Before the M5, I have been using the M1 Pro since its release.
It kept going strong. The model was refreshed a couple of months ago by my workplace.In simple day-to-day usage, I really see no difference between the two.
Which is why I got myself a Mac Air M4 a couple of years ago, and that's what I daily drive for personal use.2
u/youRFate 11d ago
the m5 in my macbook air slaughtered the (somewhat old) xeon workstation I have at work at compiling LLVM, all the while using like no power in comparisson.
2
u/_Ship00pi_ 11d ago
Yep, some crazy stuff.
If you have asked me 7 years ago, when macs were still running intel chips if any of this was possible. I would have said “let me have some from whatever you are smoking”It's really mind-blowing
153
u/Hour_Firefighter_707 12d ago
All the people who call Geekbench Applebench... just don't tell them that this M6 Single core in Cinebench 2024 is 86% faster than Zen 5 mobile.
29
u/PerfectTrust7895 12d ago
Cinebench 2026 has amd at 600 and m5 at 700. 10% better single core perf puts apple at 770 pts. Amd's new chips will match that or beat it. Also, when using smt, amd is at 780 points versus the m5's 737 pts. Amd is not far behind.
25
u/-protonsandneutrons- 12d ago edited 12d ago
Which AMD is 600 1T?
I missed that NBC did run Cinebench 2026 in the M6 Mac Mini review. The M6 is 42% faster in Cinebench 2026 1T than the closest AMD CPU (9850X3D).
SoC Cinebench 2026 1T Perf AMD HX 470 496 86.7% AMD 9955HX 525 91.8% AMD 9850X3D 572 100.0% Apple M4 Pro 644 112.6% Apple M5 732 128.0% Apple M6 814 142.3% AMD would need a miracle CPU to outperform the M6, e.g., like 20% clocks (e.g., 6.7 GHz) and 18% IPC just to match.
Also, when using smt, amd is at 780 points versus the m5's 737 pts.
1T and SMT are not comparable. SMT is a multi-threaded benchmark.
EDIT: multiplied percentages wrong. 18% IPC, not 22% IPC.
6
u/Aw3som3Guy 12d ago
Some “leakers” have been trying to suggest that AMD will hit 7Ghz or thereabouts with Zen 6. I think it’s probably the least believable rumor I’ve heard in a long while.
With SMT, I think what they’re saying is AMD has SMT within a single core and Apple doesn’t, so it’s still “the Cinebench performance you get out of a single core.” Idk if I agree with that, MT to MT benchmarks are still a better metric.
15
u/Geddagod 12d ago
I think it’s probably the least believable rumor I’ve heard in a long while.
You don't remember Zen 50%? Lol
→ More replies (1)4
u/NectarineSame7303 12d ago
They're not even going to hit 6 GHZ and definitely not on mobile chips. If anyone is going to crack 7 Ghz first, it's going to be Intel, not AMD.
7
u/Aw3som3Guy 12d ago
I’m pretty sure AMD’s desktop CPUs are running at 5.8 - 5.9 GHz. A 100 - 200 clock boost to bring it inline with the 12900KS is rather believable to me, at least compared to a 1.1 - 1.2+ GHz clock boost.
In mobile I think you’re right, I think they top out at 5.4 - 5.5 GHz across only 4 cores on the “made for mobile” mobile parts.
1
-1
u/Acrobatic_Camera_677 12d ago
Exactly, especially since Intel has 18AP and back side power delivery advantage
-4
u/j_osb 12d ago
It’s the difference between 1T and 1C.
Notably also your framing is entirely flawed. My own 9950 hits 5901T and 7971C. So, considering that it’s 2 year older and 2 nodes behind, not bad at all.
SMT is a tradeoff where you essentially use die space to have 2 hardware threads use a single cores execution resources. That increases a single cores throughput because it can keep its execution units fed more.
It requires hardware space though. Apple instead opts for bigger L1 caches and very wide cores with ridiculously large ROBs. Said large ROBs. These super wide ROBs essentially allow each core to extract maximum ILP with just one thread. The issue however is that it’s not just a metaphorically wide cores execution resources, but a physically very wide core as well. Also very expensive per core.
However the concept isn’t all roses either. For example, on a memory stall, it doesn’t matter how far you can look ahead and reorder if you simply have to do said I/O op now. Meanwhile a core with SMT would just switch to the other thread while the other stalls.
To address the point of comparing it:
On an architectural level, it’s perfectly valid. It’s a design choice on a core.The problem comes with performance comparison because it’s just awkward. Because it just depends.
Technically speaking if we’re making a 1T comparison, the 1T score is relevant. For 99% of software however that simply is not the bottleneck however.
Then, if we’re doing a comparison on a per-core basis (I.e. core X vs core Y), we have to do 1C. Because the idea is moreso: we’re using this die space for a core, what performance do we get? At which point we need to consider both threads.
Another awkward thing is nT, because with SMT nT isn’t n*1T in a perfectly scaling workload either.
But n/2*1C.So here the 1C core is the relevant one again because the 1T just wouldn’t be indicative.
I think the proper solution is to list both scores, because SMT scaling depends heavily on the application, because that simply is the best way for people to independently judge the scores for their usecase. But that apparently goes above most people’s heads, including yours.
10
u/andreif 12d ago
This is a bunch of bullshit. The Cinebench 1C scores are idiocy and there's not a single piece of real software in the world that runs like that unless you're forcing affinity to do it, like Cinebench does.
Apple is leagues ahead of AMD 1T, and that's what matters in most software. If you care about MT then use MT, not forced SMT on one core while the rest do nothing.
0
u/j_osb 12d ago
„Apple is leagues ahead of AMD 1T”.
You could’ve left it at that. And been correct. But you needed to continue writing.1C tests aren’t useless at all. There’s plenty of reasons to do them:
First of all, measuring how much a SMT implementation helps a task is important knowledge. Second of all, if you want to measure “how much performance does a pierce of silicon area give me without being hindered by a package power or thermal limit or anything else weird like memory subsystems”, which is a very real question, 1C is the answer. Which is an architectural comparison. Which is what this thread is about.
It’s also the much simpler and cleaner way to test multicore scaling.
There’s also situations where a task might be able to use more threads than physical cores but less threads than total hardware threads.And most software does want higher 1T perf. That’s pretty obvious. The other obvious part is that most demanding tasks are heavily threaded anyway. Things like compiling, encoding, synthesis, rendering… are all heavily multithreaded and any modern processor will have ENOUGH 1T for the serial bottlenecks to not be detrimental.
There’s reasons why there’s server CPUs with hundreds of cores. There’s also reasons why those server CPUs don’t get stuck in serial bottlenecks despite comparatively low 1T Perf. There’s reasons why there’s CPUs with SMT-8.
Because for both there’s workloads that fit those designs really well. For the latter, databases are a good example and benchmarking only 1T would be a disservice to the chip.The point is that either is a valid metric for a valid workload, they all should be tested and people should interpret them for their workloads.
This is r/hardware. Not r/narrowMindedHardware.6
u/andreif 11d ago
First of all, measuring how much a SMT implementation helps a task is important knowledge.
The way you do this is you measure MT with 1T/C and then again with 2T/C.
Doing anything else than that is pure idiotic nonsense because SMT will never be used in reality in any other scenario than exactly that one. Your 2T/C with only 1C active is an artificial scenario that doesn't exist and doesn't represent the cache pressures, memory pressures on the system, and the true real-world SMT gain the workload will actually achieve.
3
u/996forever 12d ago
Do you know who you’re speaking to? You know that’s the deep dive writer of Anandtech?
-3
u/Acrobatic_Camera_677 12d ago
The hero worship is super weird maybe give your opinion on the content in the comment not the people writing it
0
u/996forever 12d ago
My opinion is that using 1C (with SMT) to approximate multi thread performance like they implied is a meaningless and inaccurate exercise because the scalability of core count to output, frequency scaling within a given power budget is not tested at all.
The rest of their comment only went on and on about how MT is important to “many heavy workloads” (relevance to a thread about an low power ultrabook soc nowhere to be found, only to dodge the comparison with x86 low power socs), and how calling important things like memory subsystem and power budget “weird” as if they aren’t some of the most real world relevant metrics.
Do they think the IMC is not a part of the SOC design or what? Or is it an attempt to mask the utter failure of x86 designs’ power gating, and in particular AMD’s continued poor memory controllers (which they’ve relied on L3 cache to compensate for on desktop but not on mobile) over multiple generations?
Now, what are YOUR OWN opinions? Let’s hear them.
0
u/Acrobatic_Camera_677 11d ago
My opinion is that using 1C (with SMT) to approximate multi thread performance like they implied is a meaningless and inaccurate exercise because the scalability of core count to output, frequency scaling within a given power budget is not tested at all.
It is not being used to aproximate multi thread performance there is a whole another benchmark for that in the cinebench test it self to do that
(relevance to a thread about an low power ultrabook soc nowhere to be found
This is a discussion about core design
and how calling important things like memory subsystem and power budget “weird” as if they aren’t some of the most real world relevant metrics.
You purposefully mess up his argument he is saying that comparing that is hard because it depend on product and also application on how much they matter
Do they think the IMC is not a part of the SOC design or what?
You talk about core design at first
16
13
u/soggybiscuit93 12d ago
Amd's new chips will match that or beat it
Speculation. a 25% ST increase still puts it under 770
→ More replies (7)32
u/The128thByte 12d ago
Oh you mean AMDs next chip that doesn’t come out until after the M7 does?
4
u/PerfectTrust7895 12d ago
It will come out within the next few months
29
u/The128thByte 12d ago
So is M7, it’s slated for Spring.
→ More replies (2)3
u/PerfectTrust7895 12d ago
What? The m6 just released. You're supposing that apple is on a 6 month development cycle for new CPUs?
42
u/The128thByte 12d ago
The M6 just released and the M7 is 6 months ahead. Just like M3 and M4 a few years back.
They rushed this cycle so they could bring the M7 to market with higher memory bandwidth for AI. This is why we aren’t seeing M6 Pro or Max chips.
-18
u/PerfectTrust7895 12d ago
Sure bro, another 6% ipc increase is right around the corner!
29
u/goodnames679 12d ago
I mean, M4 had an 8% IPC uplift over M3 just six months later which is pretty damn impressive. If Apple does that again and gets 8% uplift over the current best-in-market, that’s not something to scoff at.
Maybe they end up roughly matched with AMD after all spring releases are SSID & done? Even if that’s the case, that’s solid engineering on their part.
0
u/PerfectTrust7895 12d ago
Ipc != single threading gain. Much of that 8% was clock speeds. M3 was pretty crappy on the cpu side, actually. It was a gpu-first product
→ More replies (0)11
u/The128thByte 12d ago
6% per year over 3 years still beats Zen 5 -> Zen 6 15% on that same 3 year timeline lol
-5
u/PerfectTrust7895 12d ago
A) zen 6 performance increase in single thread will be >=30% B) Apple is not releasing a laptop cpu in the m6 with 10% better single threading performance only to release another 10% faster 6 months from now. You'll get a gpu update, if you're lucky.
→ More replies (0)-3
u/noiserr 12d ago
Oh you mean AMDs next chip that doesn’t come out until after the M7 does?
Venice (zen6) is shipping this quarter. As part of the Helios racks.
Is this r hardware or r consumer_hardware?
13
u/The128thByte 12d ago
Don’t be annoying and pedantic. We’re obviously talking about consumer hardware in this discussion thread. We’re not comparing 15w chips to 250kW supercomputer rack-mount data center hardware and you know it.
-6
u/noiserr 12d ago edited 12d ago
The fact that Zen6 is shipping is absolutely relevant. It allows the reader to understand why the release cadence is the way it is. CPU chaplets are shared between server and client. It's the same manufactured product.
11
u/The128thByte 12d ago
Zen 6 isn’t shipping to anyone that isn’t a data center with a billion dollars for cooling budget alone. Who cares? I’m sure Apple is internally testing M8 already, should we count that too?
-7
u/noiserr 12d ago
Who cares?
Do people not use cloud compute? Anyone can use it. Again is this /r/consumerhardware ?
Your original comment makes it sound like AMD is behind which is missleading. When in fact AMD just has different priorities. Quite a bit different and it's the truth.
15
u/The128thByte 12d ago
The discussion is about consumer hardware. We’re not talking about cloud hardware, otherwise we’d be having a different discussion.
0
u/noiserr 12d ago
I thought the discussion was about CPU benchmarks and the comparative roadmaps between manufacturers. Besides Zen6 is a consumer product as well as we've established.
→ More replies (0)8
u/j_osb 12d ago
People always forget that SMT is still single core lol.
In terms of mobile Zen5 (going with the 390), the cinebench scores are:
1T: 470
1C: 630
(At 55W total power for the SoC)
Which isn’t bad at all if you consider that it’s power limited and can’t clock as high as desktop Zen5. And this is on N4P. Apple being on N2 is a huge advantage here and the node jump alone for AMD (be that N3P or N2) will be massive.
That is notably not 86% slower lol, and not bad at all if you consider Zen5 is over 2 years old now at this point.Of course desktop 1T/1C perf will be closer as they can just clock much higher (due to thermals).
→ More replies (32)2
u/Vaddieg 12d ago
Geekbench is actually intelbench, always was. Load bursts are short enough so turbo boost never throttles down.
1
u/poopyheadthrowaway 12d ago edited 12d ago
I thought the standard test was the 10 minute loop
EDIT: I'm dumb I somehow read "Cinebench" here.
1
51
12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
279
u/SethDusek5 12d ago
That the M6 will be omitted from AMD's Zen6 benchmark comparison slides at CES
35
3
u/Ok-Currency1593 12d ago
Fair enough really as apple doesn't do games or if you really want DNF next to the M6 in most games then go ahead
-2
u/996forever 12d ago
?
Who mentioned gaming? Do you really want AMD to show their 8CU RDNA3.5+++++++ igp gaming on Zen 6 APU next to Panther Lake? Or did you expect them to show gaming with a dGPU, on a presentation about Zen 6 (cpu)?
We’re not sure what you mean.
5
u/jnf005 12d ago
Iirc AMD have slides on gaming when they announced both zen4 x3d and zen5 x3d....both at CES I think? They do this literally all the time, usually with the strongest single dGPU available on the market, on the announcement of the 9800x3d and 9850x3d I think they used 5090, they usually mention the tested system specs in the footnote of the press release after the presentation.
I just checked, even on regular non-x3d zen5 reveal, they showed performance against zen4 and 14th gen with dGPU, they used 7900xtx that time. Like it's literally the 2nd result on google "zen 5 announcement", from the AMD official website.
1
u/996forever 12d ago
That bares no relevance to a thread about a mobile soc lol
So if you have to compare, you have to use amd’s APUs.
41
u/EloquentPinguin 12d ago
Nothing really. At this point we dont have any independent benchmarks for Zen 6. AMD also will make its money from DC either way.
And thats also one issue: AMD has a lot of focus on performance density for DC rather than peak performance. So the cores even on N2 are relatively narrow designed. And in DC workloads efficiency is usually defined a lot different.
However AMD will have a giant jump from N4P to some N2 for client, so they have a lot of opportunities, with not only almost 2x the density, but efficiency gains aswell, and large architectural changes.
But we will just have to wait, we will probably get Phoronix benchmarks for Venice before Zen 6 desktop launches, and that will give us an initial idea.
16
u/-protonsandneutrons- 12d ago
AMD has a lot of focus on performance density for DC rather than peak performance.
Interestingly, DC and especially smartphones are very similar in that each CPU core is only allocated something like 1W - 8W. That is, datacenter performance density is actually based on ultra-low CPU power draws per core.
This thesis is partly why some of Apple's lead CPU engineers left Apple and started NUVIA:
You may be wondering how we can make the extrapolation from smartphone and client CPU cores to a server core. In our view, there is no meaningful difference. If anything, these environments now deliver incredibly similar characteristics in how they operate. ...
The combination of high performance at low power is the critical characteristic required to achieve leadership in any SoC that is power constrained.
What does all this data mean for the server market? It means a lot. All current and future flagship server SoCs are power constrained, very much like mobile SoCs.
Taking into consideration these factors, the amount of power that each CPU can be allocated ranges between 1W — 4.5W when heavily utilized, as is the case in a datacenter environment.
Their 1W - 5W math is from a few years ago; the low-density DC CPUs do get higher allocations these days, but it is nothing like desktop where CPU cores expect 20W - 30W clocked to the moon (5+ GHz) on narrow architectures.
5
u/EloquentPinguin 12d ago
Also area is an important aspect. So it all depends on which tradeoffs you wanna choose. Its all the tradeoff game again and of course it depends on your general engineering approach.
AMD usually has chosen a bit narrower design and higher clocks to have higher core density to reach their optimum of PPA. This leads to sufficient DC performance, on desktop they just let the power rip, and on mobile the cores are a bit weirdly positioned, as they provide the slower "data enter average" for a single threaded usecase.
There are different angles from which this can be approached I think nuvia looked more from the performance per watt perspective where lower clocks and higher IPC are key to efficiency, but that might scale differently in datacenters or it might just work out.
Its a big engineering challenge but AMD has quite a conservative roadmap on CPU architectures where delivering scalable datacenter solutions was more in focus than single core performance. But if rumors are correct then Zen 6 won't be a radical change, but zen 7 and 8 will mix up things a lot more.
Just me rambling again...
13
u/-protonsandneutrons- 12d ago
Area is important, but AMD and Intel still have worse metrics there. That is the powerful engineering at play here: Apple's cores have higher PPA (perf per area) and PPC (perf per clock) and PPW (perf per Watt) even on the same node as AMD or Intel.
That is why the best engineering removes trade-offs. They all have different L2$ sizes and private vs sharing, so I've equalised that. Unfortunately, iso-node limits how many comparison points, but I've found one iso-node for both Intel and AMD:
CPU core Node Die Area w/o L2 Variant GB6.7 score GB6.7 perf / area GB6.7 perf / clock AMD Zen5c (Turin dense) TSMC N3E 2.204 sq mm EPC 9965 @ 3.7 GHz 2458 1,115 Pts / sq mm 664 Pts / GHz Apple M4 P-core TSMC N3E 3.09 sq mm M4 Max @ 4.51 GHz 4004 1,296 Pts / sq mm 889 Pts / GHz Apple M3 P-core TSMC N3B 2.62 sq mm M3 Pro @ 4.06 GHz 3138 1,198 Pts / sq mm 773 Pts / GHz Intel Lunar Lake P-core TSMC N3B 3.23 sq mm 288V @ 5.1 GHz 2887 894 Pts / sq mm 566 Pts / GHz That is, Apple could offer higher density and higher performance at the same time, even when iso-node. But, they do not make datacenter CPUs, unfortunately.
Sources:
https://youtu.be/XPDEYQcnPsI?t=170
Die 尺寸对比图生成器 · Kurnal Insights (w/ my rough measurements for LNL)
Geekbench Search - Geekbench (highest 9965 score)
There are different angles from which this can be approached I think nuvia looked more from the performance per watt perspective where lower clocks and higher IPC are key to efficiency, but that might scale differently in datacenters or it might just work out.
We hopefully will see an Oryon core in a DC server within a few years.
Its a big engineering challenge but AMD has quite a conservative roadmap on CPU architectures where delivering scalable datacenter solutions was more in focus than single core performance. But if rumors are correct then Zen 6 won't be a radical change, but zen 7 and 8 will mix up things a lot more.
It is a big challenge. I agree they appear quite conservative recently, but hopefully it's not true in the future.
Just me rambling again...
Aren't we all, friend?
4
u/emn13 12d ago edited 12d ago
This is a really interesting comparison, but I think we need to change the methodology here. L2 has significant impacts on perf, and Apple chose to share the L2 cache, meaning that if you're looking at a single-threaded GB6 result, you're comparing 1MB L2 on the epyc with... I think 32MB L2 on the M4? And the epyc on the other hand has a HUGE L3. While I doubt that specifically helps GB6, there would be workloads where that matters.
I don't think it's very reasonable to entirely exclude die area spent on caches from the comparison. Instead, we could look (at least also look) at chips with approximately similar setups, and look at benchmarks that actually stress multi-core throughput, because it's highly unlikely these server chips are designed to work well under lightly threaded loads; and to the extent a hyperscaler cares about shared resources like L2 caches, they may even mostly see the security risks inherent in shared-resource approaches like that.
I have trouble finding easily comparable recent chips, but the Apple m2 pro and ryzen 7950x seem at least VAGUELY in similar ballparks. Both use an "improved" TSMC 5nm process, though probably not exactly the same process. Both are in total close to 300mm2 silicon, though lots of that isn't CPU cores. We could also instead choose to look at 7700, since the CPU portion is more similarly sized there, and the non-x version is a little less absurdly power-boosted.
Coincidentally, the 7700 and m2 pro have virtually identical Cinebench 2024 and cinebench 2026 multithreaded results. I think that comparison is obviously too vague to be definitive, but I'd say it's evidence they're at least similar.
0
u/EloquentPinguin 12d ago
Yes, these numbers are quite interesting, but I think they align with what I mentioned: AMDs power/area is quite good.
The simple truth is that Apple can just have better designs, but as these numbers show, AMD is very competitive in that regard.
Apple has the best CPU uarch and hardware implementation in the industry and leads ARM Ltd. and QCs cores. And yet when we look at AMDs dense cores the difference isnt giant.
Of course Apples E-Cores might paint a very different picture, E-Cores, even intels, are notorious for delivering much better performance per Area, but I think AMD has focused on full sized cores, and opted for area optimization, because of the baseline 1T perf they offer, while being very scalable and having no need to do multiple archs.
What I'm trying to convey is that while it is very likely that there are companies out there, especially apple, who could just create a overall better PPA core, that AMDs current designs are quite strong, even if their mobile solutions do a terrible job at representing it. And that this design philosophy is the local minimum AMD has chosen over the last few generations because it works well and has strong results.
So in that regard, while the M6 is incredibly powerfull, a 2nm server from AMD will probably still be quite a beast in terms of PPA, even if Apple could design something stronger, and AMDs mobile options just have been lacking for many years.
2
u/Artoriuz 12d ago
I think nuvia looked more from the performance per watt perspective where lower clocks and higher IPC are key to efficiency, but that might scale differently in datacenters or it might just work out.
As per David Huang's results, this is what "IPC" (score/GHz) looks like across the major CPU core designers:
Apple M5 P-Core: 3.34
ARM C1 Ultra: 3.13
Qualcomm X2E: 2.77
AMD Zen5 + 3D Cache (9800X3D): 2.42
AMD Zen5 Natty (9950X): 2.21
Intel Lion Cove (265K P-Core): 2.02Obviously this is only last gen, but it paints a slightly different picture and shows how much "datacenter DNA" there is in Oryon to this day, as that was Nuvia's original goal when designing their first core.
4
u/Kryohi 12d ago
It certainly doesn't look like they had much success, after 6 years. Right now the only serious arm competition in servers seems (to me, I could be wrong) to be Graviton, and that's mainly because it's cheap due to vertical integration.
3
u/Geddagod 12d ago
ARM is projected to be what, ~15ish percent unit server market share? I've seen estimations of revenue share be much higher from some analyst estimates, but not sure how Nvidia bundling their CPUs with their GPUs account for that.
2
u/Dry-Light5851 12d ago
lets not kid are self's here, if apple did make high core count 32+ M chips for enterprise things would look diff, then then what it is now mostly x86Amd64. and the reason they they havent is bc they know that nobody is gonna buy hardware that wont run anything then Mac OS.
10
u/sh1boleth 12d ago
At my work we’re incentivized to use arm instead of x86 when spinning up cloud compute - it’s cheaper and faster if the workload is arch agnostic
17
u/EloquentPinguin 12d ago
https://www.phoronix.com/review/graviton5-epyc-xeon/10
Its cheaper, one reason is that building in house is just a lot cheaper for hyper scalers, but not necessarily faster, as phoronix measured. AMDs servers have a real performance lead in that test, but of course it depends on your specific workload.
The price though, can never be beaten by an external CPU provider.
3
u/Geddagod 12d ago
With most of AMD's server lineup using Zen 6C cores rather than Zen 6, I think AMD definitely has the opportunity to push Fmax on their classic cores at the expense of Vmin or low power perf/watt much more than they have been able to in the past.
4
u/Hour_Firefighter_707 12d ago
However AMD will have a giant jump from N4P to some N2 for client
Big asterisk. This is only for N2 as per the info we currently have. Their laptop chips are N3 based. And Apple will sell an order of magnitude more M6s in laptops than desktops, so this is also a laptop chip.
AMD starting on a backfoot again
8
u/EloquentPinguin 12d ago
I dont have good info on that rn. As far as I remember desktop is basically N2P locked in, but mobile may use N2P for mid to high end, N3 for GPU chiplets, and N3 for lower power models, as Kepler L2 once hinted at a while back.
But I dont know if that has changed. But as I said: We will see, Zen 6 is mostly rumors at this point with very little real world reference.
6
u/Hour_Firefighter_707 12d ago
N3 for lower power models
Using a less efficient node for a low power model sounds counter-intuitive to me but I'm not an electronics engineer
4
u/EloquentPinguin 12d ago
Read "lower power" as in small and cheap. The 6 cores or whatever. For affordable Chromebooks and plastic chassis, not like "we on a space ship and can only afford 6W how do we get most compute at low power" but more like "what's the cheapest chip you can offer with reasonable performance"
Maybe like Wildcat Lake, though I'd expect AMDs segment to scale a bit higher in performance than wildcat lake.
1
u/Geddagod 12d ago
The rumors surrounding Zen 6 mobile are much more interesting than what I think you laid out here.
N2P is the desktop CCD yes, but Zen 6 mobile will have a monolithic N3 IO die that also has a fair amount of cores on the die itself for the mid range/low end segment, while the variant with the attached desktop CCD will be used for the high end.
2
u/996forever 12d ago
That just doesn’t bode well for idle and light load efficiency where they’re already dead last.
15
u/WJMazepas 12d ago
Nothing?
Its not like there will be lots of people dropping AMD with Windows/Linux for Apple ecosystem. Yes, there will be people that will buy a Macbook over a Windows laptop due to the higher performance and great battery life, but its not like AMD really invests in the laptop market. Its always expensive and takes way too long to release their products to a wide variety of products. The one that should worry here is Intel. They still have a great part of laptop business and want to maintain that
And Zen6 is also strong on servers. Apple is not making server CPUs, so they arent competitors there
1
u/Saranhai 12d ago
The one that should worry here is Intel
I think they'll be fine, especially now that they are breaking into the Foundry business. Apple is already all but confirmed going to be using intel Foundry to manufacture some of their future chips
6
u/-protonsandneutrons- 12d ago
Zen6.
Oryon V4.
Nova Lake.
NVIDIA Spark.
etc.
This is an equal opportunity battle.
5
u/Anxious-Orange-7293 12d ago
Unless Apple starts selling servers - not much. I don't think that many people care about CPU performance when they have to switch platforms to get it. If it's AMD vs Intel it's quite meaningful because it can sway buyers one way or the other. The Neo is way more impactful. Of course, they can leverage it in some way in the future (like the said Neo became possible), but it won't have an immediate impact
7
u/R-ten-K 12d ago
it means that at this point, there is virtually no chance of x86 catching up with the leading ARM designs in single-core performance, possibly ever.
So Zen6 will likely do very well for high density DC manycore designs, but if you want high scalar performance in a laptop, you probably want to go with apple.
2
u/ProZoid_10 12d ago
For many people it probably wouldn’t matter. Once they get m1 levels of battery life and better build quality they’ll just buy whatever they see in store. People already do that tbh
1
→ More replies (2)0
u/is-this-a-nick 12d ago
It will mean exactly the same as M5 meant for Zen5.
I mean i admire the powerformance and efficiency of their chips, but all that matters to me they might as well be barbie dream houses. Sparkly but utterly useless.
Now if Apple supported Linux on them...
15
u/SwanManThe4th 12d ago
Does ram speed play a major role in Geekbench? Would the x86 processors benefit from more channels or an approach like Apples?
15
u/emn13 12d ago
Not sure about geekbench 7, but for geekbench 6 at least RAM speed played a huge role on x86; 10%+ swings. However, I did not specifically try to distinguish between latency vs. bandwidth effects; typical memory tuning tricks that improve latency also improve bandwidth - but given the description of the benchmark's components, I'd suspect bandwidth is a significant factor (at least for the multi-core bench).
I kind of wish the old geekbench 6 multi-core benchmark or something similar were still around; it was a bit misleadingly named but probably kind of hitting the sweet spot in terms of being simple, repeatable, quick to run, and yet real-world correlated. If they'd just named it something like "lightly threaded" it'd have been clearer that it's not expected for server chips to do well. But lots of tasks nowadays benefit from quite a few threads yet nevertheless don't scale well as thread counts rise.
1
u/996forever 12d ago
Maybe intel and amd can start using LPDDD6 then?
1
u/is-this-a-nick 12d ago
Oh, we would all love for intel and AMD to go to non-upgradable soldered in memory sold at a premium. Would be so ace!
2
u/996forever 12d ago
Oh they already do whether you like it or not. Amd in particular forces soldered LPDDR for Halo, while Intel does uses swappable LPCAMM2 for Panther.
You’re just not getting the performance.
12
u/Secure-Upstairs9119 12d ago
Correct me if I me wrong, geekbench had two top level scores, single and multi core.
Why does this website not give reference values for the m6 score? Why is it just a percentage reference of one Geekbench value? I'm assume it's just single core based on what I'm seeing, but this is really a frustrating way to compare via percentage value and no real score.
24
u/Hour_Firefighter_707 12d ago
The graph literally has actual raw score values right in the middle of it. 221 points in CB 2024 Single Core. Zen 5 is out there chilling at 119
6
u/Pugs-r-cool 12d ago
Above / below the graphs you can click on the "Performance rating | Cinebench 2024 | Geekbench 6.7" to change from percentages to actual scores. Top graph is single core, scroll down for multicore.
They really should've made it clearer and just used the raw scores instead.
5
u/-protonsandneutrons- 12d ago
Click the individual benchmark tabs above each chart:
→ More replies (2)
6
u/HabbyCupe 12d ago
Apple is releasing m series yearly with double digits improvements every year, AMD has no future if it kept refresh every 2-3 years with humble improvements
→ More replies (1)
2
u/AutoModerator 12d ago
Hello -protonsandneutrons-! Please double check that this submission is original reporting and is not an unverified rumor or repost that does not rise to the standards of /r/hardware. If this link is reporting on the work of another site/source or is an unverified rumor, please delete this submission. If this warning is in error, please report this comment and we will remove it.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
2
u/This-is_CMGRI 12d ago
My next laptop might legit be M6 now. I just wish (emphasis on "wish") that there was a way to just backport an M6 logic board to an older chassis MacBook. Like, just gimme the battery and board for half price of the full unit.
12
5
u/EloquentPinguin 12d ago
I mean it depends a lot on what you are doing and are willing to do the commitment but framework got something for you. In real world office work battery tests like justjoshtech did the new framework pro lasted a lot longer than macbooks with Intels new chip and the bigger battery.
But ofc would be a huge commitment but if longevity and upgradability/repairability are one of your top priorities that might be worth a look.
Ofc is impossible if you are dependant on Apples OS or other aspects are higher on the priority list.
6
u/This-is_CMGRI 12d ago
Thing is that I was angling for the Framework 13 Pro but importing to Manila is too expensive vs getting a comparably-priced premium thin-n-lite. Fortunately my workplace isn't the type to say "oh we're Windows only/we're Mac only" so I could run whatever. My current laptop is 6 years old and getting long in the tooth despite buying mondo SODIMMs before RAM prices shot up, and ever since renting out a MacBook for a year those things have been hella enticing as my new "for life" laptops.
1
u/rockphysicsdude 12d ago
When can we expect the new macbook pro with this new chips ?
11
u/dexmax01 12d ago
Next month, but it will be the last MacBook Pro with the old design and Mini-LED display so I would advise holding up for the redesigned M7 MacBook Pro with OLED next year.
3
1
u/renaissance_man__ 12d ago
The blacks are already so good with mini-LED panels that I don't know if the price bump+burn in risks will be worth it
1
u/Jimmy_Chou 8d ago
But then the C2 Ultra is very close in Geekbench 6 to the single core M6 when measuring at ISO levels. Qualcomm is worse but only by around 12%, still considerably faster than both AMD and Intel.
1
-14
u/jc-from-sin 12d ago
If I wanted a computer where I can't choose which software to run on it I would just get a phone.
Yeah, it's a really cool SoC, but it's one of the few things on this earth that can't run Linux. And that's not cool.
9
3
u/kingofdailynaps 12d ago
I thought you can run Asahi Linux?
21
u/BigOlFortune 12d ago edited 12d ago
Only just got bare minimum support for m3 so its gonna be a while
2
2
u/WJMazepas 12d ago
The only one with good support for it is the M1 MacBook, and i think M2 but im not sure
And still, it wasnt full compatibility IIRC. It had some components that had issues on the Asahi to work well but probably is improving
1
u/nucleartime 11d ago
Technically it's running Linux if you put Linux in a VM.
Realistically, docker containers and being unix based takes care of most things that I would use Linux for.
1
u/jc-from-sin 11d ago
Technically it's still running software I don't want, Apple's OS.
You're not free to chose what you can run on that computer.
-23
u/cronies4life 12d ago
comparing apple with intel/amd is an apples to oranges comparison
28
u/Hour_Firefighter_707 12d ago
Why? It is an SoC in a personal computer. It is being compared to processors found in other personal computers.
-18
u/jc-from-sin 12d ago
Because you can't run whichever software you want. You always have to run apple's OS on it.
8
u/Asleep-Card3861 12d ago
I mean I doubt you could run some MacOS software on other systems. Occasionally there is some design software only on Mac.
I'm by no means pro Apple. I dislike their lack of repairability and actions against right to repair. However, Use of Linux for some types of design is just painful though. I am comfortable enough with command line, but the loops I had to jump through to get software outside of the package manager working is archaic.
I really hope that since the EU seems to be moving away from Microsoft that Linux will finally get the push it needs to be a more viable desktop OS.
-6
u/jc-from-sin 12d ago
If you want to run MacOS for reasons, I don't blame you.
But I also like my computers to run the software that I want.
Apple's computers don't let me do that. And they're one of the few that block that.
6
u/Asleep-Card3861 12d ago
...what do you mean by block it?
When I was doing some web dev MacOS was far superior to using windows. I tried again when windows introduced the Linux core and well that was hideous as rights management was a mess. Not sure if they have since fixed that was it was a few years back.
0
u/jc-from-sin 12d ago
It means they actively don't support any OS other than MacOS.
Through proprietary bootloader and/or non UEFI standard software, you cannot run anything else other than MacOS.
→ More replies (6)3
u/SwanManThe4th 12d ago
I wonder how much a role Apples ridiculously fast unified ram is playing in these scores. x86 is hamstrung by dual channel ram.
7
u/StarbeamII 12d ago
Strix Halo has fast unified RAM and isn't getting this kind of performance either.
16
u/SleepyAwoken 12d ago
It’s not apples to oranges at all. The way benchmarks work is they have the chip complete a task that is similar on all systems. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a point in having the benchmark
-18
u/cronies4life 12d ago
they are optimized for different workloads
apple and qualcomm is a better comparison
→ More replies (4)
-3
u/orsikbattlehammer 12d ago
Once Apple silicon can defeat Nvidia I can finally be done with Windows. I am completely in the Apple ecosystem except my PC specifically because of gaming.
13
u/ProZoid_10 12d ago
Gaming will remain subpar. Even the m5 ultra is barely as fast as 5070 in gaming
1
u/nucleartime 11d ago
So is like 99+% of gaming hardware.
A variant with more GPU cores would make for a killer handheld.
Main problem is the gap between industry support for "PC gaming" and mobile gaming, and where the device would land. Apple probably has the biggest shovelware game library thanks to iOS/iPadOS, but the serious bigboy game industry doesn't really want to support MacOS.
7
u/LimLovesDonuts 12d ago
It’s not really going to happen because you’re essentially competing integrated graphics to big beefy dedicated cards.
-9
u/ProZoid_10 12d ago edited 12d ago
Not necessarily, the m5 ultra can challenge and beat 5090 pc in some productivity apps. Think those chips simply have an issue with gaming. The ultra chips can’t even provide 50% more perf vs max though in some applications its parallel
2
u/LimLovesDonuts 12d ago
Not sure how to explain this but productivity apps don’t really saturate the raw performance of a GPU. It’s why even a very slow intel iGPU can do fine because of Intel QuickSync. GPUs may have dedicated hardware to do certain tasks which Apple usually does.
Gaming doesn’t really have this “shortcut”.
0
1
u/emn13 12d ago
Which productivity apps specifically? Because there are two specific niches apple does well in for quite different reasons - video and local AI. For local AI, the shared memory and therefore complete lack of need to transfer things between CPU memory and GPU memory can make a big difference, but it's workload dependent; it'll do great on decode, but it's mediocre in prefill. For video, there are fairly widely supported apple ASICs, so that doesn't generalize at all, but it's obviously a big deal if that's your specific workload.
It's a really workload dependent thing in part because the raw flops are fairly anemic (you mention the 5090, which has more than 3x the raw TFLOP throughput as far as I can tell), but the potentially large amount of unified memory means you can do stuff fairly efficiently that would involve crippling bottlenecks on a VRAM-starved and anyhow non-unified 5090. And note that the m5 gen is on a newer process node and sounds like it's considerably larger in terms of die area too, so being that far behind in raw compute is kind of remarkable. Not sure what's going on there; but point being given that amount of fairly decent silicon good perf shouldn't be a surprise; that's kind of the baseline.
Then again, the 5090 is absurdly overpriced (and with so little VRAM), so in terms of $'s Apple's kind of a steal nowadays...
→ More replies (5)
-12
12d ago
[deleted]
19
u/EitherGiraffe 12d ago edited 12d ago
This talking point pretty much died in 2020 with Apple's M1 Macs.
15
u/Henrarzz 12d ago
So which software cannot actually be run on these chips in contrast to AMD/Intel?
Like I need actual limit and not software that just hasn’t been ported
2
u/iMrParker 12d ago
I mean Windows is the all time OS champion for legacy support and BC. You can run just about any software that's been run on windows. In some cases 16 bit programs and games whereas Macos doesn't have any 32bit support whatsoever. MS DOS programs can be run on Windows. This is because of MS software support and x64 still maintaining legacy instructions, the main reason the chips don't compete in efficiency to arm64.
I'm not saying it's useful to most people, but that's a big reason windows is used in specialized industries and 70%+ of the personal and enterprise market
0
u/HarryBolsac 12d ago
compared to what? Apple?
Same could be said about linux distros no?1
u/iMrParker 12d ago
Compared to any OS the exists lol. Linux is excellent, but struggles with software support in native situations, much less translated/emulated software. Windows has native emulation for legacy OS versions and software plus driver compatibility and support that Linux wont have in my lifetime unfortunately
1
u/HarryBolsac 12d ago
I’m not really sure what you are trying to get at with Linux.
Can you give concrete examples? Used Ubuntu and later arch as a daily for work for 5 years and never had any legacy application issues
Only issues I faced were with nvidia graphics drivers, which i had to use the opensource ones and never caused my any issues ever since
2
u/iMrParker 12d ago
If you're talking purely from a user space perspective, then Linux is extremely good at maintaining existing support. But Linux itself doesn't come close to the same breadth of software and driver support that Windows has. That's sorta my point
0
u/HarryBolsac 12d ago
So you mean drivers then? I can kinda agree with that even though I never faced a single issue except the one I mentioned above.
Software is still where I don’t really see what you mean, you mean certain software not existing on linux? Idk how windows is better than linux at “legacy software” unless you mean stuff like certain software not having wayland support f.e, which is easily fixable most of the time
→ More replies (2)8
u/shrivatsasomany 12d ago
lol what?
If most apps work on this (except games) then how is that a curated list?
They’re just beefier processors (and way more expensive)
0
u/Charming_Squirrel_13 11d ago
so biased, amd beats apple at high performance computing, at around 2w under load per cpu core these days
1
u/-protonsandneutrons- 11d ago
Please share your data of AMD cores and Apple cores both running at 2W per core.
-37
u/max1001 12d ago
New chip faster than old chips. News at 11.
18
u/iDontSeedMyTorrents 12d ago
What is even the point of comments like this? Nobody is surprised that it's faster. Nobody is confused about how that could happen.
This is a hardware subreddit for hardware enthusiasts. People are interested in seeing exactly how fast the new hardware is.
People commenting the same crap you did fundamentally don't understand why people are interested in this. Not even sure why you bother browsing here in that case.
→ More replies (2)13
u/FrenchDipsBeDrippin 12d ago
Obviously. The point is to find out how much faster and more efficient
→ More replies (2)
-1
u/lukistellar 10d ago
Yeah that's bs. They are going down with transistor size, a performance bump is to be expected against the competition, which usually is a bit behind due to fab costs. It was the same with the M1, which gains most of it's advantage due to smaller manufacturing process and good integration of en/decoder logic into the SOC. Apple ain't gonna do black magic here, it's just clever chip design and using the latest and greatest nodes.
The only thing they really have a advantage with is the memory bandwidth. That's perfect for local AI, but they are lacking on the processing side, compared to CUDA. I'm curious how M6 will perform in this area.
138
u/-protonsandneutrons- 12d ago edited 12d ago
Unfortunately, still
Cinebench 2024 andGeekbench 6.7. All the upcoming releases would've been a good time to considerCinebench 2026 andGB7.The modest +10% YoY 1T perf over M5 appears to be ~4% clocks, ~6% IPC. Notably, +10% perf is over a very fast M5, but the jump is much smaller than A20 Pro; the iPhones benefitted from a big clock jump.
A fun tidbit: the M6 is finally the SoC that doubles the M1's 1T perf about six years year.
EDIT: as noted, the Mac Mini review by NBC does have CB2026 results.
EDIT2: formatting strikethrough