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Fascinating thread. The first ARM processor used a 3µm process… now down to 5nm, or ~360,000x the density.. Moore's law suggests 35 years => ~17-18 doublings of transistor density, or a factor of 131k-262k. Ahead of schedule! (to say nothing of parallelism, etc)

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Ken Shirriff

@kenshirriff

· Oct 18, 2021

Apple just announced the ARM-based M1 Max processor, so it's interesting to compare it with the first ARM processor, created by Acorn Computers in 1985 as a coprocessor for the BBC Micro computer. Designers were Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber.

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10:34 PM · Oct 18, 2021Twitter Web App

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José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente

@ArtirKel

Oct 18, 2021

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@andy_matuschak

Eager to see the new M1s single thread performance! For a while one could complain that we were having progress, but only through adding more cores, the M1 showed that there were pockets of gains left to be exploited!

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Oct 18, 2021

Single-threaded performance is only slightly improved: wccftech.com/apple-m1-max-b Though of course in practice the increased memory bandwidth will probably make a large difference in real-world loads. I wonder how often I'm actually single-thread bound.

wccftech.com

Apple M1 Max Benchmarks Leak Out, 55% Faster Than M1 CPU In Multi-Threaded Tests

The first unofficial Apple M1 Max CPU benchmarks have leaked out which show how the chip performs in single and multi-threaded tests.

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Ironically Intel is the major semiconductor maker least able to keep pace w/Moore's law. In the last decade ARM won on mobile (and watch cloud next cf. AWS Graviton), Nvidia/GPUs are riding the AI rocket ship, AMD innovated w/Ryzen, and Apple silicon has had such a strong start.