SEARCH
diglloydTools™
Apple M1 Max Chip: Apparent Die Size of 432 mm^2 Dwarfs Just About Everything Else, Far Beyond Any Competitor
Related: Apple, Apple MacBook Pro M1, Apple Silicon, GPU, laptop, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Other World Computing, SSD, video tech
According to AnandTech, the Apple M1 Max chip is a massive 432 mm^2—about 22 X 20mm. That's pretty small compared to most things, but it’s HUGE for a computer chip.
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computing
ARM = Advanced RISC Computing
SoC = System on a Chip — includes CPU, GPU, memory support, etc.
Apple Announces M1 Pro & M1 Max: Giant New ARM SoC with All-Out Performance
The M1 Pro and Max both follow-up on last year’s M1, Apple’s first generation Mac silicon that ushered in the beginning of Apple’s journey to replace x86 based chips with their own in-house designs. The M1 had been widely successful for Apple, showcasing fantastic performance at never-before-seen power efficiency in the laptop market...
...
The M1 Max is truly immense – Apple disclosed the M1 Pro transistor count to be at 33.7 billion, while the M1 Max bloats that up to 57 billion transistors. AMD advertises 26.8bn transistors for the Navi 21 GPU design at 520mm² on TSMC's 7nm process; Apple here has over double the transistors at a lower die size thanks to their use of TSMC's leading-edge 5nm process. Even compared to NVIDIA's biggest 7nm chip, the 54 billion transistor server-focused GA100, the M1 Max still has the greater transistor count.
In terms of die sizes, Apple presented a slide of the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max alongside each other, and they do seem to be 1:1 in scale. In which case, the M1 we already know to be 120mm², which would make the M1 Pro 245mm², and the M1 Max about 432mm².
...Apple here claims, that in multi-threaded performance, the new chips both vastly outperform anything Intel has to offer, at vastly lower power consumption. The presented performance/power curves showcase that at equal power usage of 30W, the new M1 Pro and Max are 1.7x faster in CPU throughput than the 11800H, whose power curve is extremely steep. Whereas at an equal performance levels – in this case using the 11800H's peak performance – Apple says that the new M1 Pro/Max achieves the same performance with 70% lower power consumption. Both figures are just massive discrepancies and leap ahead of what Intel is currently achieving.
...the M1 Max is aiming at delivering something never-before seen: supercharging the GPU to a total of 32 cores. Essentially it’s no longer an SoC with an integrated GPU, rather it’s a GPU with an SoC around it... Apple is advertising a massive 400GB/s of bandwidth, which if it’s LPDDR5-6400, would possibly be more exact at 409.6GB/s. This kind of bandwidth is unheard of in an SoC, but quite the norm in very high-end GPUs.
MPG: if Apple can scale things up even further within a year, then wow. As it stands, it seems unlikely that Intel-based solutions could approach this even given two more years of development.
