Similar story with Qualcomm but to a lesser degree (both on the CPU and GPU side). I wonder why that is.
Lack of priority? Legitimately harder problem to solve? Experience from mobile scaling to desktop differently than CPU experience?
Another user though pointed out that they didn't actually design the GPU until the A11, so perhaps it really is just a lack of in house experience.
(My take. happy to be corrected by someone with chip design experience who can comment.)
Nvidia's chips lose very little performance when they're severely power limited. In fact, that's why Nvidia's Professional versions of their GPUs are typically running at under two-thirds of their consumer equivalent's power draw.
Nvidia's cards are primarily designed for their professional applications where the power consumption is lower, and then they just juice up the consumer cards deep into the territory of diminishing returns just so they win some benchmarks.
On a performance-per-watt basis, Apple is still behind an Nvidia card with the juiced up power consumption, and when you dial back the power draw, Nvidia cards are miles ahead of Apple's silicon for performance-per-watt.
Whether or not this thing is commercially available though, they basically have no choice but to at least keep up the R&D spend, or they'll be even further behind once RAM availability eventually eases up.
I’m not sure if I can measure IPC and cache misse latencies on my machines, but I’m sure latencies are pushing IPC down.
Blackwell came out in 2024 on n4p. This article is claiming that Apple hopes to get into the same ballpark of performance as a Blackwell GPU with an M7 Ultra, which at the absolute earliest would release in 2027, but more likely 2028 or 2029, and would consist of two absolutely massive M7 Max GPUs stapled together, for a total die area bigger than a 5090, but on a smaller more advanced node.
Honestly, if they can't release something that big by 2028 that's at least competitive with a 5080, it'd be extremely embarrassing for them.
For AI purposes that may change but I doubt it.
Doesn't the argument work fine on the CPU side? Apple doesn't seem to be hurting for lack of a Threadripper competitor.
A high IPC is much easier to achieve when the instructions have a fixed-length encoding, so this RISC principle followed from their main choice.