howdy ho this is dylan with semi-analysis today we're going to talk about what apple announced at wwdc which is the 20 billion transistor m2 soc unfortunately it's quite a minor uplift in performance in some areas such as cpu apple's gains mostly came from gpu and video editing the overall performance gains are quite
disappointing when you factor in the raw cost increase that comes with the m2 and the fact that it's been nearly two years since m1's introduction the cost increase story is similar to that which we wrote about on the a16 where apple is being forced to diverge soc choices to a16 on pro iphone models and a15 on normal iphone models due to
bill of material concerns that's over at the newsletter but today we're going to discuss the architectural details of m2 and some information that we have on apple's future designs including m2 pro max and m3 which worked at wwc at all we'll also do some dye analysis of the marketing image of m2 that apple released with lacuza there's
actually quite a bit of information that you can get out of it once you work with it a bit it's very odd that we have seen some pundits talk about this being m 1.5 or m one plus that's just nonsense m1 was generally based on the same ip blocks as the apple a14 outside of a few deviations regards to the cpu um you know with some minor
changes in the gpu with a slightly different architecture as well the m2 codenamed statin is generally based on the same ip blocks as a15 and that's code named ellis these code names are based on new york some of new york's most well-known islands which should be a hint as to how closely related these architectures are
a lot of the disappointment in performance uplift comes from the weak gen on gen gains given the nearly two year long gap many people expected more out of the m2 ssc we discussed it in the past but a lot of the slowdown stems from apple losing leagues of amazing engineers to firms such as nuvia and rivos the bleeding hasn't stopped in recent
years as apple's work culture simply isn't the best compared to other firms a lot of these other firms such as google microsoft amazon and meta are paying a lot more than apple to poach talent lastly there's also been an exodus of non-money motivated engineers who think they were successful in the transition of apple off of intel silicon and onto
in-house silicon these engineers have left to work on what many believe are more interesting products and projects elsewhere in the industry whether it's at the hyperscalers or at the traditional silicon firms these departures have culminated in the a15 and m2 as well as potentially the upcoming a16 to deliver much more tepid
cpu performance gains we've heard the a16 will not utilize the next generation arm v9 based core which is quite sad if true given apple was the first to implement arm v8 we heard that this next generation arm v9 core will only come in the m3 which will be apple's first product on the tsmc n3 node three nanometer apple has already designed and
taped out the m2 pro and m2 max which are still on n5 second generation n5 so let's dive into the die shot apple presented an unmarked image of both m1 and m2 and this showcased that m2 was 141.7 millimeter squared if you did the area but we believe apple modified this dye image this wouldn't be the first
time that apple did this uh they did the same with the m1 max where they hit the detail connections used in the m1 ultra among a few other things related to just the general sizing this time apple's image seems to be off-scale one could make out srim cells and phi's which should be identical across the chips and see that m2 is
smaller seems smaller um as a whole even though there is no node shrink apple presented the m2 to also have higher transistor densities than the a15 which is out of whack it wouldn't make sense it would have lower for that reason lacuza scaled the m2 die the scaling brought sram cells and the identical thighs equivalent to what apple has on the m1 and a15
we'll showcase this later on the funkiness of apple's marketing image does mean there is a error window of about three percent after the die was scaled in size the numbers are presented as measured despite the error bars let's move on to how apple spent the increase in die size first let's start off with the apple p core the
performance core it is based on apple's avalanche core which showed up in the a15 although there are some minor differences this follows how the m1 pro and m1 max also had a modified firestorm so that they could handle larger memory sizes by implementing a larger pa and there's also some different physical design the m-based cores also have a few
modifications which help them with varied page sizes that must be supported in mac os looking at the area the core itself is 20 21 percent larger than the m1 and 7 percent larger than a15 the big area of gro gen on gen growth is with the l2 shirt cache which has gone from 12 megabytes to 16 megabytes when comparing
to both m1 and a15 the m1 unit looks identical across a15 and m1 as well the shared logic is also significantly larger which is an indication that there is more bandwidth between the cores and the l2 cache and also the slc shared level cache overall apple spent 5.2 millimeter squared on the big p cores but the performance increase
from them comes mostly from clock speeds the ipc increase is quite small one very interesting change is that the rob appears smaller on the avalanche core which is found in a15 and m1 versus the firestorm core which is found in m1 and a14 this is odd because you know apple has been had the largest rob in the industry by far because they have the widest highest
ipc core in the industry by far so they sort of step back for efficiency the e core was the main unit of change on a cpu perspective from a14 to a15 and that holds true here after scaling the apple provided die shot the e cores look nearly identical between a15 and m2 which is a good sign that the scaling was accurate because
apple does less modifications on their e cores than they do on their p chords for the max silicon there isn't much to say here about the e core as it's pretty much clearly the same as a15 which has been extensively tested the e core complex as a whole is only one millimeter squared larger gen on gen while the entire cpu complex is
6.2 millimeter squared larger gen gen the gpu after scaling also appears to be nearly the same size per core 128 alus versus the m1 this is very interesting because it's one of the areas where the m1 diverged from the a14 significantly it had twice as many alus among a few other tweaks there was an architecture change there
even though they were in the same generation apple has a precedent for the x-series soc you know the a12x a10x and etc which is now renamed the m1 m2 uh changes versus the asoc as far back as even the a6 and a6x which had different gpu architectures as well this generation the gpu core itself seems unchanged at 128lus but the shared logic
is much larger so there could be changes on the fixed function aspects the core count is the major change where apple bumped it up to a 10 core gpu we can also exclusively detail the gpu clock speed which went from 1.27 gigahertz to 1.406 gigahertz so a lot of this gain in performance 30 35 that apple claimed is actually just from
clock speeds and core count not architecture in total the gpu adds nearly seven millimeters squared gen on gen this is worthwhile performance increase although apple indicated power consumption was slightly up at that maximum performance level there was efficiency gains when you keep them at the same performance level
we have also included the npu and slc figures here the mpu comes across as a little odd so we'll skip over those this will see shared level cache is where things are really interesting each two megabyte data array is generally the same size across m1 a15 and the scaled m2 die which makes sense right the there is no s gram shrink from first generation to
second generation n5 process node despite this the slc does grow somewhat in size on m2 likely because they have more bandwidth to various ip blocks such as the larger gpu and to handle that higher memory speeds and stuff etc so the last the same size 2 megabyte l2 is a testament to the scaling right that being accurate
because it should be the same size per uh purse per two megabytes the last ip block to compare is the memory controller and the five for it apple increased the area here significantly to support lt lpddr5 6400 the image above is only for one unit but the memory controller is of course multiple channels and so the total area dedicated to 128
bits of lpddr5 bus is about 14 millimeter squared versus the 8.1 millimeter squared on m1 with its 128 bit lp 4x and 4.3 millimeter squared on a15 uh which is 64 bits this is where we want to do a bit of a pr news flash where people talk about channel counts and it's completely meaningless right so the m1 is actually an eight-channel soc
despite being 128-bit bus right uh meanwhile tiger lake right intel's tiger lake uh is a two channel platform and yet it's six it's 128 bits the same bus width but channel count is much lower and alder lake when using ddr4 is two channels but when using ddr5 it's four channels and that's it's still the same 128-bit
bus so channel count is completely irrelevant stop talking about channel count use bus with so you know the last thing we want to talk about is you know the cost component um the real kicker on a cost perspective is the fact that lpddr5 6400 is significantly more expensive than lpgddr4x4266 this is a big part of the equation for
apple doing a split a15 a16 lineup on this year's upcoming iphones wrote about that decision on the newsletter overall apple has contended with similar issues on m2 which is why they are keeping the m1 based models around for the low end the combo of minor wafer price increases larger die sizes uh you know from 118.91 millimeter square to
155.25 millimeters squared and the more expensive memory hurts a lot that's why apple has kept around the m1 based macbook air the last ip block which we didn't measure but is much larger is the media engine which enables enhanced media capabilities and you know despite all the negativity the apple m series is by far the best silicon for creative
professionals right if you're editing in say adobe or doing audio workflows or doing you know final cut which is obviously apple exclusive but you know even adobe is much better with apple m-series silicon thanks for listening check out the newsletter subscribe over there for emails and have a good day thank you guys bye