That's bizarre. As if CPU vendors were unable to run "realistic" workloads. If they truly aren't, that's because they are unwilling and then they are designing for failure and Apple can just eat their lunch.
As a data scientist, I feel this. Intel and AMD don't own an OS or an app store, and you might be surprised how hard it is to get good data. Data is the new gold. If a company that can corner a piece of the market, they can collect data no one else can, and from that companies are often forced to partner or they can't properly provide services that will keep them competitive.
This makes me think that any sort of data advantage Apple may have has nothing to do with them owning an OS. Intel has a massive computer network, managed by their own IT team, just like any other large corporation. Intel could collect whatever performance data they want from actual users of actual programs just as easily as Apple could.
Apple doesn’t just control an operating system or an App Store. They also control a development toolchain and the two primary languages compiled for their platforms, as well as most of the frameworks used in commonly used apps (excepting the dreaded electron). They have a platform that’s been tailored to be profiled and optimized.
One early benchmark showed allocating and destroying an NSObject performing drastically better on the M1 vs recent Intel Macs. This wasn’t an accident. It’s probably not representative of performance overall. They have enough vertical integration to make their own first party solutions clear optimization targets.
This sort of "data," that optimizing contention free locks could have big rewards, isn't something that you need to control the OS or compiler/profiler/debugger toolchain to understand and learn. And for that matter, Intel has excellent compilers and profilers too.
All it takes is looking at what's going on in commonly used code, deciding to optimize for X, Y, and Z, and commit to it. If Intel isn't doing this already, that's all the fault of current management for not making it a priority.
The only way that Apple's vertical integration helped them make that management decision is that they were able to say "our customer is a typical laptop user." Intel tries to cater to much larger markets, so perhaps when management goes to plan a laptop chip, they are less aggressive with deciding to optimize. But I have a feeling that Apple's optimizations are generally good for nearly all code, not just for specific use cases.
There's really no explanation for why EPYC "Naples" was so bad other than AMD did not internally understand the performance of realistic large-scale programs. I mean even if they had taken anything off the shelf, for free, like MySQL, they could have determined at some point before mass production that their CPU, in fact, sucked. But they shipped it and prospective customers rejected it.
Don't discount how a weak organization can make poor decisions even when all necessary information seems to be readily available.
Apple is the only large company with a functional organization. Could that be it ? Coupled with their unparalleled ownership of a family of platforms (intel’s OS comparably is nonexistent).
I think you're probably right, but it's funny because I think Intel was well known for having really exceptional organizational function in the past. They used to be paranoid about everything!
Intel do own an OS, Clear Linux, but they probably lack profiles of typical usage of that OS, and probably there are not many users of it apart from Phoronix when they do benchmarking.
It’s a big world out there. Workloads in data science vs gaming vs hft vs packet processing vs web servers are all extremely different.
Even if you know about them, you need an expert in each to truly push the hardware to the real limits that get hit in the respective industry. The small differences between real implementations and simulated loads can drastically alter the performance characteristics and cause proc manufacturers to miss the mark.
