Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.
During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.
Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.
A concession by Apple on CPU performance, but the M2 is much more power efficient. Click to enlarge.
In other words, Intel's Core i7-1260P is nearly 15 percent faster than Apple's M2, and that's not even considering the fact that Intel has two more powerful i7s in its so-called P-series lineup: the higher-frequency i7-1270P, which has same number of cores, and the 14-core i7-1280P.
The company did claim that the M2's CPU is 1.9x faster than Intel's 10-core Core i7-1255U while using the same amount of power, but while this may be a more appropriate comparison, the fact is that Apple doesn't have a CPU for ultra-thin laptops that is as powerful as Intel's best.
Regardless, Apple is claiming that performance-per-watt, where the M2 really shines, is the more important metric, building upon the original argument it made when the M1 debuted in 2020.
"Unlike others in the industry who significantly increase power to gain performance, our approach is different. We continue to have a relentless focus on power efficient performance. In other words, maximizing performance while minimizing power consumption," Srouji said.
But performance-per-watt isn't the only way Apple hopes the M2 will stand out when it lands in the MacBook Air and 13" MacBook Pro next month.
The tech giant is also making a bigger bet on the chip's GPU and neural engine because it believes an increasing share of applications in the future will be rely on graphics and AI, according to veteran semiconductor analyst Kevin Krewell of Tirias Research.
The M2 is still an impressive chip overall, especially its GPU and neural engine. Click to enlarge.
This is reflected by Apple's decision to dedicate more transistors for the M2's 10-core GPU and 16-core neural engine compared to the M1, Krewell said. These design decisions allowed the Mac maker to claim a 35 percent boost for the GPU and 40 percent boost for the neural engine compared to the M1. On the other hand, the M2's CPU only improved by 18 percent in multi-threaded performance, according to Apple.
But even then, Krewell said, applications that are heavily reliant on the CPU, like web browsers, don't have as great a need for faster chips, which is why he believes it's important to put more weight on the GPU and neural engine since they could make a bigger difference.
"Web browsers don't need a whole lot more performance, so the comparison on industry performance is probably less relevant in my mind, though overall power efficiency is good. Apple wants to show they are competitive with Intel and that in some ways they may be ahead with neural processing and better graphics," Krewell told The Register.
The M2's GPU is looking pretty good — if you believe Apple's claims. Click to enlarge.
While Apple didn't provide a competitive comparison for the M2's neural engine, it did claim that the 10-core GPU is 2.3x faster than the integrated graphics within Intel's Core i7-1255U while using the same power. Conversely, Apple said the M2's GPU can provide the peak performance of the i7-1255U while using only one-fifth of the power. The caveat is that Apple didn't provide a comparison to the i7-1260P, which does have a faster built-in GPU than the i7-1255U.
By its own admission, Apple may not have the fastest CPU in the industry for an ultra-light laptop. But its bigger emphasis on the GPU and neural engine lends to the growing trend in the compute world that having a faster central brain may be less important than having dedicated accelerators for increasingly important areas like AI and graphics. ®
Activision Blizzard is starting collective bargaining with quality-assurance workers at its game studio Raven Software, after they voted in favor of unionizing.
The Californian video-game maker is currently trying to close the $68.7bn acquisition offer from Microsoft, and has promised to fix internal issues amid allegations of a toxic workplace culture that led to gender and race discrimination, as well as sexual harassment of employees.
As Activision attempted to clean up its public image, the biz announced it would lay off 12 workers from Raven Software after a group of employees tried to form a union. Sixty staff members protested, staged a strike for five weeks, and sided with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) to obtain formal recognition. A formal election was held, and a majority voted in favor of unionizing, and now the games biz is ready to talk.
RSA Conference An ambitious project spearheaded by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working to develop a map of the cybercrime ecosystem using open source information.
The Atlas initiative, whose contributors include Fortinet and Microsoft and other private-sector firms, involves mapping the relationships between criminal groups and their infrastructure with the end goal of helping both industry and the public sector — law enforcement and government agencies — disrupt these nefarious ecosystems.
This kind of visibility into the connections between the gang members can help security researchers identify vulnerabilities in the criminals' supply chain to develop better mitigation strategies and security controls for their customers.
Late last month, France's BEA-RI, or Bureau of Investigation and Analysis on industrial risks, issued its technical report on the March 10th, 2021 fire at the OVH datacenter in Strasbourg.
The French report [PDF] and summary [PDF] echo the findings of the Bas-Rhin fire service in March, 2022 that the lack of an automatic fire extinguisher system, the delay of electrical cutoff and the building design contributed to the spread of the blaze.
The BEA-RI findings also hint at a possible cause – a water leak on an inverter – while stating that the cause has not been conclusively determined.
Microsoft has forgotten to renew the certificate for the web page of its Windows Insider software testing program.
Attempting to visit the Windows Insider portal was returning the familiar "Your connection is not private" warning – as if webpages larded with scripts and trackers can truly be called "private." The problem has now been fixed, and someone's no doubt getting an earful.
Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will attempt to deter visitors from accessing the webpage, but will provide a link for those who ignore the warnings and persist on clicking through to advanced options.
RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.
The security conference trade has been more cautious than most when it comes to getting conferences back up to speed in the COVID years. Almost all cons were virtual with a very limited hybrid-conference season last year, including DEF CON, where masks were taken seriously. People still wanted to mingle and ShmooCon too went ahead, albeit later than usual in March.
The RSA conference has been going for over 30 years and many security folks love going. There are usually some good talks, it's a chance to meet old friends, and certain pubs host meetups where more constructive work gets done on hard security ideas than a month or so of Zoom calls.
As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.
For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains.
That’s where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR.
Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.
As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.
The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.
Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.
In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.
"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.
Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.
MEPs backed a plenary vote on Wednesday for "zero-emission road mobility by 2035" – essentially meaning no more diesel and gasoline-fueled vehicles on the road.
The ambitious target means the automotive battery industry will have to service a much larger demand over the coming years, and electric carmakers stand to benefit hugely – that is, if they can source the requisite semiconductors and batteries.
Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.
Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.
The Intezer/BlackBerry team discovered Symbiote in November 2021, and said it appeared to have been written to target financial institutions in Latin America. Analysis of the Symbiote malware and its behavior suggest it may have been developed in Brazil.
Microsoft has treated some of the courageous Dev Channel crew of Windows Insiders to the long-awaited tabbed File Explorer.
"We are beginning to roll this feature out, so it isn't available to all Insiders in the Dev Channel just yet," the software giant said.
The Register was one of the lucky ones and we have to commend Microsoft on the implementation (overdue as it is). The purpose of the functionality is to allow users to work on more than one location at a time in File Explorer via tabs in the title bar.
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