Weird they wouldn't put their high performance chips on 5nm first. Surely those have the most to gain? No-one's looking that carefully at Core i3 performance right?
And if it does make a big difference, couldn't they and up with i3s being faster than their own i5s? Which would be a bit embarrassing.
I guess they want to gather experience with TSMC's processes with a product nobody cares about, and then use that experience for the product that actually matter.
An Intel Core i7-6700K has almost two billion transistors while a GTX 1080 has 7.2 billion transistors.
Of course you may be referring to Intel's integrated GPU's, but they are still very complex. They are not merely number CPU's -- their design is very different.
Transistor count != complexity. A GPU is hundreds of simple ALUs stacked together. Minimal branch handling, no real speculative execution, no reordering buffers, etc... Very simple, very slow "cores", and just a whole shitload of them "copy/pasted" together. Some moderately complex management blocks then distribute work to all those ALUs, sure, but still nothing close to the complexity of a modern CPU core.
Which is also why GPUs can be built so large. It's much easier for them to handle defects than for CPUs. The loss of a single core cluster on a GPU isn't nearly as significant to the product's overall performance as the loss of a single core on a CPU, and the amount of transistors you need to turn off to handle that defect is much less.
As far as I understand, the 5nm process will yield lower power consumption[1]. As the i3 is on the lower end of power consumption this may be enough to make it viable for applications that it would not be viable for otherwise. While their powerful CPUs are fast enough (if you look at competitors) and the power requirements there is already so high that the reduced power consumption from the 5nm process won't make them that much more attractive.
Actually there are i9 chips with same TDP as i3 [2]. I would think that the i3 still sells more units and is lower cost, so maybe a lower power i3 will be more attractive to OEMs than a lower power i7 or i9.
Well the Apple m1 machines are fast and have incredibly low power consumption so maybe they’re trying to make their i3 compete with that?
Going to be interesting though, the higher tier Apple silicon machines will probably be shipping before any of these i3 chips so intel will likely be playing catch-up for years at least.
Eh, the cheapest M1 Mac is the Mac Mini at $699, $100 less than the outgoing model and offering better perfromance at some tasks than the iMac Pro. Keep in mind that there is the whole 'profit margin' factor. At $699, the mac mini offers much better perfromance than the outgoing model while costing $100 less. Why chop even more money off it?
Apple's cost in manufacturing has always been rooted in quality components and Software Engineering. They just don't build low end models and likely never will. The fact that you can buy a $300 iPad is actually kinda weird for Apple.
They are probably binning a lot of product right now. They'll eventually need to do something with all those chips that didn't make the cut. This is apple we're talking about. There's surely a 5+ year plan to develop this ecosystem fully. I'd be more surprised if we didn't see a complete line of custom chips across all apple products within the decade.
At least in the US market (I don't have experience in other markets), Apple is definitely not the cheaper laptop company. The average laptop sold in 2019 sold for ~$700.[0] The cheapest laptop Apple currently sells is $1,000. Apple only sells high-end luxury laptops. Most laptops sold are cheaper than even the cheapest Mac.
When you compare similarly spec'd machines from other manufacturers then yeah they're usually in the same ballpark numbers. I don't know I'd say Apple is always more expensive or always cheaper when looking at only the high-end price range.
The MacBook Air used to have an i3 in the $999 model which now has an M1. So in that sense the M1 is comparable to an i3. They both serve the same market.
There are also some high-end Windows laptops using i3s like the $999 Dell XPS 13.
Issue is that Intel will have an obvious problem on their hands:
Apple used the i3 in the Air because it was low cost and low power for good battery life. The M1 fits those needs but then blows the perfromance well beyond what we could call an i7 in this segment. (All in the comparable wattage i7 had 30% max less single-core perfromance and 1/3rd the multicore perfromance)
Intel sells chips like this on a sliding scale from i3 to i9.
If Intel made an i3 that compares favorably to the M1, it would be faster and cooler than any other CPU Intel makes, ruining i7 and i9 sales. It would pretty rapidly piss-off their vendors who seek to upsell expensive skus.
I could see a TSMC i3 core in a different name possibly, like Intel Evo Next or something like that and then them selling it as a premium chip for a high profit.
my thinking that this "i3 on 5nm at TSMC" is just to show that nothing good comes out of it. Basically faction fight inside Intel - fabless vs. owning fabs. The owning fabs faction is much more politically stronger inside Intel and they ultimately are forced to let that experiment, and they will make sure that it will have all the obstacles. Basically it like GM's EV1 or like Sun in the 200x when Linux/x86 was basically a guerilla effort oppressed by Sparc/Solaris, and the Sparc/Solaris faction allowed Linux/x86 only into a low end Sun's market.
Could it be partially motivated by competition? Maybe they are less concerned with performance, and just want to eat up TSMC capacity which would be used by competitors
And if it does make a big difference, couldn't they and up with i3s being faster than their own i5s? Which would be a bit embarrassing.