This paper investigates the architectural features and performance potential of the Apple Silicon M-Series SoCs (M1, M2, M3, and M4) for HPC. We provide a detailed review of the CPU and GPU designs, the unified memory architecture, and coprocessors such as Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). We design and develop benchmarks in the Metal Shading Language and Objective-C++ to assess FP32 computational and memory performance. We also measure power consumption and efficiency using Apple's powermetrics tool. Our results show that the M-Series chips offer up to 100 GB/s memory bandwidth, and significant generational improvements in computational performance, with up to 2.9 FP32 TFLOPS on the M4. Power consumption varies from a few Watts to 10-20 Watts, with more than 200 GFLOPS per Watt efficiency of GPU and accelerator reached by all four chips. Despite limitations in FP64 support on the GPU, the M-Series chips demonstrate strong potential for energy-efficient HPC applications. While existing HPC solutions such as the Nvidia Grace-Hopper superchip outperform Apple Silicon in both memory bandwidth and computational performance, we see that the M-Series provides a competitive power-efficient alternative to traditional HPC architectures and represents a distinct category altogether -- forming an apples-to-oranges comparison.

翻译：本文研究了Apple Silicon M系列SoC（M1、M2、M3及M4）面向高性能计算的架构特性与性能潜力。我们对CPU与GPU设计、统一内存架构以及高级矩阵扩展（AMX）等协处理器进行了详细评析。我们使用Metal着色语言与Objective-C++设计并开发了基准测试程序，以评估FP32计算与内存性能。同时，我们采用Apple的powermetrics工具测量了功耗与能效。实验结果表明：M系列芯片可提供高达100 GB/s的内存带宽，其计算性能在各代产品间实现显著提升，其中M4的FP32峰值算力可达2.9 TFLOPS；功耗范围为数瓦至10-20瓦，四款芯片的GPU与加速器均实现了超过200 GFLOPS/W的能效。尽管GPU对FP64运算的支持存在局限，M系列芯片仍展现出在能效敏感型高性能计算应用中的强大潜力。虽然现有高性能计算解决方案（如Nvidia Grace-Hopper超级芯片）在内存带宽与计算性能方面均优于Apple Silicon，但本研究表明M系列为传统高性能计算架构提供了具有竞争力的高能效替代方案，并构成了一个独特的类别——这本质上是一种苹果与橙子式的差异化比较。