[HN Gopher] Apple's M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business...
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Apple's M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
Author : danaris
Score : 550 points
Date : 2021-04-23 01:45 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.extremetech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.extremetech.com)
| outside1234 wrote:
| x86 is dead - first in consumer, then in cloud.
|
| It is hard to see to me how this ends any other way. The creative
| class (us) will quickly have largely all ARM computers within 4
| years.
|
| Its not hard to see from there how software will be even more
| optimized for ARM variants than x86 and that the scale of both
| mobile and consumer computing will push x86 out of the datacenter
| slowly as old software that relies on x86 is retired over the
| next decade.
|
| People won't want to develop on x86 and deploy to ARM. ARM is
| more power efficient which is important in the data center too.
| We already scale by the core in the cloud, so why not just heap a
| few more cheap cores on if we need more to match x86 (which right
| now looks like we might not).
|
| Tell me how I am wrong.
| asddubs wrote:
| a lot of people still rely on windows. maybe if microsoft gets
| a better emulator going, but I imagine with the amount of
| legacy they support that's a lot more challenging than for
| apple who are much more trigger happy when it comes to imposing
| changes on devs.
|
| i think it'll definitely happen, especially with the web
| browser increasingly taking on the role of the operating
| system, but 4 years seems a little optimistic, even with your
| qualification of that statement
| chao- wrote:
| I agree with you in general, but disagree on the time scale.
| Particularly:
|
| >The creative class (us) will quickly have largely all ARM
| computers within 4 years.
|
| I think good options might exist in 4 years, but still possess
| trade-offs, where legacy x86-64 platforms still have their
| place. This could be something as niche as maturity of IOMMU
| implementations in x86 workstations, but stack up a bunch of
| niches and I find it hard to see "largely all" in four years.
| Fifty-fifty in four years, "largely all" in ten for "the
| creative class". Then there is a long tail of industries may
| end up legacy-bound to x86 for decades to come.
|
| Nothing is guaranteed. If starting in 2022 we were to see
| another 3-year performance plateau, ala 2016-2019, then anyone
| who bought into an mid- or high-end x86 platform today may not
| feel compelled to upgrade in just four years. Even if the ARM
| options exist, it might not be a compelling enough gap in four
| years' time. I'm not saying that a plateau is likely
| (competitive landscape suggests the opposite), but I don't have
| a crystal ball, so I won't discount it either.
|
| Again I want to emphasize that I mostly agree, but I wouldn't
| bet any money on sweeping changes on such an aggressive
| timeline.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| Creative class is a lot more than programmers. Look at boutique
| system integrators like Puget Systems... do you see Apple/ARM
| Hardware? Heck no you don't! These guys sell hardware to a LOT
| of the companies that comprise the credits in movie production,
| game production, laboratories, university science departments,
| ML researchers, big energy, and soooooo much more.
|
| These guys are not rewriting their software stack for thin
| chassis, thermal limited, and non-repairable hardware. Raytheon
| doesn't buy Apple/ARM hardware for their simulations, design
| and development. Does Boeing, Airbus, Ford or Caterpillar run
| on Apple/ARM hardware? Are these companies just chomping at the
| bit to ditch their legacy stacks? I don't think so.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Raytheon etc don't buy them _yet_.
|
| But the M1 is already a huge hit in the music and design
| community, which is pro-performance oriented. If subsequent
| Mnx chips provide enough of a speed bump they're going to
| destroy the high end Xeon market.
| kingosticks wrote:
| You've named two industries where Apple have histrionically
| been really popular, mostly because of their software
| rather than for any particular performance reason. They'd
| all buy the latest, Apple product whatever was inside
| because that's the _only_ one Apple is going to support
| going forward. The idea of real high-performance computing
| moving to ARM is entirely dependent on there being suitable
| good software support, which currently does not exist (at
| least in my industry there is nothing yet and the vendors
| move very slowly). This "destruction" might eventually
| come but it won't be any time soon and Intel will of course
| react in the meantime.
| stephenr wrote:
| The parent comment didn't say "we'll all be using Apple"
|
| He said ARM.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| I edited my comment as I think in the context of the larger
| discussion, ARM and Apple are basically interchangeable.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| I wholeheartedly disagree. Apple is probably the "first,
| best" case of ARM, but there's absolutely nothing
| stopping anyone from making a similar investment in ARM
| hardware. Indeed, Amazon is already doing so with
| Graviton, and we're seeing similar improvements in both
| raw speed and in perf/watt like what we're seeing with M1
| chips vs. Intel[0]. And that's one of the best parts of
| ARM -- the design itself is available for licensing,
| unlike x86, so anyone can pony up the cash and build up
| their own customized chips that maintain compatibility
| with base ARM code (maybe needing a recompile to take
| advantage of new hardware features).
|
| [0] https://dev.to/dnx/arm-vs-intel-a-real-world-
| comparison-usin...
| jtbayly wrote:
| ARM, not Apple. They are not the same thing.
| imtringued wrote:
| Right now they pretty much are.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > Creative class is a lot more than programmers.
|
| I'm not sure anyone thinks programmers when they think
| creative class. That's like saying the professional athlete
| class is a lot more than just Pokemon Go players...
| rvense wrote:
| Isn't creative class just people who make things without
| consuming raw materials? I think it includes consultants,
| "knowledge workers", etc. in its original formulation, not
| just artists.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Yes that's very much the more artistic side aka graphic
| designers, it smacks of doing an easy "olgy" degree or even
| a "PPE".
|
| The sort who work in traditional professional jobs and who
| shudder at the thought of the "boffins" and greasy
| "engineers" .
|
| Recall yesterdays conversation about European pay rates for
| developers.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Intel and AMD aren't standing still in this.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Apple also isn't just standing around, enjoying the M1
| nightowl_games wrote:
| You overestimate the size and relevance of your peer group and
| you underestimate the inertia that will impede this migration.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Are there examples of Arm designs OTHER than the M1 which are
| suitable for consumers? Yes, the M1 is a remarkable product and
| it will certainly make inroads against x86 on the desktop but
| it is from a single company. Will Apple M1 (2, 3 etc) replace
| all x86 devices in a decade? That's hard to swallow. Now, if we
| see another Arm product released that ALSO kicks x86 butt, from
| another player, then maybe I'd believe a change is happening
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Lots of software have been ported to ARM architecture in the
| last half year, so the clock started ticking for great ARM
| based Windows laptops. But it's clear that ARM's memory
| ordering has won.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| if you are not using an apple phone, your smartphone likely
| uses an ARM-licensed chip, and chromebooks/windows RT devices
| ran ARM cores
|
| the only thing holding back wider adoption is legacy x86
| software
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Gaming is still x86 territory and that includes 2 of the 3
| main competing gaming consoles isn't? Hard to think of a
| PS5 as legacy stuff.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's only because no one other than Apple has put up a
| serious competition in ARM CPU space.
|
| Earlier consoles used a _boatload_ of different CPU and
| GPU architectures (PowerPC, SuperH, IBM Cell, other
| proprietary stuff, x86), nowadays consoles have converged
| to essentially a locked down, glorified x86 PC on one
| side (Xbox One, Xbox S /X, PS4, PS5) and ruggedized ARM-
| based tablets (Nintendo Switch) on the other side.
|
| On the mobile gaming space, ARM already has achieved
| utter dominance with Switch + iPhone + Android... all it
| needs for ARM to conquer the console market is for
| someone to tape out an extremely powerful chip and
| actually sell it - Apple won't.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Is the dominance of x86 due to any inherent properties of
| x86, or historical legacy?
|
| I think the xbox-s/x and ps5's choice of CPU vendor was
| driven more by business factors and the integrated
| graphics, than the virtues of x86 per se. The Switch does
| pretty well despite the less powerful CPU in the tegra.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| Is not the majority of gaming occurring on mobile ARM
| devices, not dedicated consoles or rigs?
|
| "Mobile gaming has fast become the largest gaming market
| in the world with industry revenue expected to hit $76.7
| Billion by the end of 2020 and 2.2 million mobile gamers
| worldwide. It's become so popular that 72.3% of mobile
| users in the US are also mobile phone gamers. To put this
| into perspective when compared with the wider video game
| market, by 2022 the global game market is set to reach
| $196 Billion, and the mobile gaming market will account
| for $95.4 Billion of that alone."
|
| https://www.wepc.com/statistics/mobile-gaming/
| imtringued wrote:
| >Is not the majority of gaming occurring on mobile ARM
| devices, not dedicated consoles or rigs?
|
| Yes, the "I'm taking a 5 minute toilet break" gaming or
| the "I'm sitting in a bus and I have nothing else to do"
| gaming.
|
| It's making money off of whales who like that there is
| f2p plankton to gobble up.
|
| I played a bunch of mobile games in 2014 and they were
| all trash or cash grabs. Often with grinds worse than
| MMORPGs.
| ankurdhama wrote:
| The smartphone ARM and chromebook ARM processors are
| nowhere near the M1 or x86 CPU in terms of performance. You
| need an M1 kind performance in these devices outside of
| Apple.
| tedd4u wrote:
| Also Raspberry Pi's are ARM.
|
| ARM Macs run x86 software great (my experience) and ARM
| Windows machines run x86 software adequately (I have read).
| Don't know how well QEmu works on Linux - haven't tried it
| but know it's available.
| selcuka wrote:
| Apple's Rosetta 2 that allows x86 code to run on M1 is a
| different beast than QEmu though. It translates x86
| machine code to ARM code. That's why it is much faster
| than VM solutions.
| makomk wrote:
| QEmu also translates x86 machine code to ARM code, or
| vice-versa, or many other combinations. It's more
| optimised for portability and ease of adding translation
| support for new architectures than performance though but
| it's a really nifty bit of engineering.
| selcuka wrote:
| Qualcomm is also entering the laptop segment with its 8cx
| platform [1]. While not a serious contender to M1 yet, it is
| comparable to an Intel i5 [2].
|
| Samsung is also planning to release an Exynos laptop [3].
|
| [1] https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon-8cx-
| gen-2-5g-co...
|
| [2] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/snapdragon-8cx-
| vs-co...
|
| [3] https://www.engadget.com/samsung-exynos-
| amd-2200-windows-10-...
| imtringued wrote:
| Qualcomm tried so many times, it is actually a strong
| argument against ARM dominance, if Apple is the only one
| who can make it work but there are two companies that can
| make x86 work then the answer is pretty obvious which
| architecture is better.
| slezyr wrote:
| So what? Microsoft SQ1 has been there for a while [1].
| Without a software support they are just a fancy stones
| that can't run desktop software.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_X
| [deleted]
| pjc50 wrote:
| Qualcomm are _terrible_ , though; rather than doing an M1
| and competing on performance, they rely on cornering the
| mobile market with a patent portfolio.
|
| They also have (fortunately) zero control over the
| downstream software, so they can't do Apple-style
| vertically integrated improvements.
| nerfhammer wrote:
| waiting for the gaming console announcement
| Gaelan wrote:
| If you mean specifically an Apple Silicon game console,
| that's the Apple TV.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Uh, Nintendo Switch?
| 1_player wrote:
| Something a bit more modern and powerful, perhaps?
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| "creative class" :-)
|
| The m1 is cool but for heavy duty work its still got a number
| of issues memory multiple displays.
|
| Rember there no such thing as to much Memory, IPC, Graphics
| performance - thee is sadly often a luck of budget.
| ankurdhama wrote:
| Only if I can buy a desktop/laptop with a powerful ARM
| processor and plug-in a bootable usb and install operating
| system (arm version) of my choice with all drivers etc working
| fine.
| Gaelan wrote:
| I expect this will be the case with Linux on the M1 in a year
| or two, given the pace of marcan's work. Windows depends on
| Microsoft's willingness, of course.
| imtringued wrote:
| That's an argument against the M1 and ARM dominance.
| ankurdhama wrote:
| That's the thing, reverse engineered drivers are not the
| solution and I don't see Apple providing drivers or any
| documentation of M1 SoC for other operating system. We need
| M1 equivalent from vendors that are NOT into "vertical
| integration" like Apple.
| imtringued wrote:
| Ok, it's time for the emulation anxiety meme (based on EV
| range anxiety), will this system emulate this extremely
| performance intensive x86 game at ultra with 4k graphics at
| 144hz? If not, then I will not buy it.
| CrLf wrote:
| > People won't want to develop on x86 and deploy to ARM.
|
| It's still too early to say if people want to develop on ARM to
| deploy on x86.
|
| The 90's with all their "better than x86" chips couldn't beat
| the fact that people want to develop on the same architecture
| to which they deploy. Back then that meant displacing all these
| other chips from the server side because there was no option
| but x86 for us mortals to have as PCs.
|
| This dearth of alternatives on the server side took out their
| respective offerings on the high-end/niche workstation market
| as well. The PowerPC was one of these casualties, lets not
| forget about that.
|
| Things are even worse today. The x86 is dominant in both ends
| and has no real alternatives: ARM server chips are weak and the
| inertia of building on x86 and deploying on x86 is too strong,
| and ARM desktop chips are also weak, except for a single luxury
| brand (Apple, which incidentally cares very little for any
| developers besides the ones that develop for their own
| ecosystem).
| matwood wrote:
| > ARM server chips are weak
|
| For AWS cloud customers, I don't think this is true anymore.
| Graviton2 is quite capable with better performance in some
| instances for less money. I've already started moving some
| Java services to Graviton2 for the cost savings.
|
| AWS is positioning the the Graviton2 in such a way that
| everyone using AWS will end up on them if they can.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > as old software that relies on x86 is retired over the next
| decade.
|
| seems very, very, very unlikely to me
| imtringued wrote:
| >Tell me how I am wrong.
|
| It's already difficult enough to get Windows games to run on
| Linux, getting them to run on ARM with good performance isn't
| going to happen, especially when every ARM vendor insists on
| using an integrated GPU.
| jeofken wrote:
| If your CI system builds for x86 and ARM from the first
| build, it will be simple to ship to both. For old games it'd
| be harder, but one could maybe compile from one ASM to
| another.
| yalogin wrote:
| The difference is the advantage Apple has with their HW+SW
| vertical integration. Its as simple as that.
|
| Intel sells CPUs, so it creates the ranges of CPUs to make money.
| They advertise clock speed and put the higher ones on a pedestal,
| that is how they can charge more money. The OEMs just used that
| playbook and developed their own marketing stories on top of
| Intel's marketing. Either no one tried to differentiate or they
| just didn't have the power to fight it.
|
| Apple has a lot going for it in that scenario. They never had
| proliferation of models and always kept the number of options to
| a minimum. They also don't deal with volume, so they didn't have
| to do 20 variations of mac mini or the iMac. They kind of did
| their own thing even with the intel macs. Now with their own
| processor they were in a position to double down and make the
| whole product line even more efficient.
|
| Like the article said, they couldn't have done if the M1 is not
| clearly better than the competition.
| slver wrote:
| > Intel sells CPUs, so it creates the ranges of CPUs to make
| money. They advertise clock speed and put the higher ones on a
| pedestal, that is how they can charge more money.
|
| How is any of this specific to Intel?
|
| Apple uses M1 at different clockrates in different devices. And
| that's not only due to battery and heat concerns, but also
| because those M1 are rated to run without errors at different
| clockrates.
|
| Similarly the new iMacs come with two types of GPU: 7 core
| (cheap), and 8 core (more expensive). The 7-core ones had one
| core disabled because it was defective.
|
| What Intel does reflects the simple reality of producing
| microchips. Some units turn out better than others. So you sell
| them at different prices. It's the same for AMD. It's the same
| Apple.
|
| > Apple has a lot going for it in that scenario. They never had
| proliferation of models and always kept the number of options
| to a minimum.
|
| Yet.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > How is any of this specific to Intel?
|
| As of right now, there are 6 different Intel processor brands
| and close to 100 different SKUs.
|
| Source: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/deta
| ils/pro...
|
| Currently, there is one M1.
| slver wrote:
| I just explained above there's no single M1. They vary by
| core count, and by clockrate. And probably more.
|
| The only thing that's "one" about M1 is the brand. It's one
| brand. It's easy to have a clean brand, when you don't sell
| naked CPUs by themselves. "Oh everything we have has M1".
| It doesn't even matter if this is accurate or not, we
| realize that, right?
|
| Are we going to hold up Intel for having hundreds of SKUs
| because they sell chips alone, and Apple sells them in
| computers? I hope not, that'd be silly.
|
| Are we also going to hold up Intel for being in the PC CPU
| business for decades, while Apple has been at it for
| several months only? I hope not, that'd also be silly.
|
| Finally, are we going to hold up Intel for targeting cheap
| office machines, and high-end data centers, and hardcore
| gamers, and scientific uses, and many other customers that
| Apple isn't even trying to have? I hope not, same reason.
| :-)
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I thought you were making a claim that Apple would
| eventually trend like Intel with hundreds of SKUs. I
| don't see apple complicating its CPU line like that
| because it has no need to: the M1 works in a variety of
| scenarios, which which is what the OP was pointing out.
| r00fus wrote:
| > It's easy to have a clean brand
|
| I think vast evidence over the past few decades has
| proven this is actually not the case, especially in tech.
|
| > , when you don't sell naked CPUs by themselves.
|
| This is Intel's choice of a hill to die on. They drove
| everyone else out of the market then failed to realize
| that market itself is collapsing with the rise of cloud
| computing and ISA agnosticism and haven't evolved with
| the times.
| wayneftw wrote:
| Meh. The M1 got laughed right out of our office. It couldn't do
| anything without us changing all of our code and tooling for it.
|
| We'll see how stable the landscape looks for it in five years.
| shoto_io wrote:
| _> Apple's gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU
| performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that
| the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within
| a given product generation. It challenges OEMs to consider how
| they might spec higher-end systems if some of the higher price
| tag didn't have to pay for a faster CPU._
|
| I guess that's the key paragraph.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn't thought of
| the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light,
| it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn't make sense when its
| in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size,
| RAM, and OS?
|
| I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two
| years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I
| am not looking back either. If anything, I am more focused on AMD
| Ryzen and Nvidia 30 series chips in MSI, Lenovo Legion and Asus
| offerings. There is nothing I can't do with one of those
| machines. Going Apple is a backward move for me as I like to
| program, design in CAD, play steam VR, and run blender sims.
| Can't do any of those well with Apple hardware.
| fumar wrote:
| Why doesn't the M1 make sense in a variety of products? I don't
| follow the logic. It is a processor that can scale to meet the
| demands of mobile computers including laptops, tablets, and
| designer desktops (iMac). In each use case it fulfills the its
| computational role regardless of I/O or even operating system.
|
| Based on your own description, you are self-selecting as an
| enthusiast that prefers gaming-like PCs. Isn't that exactly the
| sweet spot that Apple doesn't support?
| nashashmi wrote:
| I think what apple may be trying to do is reduce macOS sales
| and full throttle on iOS sales. It no longer makes sense for a
| macOS if it is going to have the same chip as iPad Pro.
| maliker wrote:
| I agree that the M1 doesn't look good for high performance
| computing right now or anything with poor ARM support. But
| strategically, I think Apple is in a good spot. For heavy
| computation these days, I always remote into another machine.
| With increased bandwidth and more efficient remote desktop
| protocols, I even do all my graphics-intensive 3d work remotely
| now. By focusing on low-power processors, Apple is making the
| laptop/tablet/phone experience better, and I could see them
| handling the performance issues via remote compute. It could be
| a very effective strategy (if it is their strategy).
| crooked-v wrote:
| > The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The
| only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?
|
| They've only replaced the lower tier of Macbooks and iMacs with
| the current M1 board, which suggests to me that they're working
| on a variant with more CPU and GPU cores that will go into the
| higher tiers of those machines.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do
| that.
|
| Since M1 products are selling very well, they likely have
| reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor
| to the M1 back to making the M1.
|
| A higher performance M1 would have a bigger die size. It
| would have a lower yield and get fewer dies per wafer. The
| same capacity would sell fewer products.
|
| Apple probably earns more profits by simply selling more M1s,
| unless they can reserve substantially more fab capacity.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's already signs of multiple "next generation" chips
| in the works.
| daemoon wrote:
| > they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had
| planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1
|
| Got any proof or something? This is a bold claim to make.
| iSnow wrote:
| Some benchmark sites claim they saw performance reports.
| Whether they make those up to see more traffic, I cannot
| tell. If I worked at Apple, I would not tell :)
|
| For example https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-
| apple_m1x-1898 talks about a 12 Core CPU but with only
| 16GB RAM.
| kingosticks wrote:
| > I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do
| that
|
| Do you have a source for there being any fab capacity
| shortage for Apple (or anyone, for that matter) at 5nm?
| Older nodes are a different story because that's still
| where most of TSMC's customers are doing their high-volume
| production.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Plenty of people would like to die-shrink their 7nm
| designs down to 5nm if only capacity existed.
| kingosticks wrote:
| I think plenty of people will skip it. Even ignoring the
| high cost, not everything scales as well with every new
| node. There're plenty of customers who will have no
| interest in this node right now and some that will have
| no interest in it ever. I've not seen anything that
| suggests capacity shortages at 5nm yet, especially for
| Apple who've already booked all of 3nm for next-gen.
| fogihujy wrote:
| > The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The
| only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?
|
| Why not? It's basically back to where we were in 1980 when
| "everything" had a Z80 or 6502 (or both!) in it, and the major
| differences were in what else was in the system.
| anthk wrote:
| 6809.
| izacus wrote:
| How's that any different than having a single Intel generation
| scale all the way from low powered laptop SoCs to 12 core i9s
| though?
|
| After all, the M1s across devices aren't the same either -
| iMacs have different configuration from iPads, those have
| different amount of cores and clocks from Airs and MBPs as
| well.
|
| It seems like the difference is only in Apple vs. Intel
| marketing blurb.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Power consumption, number of cores, clock speed, etc.
| izacus wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're trying to say - M1s are differing
| in clock speed, number of cores and number of GPU cores
| across Apple products as well.
|
| "M1" is basically equivalent to "Core i" designation from
| Intel - except that Apple just doesn't tell you about the
| other part.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| No? That's the entire point of the article. The only
| difference is whether you get a 7 core or 8 core GPU.
|
| > If you want to buy a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, Apple
| will sell you an M1. Want a Mac Mini? You get an M1.
| Interested in the iMac or the new iPad Pro? You get an
| M1. It's possible that the M1 CPUs inside the iMac will
| have different thermal or clock behavior than those
| inside the systems Apple has already launched, but the
| company's decision to eschew clock speed disclosures
| suggests that these CPUs differ only modestly.
|
| > with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now
| so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice
| of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a
| given product generation
| izacus wrote:
| Exactly, so what is the point here? How exactly is that
| different from Intel generations?
|
| Why does Apple put different amount of cores and clocks
| into different products if the choice doesn't matter? It
| seems like there are performance differences there if
| they choose to install differently configured SoCs in
| different devices and even split them by pricing on the
| iMac.
|
| So, please, explain where's this big difference? (With
| more than a single sentence of your words if possible.)
| oarsinsync wrote:
| The M1 in the macbook air throttles when it gets too hot
| due to the thermal characteristics of the case (no active
| cooling).
|
| The M1 in the macbook pro is actively cooled, and does
| not throttle.
|
| When additional cooling is applied after-market to the
| macbook air, it has the same performance characteristics
| as the macbook pro.
|
| The M1 is the same in both products. It throttles when
| hotter. It's more likely to throttle if not actively
| cooled and under heavy workload. It's not clocked
| differently. There's no artificial constraints.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| There are only two different M1 versions. The 7 GPU
| version and the 8 GPU version. All of the cpu cores are
| the same. All power envelopes are the same. That's much
| different then the vastly different form factors and
| power envelopes intel has.
| philistine wrote:
| We have yet to see any new iPad Pro with the M1. I
| wouldn't be surprised if there was a difference in clock
| speed with those.
| soneil wrote:
| I've seen nothing to indicate different products have
| different clock speeds?
|
| So far we're seeing two differentiators. One is the use
| of the 7-GPU bin to hit the bottom-of-the-range price
| point for each product family. The other is simply the
| different thermal characteristics of different products -
| the passively cooled Air & iPad Pro will thermally
| throttle earlier than the actively cooled MBP, iMac &
| mini.
|
| The products aren't being differentiated in silicon,
| they're being differentiated in feature & format. My
| mother can tell me the difference between an iPad and a
| macbook without describing anything that she can't see
| with her own eyes.
| ksec wrote:
| >The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product.
|
| Would you feel better if they called it A14X?
|
| It is basically the same thing as what Intel is doing. Same
| Die, different binning, different naming. Same with Core count
| on AMD, same die, different binning on Cores and Clock Speed.
|
| Apple doesn't bother do any of that because well it is
| complicated for consumers. I call it TDP Computing. You are
| limited by the TDP Design of the product. Not the Chip.
|
| I am waiting to see Apple absolutely max out their SoC approach
| for Mac Pro.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Apple is doing binning, at least to some extent. e.g. some
| Macs have only 7 GPU cores rather than 8. Presumably that's
| done to a greater extent for the iPad Pro
| imtringued wrote:
| >I am waiting to see Apple absolutely max out their SoC
| approach for Mac Pro.
|
| But they already maxed out their SoCs in the benchmarks
| because Geekbench doesn't care about TDP. The TDP makes a
| difference in real world performance but not in the
| benchmarks.
| ksec wrote:
| They are only maxed out in Single Thread Performance with
| its current power designed constrain per Core using current
| low power node.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Apple differentiates the majority of their products by
| generation rather than binning. If you buy a low-end iPad, you
| get an A12; the iPad Air steps you up to an A14; and the iPad
| Pro gets you an M1.
|
| This is less evident on the Macintosh side of the business
| right now because they're just trying to get M1 silicon into as
| many product lines as their fab capacity will allow. They don't
| actually have an M2 (or even M1X) to sell high-end products
| with yet, which is why they're starting with low-end products
| first. When they release upgraded chips, they will almost be
| used to transition the high end models with lower-end product
| getting it later.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Apple differentiates the majority of their products by
| generation rather than binning.
|
| This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make
| chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do
| they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they
| can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core
| and cache, but Apple's margins are already so high they don't
| care?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Apple has always binned; they just don't publicly announce
| it all the time. For example, iPod Touch has been
| historically underclocked compared to the equivalent chip
| in iPhone or iPad.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| So, there are a few instances where Apple _does_ bin their
| products:
|
| 1. "7-core GPU" M1 Macs, which have one of the eight GPU
| cores disabled for yield
|
| 2. The A12X, which also had one GPU core disabled (which
| was later shipped in an 8-core GPU configuration for the
| A12Z)
|
| 3. iPod Touch, which uses lower-clocked A10 chips
|
| It's not like Apple is massively overbuilding their chips
| or has a zero defect rate. It's more that Intel is
| massively overbinning their chips for product segmentation
| purposes. Defect rates rarely, if _ever_ , fit a nice
| product demand curve. You'll wind up producing too many
| good chips and not enough bad ones, and this will get worse
| as your yields improve. Meanwhile, the actual demand curve
| means that you'll sell far more cheap CPUs than expensive
| ones. So in order to meet demand you have to start turning
| off or limiting perfectly working hardware in order to make
| a worse product.
|
| Apple doesn't have to do this because they're vertically
| integrated. The chip design part of the business doesn't
| have to worry about maximizing profit on individual designs
| - they just have to make the best chip they can within the
| cost budget of the business units they serve. So the
| company as a whole can afford to differentiate products by
| what CPU design you're getting, rather than what hardware
| has been turned off. Again, they aren't generating _that_
| many defects to begin with, and old chips are going to have
| better yields and cost less to make anyway. It makes more
| sense for Apple to leave a bit of money on the table at the
| middle of the product stack and charge more for other, more
| obviously understandable upgrades (e.g. more RAM or
| storage) at the high end instead.
| DenseComet wrote:
| It seems like they do binning. For example, the M1 with 7
| gpu cores vs 8 gpu cores.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| That struck me as an extremely odd metric to
| differentiate products by, given its low relevance to
| non-technical users who don't know what a GPU core even
| is (except gamers, but they are not buying iMacs).
| Additionally, most people are going to think adding one
| more core is hardly worth the price upgrade, and its
| quite strange to see an odd number of cores.
| ksec wrote:
| Apple dont bin them because of price / product
| differentiation as in Intel / AMD.
|
| Apple bin them only because of yield.
|
| I also think Apple doesn't want to use their M1 as
| differentiator. They use RAM and Storage instead which is
| an easier concept to grasp by consumers.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact.
|
| When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7
| cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the
| work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.
| rubatuga wrote:
| GPU schedulers are much, much more advanced than you give
| credit.
| [deleted]
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Nope, AFAIK the actual performance impact is < 10 % for
| most workloads.
| [deleted]
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Well GPU data structures aren't always a power of two,
| right? There's more than textures. For a fact, I know
| vertex count (vertex shaders?) and screen sizes (fragment
| shaders?) will rarely be exactly a power of two.
| NavinF wrote:
| Isn't false sharing (as in all your addresses hashing
| onto the same cache lines) still an issue for power-of-
| two sizes? You'd have to mess with padding to figure out
| what's fastest for each chip regardless of core count.
| whizzter wrote:
| Depends, remember that the 5nm processors overall are
| fairly new so we have no idea of yields. But if 1/5th of
| the processors are flawless, 1/5th have one faulty GPU
| and the rest have more errors (in either CPU or two or
| more GPU failures) then having twice the amount of CPU's
| available to sell (at a slightly lower pricepoint) might
| make perfect sense.
| isomorphic wrote:
| I believe that Apple is effectively doing _some_ binning
| with the M1: The intro MacBook Air has one less GPU core
| than the higher-config version or the MacBook Pro.
|
| It would make sense if those were identically-made M1s
| where one GPU core didn't test well and thus had its fuses
| blown. Between the CPU and GPU, the GPU cores are almost
| certainly larger anyway; the GPU cores would therefore have
| higher probability of defects.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It should be possible to identify this from infrared
| images of the cores in operation.
|
| If you find different sets of cores in use, you can be
| pretty sure it was binned...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Binning requires more design work for the chip. I would
| guess the M1 was designed rapidly and probably they decided
| that hundreds of different bins for different types of
| defects wasn't worth the complexity if it meant delaying
| tape out for a few weeks. It also leads to extra product
| complexity (customers would be upset if some macbooks had
| hardware AES and others didn't, leading to some software
| being unusably slow seemingly at random).
| pas wrote:
| > I would guess the M1 was designed rapidly
|
| How rapidly? And so how come it has such spectacular
| performance? Or the shortcomings of the x86 arch were so,
| so soooo obvious, but nobody had the resources to
| reaaallly give a go to a modern arch?
|
| Or maybe, simply the requirements were a lot more
| exact/concrete and clear? (But the M1 performs well _in
| general_ , no?)
| solatic wrote:
| > The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?
|
| Apple is iPhone-izing (for lack of a better word) the rest of
| their product lines. If for the last ten years, the market
| hasn't really cared about the speed of the phone's processor
| within the same generation, but rather about physical
| differentiators (e.g. screen size, number of camera lenses,
| adding facial recognition), and the non-professional market is
| overwhelmingly characterized by light-usage applications, then
| why, pray tell, should laptops and desktops be so different?
| stepbeek wrote:
| I think this is what BMW does with cars to a large extent
| (maybe all car manufacturers do?) - an example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_B58
|
| They combine standard parts into a number of configurations
| that aren't as different from each other as a consumer might
| imagine, then slot those engines into a whole host of
| different car models.
|
| From a production stand-point, this makes sense to me. I
| imagine that it makes high quality at a lower price much
| easier to accomplish for Apple.
| tarsinge wrote:
| > the non-professional market is overwhelmingly characterized
| by light-usage applications
|
| I'm not sure social networks and most modern sites or apps
| qualifies as light-usage nowadays. Browsing Reddit or
| Facebook put my pro to its knees. The difference of CPU speed
| in phones is clearly visible for consumers (but maybe you
| don't notice it if you only use iPhones, because an SE from
| 2015 is still fast, but try an Android phone from that
| period).
| bashinator wrote:
| That's because new Reddit is laden with ads and JS and
| crap. Try https://old.reddit.com
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Or one of any third-party native iOS apps (Apollo[0] is
| my preference) that are both faster and feel better than
| the official app and mobile site.
|
| [0] https://apolloapp.io
| [deleted]
| Corrado wrote:
| > The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?
|
| I think that's the point. Until now, buying a computer has
| always been focused on the CPU and RAM stats. If you wanted
| faster/bigger you had to spend more. With Apple's new strategy
| you almost don't even care about CPU/RAM stats. They are
| focusing on providing value in other ways; larger screen,
| lighter weight, different colors, more ports, etc. I think this
| is the biggest shift in computers in quite a while and makes it
| much more akin to purchasing a phone or tablet than specing out
| a computer.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Apple's goal is to eliminate technical specifications from
| marketing: tech specs are an excuse - make it good enough
| that few care what those specs are.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| In high school, I worked a retail job for an office supply
| store, and one of the PC brands we would sell was Packard
| Bell.
|
| We sold many different models with similar specs, and the
| main feature many of the potential buyers would be concerned
| with:
|
| Will it fit with my current office furniture?
|
| We sold both desktops and tower configurations, and the type
| of desk the computer would be used with was the determining
| factor in which model to buy.
| iSnow wrote:
| And essentially, why not? If I want to work on a machine, I
| want it to be fast. Not 1.33x of the baseline benchmark CPU
| when equipped with X GB RAM. Just fast enough it doesn't
| annoy me.
|
| And with today's PCI-E-based SSD's, waiting for data to be
| written to "disk" is a non-issue, so the system feels much
| faster.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Is it possible to write C++/Rust on an iPad? If so I'll consider
| buying one, as my iPad4 is struggling both wth charging and with
| 'modern' websites and apps. Otherwise Apple's hardware is just
| too expensive for me for what it is.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| While everything wants to be faster. The Apple direction is
| everything I don't need.
|
| I have a desktop for 1000$, 64 gb DDR3, 512 gb ssd + 1tb hdd, AMD
| 2600 ( 6 core) and a AMD 380 8gb and I could have gone overboard
| with the latest CPU and GPU. But I didn't think i needed it ( and
| after 7 months of usage I still think it was the right
| decision)...
|
| Either way, I don't think I ever was Apples target audience. And
| something like an IPad is for consumption, not producing
| anything.
|
| Ps. Yes, i use it for some gaming and for VR too, but mostly dev.
| DelightOne wrote:
| > The most likely outcome here is a future M-class CPU with eight
| to 32 "big" cores and a conventional DRAM interface, based on
| either DDR4 or DDR5.
|
| How much faster would M1 still be?
| fggg444 wrote:
| Can't they just stick a few dozen M1s in a box and call it a Mac
| Pro to scale up that way?
| wmf wrote:
| No, the M1 lacks any (usable) way to connect to other M1s.
| thitcanh wrote:
| For now?
| kingosticks wrote:
| Yes and they need to go away and design a very different
| chip. It's not trivial. x86 vendors already have chips like
| this.
| [deleted]
| malf wrote:
| Did you just "imagine a beowulf cluster of those"?
| danaris wrote:
| Thanks, that takes me back ^_^
| michael1999 wrote:
| The return of NUMA!
| wmf wrote:
| The year of NUMA on the desktop.
| fireattack wrote:
| I was always taught ARM (and M1), being a RISC architecture,
| isn't as "capable" as x86 in _some way_ , whatever it means.
|
| I am no longer sure if that's still the case, since they seem to
| work just as good, if not better (energy efficiency). Of course,
| it's not exactly an apple to apple comparison since Apple
| upgraded so many other things, but I just didn't see any mention
| about the limitation of being RISC in these articles.
|
| Could someone enlighten in this respect for an average Joe who
| knows nothing about hardware?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| You have been listening to propaganda. ARM has always been
| better. Consider the fact that it still exists, despite Intel's
| predatory nature. It exists because Intel could not make a
| processor for the low power market that was performant. They
| tried. But anything they built either took too much power, or
| used the right amount of power but was too slow. So ARM
| survived in this niche. But it couldn't grow out of this niche
| because Intel dominates ruthlessly.
|
| But the low power market shows that, for a given power
| consumption, the ARM is faster. Does that not apply everywhere?
| Yes, it does. And so Apple, which controls its own destiny,
| developed an ARM chip for laptops and desktops. Its faster and
| cooler and cheaper than Intel chips, because ARM has always
| been faster and cooler and cheaper than Intel chips.
|
| AWS, which also controls its own destiny has launched
| Graviton2. These are servers which are faster and cooler and
| cheaper than Intel servers, and the savings and performance are
| passed on to customers.
|
| As long as Intel ruled by network effects - buy an Intel
| because everyone has one - build an Intel because it has the
| most software - their lack of value didn't matter.
|
| There are now significant players who can ignore the network
| effects. The results are so stunning that many people simply
| refuse to believe the evidence.
| nnadams wrote:
| You are right that CISC processors (like x86) have more
| capabilities, i.e. more instructions. You as the programmer get
| to take advantage of the "extra" very specific instructions, so
| overall you write less instructions.
|
| Less instructions sounds great, but with CISC you do not know
| how long those instructions will take to execute. RISC has only
| a handful of instructions, that all take 1 clock cycle (with
| pipelining). This makes the hardware simple and easy optimize.
| The instructions you lose can just be implemented in software.
| That space on chip can be used for more registers and cache,
| for a huge speed up. Plus nowadays, shared libraries and
| compilers do a lot of work for us behind the scenes as well.
| Having tons of instructions on chip only is a benefit for a
| narrow group of users today.
|
| We've found that for hardware it's better to reduce clock
| cycles per instruction, rather than reduce total number of
| instructions.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > RISC has only a handful of instructions, that all take 1
| clock cycle (with pipelining).
|
| This isn't really the case with modern ARM. Fundamentally
| modern ARM and x86 CPUs are designed very similarly once you
| get past the instruction decoder. Both 'compile' instructions
| down to micro-ops that are then executed rather than
| executing the instruction set directly so the distinctions
| between the instruction sets themselves don't matter all that
| much past that point.
|
| The main advantages for ARM come from the decode stage and
| from larger architectural differences such as relaxed memory
| ordering requirements.
|
| https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/13480/did.
| ..
| fireattack wrote:
| So ARM nowadays is just straightly better than x86?
| enragedcacti wrote:
| For the most part I think so. The main advantages x86 has
| are based on code size. Many common instructions are 1 or
| 2 bytes so the executable size on x86 can often be
| smaller (and more instructions can fit in the instruction
| cache). I'm sure there are tons of other small
| differences that weigh in but I'm not well versed enough
| to know of them.
| bitL wrote:
| Would M1 scale up with 64GB or even 1.5TB of RAM? It's not
| possible to have that much memory integrated; what would be the
| performance difference in that case?
| numpad0 wrote:
| I was thinking that there'll be "M2" by now but a suspicion is
| growing inside me that they might use a NUMA cluster
| configuration with PCIe interconnect for upper tier models.
| Doesn't it make sense?
| grecy wrote:
| I think it's very likely they will announce the "faster M1" at
| WWDC this year. It will go into the 16 inch MacBook Pro and the
| iMac Pro.
|
| Hard to say if whatever they announce will go into the Mac Pro
| - or if maybe they'll have yet another "faster" chip for that.
| Time will tell.
| floatboth wrote:
| That would be a very AMD thing to do. Apple is likely to pump
| endless amounts of cash into TSMC to make huge monolithic chips
| so that there's no cross-core latency issues and that they can
| still say they have a single "chip" in marketing materials.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think Apple will keep selling x86 Macs forever. For heavy-duty
| workstation workloads, M1 just doesn't cut it.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I will grant that the Mac Pro will be one of the last to
| transition, but I don't think it will stay on x86 forever. It
| may receive a spec bump at most.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I believe Apple will release something groundbreaking again
| when they scale up the number of cores in that M1.
|
| 8 high performance 4 low performance cores? Yes please. Or
| maybe we'll get 16-16
| phire wrote:
| I'm expecting apple to go the tiles or chiplet route for their
| workstation processors. TSMC have been working on some advanced
| packaging methods that are ideal for this usecase.
|
| Apple could make one 16 core die and offer workstations with
| anywhere between one and four tiles for 16 to 64 cores.
|
| As for the high end laptops and iMacs, I'm expecting Apple to
| launch a monolithic 8+4 chip.
|
| That would be just 3 unique dies to cover Apples entire Mac
| lineup.
| rvz wrote:
| > I think Apple will keep selling x86 Macs forever.
|
| Apple immediately discontinued all Mac minis, almost all the
| Macbook Air and Pro line ups and the iMac's running Intel. The
| last form factor to transition is the Mac Pro.
|
| > For heavy-duty workstation workloads, M1 just doesn't cut it.
|
| Perhaps you are right on this one for now. The M1 doesn't cut
| it for 'Apple's standards' for now but when the time comes for
| the Mac Pro to transition, it won't use an M1 chip, but
| probably an M2 / M3 chip.
|
| Apple Silicon is the start of it all and M1 is only the
| beginning and is certainly not the last. So its worth waiting
| to see how the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs improve over M1.
| danaris wrote:
| ...And you think there'll never be an M2? Or M1X, or whatever
| branding Apple decides to put on their 32/64/128/???-core
| version that supports terabytes of RAM?
| pfranz wrote:
| I think the open question about the Mac Pro is the
| expandability. The trash can Mac Pro didn't do well and they
| went back with something with expansion slots. Is it worth it
| to Apple to build out and support everything necessary on the
| M1 platform for one low-margin line of computers? We'll find
| out in the next year.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Even the 27" iMac has a 128 GB RAM SKU, so they're going to
| need to build a chip supporting external RAM regardless.
| External PCIe support already exists thanks to thunderbolt.
| So the architecture will be there, it'll just be a question
| of how expensive it is to scale up.
| dvhh wrote:
| 16GB should be enough for everyone
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| Until they publicly show they can make such a thing, there
| will be some scepticism
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Why? Apple just demonstrated that they could do something
| that had previously been considered unrealistic. They've
| also been demonstrating massive annual performance gains
| for many years. For people who have been watching closely,
| they should have some credibility by now.
| random5634 wrote:
| You realize Apple is designing against more advanced nodes
| than intel - and from where I stand intel has nothing
| competitive in small form factors
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Gigacore
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Hmm. Sure, M1 isn't suited for heavy workstation loads. They
| didn't target that sector yet. What's your point?
|
| This is not the last processor they will do. Have you been
| watching the massive year over year performance gains Apple has
| been making for several years? There will be an M2 and an M3,
| and ....
|
| Given the performance AND energy beating they are putting on
| the market sector that they targeted with M1, why is there any
| reason to believe they won't kill the high-end workstation
| sector when they target that?
| jamesmcintyre wrote:
| Why should Apple care if a small portion of its product lineup
| will still rely on Intel/AMD? Why shouldn't they put pressure
| on these chipmakers to defend their position. They have both
| the vertical integration and scale to push entire industries to
| innovate. If this serves to "wake up" Intel we all benefit
| (including Intel). Look into xscale and its relationship to the
| original iPhone circa 2006-2007, that didn't wale up Intel and
| arguably they lost out on billions and weakened their future
| outlook.
| plywoodtrees wrote:
| Because of the cost of continuing to maintain software for
| that small fraction of the user base. Not only the core OS
| but the toolchain, and all their first party apps. And the
| difficulty of incentivizing and enabling third party
| developers to continue to support x86.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| The m1 is built specifically to sip power and run cool. You
| don't think apple could come up with an arm processor that can
| keep up or exceed desktop x86 when those constraints are
| removed?
| artiscode wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but isn't power efficiency the selling
| point of ARM? As in it runs efficiently, but there are
| diminishing returns to running it faster?
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| the power efficiency is a consequence of simpler circuitry.
| modern x86 chips devotes a fairly large amount of logic to
| translating the exposed cisc interface to an internal
| microcode that more resembles a risc system anyway. A risc
| chip doesn't need that.
| NovaLuddite wrote:
| I heard similar arguments in regards to initial performance
| with the transition from 68K to PPC and then again with PPC to
| Intel. The transition will probably be far quicker than you
| anticipate.
| thesandlord wrote:
| They already said they would be 100% off x86 in two years:
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...
|
| We are still only 6 months into that transition.
| lstamour wrote:
| The page you're citing contradicts that statement -- they
| will not be 100% off x86, but instead will offer 100% of
| their products with the option of buying an Apple ARM chip:
|
| > This transition will also establish a common architecture
| across all Apple products, making it far easier for
| developers to write and optimize their apps for the entire
| ecosystem.
|
| > Apple plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the
| end of the year and complete the transition in about two
| years. Apple will continue to support and release new
| versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come, and
| has exciting new Intel-based Macs in development.
|
| I would expect Intel-based Mac Pros to continue for as long
| as there's a market for them. Probably at least 2-4 years
| after the "transition" finishes. (The last spec bump in 1-2
| years, and sales end 3-4 years from now...)
|
| It's also worth pointing out that Apple supports its products
| roughly 7 years from when they're sold, which means Apple
| will likely continue supporting Intel-based MacOS for at
| least another decade, possibly as much as 13-15 years. That
| said, I wouldn't buy an Intel Mac after 2024 and expect the
| same experience even if Apple supports it until 2031 or
| later: In just a few years, I'd expect Apple would have
| created even more MacOS features uniquely suited to the ARM
| chips they're now making.
| thesandlord wrote:
| I'm sure they will support x86 for years, but I have a
| feeling they will stop selling _new_ products with x86
| rather quickly.
|
| If you look at the PPC to x86 transition [0] it happened
| faster than predicted, and OS support only lasted 3 years
| after it was done.
|
| IMO Microsoft is the company that heavily prioritizes
| backwards compatibility, while Apple is happy to drop
| support where necessary to move forward.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Intel_p
| roces...
| lstamour wrote:
| You're using the transition that everyone wanted to point
| a rosy picture. Everyone wanted Intel chips and Wintel
| compatibility. PPC was too slow, too hot.
|
| Fact is, until they can get nVidia GTX compatibility or
| quality, there will be a significant market of 3D and
| gaming that does not want to switch.
|
| And I say this as someone who very much likes my new M1
| Macbook and wants to convince the rest of the family and
| friends to never again buy an x86-based laptop computer.
|
| If Apple can add 3D and gaming chips equivalent to the
| GTX 3000 series with software support, all within 2
| years? Amazing and that speeds up their switchover -- but
| Adobe, for one, has still not yet updated Adobe After
| Effects and likely won't for at least a year, even though
| they announced they would. I'll remind folks that Adobe
| said they would consider adding Metal support to After
| Effects almost five years ago and still hasn't. Other
| apps are in a similar state.
|
| I don't doubt that Apple would like the transition to be
| quick as well as seamless, and I think most portable
| products will transition very quickly. But unless Apple
| wants to leave the Pro market they just entered by making
| things too unstable for Pros, they will tread carefully
| on eliminating sales and support for Intel. Especially
| because even now they are selling 16" MacBook Pros that
| run Intel, and Intel Mac Pros, and 27" iMacs (formerly
| Pros) and all three of these platforms should ideally be
| supported for five years, minimum, ideally six given we
| could count the last year as the "seventh" year of
| support.
| anthk wrote:
| Yes, but in the PPC era Apple published amazing quality
| products several times superior to W98SE, W2000 and even
| XP.
|
| Now, until the M1, Intel Macs where pretty much mediocre,
| even against a (fully configured OFC) KDE [3-5] BSD/Linux
| setup. Even with their iThingie ecosystem integration.
| agogdog wrote:
| It seems odd to think that their first attempt at this, which
| largely consists of small consumer-level devices with little to
| no active cooling, is the best they're going to do.
|
| Not to mention that they've already been dominating mobile SOC
| performance for half a decade as well.
|
| There's no indication that they couldn't take on the pro
| market. They've clearly got the talent in place. It's likely
| that the market size is a bigger factor than capability.
| sgt101 wrote:
| The really smart move is launching the low power consumer version
| first. This positions the eco-system for the native code where
| Apple wants it - on apps that run on the mass market devices. The
| higher power apps can come later and exploit 8 firestorm cores
| and up.
| domano wrote:
| People underestimate AMD and mix it in together with the current
| Intel chips when talking about the M1. Ryzen is not far behind M1
| in single thread performance and beats it in multi core. If Intel
| had not made all kinds of deals with laptop makers for
| exclusivity then the narrative would be totally different in my
| opinion.
| rektide wrote:
| Ryzen 7401p still represents the pinnacle-for-it's-time value
| offering to me. 24 cores, single socket, on a 14nm process,
| launched July 2017 for $1075. Just an amazing breakthrough
| processor. At the time there were supposed to be X300 and A300
| chipsets coming, basically just boot bios, to make ultra-low cost
| motherboards possible. There have been improvements since then to
| architecture & IPC, but overall it feels like we've been headed
| in reverse since then in terms of chips that get put into
| medium/large-ish sized chassis.
|
| It has been remarkable what a mockery Mac has made of mobile
| chips, and now of desktop chips. At a way more reasonable price
| point.
|
| > but the company's decision to eschew clock speed disclosures
| suggests that these CPUs differ only modestly.
|
| I forget exactly when but the first Google IO that happened where
| Google started offering simply "Intel Core i5" or i7, without
| saying the model number (2017?), without revealing speeds, & it
| was a huge huge jumping the shark moment for me. A post
| competitive market, where speeds were good enough, where
| reputation & market presence domineered over metrics & comparable
| factors. I don't think chasing specific GHz & cache size numbers
| &c is super rewarding or important, but it felt like the first
| time we were being sold an unspecific system, where obvious
| inquiry into what we were buying was blocked.
|
| This is somewhat the opposite of this article: that Apple has
| found a good enough CPU to sell everywhere. But I still think the
| real truth is that the providers, those building systems, have
| begun to refuse to compete. They refuse to detail what they are
| offering. AMD has been without competition and the new 24c chip
| is considerably more expensive, albeit for yes more IPC, but it
| still hurts me a little. Looking at Google no longer allowing us
| to have any idea what kind of Core i5 or whatever chip though,
| they beat this article to the punch almost half a decade ago.
| Consumers haven't been given respect, haven't been allowed to
| know what wattage, what caches, what Hz their chips use for a
| long time now. Google started that, Google pushed the post-
| knowable computing upon us. Apple is merely following up on this,
| merely delivering what Google started, at a far better price
| point, with far better underlying technology.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > but the company's decision to eschew clock speed disclosures
|
| There's one other major factor here: clock speed isn't all that
| useful for this new architecture full of custom-purpose cores,
| asymmetric cores, a new arrangement of connections between
| cores, etc. Actual benchmarks may be useful, but not so much a
| clock speed measurement (and which of those various asymmetric
| cores are you measuring against?).
| rektide wrote:
| I agree! There's a lot more to it than MHz! At the time, we
| also didn't have any other figures, like cache size, any
| power consumption/TDP figures, memory speed/bandwidth, any
| base or turbo clocks.
|
| I felt like it was probably one of the first possible custom
| cores I'd seen, something specifically built for Chromebooks
| or Pixel or whatever the product was. That probably this part
| was not listed on Intel ark. But it was super distressing
| none-the-less: I had been denied any understanding what-so-
| ever of what kind of core was going to be within. There's
| more than MHz, yes, but also not knowing process (nm), not
| knowing wattage, not knowing caches... Google was asking me
| for something unprecedented: to spent ~$1000 on a system for
| which I had no understanding at all of expected performance.
|
| It felt like a dark dark dark dark day. After decades of in
| depth analysis & review of every cache change, every TLB
| tweak, after endless in depth review of cores, we'd entered a
| bold new era. Where none of of what you really were buying
| was regarded as consumer-pertinent.
|
| There's some "bright" spots but they are somewhat obfuscated.
| Lenovo's M75q gen2 with AMD 4750GE was an amazing package,
| regularly on sale for a very reasonable price with amazing
| performance[1]. But alas, it's rare that the genuine
| performance is known, is what is for sale. We have become a
| post-consumer market. The invisible hand operates at a post-
| consumer level, selling us on other, more illusory factors
| than capability. Truth vanishes. And yes, as this article
| says, many people just don't need to play the game in the
| first place, but still, the becoming invisible, the vanishing
| of actual competition is most dismaying.
|
| [1] https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-
| thinkcentre-m75q-gen2-ti...
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Perhaps Apple has more processors in the pipeline (this almost
| certain, as we have seen with its mobile processors).
|
| It may be very difficult to sell products with the same processor
| but different hardware forms, because the market is tuned to
| comparing processors.
|
| I am not saying whether its right or wrong, just that there is a
| whole mindshare of the market (marketing, advertising, news
| articles, blogs and videos) that start comparison of two
| different with their core processors.
| trilinearnz wrote:
| Learning a bit about this in my MBA classes. Cost + Margin =
| Selling Price. Apple have the capacity to be more of a cost
| leader now, since they are not subject to the same bargaining
| power forces of CPU suppliers. As a result, they have the
| potential to push their costs down (if not now, then in the
| future once production scales) and increase their margins. A good
| time to invest, perhaps?
| clairity wrote:
| > "Cost + Margin = Selling Price."
|
| that's cost-plus pricing, and should be viewed as a relatively
| naive model that is no longer typically used for pricing.
| sophisticated pricing decisions are based on price elasticities
| to find the profit-maximizing price. apple is a notable example
| of a company that exhibits this type of pricing decision-
| making.
| robocat wrote:
| Perhaps one reason for using a single model of chip for
| everything is because the design costs for a 5nm SoC are
| estimated to be ~$500 million.
|
| For comparison, revenue for Apple Mac computers in 2020 was ~$30
| Billion. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263428/apples-
| revenue-fr...
| dannyw wrote:
| It's not linear. Doing a M1 variant with say 6+6 wouldn't cost
| another 500 mil.
| robocat wrote:
| Sure. But does Apple's CPU engineering team have the capacity
| to work on variants?
|
| Perhaps they instead prioritise working on a faster M2, and
| M1 becomes the low end CPU, similar to what they have done
| with the A series processors?
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| The real mockery is that everyone has a black box in their
| computers that can read all of their passwords & keys... And then
| when you argue to open up the firmware & code all the customers
| exhibit Stockholm syndrome and say, "but that wouldn't be good
| for the company!" Yes it would... It wouldn't be good for their
| intelligence agency funding, though...
| adrian_mrd wrote:
| What's also lacking from a marketing perspective is the "Intel
| Inside" campaign - which was incredibly successful for the Wintel
| monopoly in the 1990s and early 2000s.
|
| Seeing the sticker or hearing this slogan used to imply a premium
| or cachet to the product/hardware to the average Joe or Joanne.
|
| No longer, Intel's brand recognition has really taken a hit in
| the past decade.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| > Second, Intel and AMD both benefit from a decades-old narrative
| that places the CPU at the center of the consumer's device
| experience and enjoyment and have designed and priced their
| products accordingly, even if that argument is somewhat less true
| today than it was in earlier eras.
|
| I would have argued that memory was far more important than CPU
| in quickly judging the performance of a machine, once the 7th
| generation Intels made dual-core obsolete. But the M1 seems to
| buck this trend a bit as well, given that it only has an 8GB and
| 16GB variant and its new unified memory model makes traditional
| estimates of how much memory is needed less important. Some
| workloads such as an in-memory database won't change, but the
| memory usage for GUI rendering, graphics, etc. can take advantage
| of much faster accesses. And, with SSDs which are now considered
| a must-have for any serious machine, paging to disk is far less
| expensive than before in any case.
|
| On another note, the M1 iPad Pro is the first time Apple has ever
| officially confirmed or marketed, let alone offered a choice in,
| the RAM for an iOS/iPadOS device.
| tyingq wrote:
| I remain interested in seeing how much of Apple's lead is the
| process size, and how much is engineering prowess.
|
| That is, would a more generic new ARM Neoverse on 5nm perform at
| roughly the same clip? I suppose AWS's Graviton 3 would be the
| first place to see that, or something close to it.
| wmf wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're comparing a server core to a
| mobile/desktop one. There are two X1-based SoCs on "5 nm"
| (Samsung not TSMC) and they're not very close to A14, let alone
| M1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-
| exyno...
| titzer wrote:
| The CPU microarchitecture is truly a quantum leap ahead of x86
| processors. The fixed-width nature of arm instructions means
| there's way more front-end bandwidth for decode, which can then
| feed a much larger out-of-order engine. Having memory so close
| is also a huge win. TBH, I don't know what wizardry they have
| managed to get power consumption so low, but wow. 15W TDP and
| trouncing desktop processors pulling 12x that power!
| mhh__ wrote:
| _micro_ architecturally is M1 really a leap?
|
| In terms of decoding bandwidth I'm not sure how many
| instructions it can actually sustain but it's not like it's
| 10x - M1 is a basically a very wide version of a tried and
| tested formula rather than a wholely new thing.
| wmf wrote:
| Wait till you see AMD put 8 cores in 15W.
| akmarinov wrote:
| That's the thing, while we're waiting on AMD, Apple is
| already half way through an M2/3
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| The 4800U came out in March 2020 with 8 cores, 16
| threads.
| [deleted]
| cecja wrote:
| Yeah, if they had something on their hand they wouldn't
| put the same chip in everything.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| That is the talk yes, but we don't know how much of the
| actual performance improvements is simply due to the lower
| process size. And process size is independent of if it is ARM
| or x86, but instead depends on manufacturers getting
| production slots in the chip foundries. Currently Apple is
| hogging up all the production capabilities of the smallest
| process that TSMC have.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Apple can afford to exclude some hardware that other
| manufacturers need to support legacy OSs and apps, leaving more
| space on their SoC for more CPUs and specialized hardware.
|
| Want to ditch OpenGL? No problem for Apple.
| dagmx wrote:
| I'm not sure what OpenGL has to do with here?
|
| Generally no hardware today is designed for OpenGL. They all
| translate it into their own instruction set. The M1 is no
| different as it supports OpenGL as well.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| Disrupt the hosting market, Apple. We're ready for your EC2.
|
| Achieving a quantum power/performance leap without swinging for
| server market share is an massive wasted opportunity.
|
| But Apple is Apple. I'll keep dreaming. Oh look, an AWS invoice.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| Apple's focus tends to be on consumer products, I don't see
| them swinging for the fences and presenting an AWS like cloud
| offering at least under their own name.
|
| Personally I'd like them to offer alternative versions of their
| CPU to cloud providers, I imagine that the current core
| configurations are not ideal for the sorts of workloads the big
| cloud providers need from a single processor.
|
| But this will require serious heavy lifting and would likely
| require official linux support for Apple's hardware
| (undoubtedly they have internal systems running bare metal
| linux on Apple silicon), however I don't see Apple wanting to
| do this in the open and in public.
| thitcanh wrote:
| What's the advantage? I don't think it's likely to cost less as
| a service, especially directly from Apple. If you get the same
| performance per dollar you might as well keep using what you
| have.
|
| Heat and energy savings only apply to the direct user (in this
| case Apple Hosting) and unlikely to be passed onto you (since
| it's Apple).
|
| We've already seen this with M1 computers which are simpler and
| less expensive but did not have a lower retail price.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| They would use their scale and engineering muscle to
| differentiate. Free outgoing bandwidth to iCloud users. The
| most eco friendly cloud. "Lambda at edge" which can compute
| on charging iOS devices nearby, those users earn a little
| Apple Cash. "Launch in iCloud" thin client support for
| resource intensive applications, using a proprietary low
| latency VNC alternative (like Parsec). I want to see them get
| creative.
| thenickdude wrote:
| AWS is bringing ARM to the cloud in the form of their new
| Graviton instances, so in a way we already have this.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| "has already brought"
| dane wrote:
| Completely agree. I can't see them reviving the Xserve brand
| with their own silicon, but I could see them introducing cloud
| hosting services. Ideally with differentiation in something
| like environmental credentials (reduced, renewable power, etc.)
| to try and gain market share whilst maintaining margin.
| andrewjl wrote:
| They already have, though the marketing is subtle. [1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/icloud/
|
| [2] https://developer.apple.com/icloud/cloudkit/
| klohto wrote:
| We are talking AWS competitors, not Google Drive
| alternative.
| adhambadr wrote:
| Economics of scale. my bet is Apple will develop a cluster of M1s
| and call them M-power-2 to address the 1.5TB RAM workstation
| market you mentioned. It will be practically an array of M1s (or
| next gen) together. The way the M1 is used from iPad to iMacs is
| genius in terms of cost reduction at scale and for an end
| consumer, who doesnt care who else uses their chip, I get a good
| $/cpu power bargain. Tim Apple being the supply-chain guy he is,
| I see him doubling down and scrambling engineers to user more M1s
| in array to build a stronger core. Maybe an M1-based server rack
| for AWS?
| rvanlaar wrote:
| What I find lacking in the article is an apt comparison with
| AMD's Ryzen chips.
|
| Those are all the same chiplets, just binned differently. High
| performance ones go into the 5800x and 5950x. Lower performance
| ones into the 5600x and 5900x.
|
| Which seems to be the same thing apple does, with a slight naming
| difference. Calling everything M1, instead of naming the CPUs.
| anthk wrote:
| And here I am with an AMD Turion2 and 2GB of RAM.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I really do wonder what would Apple create in order to be able to
| offer ARM workstations.
|
| Maybe chiplet / modular design like AMD? Only this time one of
| the chiplets is going to be a full M1/M2/M3 ARM CPU + some RAM
| and everything else usually included, and the other chiplets
| would be extra RAM or dedicated GPUs?
|
| I am looking forward to their first ARM workstation offering.
| inasio wrote:
| Assuming the M1 performance extrapolates to desktop power/cooling
| it's going to be a monster chip. If that is the case I think
| apple will not stop at having the fastest
| watch/phone/tablet/laptop/PC. Why not go after the datacenter and
| leave money (a ton of money) on the table?
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Why not go after the datacenter
|
| For certain applications, the migration will be challenging.
| It's also a slowly dying market. Amazon has an ARM instance,
| already. I'm sure they're already tearing the M1 apart to see
| what they can use. It's also no Apple's core competency;
| enterprise sales is a different beast.
|
| Edit: I wasn't quite clear: it's dying because businesses are
| migrating to the cloud, and cloud providers are already working
| on/support ARM CPUs. Google _might_ be willing to buy M1 chips.
| Not servers or boards because everything is probably custom by
| now, just the chips.
| titzer wrote:
| In what way is the datacenter market dying? Are Googles and
| Facebooks and Cloudfares and Microsofts and Amazons suddenly
| decommissioning huge racks of computers while their cloud
| businesses take off? What _is_ that cloud made of?
| snotrockets wrote:
| Those all owns their datacenters (and some can afford to
| design their own CPUs for those). Renting racks isn't dying
| yet, but it is on a downward trajectory.
| pmontra wrote:
| Maybe because every tier 1 cloud provider is starting to
| design its own CPU. If this is the trend there will be
| little left to sell them.
| titzer wrote:
| Can you name a cloud provider that has recently launched
| their own CPU?
| dehrmann wrote:
| Graviton's been out for a while.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-designing-its-
| own...
|
| I haven't seen anything on this from GCP, but Google
| builds so much in-house, I'm sure they've at least
| considered it.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| AWS is on its _second_ in-house ARM chip. You can launch
| an M6g /R6g/C6g right now. If you have workloads on the
| cloud, you should be benchmarking already, as they will
| likely be cheaper for any given workload.
| em500 wrote:
| How you intend to extrapolate that? A seemingly much larger
| thermal/cooling headroom usually does not gain you that much in
| absolute performance. Consider the mobile/desktop Zen3 Ryzen
| geekbench (S)ingle/(M)ulti scores:
|
| - 5800U, mobile (10-25W), 1400(S), 7000(M)
|
| - 5800, desktop (65W), 1600(S), 9000(M)
|
| - 5800X, desktop (105W), 1700(S), 11000(M)
|
| and
|
| - M1, mobile (10W), 1700(S), 7000(M)
|
| Everyone's going gaga over the fact that the passively cooled
| M1 can trade blows with big desktop towers. But mobile Zen3 is
| not that far behind those towers either, so I think much more
| thermal headroom buys you less than people assume.
| DoomHotel wrote:
| One of the big reasons the M1 is so fast is its RAM is on-die.
| Latency and throughput to memory are dramatically better and
| you don't have to drive those long traces, saving power as
| well. Servers need to scale to memory sizes in the terabyte
| range. Apple will need a new design that uses conventional
| memory before they can go after the big workstation market, let
| alone server.
| floatboth wrote:
| It's not on die arghhhh why does this misinformation keep
| happening. It's on _package_. It 's two separate LPDDR4X
| chips. Latency is not _dramatically_ better. Other current
| LPDDR4X laptops run the same clock speeds off package. Maybe
| Apple has more aggressive timings than them, but the
| difference would be tiny.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Reality distortion field.
| klelatti wrote:
| One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the
| marketing effort behind the M1.
|
| It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of
| computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1
| is great - get a new Mac and get an M1".
|
| It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the
| next generation M2 (presumably).
|
| I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7
| stays the same over 10+ years with only the obscure (to the
| general public) suffix changing from generation to generation.
| [deleted]
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Remember when Intel was 8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium,
| Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, then ... insanity.
| smitty1110 wrote:
| The insanity started with the Pentium 4, specifically the HT
| versions. HT made the CPU slower, it was quite the anti-
| feature.
| jsight wrote:
| That's a good point. I think this will finally be the thing
| that makes Intel move away from that marketing approach too.
| Its outlived its usefulness.
| noir_lord wrote:
| It could be clearer but I suspect they do it on purpose for a
| purpose I've never understood.
|
| I've always thought that a system like
| i7-4-8-10-M (4 cores, 8 threads, 10th gen - Mobile)
| i5-8-8-11-H (8 cores, 8 threads, 11th gen - High perf/Desktop)
|
| There has to be a reason they haven't just been explicit with
| it.
|
| When I shop for a cpu I care about a handful of things,
| manufacturer, cores, threads, generation, model
| klelatti wrote:
| Just remembered a bit of history: the first (4 bit) Intel
| microprocessor would have been called the 1202 according to
| Intel's chip naming convention at that time until Federico
| Faggin pushed to get it changed to the 4004.
|
| The 4004 was a hit and the rest is history!
| apexalpha wrote:
| I like to read news and keep up to date on silicon
| development but when it comes down to buying a laptop with an
| Intel CPU I really can't tell how good it is from the name.
|
| I usually end up putting it into cpubenchmark to get any sort
| of comparable numbers.
|
| Nowadays a chip from 2014 and 2019 can both be named i5, and
| the 2014 can have higher clockspeed while being half as
| slow... You just can't tell, and maybe that's the goal.
| Macha wrote:
| Just be aware those kind of sites aren't always impartial,
| particularly in how they weight actual metrics to come to
| the composite single score, e.g. userbenchmark:
| https://ownsnap.com/userbenchmark-is-not-trusted-by-tech-
| ent...
| XorNot wrote:
| Keep in mind this is all fallout from the 90s/really 00's
| where "clockspeed was king" which AMD worked hard to
| disabuse the market of.
|
| We've never really recovered from that.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I do remember clockspeed being the
| main thing you looked at and then being surprised that
| changed, but didn't really have any insight.
| Macha wrote:
| Pipelining was really kicking off in a big way and
| suddenly IPC made as big a difference at a time amd led
| in that regard as clock speed so amd started numbering
| their cpu models with a number that was based on the MHz
| they'd expect an Intel CPU to need to reach to match it.
|
| Of course intel also released new CPUs and AMD didn't
| want their newer CPUs to have lower numbers than their
| old one, so that number eventually got inflated.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Parent is probably referring to ~2000 to ~2010.
|
| Generally speaking, AMD had some more advanced
| microarchitecture features than Intel, leading to better
| per-clock performance.
|
| Intel marketing struck back by emphasizing GHz, GHz, GHz.
| At least until Pentium 4 scaling hit a brick wall.
|
| Then, a chip was sold as a "Pentium 4" "2.8 GHz" (or a
| "Pentium II" "300 MHz"). No other codes.
|
| By the end of that range, the multicore era had started,
| and both Intel and AMD had moved to new systems of
| processor labelling.
| petra wrote:
| If it's complicated for most customers to choose a
| processor/pc, than often sales people help them choose.
| That's good for those sales people and good for Intel.
|
| And it's not that like Intel is really competing with
| anybody.
| Anther wrote:
| I ran a gadget shop for years. The amount of times people would
| say 'What I have must be better because it has an i7 and that
| is an i5'. Then I'd have to explain that their i7 is ten years
| old and that they aren't even in the same realm. Confusing
| marketing indeed.
| the_duke wrote:
| Yeah the marketing effort is immense, and it's really
| surprising to me how many eagerly lap up the angle Apple is
| pushing without much reflection, even on HN. Like the good old
| Apple hype days.
|
| Now to be fair, the M1 is an impressive iteration on the A*
| chip line.
|
| But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in
| comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Let's look beyond the hype:
|
| - With M1, Apple has finally closed the loop and created a
| fully closed system that it has control over vs an x86-64
| platform that is more open and gives us users more choice and
| control.
|
| - All new devices with M1 SoC score very poorly on
| repairability and upgradebility vs the x86-64 platform that
| still allows you to repair / upgrade RAM, memory, CPU's and
| other parts in an affordable manner.
|
| - And because of the above two, all M1 devices with low ram
| and storage, have planned obsolescence of 3-5 years built-in,
| along with a kill switch to totally disable the device.
|
| Apple has a found a great fit for their business model with
| the ARM SoCs. Even when (not if, when) AMD and Intel bring
| out better processors, Apple will stick with their ARM SoCs
| because todays computing power has far outpaced the demand
| made by the common softwares used by all. And Apple can cater
| to the common denominators with their own OS + CPU + 8GB +
| 256 GB NvME quite well for maybe another decade.
|
| I am happy there is some good tech development and
| competition in computer systems. But my Intel Mac Mini will
| be the last mac I will buy from Apple. macOS Mojave still
| runs fine on it. Otherwise there's always Windows, Linux and
| FreeBSD. That's the real advantage of the x86-64 platform
| that people like me will never sacrifice for closed systems
| like the M1 devices.
| woah wrote:
| Do you want to buy my 2020 Intel MacBook Pro?
| katbyte wrote:
| > kill switch
|
| can you elaborate?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I mean technically there's the T chip which could switch
| off everything. Parent poster seems to be posting
| conspiracy theories that apple will maliciously kill
| machines in 3-5 years at their whim. I would guess that
| would not go over with the government or customers and be
| the end of Apple PC type products though, so it's not
| going to happen
| webmobdev wrote:
| > Parent poster seems to be posting conspiracy theories
| that apple will maliciously kill machines in 3-5 years at
| their whim.
|
| I didn't insinuate anything like that. I was just
| pointing out that it exists.
| webmobdev wrote:
| In all its iDevices, and mac with T2 security chip (so
| all the M1 devices now), Apple offers an anti-theft
| feature called the "Activation Lock" -
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201365 - once
| activated, you can use it to erase all data on your
| iDevice remotely and ensure that nobody can use it
| without knowing your Apple ID and password. It's a useful
| feature.
|
| But if a government (or Apple) wants, this can be abused
| - for example, tomorrow if your country goes to war to
| the US, the US government could ask Apple to disable all
| Apple devices in that country, and Apple could do it,
| whether you like it or not.
|
| (The conspiracy theory part that others are hinting at is
| that many believe that this can be easily extended to
| totally cripple the device and make it unusable.)
| kube-system wrote:
| > the x86-64 platform that still allows you to repair /
| upgrade RAM, memory, CPU's
|
| Have you opened many x86 devices of a similar form factor
| to the current M1 devices? I haven't seen a socketed CPU in
| a laptop in over a decade, and the vast majority of
| ultrabooks and thin-and-lights have soldered RAM now too.
| The latest trend has been to start soldering SSDs as well.
| webmobdev wrote:
| True, other manufacturers have been trying to ape Apple
| and solder RAM and other parts on the x86-64 platform
| too. Thankfully it hasn't yet fully spread to the desktop
| platforms - I can still build my own PC. I pin my hope on
| government regulations and right to repair to stem this -
| EU has already emphasised that they are serious about
| their "right to repair" legislation. I also like the
| attempt being made by indie engineers to create more
| repairable phones and laptops.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at
| all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the
| field.
|
| Not look too bad best to say.
|
| Even if we add a one node advantage, we still have a ~15 watt
| chip making 20W-30W chips sweat.
|
| If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get M1
| beating it by double digit margin.
|
| M1 is simply a way more efficient chip than any X86 chip can
| be because of 40 years of architectural advantage.
|
| - latest x86 chips have patently gigantic decoders
| metastasising into backend. They are very tightly coupled to
| pretty much every other piece of logic.
|
| - x86 memory model, and blockage behaviour costing huge
| transistor count to work around
|
| - better SMP efficiency because of laxer memory model, and
| SMP logic being deeper integrated into cores, rather than
| being an afterthought
|
| - generally better register utilisation, at lower transistor
| count, and the upstream software ecosystem historically
| having better understanding how to work with large register
| count
|
| - X86 cores prefetch from both main memory, and in between
| caches is more expensive, and less efficient because it has
| to rely on more complex logic, and do more guesswork than in
| ARM.
|
| The list can go on for a few more screens.
|
| Remember. Even if M1 is a SoC, it still manages to beat Ryzen
| which barely have much besides cores, memory controller,
| PCIE, and USB. If you give a 1 node handycap to Ryzen, and
| only compare cores, you will still get M1 having almost 3 to
| 4 times advantage at performance per square mm.
|
| It's really sad to see X86 development digging itself into a
| ditch with "40 years binary compatibility at any cost."
|
| With all regards to Su Lisa, I believe they very much
| understand all that, but nevertheless still signed under the
| idea that X86 market will never go anywhere.
|
| I believe it's trivial for both AMD, and Intel to easily
| slash X86 transistor counts, while increasing the performance
| by double digits if they can go in err of the X86 ISA
| convention on just the few most egregious anachronisms.
| userbinator wrote:
| _latest x86 chips have patently gigantic decoders
| metastasising into backend._
|
| It's still a tiny percentage of the area. The caches are
| the biggest.
| adwn wrote:
| _Area_ isn 't what affects power usage, _switching
| activity_ is. [1] Besides, the cache size doesn 't
| negatively influence or constraint the design of the core
| logic, but highly complex instruction decoding absolutely
| does.
|
| [1] Well, mostly. There is such a thing as static power
| draw, but I suspect that the transistors in the L3 cache
| are optimized to have lower static leakage than the
| transistors in the core logic, which are optimized to be
| fast.
| userbinator wrote:
| Leakage is actually a significant part of idle power
| consumption, especially at smaller process sizes, so much
| that some CPUs have the ability to turn off parts of
| caches when idle.
|
| I repeat my stance that x86 instruction decoding is a
| tiny part of a processor, and things like vector units
| (which are also often powered down when idle) and
| reordering logic take far more power.
|
| There's a paper about this that compares the efficiency
| of different ISAs, and basically concludes that ARM and
| x86 are no different in that respect. Only MIPS is an
| awful outlier.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-
| sho...
| gameswithgo wrote:
| >If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get
| M1 beating it by double digit margin.
|
| Nah, people have done that experiment and it is competitive
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Trust me, it does not have 40 years of architectural
| advantage, just an advantage. It's not going to take Intel
| "40 years to catch up" give me break. I have an M1 mini
| anad it's a great little desktop machine for browsing and
| light development but it's not 40 years ahead of intel.
| baybal2 wrote:
| This is not the point.
|
| 40 years of architectural advantage is X86 _electing_ to
| forego results of 40 years of advances, and improvements
| that every other sane ISA had, and instead trying to add
| them by increasingly complex "workarounds."
|
| Giant transistors counts go to allow X86 cores to not to
| break ISA compatibility with a 40 years old chip, while
| trying make new ISA features to live along with it.
| canadianfella wrote:
| > Not look too bad best to say.
|
| What does this mean?
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| "Itanium failed therefore the market has shown it only
| wants x86"
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's not how downclocking chips work. Reducing the
| wattage reduces performance by much less.
|
| In multicore workloads Zen 3 slaps the M1 even per watt.
| baybal2 wrote:
| CMOS power = Leakage + Average switching energy *
| frequency^2
| my123 wrote:
| Nope, about Zen 3.
|
| 5800U (Zen 3 mobile) and M1 are actually very close
| _multithread_ perf wise despite one being a 8 core part
| and the other a 4+4 part. And with more power use for Zen
| 3 too.
|
| What hurts Zen 3 there is while the M1 maintains the full
| clock with all cores busy, Zen 3 has to downclock away
| from its max turbo clocks.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Which benchmarks are we talking about?
|
| The 5800u is a 15w part, you might be confusing the
| normal part with some overclocked implementation.
|
| But the 5800u at 15w is still faster than the M1 in
| multicore.
|
| Yes, Zen has to downclock, but it has more cores.
| my123 wrote:
| It's far from being as definitive as you say.
|
| Trying to find with one of the best 5800U scores: https:/
| /browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/7449909?baselin...
|
| It's for 5800H which is at 45W where Ryzen can get a tiny
| edge.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Ok, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking
| about the 5800U@15W.
|
| On Cinebench, the 5800U gets much more than the M1 in
| multicore and slightly more in single core. It even edges
| out the M1 on Geekbench, though Gb is a poor benchmark.
| my123 wrote:
| Cinebench is a rendering load that isn't that much
| optimised. (Doesn't even use the newer AVX levels when
| available, and isn't properly optimised for Arm either).
|
| Cinema 4D, the program that Cinebench benchmarks,
| normally does the renders on NVIDIA GPUs, not CPUs. As
| such, it's a very poor benchmark.
|
| And those 5800U results are at probably much higher than
| 15W. (Because that's the base config, OEMs are free to
| ship with higher TDPs)
| jeswin wrote:
| > ...you will still get M1 having almost 3 to 4 times
| advantage at performance per square mm.
|
| 400%? Do you have any sources to back up this somewhat
| extraordinary claim?
| baybal2 wrote:
| I used die shots from
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-vs-
| apple-m14-floo...
|
| And 119 mm2 total die area claim
|
| For Zen 3 I used https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/11/AMD-Ryze...
|
| 0.5mm2 per core on M1 vs 2.2mm2 on Zen 3 sans caches
|
| If you add caches, it gets much worse
|
| 17.5mm2 vs 65mm2
|
| And I may have had inadvertently included non-core parts
| into M1 calculation because of no official die floor map
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > It's really sad to see X86 development digging itself
| into a ditch with "40 years binary compatibility at any
| cost."
|
| Probably some of that is because they _did_ try to do
| something different once - and Itanium was an unmitigated
| disaster.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Sure, if we don't care about performance per watt.
|
| (Hint: we do)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| No reflection? The iPad Pro running the Axxx soc was already
| insanely powerful. x86 is a monster with this huge legacy.
| Sounds to me more like the usual anti-apple speak..
|
| The whole article is about not having to choose between
| performance and powerusage. With "5000", which 5000 do you
| mean? A 100W cpu of about the full cost of a macmini?
|
| This is the whole point of the article. Apple made a monster
| move. Next up: Apple Cloud. M1 based cloud computing. Will
| save them a couple billion per year on aws which expires in
| '22 or '23 iirc.
| bredren wrote:
| I had wondered what their first Apple Silicon powered data
| center would be.
|
| I thought the company would wait and deploy a later gen
| chip. Though with the standardization of M1 across such a
| wide array of products makes me think it is going to be the
| M1.
| smolder wrote:
| Given the competition for fab capacity at TSMC, I'm not
| so sure Apple would want to use that capacity to supply
| servers. If things were less tight in that department I'd
| agree the time is right.
| thehnguy wrote:
| I was bit surprised to see M1 in the iMacs. I thought the
| M1 was going to be a very capable proof of concept. But
| now we've got it in iMacs, iPads, and Macbooks. So I
| wouldn't be shocked if they spread it far and wide.
| bredren wrote:
| Ya, part of the reason I presumed there would be at least
| one rev was because there have been reports of system
| hangs and restarts on some M1 machines.
|
| So I had thought there may be something learned in the
| mass deployment that would trigger even minor design
| changes.
|
| Perhaps those are software issues. Or maybe the M1 as a
| product name should not be taken literally to describe
| the SoC in the current lineup.
|
| We know the Secure Enclave component appears to have been
| updated mid-production this past fall for a host of
| A-series chips.
|
| Perhaps, if light changes were needed Apple would not see
| them a sufficient to designate a new moniker.
|
| Or perhaps they are but the iMac and (theoretical) apple
| silicon-based data centers are intending to build
| consumer confidence in this bold foray.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/12/apple-
| security-a12-and-s5-pro...
| skohan wrote:
| Which Ryzen laptop currently competes with the latest
| macbooks in terms of form factor, performance, battery life
| and build quality? I'm honestly asking, I've been thinking
| about getting a Linux laptop in a while and I would be
| curious to see what the playing field is like
| eertami wrote:
| Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is
| unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever
| experienced a keyboard breaking.
|
| I think people are a little too nostalgic when talking
| about Apple build quality. There's a 2011 MBP here that
| still works well. But recent releases... no better than the
| competition really.
| zepto wrote:
| > Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro
| keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life
| I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking.
|
| Given that you know the keyboard has been fixed, is there
| a reason why you didn't make it clear that you were
| talking about older machines and not current ones?
|
| You make it sound like the current machines have the
| flawed keyboard, which is not true as far as I am aware.
| skohan wrote:
| I'm typing on a current-gen macbook, and the keyboard is
| fine. Butterfly keyboards were flawed, but I think it's
| also a bit disingenuous of the parent comment to imply
| that this is a reflection on overall mac build quality.
| Those generations of macs were bad products for several
| reasons, but the general build quality of those machines,
| and everything in Apple's line is quite high comparing to
| competitors
| boboche wrote:
| AMEN to that. I still use my fully repairable MBP 2010
| for web surfing and light tasks (with 8GB and a SSD its
| fine). On the Keyboard note, I've bought an expensive
| Eurocom (Clevo) Xeon laptop that had keyboard issues
| after a few years. Its not only apple that did bad with
| bad keyboard on expensive products (Fortunately I could
| repair it myself for 50$). Today apple product should
| ship with rossman videos and a SMD workstation if you
| plan to use them more than 3yrs ;)
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Are you aware that the latest generation has a new
| keyboard? It's not the fiasco that the previous super-
| slim one was.
| eertami wrote:
| Once bitten, twice shy.
|
| I considered that keyboard to be designed to fail. I'm
| not interested in gambling that another component won't
| fail the same way. It's easier to use products that have
| not demonstrated such designed failures.
|
| The good news however is that due to this garbage tier
| engineering I've discovered that desktop Linux is more
| stable for me than post-Catalina OSX - I'd have probably
| never found this out otherwise.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Designed to fail is preposterous. Apple lost a ton of
| money due to that problem, both directly in paying for
| repairs, and indirectly in damage to their stock price.
|
| It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate but
| banal: someone went too far with making the key mechanism
| as thin as possible, and all plastic to make it easier to
| manufacture. Ends up the plastic wasn't strong enough for
| the little pins in the mechanism.
|
| That's it. Just an ordinary design mistake. Embarrassing
| but no conspiracy.
|
| FWIW they've resolved it. The keyboard on this M1 MBA is
| perfectly fine.
| minikites wrote:
| >Apple lost a ton of money due to that problem, both
| directly in paying for repairs, and indirectly in damage
| to their stock price.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL
|
| I don't see any evidence that Apple's stock price was
| affected. Apple can ship any garbage (they shipped a
| keyboard they knew was defective for _three years_ ) and
| people will buy it because they're locked in to Apple's
| services, another reason they're pushing services so hard
| at the expense of the rest of the company.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The new keyboard is what they should have had the last
| few years. A refinement of the scissor switch keyboard
| from the glory days of the MacBook. It's great.
| r00fus wrote:
| > It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate
| but banal: someone went too far with making the key
| mechanism as thin as possible
|
| I see it as a symptom of the Jony Ive ideology,
| untethered from realty by Jobs, poisoning Apple in the
| early 2010s. iOS7 flat UI, overthin devices, keyboards.
|
| Signs are pointing that Apple is recovering from this
| (new aTV remote).
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| The keyboard has been fixed since 2019
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| You have to test new keyboard on M1 MBA/MBP
| eertami wrote:
| Test it for what exactly? All ultrabook keyboards are
| garbage, but they shouldn't out-right fail. "Testing" one
| isn't going to tell me if it will fail, it's just going
| to feel as crappy as the other keyboards.
|
| If a product fails within the first 10% of expected
| lifespan I'm no longer interested in that product. If it
| fails _AND_ the manufacturer refuses to take
| responsibility until months of bad press and class action
| lawsuits then I'd have to be insane to trust them with
| another device.
| ben7799 wrote:
| The point is the keyboard on a 2018 Macbook when Jony Ive
| was allowed to push his nonsense is just not the same
| keyboard as on a current Macbooks.
|
| It's a different keyboard. Different mechanism, very
| different feel, larger key travel, much more comfortable.
|
| I have a 2018 i7 MBP and a 2020 M1. The keyboards feel
| incredibly different. On top of that the 2020 M1 has a
| real Escape key which is a huge upgrade for anyone in
| unix land/developer land, etc..
|
| The 2019+ keyboard has had no controversy or reputation
| for failing.
|
| My 2018 one does feel like it's on it's last legs FWIW.
| It's a work machine.. just hoping to get a refresh before
| it dies.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Which competitor has a touchpad that's equal to or better
| than apple?
| lsaferite wrote:
| That is certainly one area where I think Apple has no
| peer.
| eertami wrote:
| I'm probably not the person to ask, I only use the
| touchpad as a last resort.
|
| (Honestly I never even noticed that the apple touchpad
| was better than any other touchpad, but I understand that
| touchpad users will notice things I didn't.)
| ModernMech wrote:
| I prefer the touchpad on my Surface Book 2 to the one on
| my Macbook Pro (2019). The one on my Macbook is comically
| huge, and I also am not in love with the feel/click noise
| compared to the Surface Book. YMMV.
| macintux wrote:
| Ideally there's be no feel/click noise on an Apple
| trackpad. "Tap to click" is a revelation.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| You know when you say stuff like "revelation" it really
| doesn't help your argument that you're not just fanboying
| out for apple?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Oh no, I much prefer the tactile response and sound of a
| physical click. But again, that's maybe just me.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| I have a dell XPS and it's a dream. Probably the closest
| thing to a good trackpad. That being said, Apples
| keyboards, even on the MBP are below par. They don't feel
| like they're supposed to be put through their paces. At
| work they make us use Macs and iMacs and to be honest, I
| damn near threw the wireless keyboard in the trash but
| Apple will win the screen wars till Jesus comes back
| though.
| Bayart wrote:
| The very latest Lenovo laptops have touchpads made by
| Sensel. That should roll all over Apple's stuff,
| hardware-wise.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I have both an XPS 13 Developer Edition from 2018 and two
| MacBooks from 2019. The touchpads on both 2019s are not
| good. They both have difficulty inertial scrolling and
| the touch rejection is far too sensitive.
|
| Coming from lifelong Linux-land it's actually comical
| reflecting on how poor these things operate in day to
| day. The most prominent issue for me is how poorly they
| operate with my USB-type C dock I use for multi-monitor.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I had an Ideapad 5 (4800u) for a few months, it was a great
| little Ryzen laptop. Battery life was 7-10 hours of "real"
| use, CPU performance is righteous, and build quality is
| pretty surprising for sub-$500. Great little Linux laptop!
| echlipse wrote:
| Probably a Thinkpad. But depends on completely the type of
| work you wanna do. With anything you end up buying it's a
| long term investment. So whichever gets your job done and
| whichever has a good build quality (also something which
| you can easily upgrade yourself and repair easily) is the
| one you should buy.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Thinkpads feel well made but the screens are mostly
| terrible and the trackpad design is very dated.
|
| I'm not sure why Lenovo doesn't use better IPS panels,
| they can't be saving that much margin from them.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Not a huge sample size, but the screen on my X1 Nano
| looks excellent. Competitive with my 2018 11" iPad Pro's
| screen visually, if a bit lower PPI.
|
| That's one of the highest end ThinkPads though, so I
| guess that's to be expected. Have heard that getting a
| good panel on more mainstream models like the T-series
| can be tough.
| BadOakOx wrote:
| Dave2D just reviewed the new surface laptop comparing it to
| the new MacBook Air:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKN9nvXTGHE ...and he got
| pretty good battery life (11 hours on his own benchmark).
|
| edit: form factor, performance, build quality.. is also up
| there, I just didn't mention it, because I think the
| battery life is the killer feature of the M1.
| ZuLuuuuuu wrote:
| It is a good battery life for a PC laptop but it is still
| significantly behind of M1 based Macs while also having
| significantly lower single core benchmarks compared to
| M1. And the performance difference is even bigger when
| both laptops are on battery power.
| reader_mode wrote:
| Microsoft is almost always a generation behind with tech
| in surface products it's ridiculous because they look so
| appealing otherwise. I just feel like I'm buying last
| years model on launch.
| yoz-y wrote:
| That is really a problem only if you watch tech news. In
| reality people use computers for years, so having a 4 or
| 5 year old tech doesn't really matter that much.
| zepto wrote:
| It means the usable life is shorter, so even if it's fine
| for a while, you need to think of it as a much more
| expensive device per useful year.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Sadly, with the current trends I think the device will be
| more likely rendered by an irreparable hardware failure
| before it reaches end of life due to speed.
| zepto wrote:
| I mean that seems inevitable.
|
| I have a 2014 retina iMac. At some point in the next few
| years, I'll probably replace it with an M series iMac,
| and then put Linux on it. It's hard to imagine that it
| will _ever_ really reach end of life due to speed at that
| point.
| reader_mode wrote:
| Developers should be upgrading on 2-3 year cycles max -
| the leap in performance of 2 generations noticeably
| impacts performance and unless you're doing some really
| trivial stuff - performance matters.
|
| Check out Chrome build time benchmarks between 3/4xxx and
| 5xxx series (or any dev tool related benchmarks). 10-20%
| off your iteration cycle is noticeable - and that's a
| single generation jump.
|
| Increasing iteration speed is a big productivity boosts,
| seeing professionals with 5+ year old devices is just
| ridiculous to me, you spend 8+ hours on that device -
| investing 2000$ for an upgrade every two years is not
| that much to ask.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Personally I'd like if developers stayed a couple of
| generations behind on their computers, so the rest of us
| aren't forced to upgrade regularly to keep software
| running at a decent speed.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Developers may have a reason to upgrade (many don't as
| ssh isn't going to get any faster-er with a fancy new
| CPU), but they constitute the part of people that read
| tech news. This is a minuscule part of general
| population.
|
| Compiling Chrome is a nice benchmark but in reality dev
| cycles are quite smaller (or you might want to optimize
| your toolchain).
|
| Finally, it's quite common for developers to forget the
| kind of hardware their users are running on. Then they
| produce software that only runs well on the next gen
| hardware. If you develop on a beast, then at least test
| whatever you are producing on a 3-4 year old machine to
| see how it will work for the clients.
| hhh wrote:
| I haven't really felt this way with the Surface Book. The
| first gen was rough, but I've been using an SB3 for
| several months now and have nothing but praise for it.
| gambler wrote:
| Form factor and build quality are not something AMD can
| control by making a better CPU architecture.
| Macha wrote:
| Not entirely for sure, but form factor is limited by
| thermal requirements (well, mostly, Apple and other OEMs
| have gotten into trouble by ignoring this in the past,
| like the first i9 macs), and that is influenced by cpu
| architecture.
| oblio wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted. A 5nm version of the
| AMD stuff should be reasonably close to the M1.
|
| The main bottleneck is the production capacity, we badly need
| more manufacturers of high end chipsets.
| jkrems wrote:
| > I don't know why you're being downvoted.
|
| I can answer why _I_ downvoted the comment. It was this
| part:
|
| > [...] it's really surprising to me how many eagerly lap
| up the angle Apple is pushing without much reflection, even
| on HN. Like the good old Apple hype days.
|
| You can make a point without implying that anybody who
| doesn't agree with you is incompetent (the "Apple hype"
| meme is really stale).
| [deleted]
| thehnguy wrote:
| I think the issue with the comment is that it comes off as
| biased or distracting (regardless of the intent). The
| conversation is about Apple Silicon vs Intel, and then it
| veers off topic with discussion of Ryzen.
|
| Also, saying that people are "lapping up" the Apple
| marketing suggests that it's more sizzle than steak. But
| it's completely undeniable that the A chips, and by
| extension, the M1 is a beast.
| Grustaf wrote:
| So a future hypothetical AMD processor could be as good as
| the M1, and that shows how M1 is just marketing hype?
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| It's only "future" because Apple strongarms the whole
| market with their market position buying whole 5nm TSMC
| capacity
| runeks wrote:
| By "strongarms" do you mean "places the highest bid"?
| ludamad wrote:
| A fist full of money is a strong arm isn't it?
| gumby wrote:
| > strongarms the whole market
|
| I see what you did there. Really casting shade on Intel!
| afavour wrote:
| I think the OP is saying that it could be a mistake to
| focus on the processor so much when it might turn out
| that worthy competition is just around the corner. Apple
| have ever focused on processor like this before, instead
| opting to focus on the whole product, fit and finish,
| etc. Which arguably still very few rival them on even
| today.
| jclardy wrote:
| But by the time "just around the corner" happens, we will
| be comparing it to the M2.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Apple have ever focused on processor like this before
|
| Eh, I'm not sure that's true. They did with the original
| PPC, and also the G3 and G5.
| giantrobot wrote:
| While the competition might have M1 competitors
| (perf/power) "just around the corner", Apple has the M1
| out right now. You can go buy an M1 Mac today. If I need
| to wait until next quarter or the second half of the year
| to get an M1 competitor that doesn't help me much today.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Yes competitors may have worthy opponents to the M1 "just
| around the corner".
|
| But do you think that Apple stopped innovating after
| releasing the M1 last year? Don't you think the M2 (or
| M1X whatever it's called) is well into design and
| prototyping at this point?
| afavour wrote:
| The broader point, I think, is that Apple has never
| really competed on specs before. Not meaningfully,
| anyway. They've competed on whole product. Competing on
| specs opens them up to new challenges.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This is like people obsessing over the amount of RAM in
| iPhones.
|
| Just because it matters on Android, which is a COMPLETELY
| different system, doesn't mean it matters as much on iOS.
|
| Yes, it matters a bit when switching between multiple
| apps, but app suspend is handled in a completely
| different way on iOS than on Android.
|
| Apples to Oranges.
| danaris wrote:
| This has _always_ been the line people use against Apple,
| at least since the days when it was no longer credible to
| use the "beleaguered" line on them.
|
| There have been just _so many_ genuine tech news articles
| of the form, "Future Apple Competitor Product Beats
| Current, Widely Successful Apple Product".
| naravara wrote:
| > There have been just so many genuine tech news articles
| of the form, "Future Apple Competitor Product Beats
| Current, Widely Successful Apple Product".
|
| It's the twin brother of all the "Currently, successful
| Apple product feature technically existed on [not-Apple]
| Product years ago (even though basically nobody used
| it)."
|
| People read those articles and conclude it's all
| marketing hype but never ask themselves why it seems to
| happen again and again where simply checking off the box
| for having a specific feature never seems to actually
| lead to broad adoption. And if it truly is ONLY marketing
| hype leading to those ecosystem effects, then maybe you
| should start thinking of marketing hype as a feature?
| paulcole wrote:
| > A 5nm version of the AMD stuff should be reasonably close
| to the M1.
|
| Reasonably close only counts in horseshoes and hand
| grenades. Until a 5nm version of the AMD stuff can run
| MacOS, there's no point comparing the 2.
|
| If the AMD stuff blows past the M1 (or the M-whatever),
| Apple's marketing will turn on a dime.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| But let's say that a 5nm Ryzen comes out ahead for mobile
| usage. (But not necessarily by very much.)
|
| Chips like the M1 (or ideally, something similar made
| available to other device manufacturers) is still really
| interesting. The ARM architecture can scale down better
| than x86/x64 can, allowing a device maker to hit low end
| performance targets with less cost than x86 chips can
| manage. For the low end, it also tends to provide better
| power consumption for a fixed performance target than the
| x86 offerings.
|
| This makes M1 type chips really interesting for any
| manufacturer who want to make devices that span a huge
| scale of performance requirements, from slow kiosks
| performance range to the decent laptop range. All being the
| same ISA makes sharing firmware and applications across the
| lineup easier than having to switch to x86/x64 above some
| threshold.
|
| It also does not hurt that M1 means that the really popular
| for development Apple devices are now running on ARM, which
| helps ensure that more software has been ported to (and/or
| tested on) ARM devices. ARM's weak memory model for example
| is something that can trip up a lot of software that tries
| to implement low lock algorithms, but whose designers were
| only familiar with the x86/x64 memory model.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Not really in any other way than speculation. No one can
| use M1 tech unless they steal it. Sure they can build
| what they think are similar designs to it but they don't
| know if they're going down the right path. M1 isn't just
| another ARM design, it's solely done by apple.
| oblio wrote:
| > This makes M1 type chips really interesting for any
| manufacturer who want to make devices that span a huge
| scale of performance requirements, from slow kiosks
| performance range to the decent laptop range.
|
| This is purely theoretical. Apple will <<never>> sell its
| chips to other companies.
|
| So if you were expecting Apple Silicon on its own to
| start a revolution, that's never going to happen.
| ragnarok451 wrote:
| Honest question - why not?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Why would they? Apple likes vertical integration, it's
| not advantageous to them to sell off a differentiating
| part of their product, the hyped processor, so that
| others can use it, often competitors.
|
| Back in the 90s, when Jobs was gone, Apple licensed its
| OS and almost went bankrupt as you could simply get a
| cheaper clone of Apple's computers with the OS on them.
| They won't repeat that mistake again.
| zerkten wrote:
| The poster stated "M1 type chips". That is not setting an
| expectation that Apple will sell their chips.
|
| Microsoft already have a Surface product with an ARM chip
| that didn't get updated in this round AFAIK. It already
| has solid ARM performance, but it's not as good as M1. It
| was let down with how well x86 emulation worked, but
| there seem to have been improvements including x64
| support. If they focused on improvements with the chip
| design then they could see improvements along the lines
| of Apple. It's a question of whether the investment is
| made rather than whether it's possible.
| zucker42 wrote:
| No other company has the volume to economically build on
| TSMC's leading node.
| akmarinov wrote:
| By the time there's a 5nm version of Ryzen, there'll be a 4nm
| M2.
|
| AMD's 5nm shift is scheduled for 2022
|
| iPhone 13 (2021) rumors indicate a 4nm SoC
| ghaff wrote:
| Node sizes are pretty meaningless at this point.
| bhouston wrote:
| If it is the same foundry (and it is in this case) you
| can compare them and you can assume that 3mn is better
| than 4mn and better than 5mn. Across foundries, no so
| much.
| akmarinov wrote:
| True, but that's what OP claims.
| kareful4mktng wrote:
| >it's really surprising to me how many eagerly lap up the
| angle Apple is pushing without much reflection, even on HN.
| Like the good old Apple hype days.
|
| Post purchase Rationalization or Apple uses upvote farms or
| fake accounts.
|
| All 3 are marketing. Not surprising in the slightest bit.
| Apple lives by marketing where the competition has to live by
| product quality.
|
| I look at my real world peers that fall for Apple and none of
| them are excellent when it comes to tech.
| emteycz wrote:
| But there isn't a 5nm version of those... And laptop battery
| life is vastly different between these two.
| oblio wrote:
| The difference isn't that big:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKN9nvXTGHE
|
| And for 5nm, I'm quite sure AMD already has contracts for
| that with TSMC. So the gap should be even smaller.
| foldr wrote:
| It has less battery life _and_ less performance (judging
| by Cinebench, at least), so it is a fairly substantial
| difference. And it 's quite possible that Apple will
| remain one TSMC process ahead of AMD for the next few
| years, even if AMD do put out 5nm chips in the near
| future.
| ndiddy wrote:
| The surface laptop has a Ryzen 4000 CPU, not Ryzen 5000.
| foldr wrote:
| I assume the person I was responding to was talking about
| the laptop in the video that they linked to.
| ianai wrote:
| His "as tested" was 11 hours for AMD and 13 for M1. His
| "max time use" for AMD was 14.5 and 20 for M1. That's a
| 38% greater time for the M1 in a best possible outcome
| and 18% on "average". Substantial differences that users
| would perceive noticeably.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm not so sure. I think it reaches a meaningful maximum.
| Can I do an entire days work on the laptop? Yes to both.
| Can it last an entire flight, even a long one? Yes to
| both.
|
| It's not that it doesn't matter at all, it's just that it
| matters a lot less once you've checked boxes like that.
| The effective experience of both would be "you only need
| to charge it overnight"
| foldr wrote:
| What the sibling says, but you've also got to take
| battery degradation into account. Even at 80% of its
| original battery life, an M1 Macbook Pro/Air will still
| give you a full day's usage.
| ianai wrote:
| Just to admit something odd I do in public. I've started
| using my lithium powered devices between the 40%-80%
| charge range. i.e. I plug it in when it's at or around
| 40% left charged and unplug it when it's 80% charged or
| around there. I'd read that's what Tesla drivers
| recommend for maximizing the life of their batteries.
| Don't know how much it translates to phones/computers.
| 40% of 20 hours is 8 hours...
| emteycz wrote:
| It matters to me a lot. I was constantly out of charge
| with my previous laptop, it's exactly these extra hours
| that fixed it.
| giantrobot wrote:
| For me it's always been "how desperately do I need to
| find an AC outlet" with my laptops. I've been pretty
| happy with my M1 MBA in that regard because the answer
| has been "not desperate at all". I've done a couple
| weekend trips since getting it and I never even thought
| of getting the power adapter out of my bag the entire
| trip. This was despite doing a bit of work.
|
| The same can't be said for the MBPs I've owned over the
| past decade. They get ok battery life but I always needed
| to know where the nearest outlet was. While an 11 hour
| Ryzen might be close to a 13 hour MBA, those extra two
| hours is the difference between a full weekend worth of
| work or just a full day.
|
| For anyone wanting long battery life in a laptop those
| extra couple hours are important.
| BadOakOx wrote:
| In the video, he mentions the 'max time use' is on
| somewhat standby. So, the second value is more
| representative (11 vs 13).
|
| On the other hand, I think if you can go a full day on a
| battery, that should be enough. You won't be using your
| laptop for 20 straight hours.
| the_duke wrote:
| Can you link a good test result that proves this?
|
| The 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile chips are not very power hungry
| either.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
| the_duke wrote:
| This doesn't contain any comparison graphs relevant to my
| question, and couldn't, because it's from November. The
| Ryzen 5000 mobile chips came out this year.
| ianai wrote:
| Here's the AMD benchmark and it's using up to 3x the
| power of the M1.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16446/amd-ryzen-9-5980hs-
| ceza...
| bildung wrote:
| Isn't it 35W for the 5980hs vs. 26.8W for the M1, so up
| to 1.3x? https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| That's not the right part, the 5800U is the low power
| Ryzen competitor.
| ianai wrote:
| I don't see any reviews for laptops with that CPU. It's
| hard to compare against something no one can test.
| truculent wrote:
| Is this relevant?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5bAMoQt7EQ
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| With the M1 in the latest iPad Pros I'm not even sure if
| Apple will keep the Ax line but instead to upgrade their low
| to high end with just Mx series processors .
| kergonath wrote:
| Isn't the M1 a bit big to put in a phone? Presumably, both
| Mx and Ax SoCs are already very similar so the distinction
| could be mostly marketing. But they'll probably want to
| have different names for the lower-power, fewer-cores phone
| SoC and the things they put in their Macs. If only to avoid
| the perception that Macs run on "low-performance" phone
| parts.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| What if Apple didn't care about the size and just put in
| an M SoC? iPhones have been getting thicker and it seems
| like their design language is going to have devices under
| certain thicknesses.
|
| Option two would just be to make an A15 be only a die
| shrink and surprise ! It fits.
| igammarays wrote:
| Apple Silicon is NOT just an ARM CPU. It's also a deep
| integration with macOS, and a unified memory architecture
| (less unnecessary copying on the bus). For example on the M1,
| certain very common operations for macOS apps, like freeing
| Objective C pointers, which happens millions of time per
| second, are optimized at the hardware level. The M1 is not a
| CPU.
|
| So no, the Ryzen 5000 with 5nm would NOT level the field.
| slver wrote:
| How are objective c pointers handled?
| skohan wrote:
| From what I understood, ARC operations are cheaper on M1
| because of weaker memory ordering constraints. But I
| thought this was and ARM thing, not M1 specific, but I
| could be wrong
| astrange wrote:
| That's right. M1 doesn't have specific Objective-C
| optimizations.
| slver wrote:
| An interesting realization that it could, though.
|
| Overwhelming majority of MacOS/iOS software is written on
| Obj C and Swift, which have the same underlying
| semantics.
|
| That said ARC doesn't have such a great impact on
| performance as some people (esp. fans of Java's GC etc.)
| would convince you. Most ++/-- operations on the refcount
| are eliminated by the compiler.
| igammarays wrote:
| I can't find the interview now, but I distinctly remember
| someone at Apple saying that Cocoa apps benefit from
| hardware-level optimizations of common Objective C
| operations in the M1.
| skohan wrote:
| But from what I understand, there's a _much_ smaller gap
| between ryzen and M1 than intel
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > and a unified memory architecture (less unnecessary
| copying on the bus).
|
| So does every other Intel & AMD laptop CPU from the last 5+
| years. So does every Qualcomm SoC from the last 5+ years.
| This has been incredibly common for years and years now.
|
| This does a _lot_ less than you think it does, particularly
| since there 's very few consumer workloads that switch
| between CPU & GPU.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > For example on the M1, certain very common operations for
| macOS apps, like freeing Objective C pointers, which
| happens millions of time per second, are optimized at the
| hardware level
|
| I mean, this is _kind_ of true, but it's not unique to
| Objective C, the M1, or even particularly intentional. The
| _ARM_ memory model is more conducive to reference counting
| in general than the x86 one. Nothing special about Apple's
| chip in that respect, tho.
| api wrote:
| I didn't buy the hype until I tested an actual M1. It
| exceeded the hype. It feels like when I was a kid and went
| from a 386SX to a Pentium at 4X the speed, except the M1 was
| also a quarter the power consumption.
|
| It's the first time in a over a decade I've felt a
| revolutionary step forward in a chip and the only time it has
| ever come with less power.
|
| Process node is a factor but I find it hard to believe it's
| the only factor. I know enough about the X86 legacy tax to
| know that is not the case.
|
| Apple didn't do black magic. They just took a cleaner
| superior CPU architecture and made a desktop class muscular
| chip with it. Other ARM manufacturers could equal or exceed
| the M1 if they wanted. X86 has been delivered a death
| sentence.
|
| IMHO the greatest threat to AMD is ARM not Intel, and vice
| versa.
| octorian wrote:
| > It feels like when I was a kid and went from a 386SX to a
| Pentium at 4X the speed
|
| I remember the jump from the 486 chips to the Pentium being
| that dramatic. Heck, 486DX2-66 to P100 brought Linux kernel
| compile times from 45 minutes down to like 5 minutes.
|
| Back then, I think a big part of these jumps wasn't just
| CPU design. I think a lot of it was that those CPU design
| changes were often accompanied by massive improvements to
| overall system architecture. So the I/O buses, memory,
| peripherals, all of it got a lot faster as part of the same
| upgrade.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Apple didn't do black magic. [...] Other ARM
| manufacturers could equal or exceed the M1 if they wanted._
| "
|
| I see lots of people saying "If only $company had an ARM
| device", and I don't understand it. My experience of ARM
| device is slow laggy janky products - from competing
| smartphones, tablets, router and network device management
| interfaces, year on year, the pairing is always (arm +
| fucking slow).
|
| It's only Apple who have managed to get "desktop class"
| performance, and at this point I'm more willing to
| attribute that to Apple doing black magic than to ARM being
| inherently superior.
|
| Microsoft have piles of money, thousands of developers,
| they make hardware, they've been working with ARM since the
| likes of the Compaq IPAQ PDA and Windows CE 21 years ago,
| and the Surface RT in 2012, their ARM devices are nothing
| to speak of. Google, industry gorilla of tech with the
| finances to match - see the famous Gruber/DaringFireball
| about iPhones far ahead in single core JavaScript
| performance year after year after year. Tech giants like
| Samsung, Qualcomm, Sony, who have been designing and
| building chips for decades, with their own drivers,
| firmware, and customized Android builds, and building their
| own flagship products.
|
| Apple whomps in from "nowhere" with the fastest ARM device
| anyone has ever seen, and the critics response is "anyone
| could do that if they wanted to".
|
| Then _why don 't they want to_?
|
| [Edit: Consider also that Apple spent $278M on acquiring PA
| Semi chip design company in 2008, and $600M on Dialog
| Semiconductor in 2018, and Microsoft spent $2.5BN on
| Minecraft. I say these companies "are tech giants with
| finances to match", but it's not like Apple had to lean
| hard into their hundreds of billions cash pile to do what
| they've done. Instead they had to do something that appears
| to be "black magic" (i.e. desire + leadership + execution +
| long term planning + ???)].
| dmitriid wrote:
| Apple has had a vision for this for _at least_ 12-13
| years. Most likely, ever since (before) the transition to
| Intel.
|
| The first A-series chip they officially released and
| named was the A4 in _March 2010_. That is 11 years ago.
| That is the beginning of M1. And the reason is originally
| in this amazing Ars Technica article [1]. Apple has
| always wanted to fully control the entire stack.
|
| Any competitors in the same space lack either the vision,
| or the products, or the money to do the same thing. In
| the case of Microsoft and Google, their internal politics
| don't allow them to do the same thing (Google couldn't
| care less about hardware because the Web is where
| Google's money at; MS cares about hardware but
| traditionally they have relied on throwing money at
| partners to make them come up with solutions).
|
| [1] Owning the stack: The legal war to control the
| smartphone platform, https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack...
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Indeed, which is two things against "anyone could do it"
| - it took Apple 13+ years to achieve - "using ARM" isn't
| enough - and competitors haven't been taken by surprise,
| they've had 10+ years to mount a response and haven't.
| dgemm wrote:
| Apple is pretty uniquely positioned to make the
| architecture change as smooth as it has been. If you look
| at competing smartphone SOCs it's not hard to believe
| that a technical M1 competitor could be put together, but
| getting it adopted would be much, much more difficult.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Microsoft has to more or less take what Qualcomm will
| give them. Qualcomm's virtual monopoly on high end non-
| Apple phones has made it complacent.
|
| > Apple whomps in from "nowhere" with the fastest ARM
| device anyone has ever seen
|
| Not really from nowhere; they've already had the fastest
| (non-datacenter) ARM chips anyone has ever seen, fairly
| consistently, in their phones, for years.
| onli wrote:
| From what did you upgrade? Apple had no competitive product
| with modern processors. Where is the Zen3 macbook with
| which you compared that? Did the laptop you compared with
| had an equivalent fast SSD?
| klelatti wrote:
| Given Apple had/has competitive products with 2020/21
| Intel CPUs this is patently not true.
| onli wrote:
| Hm, I'm surprised by that statement. The Ryzen 5000
| mobile CPUs were a lot faster than the Intel competition
| and I am pretty sure Apple does not have them in any
| laptop. And the very fast SSD is a new addition, isn't
| it? Did I miss something?
| klelatti wrote:
| You implied that they only saw a difference because Apple
| wasn't using "modern processors". You can't exclude
| everything but Zen 3 from any sensible definition of
| "modern processor".
| onli wrote:
| The parent comment talked about the implications he
| thought this had about the architecture. Like half of the
| thread seemingly ignoring that a) there are x86
| processors that are more than competitive and b) that the
| big leap he described is more likely coming from the
| faster storage and from comparing it with the very much
| older and weaker processors most people that bought an
| upgrade now had in their old laptops.
|
| Heck, he might have used an old dual core with an HDD
| from all we know. Of course the new M1 models would make
| a big difference then. So would all other modern laptops.
|
| But in that context of x86 and ARM Zen3 is absolutely the
| only sound comparison.
| klelatti wrote:
| I know what you're trying to say is that you have to do a
| comparison of CPUs built on similar process nodes - and
| that maybe the parent has overstated the x86 vs Arm
| comparison.
|
| I would have some sympathy with that - but that's not the
| same as discounting the parent's perspective because
| Apple somehow weren't using "modern processors"
| previously - because that simply isn't true.
| onli wrote:
| Similar process nodes, or at least when making general
| statements of the architecture to compare the best modern
| candidates. Otherwise you just can't make statements
| about the architecture based on that. And Apple just does
| not have Zen 3 laptops (unsurprisingly), so there is
| that.
|
| And I still think it's very valid to not forget how old
| hardware used for subjective comparisons will be. E.g.
| the old Macbook air sold very well all that time.
| api wrote:
| Are there any x86 processors that are competitive in
| performance / watt?
| onli wrote:
| The processors that come closest are the Zen 3
| processors. They beat the M1 in total performance, see
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/3604597/apple-m1-vs-
| ryzen-50..., but are made for a higher watt usage. There
| is no direct performance/watt comparison I am aware of.
|
| It's likely the M1 is better in that category, but it
| does not look like a huge difference if you factor in the
| higher performance you get from the Ryzen 9 5980HS.
| klelatti wrote:
| Single core Ryzen 7 5800U Geekbench scores are c20% lower
| than M1.
|
| Multi core better but still lower but not too surprised
| as it's got 8 large cores vs big.LITTLE 4/4 for M1 - not
| clear when those cores will start throttling down.
|
| Suspect single core performance is what drives apparent
| responsiveness so I'd say not too surprising that the M1
| gets rave reviews from users.
| api wrote:
| Top-end Ryzen chips may be as fast or faster. Are they
| also as low power?
|
| The impressive thing about the M1 isn't just raw
| performance but performance / watt. There are obviously
| faster high-end many-core x86 chips, but the power use
| difference is wider than the speed difference. The M1
| destroys mid-range Intel and AMD offerings at a fraction
| of the power consumption.
|
| Check out this madness:
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
|
| The MacBook Air trounces the top-end Mac Pro on single
| core performance. No this is not the top-end Intel you
| can get, nor is it as fast as AMD, but it's a _MacBook
| Air_ and consumes a small fraction of the power.
|
| Again... the _power efficiency_ is the thing that really
| blows me away. 5nm accounts for only some of that.
|
| On multi-core the same MacBook Air is just below recent
| Mac Pro models on total computational throughput. To beat
| the _MacBook Air_ you have to go up to newer-generation
| Xeon chips with 8 full-speed cores. The Xeon is branded
| as a server chip and uses as much power as probably eight
| to ten M1s.
|
| It's just insane. If Apple puts, say, 16 full-speed core
| in one of these chips it's absolutely over for all other
| vendors. Speculation is that the 16" Pro will end up
| getting 8 performance cores and 4 low-power cores. I
| wouldn't be surprised if it ends up beating the top-end
| Intel Mac Pro.
| klelatti wrote:
| Feeling a bit sad now as I had to buy a 2020 MacBook Pro
| to get AVX512!
| api wrote:
| I currently use a MacBook Air with the same 10th
| generation Intel chip in it and it's not bad. The only
| difference between the Air and the Pro with this chip is
| that the Pro can sustain high clocks longer and has a
| Touch Bar.
|
| I expected the M1 to be like a much lower power and maybe
| a bit faster version of this chip, and was really blown
| away by it being far beyond that.
| klelatti wrote:
| I'll probably be in the queue for the M2!
| onli wrote:
| Just keep in mind that scaling things will change power
| efficiency. Like the Vega gpu architecture showed so
| clearly - which could be quite power efficient, but the
| Vega graphics card released were ridiculously power
| hungry, it seems because they missed their performance
| target and thus got overclocked out of their power
| efficiency range.
|
| I'm not sure that they can easily add more cores to the
| M1. If they can, that would also raise the TDP. And
| adding more cores does not increase performance linearly,
| even if the architecture is made for it.
|
| Also keep in mind that comparing it to 14nm Intel
| processors with an architecture from a decade ago is a
| fair comparison when comparing M1 vs prior Apple
| products, but is not a fair comparison when comparing it
| against what x86 can do in general. You would need a
| modern x86 processor targeting the same watt usage to
| have a completely valid comparison. As discussed in the
| thread above.
|
| So yeah, it's a great processor for its target. And it
| likely will also be a very strong processor when scaled
| up - it bodes well for the future of ARM. But don't
| extrapolate the performance too linearly, that is likely
| to be misleading.
| klelatti wrote:
| Sigh. I'm typing this on an Apple "prior" product which
| has a two year old microarchitecture and is built on
| Intel 10nm (roughly the same as TSMC 7nm) - it's
| absolutely a modern x86 processor and a valid comparison
| - and it's left in the dust by the M1.
| onli wrote:
| And you swapped the SSD and the swapping algorithm/memory
| usage model so that the IO performance is equal?
| ben7799 wrote:
| Excellent analogy, I'm old enough to remember those old
| generational jumps and the M1 feels like that to me.
|
| Last time it felt like there was a jump this big was around
| 2005-2006 when the Core 2 Duo started becoming common.
| randomopining wrote:
| What about it is so amazing? Did you test the 8gb or the
| 16gb version?
|
| Is it really a gamechanger for surfing, coding, videos,
| etc?
|
| Curious because I might grab the base mac mini 8gb for
| music production, surfing, Java coding etc.
| officeplant wrote:
| It's a game changer if you can wholly devote yourself to
| the ecosystem. I can tell you that even third party
| applications with M1 support (ie. Google Chrome) can be a
| mixed bag and still run kinda clunky.
|
| Also you said music production so verify before hand that
| your DAW, etc of choice will work fine. I use Reason and
| the visuals in the DAW itself are still laggy, but it
| isn't M1 native yet.
|
| Other things like the fact that World of Warcraft runs at
| medium settings on a 1440P monitor feel kinda magical
| given I can barely feel any heat leaving the M1 Mini.
|
| In the end I returned my M1 Mini (8gb/256gb) because my
| personal experience still felt half baked at this time.
| Once we hit the next generation a lot more software will
| have caught up.
| api wrote:
| I'd get 16gb. The memory options are disappointing. I am
| waiting for 32gb to switch my daily driver, and also
| giving the ecosystem a bit of time to catch up. I have an
| M1 Mini but that was for us to test our software on and
| make sure our Mac ARM builds were correct.
|
| Apple's memory and storage options tend to always be on
| the disappointing side.
| phkahler wrote:
| I've been trying to get to the bottom of this here:
| https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/972
|
| With my 2400G the benchmark takes 5.5 seconds. With someones
| M1 it takes 1.3 seconds.
|
| We still need to verify that was run at the same settings,
| but it looks like the M1 is going to be faster than the 5000
| series APUs regardless, possibly by a large margin and I'm
| assuming the 5000s are between 1.4x and 2.0x the speed of the
| older 2400G.
|
| It will still be interesting to see AMD on a 5nm process, and
| Zen 4, and with 8 core, but by then Apple will probably have
| an M2 on the 3nm process. You gotta compare what can be
| obtained today.
| Macha wrote:
| The 2400G is a relatively low end part that is four
| generations old. In the past AMD did not release high end
| desktop APUs, preferring customers to buy CPUs + GPUs. This
| is already announced to change with a 5700G being produced.
| https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-5700g - On
| paper this is a 5800H in a desktop form factor with a
| higher max TDP and higher clock speeds.
|
| The 5800H gets 2.5x on cpu benchmark's rating vs the 2400G.
| This is composed of a 50% single core and 300% multi-core
| improvement.
|
| 2400G: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5
| +2400G&i...
|
| 5800H: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5
| +2400G&i...
| phkahler wrote:
| >> The 5800H gets 2.5x on cpu benchmark's rating vs the
| 2400G.
|
| That's in large part because its 8 cores instead of 4.
| The test I ran makes good use of multicore, but going
| from 4 to 8 won't cut the time completely in half. I
| suspect the M1 will still beat it by a bit.
|
| I take back my comment on availability. We ideally need
| to compare things on the same process node to see which
| design team has done a better job ;-)
| Macha wrote:
| The M1 is also 8 cores and benefiting from that.
| itsokimbatman wrote:
| I don't think "impressive iteration" begins to describe it. I
| am very rarely impressed by new tech these days, and the M1
| is the first piece of new hardware I've seen in years that
| seems downright magical.
|
| My previous laptop was a 2016 MBP with an i7, and the M1
| destroys it. I can build large projects like LLVM or WebKit
| fast and it doesn't even get hot.
|
| I've also been running Linux VMs with the new Parallels and
| they feel native speed.
|
| Rosetta 2 is incredible, Intel apps are very responsive on
| M1.
|
| My work computer is a high end 16" 2019 MBP with 64 GB of RAM
| and honestly if it weren't for needing the extra RAM or the
| occasional x86 VM I'd trade it in for an M1 in a heartbeat.
|
| I'll agree the Apple hype is unrealistic at times, but the M1
| is one that absolutely deserves it.
| Blumfid wrote:
| It's not a helpful comparison if you compare a chip from
| 2016 with a chip from 2020.
|
| You would need to benchmark it against a current chip from
| someone else.
| acdha wrote:
| You're certainly correct for, say, highly-controlled
| benchmarks but don't discount subjective user experience.
| I've heard _far_ more M1 users talk about the subjective
| feel compared to even the previous generation MacBook
| hardware whereas it's been a long time since I've heard
| that about an Intel to Intel upgrade (basically since the
| Core -> Core Duo period) other than people with GPU-heavy
| needs and that seems like an interesting data-point to
| me.
| CountHackulus wrote:
| I do wonder how much of that is just getting a nice new
| laptop? If the average user was handed the equivalent
| laptop with an Intel CPU but told it was an M1 would they
| notice? Would they also think it was nice and fast?
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| Absolutely. Performance is very noticeable even between
| the current MBP Intel vs. M1
| acdha wrote:
| Possibly but it feels like that should have but has not
| happened to anything like this degree when people were
| getting shiny new Intel CPUs after the early 2010s.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| yeah, especially given the leaps AMD has made.
| emteycz wrote:
| There's a value in that too - people know immediately that i7
| is powerful, and everyone [that cares] already knows that
| processors are renewed frequently. Though yeah, perhaps
| something like 7i1, 7i2 would've been better. Apple solved this
| nicely (given the naming is confirmed) with M1X.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| But then you have different i7 variants with one having a
| different letter in the name which makes it just half as
| powerful because it's an extra energy-conserving mobile CPU.
|
| I'm not into hardware but I have a rough overview, though
| whenever I'm supposed to help someone choose a laptop I only
| see a whole page with dozens of products and the only
| difference are a few numbers in the CPU serial number and
| some other weird product names and I simply have no idea what
| to say. I fully understand people who just go "I take this
| one because it has a nice color" - a layperson simply has no
| chance at understanding the difference, and good luck finding
| a store where the employees know more.
|
| I never owned an Apple computer and I can still tell you on
| the spot which category of Macbook is better and more
| expensive, and why. Might have to do with the devices having
| normal names instead of alphanumeric strings that probably
| came from a password generator.
| Joeri wrote:
| It is very confusing because typically the previous
| generation's i7 performs the same as the current gen's i5,
| within the same tdp tier, and i5's from a higher tdp can
| vastly outperform i7's from a lower tdp within the same
| generation. Typically at any one time there are two or three
| processor generations in actual laptops being sold, as well
| as three or more tdp classes, so there is basically no good
| way of knowing how different laptops in the store compare
| performance-wise except by looking up benchmarks.
| mysterydip wrote:
| That's fine if you're buying new. Is there an i5 that beats
| an older i7 in performance? When buying a used laptop or
| desktop, how much extra research do I need to do to figure
| out which processor I'm actually getting? There's been 13
| years of i7's.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Is there an i5 that beats an older i7 in performance?
|
| Of course. I got a new laptop last year with a Core
| i5-10300H, and it easily beats my desktop i7-4790K, despite
| the same number of cores, in every workload.
|
| UserBenchmark is your friend for this kind of thing really:
|
| https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/
|
| I do have to say that nowadays buying an Intel CPU is a
| _really_ bad idea though.
| oblio wrote:
| I can't ever imagine why manufactures of <<everything>>
| don't use dates.
|
| Product lines 1 - 10. Bigger is better.
|
| A minimal number of qualifiers next to the numbers, ideally
| just 1 of them next to a product line number
| (Pro/Home/Hobby/Enterprise/whatever).
|
| Date, month and year format if you really want flexibility.
|
| OblioCorp Oblio 1 Home 2020.06. Oblio 10 Enterprise
| 2021.04.
|
| How hard is that? Not that hard, from where I'm standing.
| bakatubas wrote:
| It makes sense for software release versions, but I think
| this lacks marketing prowess.
|
| Consider; "hey man check out my new M1 machine!" Versus:
| "hey man check out my M1 2021.04"
|
| Even with the Core series it's short and sweet.
|
| "10th gen. Core i7" still sounds futuristic and always
| will.
|
| Ryzen 7 also.
|
| Honestly I think folks here are overthinking this stuff.
| It's easy enough to compare the specs on a 10th gen cpu
| vs 8th gen. I think that's easier than comparing
| different product names.
|
| For instance, just by the names: Pentium 5 versus Core i5
| it's not quite clear unless folks were old enough to
| remember Pentiums. Whereas, everyone knows current
| generation has better processing than previous
| generation.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Speaking of Ryzen, I see everyone attacking Intel for
| their naming especially now that the generation is 2
| digits, but AMD's situation is a mess too. The Ryzen 7
| 5800x is built on Zen 3 architecture. I know the
| numbering scheme and still sometimes mix up the
| generation of processor with the generation of
| architecture.
|
| Also, given that AMD copied Intel's 3/5/7/9 numbering,
| I'll be interested to see if in a few years they're
| selling a 10800x.
| tjoff wrote:
| > _Versus: "hey man check out my M1 2021.04"_
|
| _Noone_ would ever say it like that. They would simply
| say: _"hey man check out my new M1 machine!"_ And if it
| happened to come at a generation shift the context would
| make it obvious if it was the old generation at a bargain
| or the brand new generation. (or that the person saying
| it couldn 't care less about specs and generations)
|
| Now if you would buy a used computer, or would like to
| compare your current i7 to the latest i7 - then you would
| take notice. How much difference is there between a i5
| 2021.04 vs. i7 2016.8 ?
|
| That is dead simple to google and reason about.
|
| Compare that to: So what computer do you have? Oh, it is
| an i7 with 16 GB of RAM. I have no idea what decade that
| machine is from. And noone remembers the specific
| version, and if they do I have no idea how to parse it
| anyway.
| nl wrote:
| Because approximately no one in the whole supply chain
| wants to be stuck with a part dated last year.
|
| And product lines are speced 12 months in advance.
|
| So you need precise demand prediction all the way along
| your supply chain for this to work.
| oblio wrote:
| Who's ever going to use the full date in the marketing
| material?
|
| Apple never says iPad 2019 on their website, until you
| start digging really hard.
| thehnguy wrote:
| This was a situation I ran into a lot when buying simple
| Intel-based nuc's for family. It got more complex when the
| difference between and i5 and i7 got really close due to
| thermal constraints.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I don't think this is a solveable problem. with a wide
| range of skus, inevitably there will be an nth gen part
| that outperforms an n+1th gen part.
| bluedino wrote:
| The i7 name was ruined by dual core mobile parts
|
| It meant at one time "quad core"
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean......the very first generation of i7s already had a
| dual-core mobile part, i7-620M was a dual core cpu.
|
| So I'd argue you can't really "ruin" something you've just
| introduced. I do agree that for a while it was standard that
| a desktop i7 was a quad core and a mobile one was dual core.
| klelatti wrote:
| At one point I think hyperthreading was i7 only too?
| gambiting wrote:
| Mobile i5s always had hyperthreading from the beginning.
|
| Edit: nope, actually, I'm wrong - Core i5-430M was a
| straight dual core, no hyperthreading part.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Originally, my memory says "i7 meant 4+ core & hyper
| threading", "i5 meant 4 cores w/o HT", "i3 meant 2 cores
| (with or without HT)".
|
| But I'm sure even at the beginning there were SKUs that
| broke the coding due to customer demand.
| jandrese wrote:
| I think the lesson here is that Intel's marketing for
| these chips has been a mess from day one.
|
| Some of it is inevitable, they have too many aspects to
| contain in a reasonable product name, but letting the
| names become divorced from any sort of reality helps
| nobody.
| usefulcat wrote:
| I'm writing this on a dual core i3 with hyper threading.
| superjan wrote:
| Yes this was so annoying... We optimized software for multi
| core, but the laptop builders label their products as 10th
| gen i7.... which says little about it's performance. GPU
| labels are easier to decode by comparison.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Interesting. Marketing about "computer guts" has never been an
| Apple thing,so it's interesting to consider the motivation
| here. It _could_ be that the M1 is that revolutionary, but
| Moore 's Law et al makes me think this is not about new chip
| technology. More likely competing against Intel or whoever.
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| How can you say Marketing is not being commented.
|
| Outside of consumerist/fanboy forums (here is the later) it is
| the only thing being talked about.
|
| M1 is apple doing a mattress-store on the CPU market. It is 90%
| marketing.
|
| Would people be talking about apple if either of these were
| true:
|
| - they announced the cpu architecture and metioned a integrated
| GPU with a few cuda cores
|
| - they used numbers in the axis of their promo graphs :)
| AnonC wrote:
| > I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7
| stays the same over 10+ years with only the obscure (to the
| general public) suffix changing from generation to generation.
|
| It's been a mess for a long time. An i7 may be less performant
| than an i5, which may be less performant than an i3...all
| depending on which specific processor is chosen.
| fiatSuxxxx wrote:
| I'm not convinced this is all Organic. Given Apples poor ethics
| I imagine lots of this is astroturfing or free equipment that
| demands positive reviews. Along with an upvote factory.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > i7 stays the same over 10+ years with only the obscure (to
| the general public) suffix changing from generation to
| generation.
|
| My wife was confused about that earlier this week. She was
| like: 'you mean i7 is not newer than i5? And if i7 is better
| than i5, why can an i5 be better than an i7? (when it's an old
| i7)'
|
| I get they have the generation. But:
|
| 1 - it's not easy to compare different models of different
| generations. How can a non-technical person compare 7th gen i5
| with 5th gen i7?
|
| 2 - Many places that sell computers don't put the generation on
| the 'headline'. You have to dig in the specs to discover that,
| if you can find it at all
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, it's arguably quite weird that Intel don't market this
| way anymore (they used to, particularly with the Pentium
| brand).
|
| EDIT: Though, thinking about it, I can see why they might have
| been reluctant. Of the big releases over the last 15 years or
| so, Core 2 was, while a massive improvement, also essentially
| an admission that P4, and their whole strategy around it, had
| failed, and Skylake had a lot of teething troubles. The only
| big microarch shift that was an unqualified plus was Haswell,
| and I don't understand why they weren't louder about that.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| > I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7
| stays the same over 10+ years
|
| I think that is because the performance has been the same for
| the past 10+ years.
| FpUser wrote:
| Not really. I had this exact case when modern i7 laptop had
| kicked the butt of my 10 year old desktop speed wise at the
| same number of cores. Not sure how's this trend would go when
| started now though.
| makomk wrote:
| The overall performance of Intel's range of processors may
| not have changed much, but what they called an i3, i5 or i7
| sure has lately. For example, the popular i7-7700k is most
| similar in terms of core count, clocks etc to the current i3
| chips, and I don't think there was any real equivalent to the
| current i5 or i7 chips back then. If I remember rightly, the
| generations prior to that were still seeing actual
| performance improvements generation-on-generation too.
| jean_tta wrote:
| Most people have no need to compare CPUs between mobile/non
| mobile or generation. They just need to know if the laptop
| they're looking at has the high end / middle end / low end
| CPU. You'd be comparing a new laptop with latest(-ish) CPUs.
|
| The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.
|
| You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is
| called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Yeah and then they get surprised at why the mobile one
| suck.
|
| That was me trying to play games on laptops with 'i7' about
| a dozen years ago.
| jean_tta wrote:
| I am not arguing that the product naming is perfect, only
| that is not completely absurd as others claimed.
|
| Comparing the performance of laptop and desktop is a
| niche case. Most people know whether they want a laptop
| or a desktop and then choose among those categories.
| eitland wrote:
| > Comparing the performance of laptop and desktop is a
| niche case. Most people know whether they want a laptop
| or a desktop and then choose among those categories.
|
| I think you will find many people thinking that is a very
| useful thing to compare.
| tester34 wrote:
| what???
|
| >The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.
|
| there are i7s that are terrible
|
| there are i5s that are terrible
|
| there are decent i3s
|
| "i3" "i5" "i7" doesn't tell you anything itself about perf
| manigandham wrote:
| That's already too low-level for most people. They care
| about the overall device model, not the components inside.
| This is why Apple has been so successful, everything has a
| simple model and version number or year attached, with
| generally more performance as numbers (storage, ram) get
| bigger.
| caslon wrote:
| You can't forget that there are multiple variants of i3, i5
| and i7 every year! And presumably now the i9 but I haven't
| been paying attention.
|
| 6400 6500 6600 6600 _k_ random assortment of numbers and
| letters!
|
| It hardly works! The consumer still has to do just as much
| work!
| kijin wrote:
| It's even worse these days. There are letters in the
| middle of the model name, e.g. i7-1165G7, not just at the
| beginning and end! That thing doesn't even sort. You have
| no idea where to position it without seeing the spec
| sheet and Passmark scores.
|
| We consumers have it easy, though. Go find some Xeon or
| EPYC model numbers and try to figure out which digit
| means what. They make absolutely no sense.
| jrumbut wrote:
| This definitely feels like an engineer's approach to
| marketing.
| klelatti wrote:
| The decision that people think about most is when to
| upgrade (by definition it stretches over a longer time
| period than the single point purchasing decision).
|
| That's why we have iPhone 7/8/9...13 and similarly for
| Samsung etc.
|
| If your i3/i5/i7 designation gives no clues then that's not
| helpful.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yes, this point is so obvious, I feel like I've got to be
| missing something. I am a professional programmer. I am
| vaguely aware that Intel chips have X-Lake based
| codenames. I have no idea how to compare the chip in my
| current laptop to a new laptop based on Intel's marketing
| names. To convince myself to upgrade, I just go to
| Geekbench, because nothing else in the marketing tells me
| the new chip is better. Seems like a very fundamental
| marketing failure that could be resolved by exposing the
| X-Lake names to the public in some friendly form.
| klelatti wrote:
| I think Intel's marketing may have fallen down because:
|
| - At one point everyone upgraded their PC every few years
| anyway.
|
| - Just having Intel on the box was sufficiently
| impressive to make the sale.
|
| Now they really need to push their latest CPUs as the
| latest and greatest.
|
| I like the Lake names but I've never understood from a
| marketing perspective (what have chips got to do with
| lakes - were they designed near these lakes?) they feel
| more like code names that accidentally got leaked.
| k1t wrote:
| They are code names.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_codenames
| sib wrote:
| Many years ago Intel got sued for using code names that
| were things like "Hendrix" so they started using code
| names that were geographic features that could not be
| "owned" by others...
| Macha wrote:
| Intel CPU numbering:
|
| iX-YYZZZ[Suffix]
|
| X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better
|
| Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a
| numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen
| where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet
| Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops
|
| ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better,
| more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing.
|
| Suffixes:
|
| H = "High Performance" - laptop CPUs with higher perf and
| higher energy usage. The fastest laptop chips in a given
| gen previously got branded "HQ" (originally the Q meant
| quad core), but otherwise HQ = H.
|
| U = "Ultra portable" - laptop CPUs with lower perf and
| energy usage. Usually can boost well for short tasks, so
| you might not notice if the most intensive thing you do
| is compiling code but fall flat for longer workloads such
| as gaming.
|
| Y = Lowest power usage - These are all garbage, to be
| honest. You might have one in your windows tablet or
| netbook.
|
| M = "Mobile" - dead these days, as the H chips replaced
| them, there were a couple of gens where H and M co-
| existed with H > M > U.
|
| G_N_ - Integrated graphics rating. All G3 cpus in the
| same gen will have the same igpu. This only exists on
| tenth gen/eleventh gen 10nm chips. These chips are more
| efficient than H/U series chips at the same perf, but
| don't yet reach the performance peaks of the H series due
| to lower clock speeds.
|
| K - Unlocked overclockable CPUs, mostly desktop chips,
| but HK chips for laptops exist too.
|
| F - No integrated GPU. Mostly desktop only.
|
| T - Power efficient desktop CPU (thanks mehlmao)
|
| These suffixes can be combined, e.g. HK for overclockable
| laptop cpus or KF for desktop cpus with overclocking and
| no IGPU.
|
| ---
|
| So the rule of thumb version for a laptop buyer is H =
| high power, U/Gx = better battery life, within that, pick
| highest perf ranking number (ZZZ) within your budget.
| Deduct 1-2 positions per generation out of date. If you
| need to compare cross-gen or vs AMD, you need to go look
| at reviews.
|
| The G numbers in particular are pretty meaningless to
| consumers. Basically all Intel iGPUs fall into a bucket
| that is "Good enough for windows or esports titles, not
| good enough for new or recent AAA games".
|
| Other features are more of interest to DIY builders,
| nobody is going to sell you a laptop with no igpu and no
| dgpu, and if you're not interested enough to read up on
| this, you certainly don't care about overclocking.
| javajosh wrote:
| Oh wow, this is great Macha! You've provided a concise
| solution to a real puzzle who's importance fit precisely
| in the space occupied by "important enough to know" and
| "not important enough to research it myself". Intel
| should put your explanation in a PDF and distribute it
| widely. (Or better, review their marketing approach.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| Has anyone made a website that decodes the numbers like
| this?
| clukic wrote:
| Well...this is incredibly useful information that is
| remarkably obscure.
| vel0city wrote:
| They might not do it anymore but they also previously
| used P for GPU-less CPUs as well, i.e. 3350P.
|
| https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/6911
| 4/i...
| mehlmao wrote:
| There's also the T suffix for desktop processors,
| indicating lower power usage. I put one of those in my
| NAS/Plex server.
| unchocked wrote:
| Right, and this describes the marketing problem. If I
| already have an i5, why would I need another one unless
| it's broken?
|
| If I have an M1 and they're selling M5's, I'm continually
| reminded that my rig is out of date.
| kijin wrote:
| This reminds me of when the iPhone first came out. Back
| then, most phones from other manufacturers had an
| assortment of random names and model numbers that carried
| no hint as to which one was better or newer. Meanwhile,
| iPhone N+1 was obviously better than iPhone N.
|
| Samsung quickly learned to play the same trick with their
| yearly Galaxy S and Galaxy Note releases. That decision
| probably contributed to the market share they've been
| enjoying.
| astrange wrote:
| The confusing names can be good for big box stores
| because they prevent comparison shopping, if every store
| gets their own SKU then they can offer to beat
| competitors' prices without ever having to do it.
| Although for phones, they were mostly handed out by
| carriers at the time and people didn't shop on their own.
| Macha wrote:
| Except you go to the store and there's laptops with 3
| generations of cpus in there and the 10nm/14nm split for
| tenth gen so it's entirely possible to run into a laptop
| with an i7 worse than the i5 in the laptop next to it on
| the shelf/store webpage.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Or in my case, my new i3 laptop runs circles around my
| 5-year-old i7 laptop.
| michaelt wrote:
| Maybe not.
|
| But if you're thinking "Should I upgrade my 6 year old i7
| system?" or "Will I notice the difference from spending an
| extra $200 on my CPU?" these days it isn't easy to come up
| with a sure answer.
| josho wrote:
| That's intentional. It's so that the salesperson can use
| messaging to guide you to whatever machine they have the
| best margins on.
| hobs wrote:
| Spoiling your customers with choice actually often has
| the opposite effect, they become apathetic and do
| nothing.
| brewdad wrote:
| For me, the buying strategy these days is to decide on
| the features that are most important (screen, keyboard,
| RAM, battery life, etc.) Find a machine that satisfies
| those key elements and then pick a price point and buy.
| Doing anything more leads to the paralysis you mention.
| memsom wrote:
| When you can walk in to a store and be presented with
| laptops with "Core i5" that are 1 or more generations
| apart, and where a newer processor isn't always better than
| an older generation (different architecture, cores caches
| etc), I think having more than "it's an new laptop and it
| has an i5" is quite helpful. I think with the Apple chips,
| there is always a progression so far. If they keep that up,
| the marketing is on point and you'd always know that what
| you are buying is "one better than last year". I appreciate
| we can't guess what they will actually do, and the reality
| might be as diluted as the ia32/X64 marketplace is now.
| eloff wrote:
| The performance difference between i7s of 10 years ago versus
| today is more than 2x per core, and the number of cores have
| also more than doubled in that time period.
|
| That's over a 4x performance difference in 10 years, it's not
| quite the good old days of Moore's law, but it's still an
| exponential improvement.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| That sounds like an S-curve, not an exponential
| improvement. You can make any monotonically increasing
| function look exponential if you only have two points
| (f(n+x)/f(n)) and you get to pick both n and X. "It doubled
| over the past fifty years!"
|
| If looking at all the points shows the time it takes to
| double is way longer than it used to be you're probably on
| the top of the S.
|
| Which, ok, we know we're headed to an S-curve instead.
| There are limitations on what we can do on silicon, right?
|
| It's just that the CISC/Intel S-curve is way lower than the
| ARM/M1 S-curve. Intel got used to leaving a margin of
| performance sitting on the table because it'll be faster
| next year. They got lazy. As chip gains have slowed those
| margins have started to add up.
| kevstev wrote:
| I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge
| core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely
| serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The
| bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays
| standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded,
| but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works
| great alongside my main laptop I use for work.
|
| I knew back in 2011 I was buying something that was going to
| be pretty future proof, but 10 years... I would have laughed
| at you.
| nemacol wrote:
| I built my own gaming pc back in Nov 2010 with an i7-970
| 24g ram. While I have upgraded the GPU twice and upgraded
| to larger SSD's as prices have come down, I am still using
| the same machine for gaming. Not that what I am doing is
| very intense or hardcore intense graphics. I can
| comfortably play all the Blizzard titles, modern FPS like
| whatever COD is newest, etc. Maybe not on max settings
| anymore.
|
| Still, I am impressed by how much I have gotten out of my
| machine.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| There is only one other popular task that a decade-old CPU
| can't handle acceptably well: running a web browser.
| Outside of that, computers have been good enough ever since
| HiDPI/Retina screens became standard.
| MrFoof wrote:
| I'm also staring at a Mid-2011 Sandy Bridge quad-core iMac
| that's been on my desk since May 2011.
|
| It'll be replaced come August-ish with a 32-core Zen 3
| Threadripper (with 256GB of ECC). Though in a few years
| I'll likely put an M3 Mac Mini alongside it to figure out
| when I'll feel comfortable going to ARM full time, as all
| my customers (and their applications) are still native x86
| only... for now.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| I got a 2009 Mac Pro with dual sockets at a state auction
| and put in a couple of inexpensive hexcore Xeons. The sum
| total after 2 graphics cards and 48 GB of RAM was less than
| $750 and it runs everything pretty well.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| If it weren't for the fact that it's not good at being a
| laptop (chunky, heavy, hot), I'd be perfectly happy using
| my old QX9300 (Core 2 Quad) workstation laptop for day to
| day. With an SSD and the Bluetooth+Wifi upgraded to Intel
| AX200 it's only marginally slower than my newer x86 boxes
| at most things, and its 15.4" 1920x1200 display is still
| nicer than what ships on a lot of laptops today. Wouldn't
| want to use it as a dev machine, but any less demanding
| usage would be fine.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I think that's because 99% of regular computer tasks don't
| need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second.
|
| The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more
| about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That's why
| they look _so_ much better in benchmarks that are designed
| with that in mind.
|
| My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple
| VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only
| gave Windows four (of my 16) cores. Literally 3/4 of the
| processor was unused for months, and I didn't notice any
| slow performance the entire time.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core
| per Chrome tab.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Yeah, 2500 cores per CPU sure would be nice.
| yunohn wrote:
| I'm unsure if this is sarcasm.
|
| But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a
| majority of the time. There's no value to this at all.
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| > But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a
| majority of the time.
|
| Maybe they do not have an ad blocker? :D
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| My new M1 constantly freezes, and I'm pretty sure it's
| because of chrome. Or the secret SSD thrashing design
| flaw that Apple is hoping nobody talks about till they
| quietly fix it.
|
| Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new
| thing! I'm freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I
| miss sandy bridge, etc.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| What about Safari?
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's a perfectly valid question. Lots of people use
| Chrome because they've used Chrome, and that's the whole
| reason. Some people _need_ Chrome because it supports
| some site or tool that they require. I recommend that
| everyone else at least _try_ Safari and see what they
| think of it.
| davio wrote:
| When I first had my M1, I ironically had to use Canary
| for stability purposes
| spurgu wrote:
| Last time I tried it (couple of months ago) there were
| practically no extensions and Bitwarden didn't work in
| incognito. And Chrome's UI/UX is simply great. And dev
| tools as well.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| That's a personal preference thing. Personally I think
| chrome UI/UX is horrible and slow. Ut I'm a safari user
| so again: personal preference.
| spurgu wrote:
| Sure, I've never used Safari enough myself to have an
| opinion (since it's never been an option for me due to
| various things), it might be equal to Chrome or even
| better (I like Safari's clean UI). I'm mostly comparing
| it to Firefox which is quite clunky in my opinion (I've
| given it many chances).
|
| And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks
| like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in
| private mode. Maybe it's time to give it yet another
| shot. :)
| vesrah wrote:
| Is the the 8GB model? I had the same issue with my
| workload and found that it was always under high memory
| pressure, upgrading to a 16GB model fixed it for me.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It's the 16GB. The memory pressure is indeed the issue. I
| find it hilarious that Apple accidentally inverted their
| LRU into an MRU and constantly swaps for no reason, yet
| it's still so fast that nobody even noticed during QA.
| Mine has already read/wrote 48TB in the first three
| weeks; at this rate the SSD will be dead in three years.
|
| (If you haven't looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check
| your smartmon to see whether you're affected.)
| msie wrote:
| This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I
|
| The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
| astrange wrote:
| Emulated apps don't use more memory. It's more likely
| Activity Monitor calculates their usage wrong, it doesn't
| show very accurate numbers in the first place.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Chrome is by far the worst-performing browser on my
| (Intel-based) Mac with many tabs open. It doesn't come
| anywhere close to keeping up with my browsing style,
| wasting tons of system resources, glitching, crashing,
| etc.... and then oh wow the battery drain.
|
| Safari is best, but Firefox is also pretty decent
| nowadays.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I use an M1 powered 16GB MacBook Air and I've never seen
| any freezing, even under heavy load. I don't use Google
| Chrome though.
|
| Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of
| my Linux machines: 4TB/year.
| markphip wrote:
| Same here, zero freezing and amazing performance. I use
| Safari though and have not even installed Chrome.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I consider Chrome harmful TBH. I use Safari and Firefox
| (and I sync it with my other, non-apple computers).
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six
| of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a
| few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube
| videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm,
| one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs
| open in Preview. I'm not exactly representative, but I
| think the stddev of usage patterns is high across
| developers.
|
| The unfortunate part is, when it freezes, it does the
| beachball for a full minute before I successfully execute
| a "switch to activity monitor / s click topmost process /
| force quit / confirm" sequence. Each step takes around 45
| seconds to complete. I assume Apple QA never tested the
| extreme edges of workloads.
|
| One poor guy on Twitter is already up to 18% of his SSD
| lifetime, in the first three months of having an M1. We
| had a heart to heart about how silly it was that the
| drive will die within a year, that Apple better replace
| it under warranty, and so on. But it's a coin toss
| whether he'll just have to eat the cost and buy a new
| one:
| https://twitter.com/_wli/status/1364934834229977090?s=21
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is heavy load for any machine unless it's configured
| as a bona fide workstation. Any machine, any OS (with M1
| MacBook Air's HW configuration) would trash its SSD while
| swapping in that case, IMHO.
|
| > I'm not exactly representative, but I think the stddev
| of usage patterns is high across developers.
|
| When I'm in development mode with all cylinders firing, I
| have a single Eclipse window in CDT perspective, a couple
| of terminal tabs, Zeal (or Dash) for documentation and a
| couple of firefox tabs for documentation not available in
| Zeal.
|
| Music is either supplied by a single YouTube tab or
| Spotify, and that's it.
|
| The most unfortunate component is CPU in my case. I try
| to ooze every single bit of performance from it while
| running the application. Memory controller comes the
| second due to transfer operations but, I neither max out
| the RAM or cause system to do heavy swapping.
|
| I'm always kind of conscious about the hardware resources
| of the system and minimize my resource usage habitually,
| without killing productivity.
| msie wrote:
| This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I
|
| The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you for finding this!
|
| Unfortunately, and somewhat sadly, and melanchololy, I
| must report that I've been at OS version 11.2.3 (the
| latest) and run almost zero Rosetta apps: KeepassX,
| Beyond Compare, and Optimal Layout; of those, Optimal
| Layout has read 100GB, which is almost nothing.
|
| In comparison, my kernel_task process is at 43TB bytes
| written, and WindowServer is at 8TB read.
|
| So, as with cancer, there are multiple contributing
| factors, and hopefully Apple will ship an update to fix
| it... someday.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Well on Linux my 16GB thinkpad would thrash for more than
| 60 seconds unless I sysrq.
| oriolid wrote:
| The surprising part is that you have attention to spare
| for all those distractions.
| cesarvarela wrote:
| And here I am, thinking that heavy load is one node
| instance running webpack, a sql server, vscode, Figma and
| a few chrome tabs.
| exikyut wrote:
| I am genuinely curious how you keep track of all that.
| Presumably this is all spread out over maybe a dozen
| workspaces?
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm reminded of the podcast ATP and the great episode
| 'The Windows of Siracusa County'. John's window
| management system is both baffling and amazing. It's a
| good listen.
|
| https://atp.fm/96
| bayindirh wrote:
| Possibly multiple desktops.
| airstrike wrote:
| > 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch
| streams and YouTube videos
|
| > around 35 macvim windows
|
| You do you, but I'd wager you could probably trim some of
| that low hanging fat
| snambi wrote:
| If I do the same in my intel Mac book pro, it not only
| screams, burns but also slows down. honestly intel chips
| are overrated and overpriced.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube
| videos_
|
| How many eyes do you have?
| astrange wrote:
| Sounds like you should report it in Feedback Assistant
| since you have an unusual workload.
| amilios wrote:
| I actually have an orthogonal issue, but I wonder if it's
| related. When I have an external monitor connected via a
| Thunderbolt dock, the device takes forever to wake from
| hibernation (that is to say when I've left it on sleep
| for several hours). i.e. 10+ seconds, which is kind of
| ridiculous in 2021. This doesn't happen when the monitor
| is not connected. I also have a similar amount of things
| open as you described
| thehnguy wrote:
| This is perhaps the real genius of the M1. It's a great
| chip and all. But when you make it the only choice,
| people are finding the only choice is more than
| sufficient. And now Apple only has to produce one piece
| of silicon for their iMacs, iPad Pro, and Laptops. What a
| boon for logistics.
| fragmede wrote:
| The success of the M1 is a boon for Apple, but I'm not
| sure that only having to produce one CPU to be used
| across all devices is where the optimization lies,
| especially considering that Apple is selling the iPhone
| SE with an older CPU and not simplifying by not selling
| it.
| pranavjoneja wrote:
| Just because it's being sold today doesn't mean it's
| actively manufactured still. They could have stockpiled
| the older processors or have spare inventory to continue
| meeting demand
| mh8h wrote:
| I have a 15" retina MacBook Pro from 2012, and another
| from 2018. The one from 2012 is fine for everyday use.
| But the difference in single core performance, and also
| IO, is substantial. That's really important when it comes
| to a lot of typical development work. For example Rails
| starts at least 2x faster on the newer laptop.
| ynik wrote:
| Two years ago when I got the Lenovo e590 (Intel Core
| i5-8265U), I benchmarked running the unit tests of my
| project on it. (though I didn't really intend on using the
| e590 for development) I compared against my old desktop
| from 2010 (1st-gen Core i5-750).
|
| Turns out that the old desktop won by a solid 10% margin! A
| whole decade of new Intel generations still can't make up
| for the disadvantage of using a mobile CPU.
|
| P.S. The e590 barely survived 2 years and is dead now
| (broken USB-C charging port).
| ska wrote:
| > I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable
| for pretty
|
| Isn't this essentially what Apple's observation was (and
| hence their spec choices)?
| pdimitar wrote:
| My gaming PC is almost 10 years old and is with an i7 3770.
| Only upgrade was a GTX 980 five or six years ago.
|
| That thing _flies_ for anything and everything I put it
| through.
|
| One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it
| to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure
| it's going to be even faster than Win10.
| bitwize wrote:
| Yeah, I have two thinkpads -- one from 2010 and one from
| 2012. Both of them have enough grunt to get through most
| any task, the heaviest of which is compiling large
| codebases. One of them was my daily driver for eight
| years; I only upgraded to a Ryzen because I wanted MOAR
| COARS and more RAM.
|
| It's funny how today's computers could theoretically
| handle a user's workload for decades yet Apple builds
| them to fall apart after four years. There was a
| Hackernews story recently about a guy faffing around with
| old 68k Macs from the late 80s, he said that those old
| Macs were rated by Apple to last for _fifteen years_. And
| yet they come from an era of much more rapid utility
| decay for computer hardware, when a computer would be
| utterly obsolete after just a few years.
| anthk wrote:
| TBH a 68040 mac would be useful in 1999.
| oriolid wrote:
| This would be more convincing if I wasn't reading it on a
| 2013 Macbook. But yes, Big Sur is the last major update
| available and in a few years it's going to be obsolete.
| bayindirh wrote:
| My primary desktop is a 3770K running Linux. That CPU's
| the unexpected beast. Just churning through what you
| throw at it with incredible speed even for today. I
| process RAW photos, encode some audio and develop high
| performance scientific software on it (testing it lowers
| my heating bills, somewhat).
|
| I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no
| reason to upgrade.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I've been doing big C++ builds (think gcc, LLVM-sized
| projects) on my Ryzen 9 5950X and I wouldn't have it any
| other way. This thing saves me so much time every day.
| It's so nice not to have to do remote builds to get a
| quick prototype.
|
| The best part is that it was a drop in replacement for my
| 2700X. I already had a great Noctua air cooler so I was
| all set.
| strictnein wrote:
| Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my gaming system (4970k and a
| GTX1080ti) but past wanting to play at 4k and experience
| ray tracing there is almost no reason to do so.
|
| Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd
| probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away
| from happening.
| pdimitar wrote:
| IMO go big or go home in this case. For a gaming machine
| I'd aim for some of the Ryzen 5000's (likely even the
| 5700 is an overkill) and an RTX 3090 so I can play
| 3440x1440 @ 144FPS (or maybe even 4K @ 120FPS).
|
| As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming
| machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display
| (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game.
| Usually it's 100-120 FPS.
| notJim wrote:
| The problem with these cards is actually being able to
| get one. Even if you've got the $2k to spend for a 3090,
| good luck with finding stock.
| pdimitar wrote:
| True. Right now I could only buy an RTX 3090 for 3100 EUR
| (~3740 USD) and I am not willing to pay that much.
|
| But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a
| very low prio.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yep and take computer from 2001 and run it in 2011, you
| wouldn't have been nearly as happy with the performance.
| There have been incremental upgrades but mostly just the
| core count which is great for handling server stuff but not
| nearly as noticeable as Hz counts increases
| brewdad wrote:
| The other main improvement in the past 10 years is the
| power draw. You can get more than 10 hours of battery
| life in a machine that weighs less than 3 lbs. That would
| have been unthinkable a decade ago.
|
| CPU improvements are only part of the story in making
| that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where
| things were in the not so distant past.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 10 hour battery life was achievable 15 years ago on
| Pentium M provided you under-volted, under-clocked, and
| had a high capacity battery.
| edvinbesic wrote:
| How far does this goalpost go?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The point is that the technology for long life laptops
| has been ready for a long time. It's just that Intel
| marketing calls all the shots and they only wanted to
| sell multicore space heaters with space heater memory to
| sweeten the deal. With this burden on chipset side, it
| was impossible to compensate with extra amp hours and
| maintain portable weight.
| simonh wrote:
| I have to admit this is right. Even my old 2012 i7 Mac mini
| is still a perfectly serviceable machine to this day.
| notahaterbut wrote:
| I have a near death grip on my late 2012 Mac mini i7
| (upgraded to 16GB and 2 1TB ssds) It has stood the test
| of time and to me is an engineering marvel.
|
| Aside from gaming it can last another 10 years.
|
| For longevity, I keep it on its side and replaced the
| bottom lid with an aluminum mesh lid. This has made it
| near silent for 80% of my tasks (programmer centric). I
| also regularly clean out the fan.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Same here - I was tempted to upgrade when the newer mac
| intel models came out, but the soldered RAM / SSD
| bullshit kept me off them. I've hear that the 2012 mac
| mini can theoretically support 32 GB RAM (as other
| similar i7 processor devices can) - I think I'll try that
| 5 years down the lane for the heck of it. For now, 16 GB
| RAM and an SSD disk make it a very capable machine, that
| can (as you rightly pointed out) last for another decade.
| city41 wrote:
| My 2012 MacBook Pro (the very first retina model) is 100%
| usable as daily driver. Only problem is it needs a new
| battery.
| officeplant wrote:
| Late-2012 ivy bridge i5 Mac Mini here. For a dual core
| machine it's really not all that bad of a daily driver
| experience. Makes me sad that I have to spend a crazy
| amount of money to get 16GB of ram and 1TB of SSD in a M1
| Mini to match what I currently use. (although I
| understand the 1TB of SSD in the M1 is vastly superior)
| nemacol wrote:
| Just for the fun of it, I tried to play WoW classic on my
| late-2012 mac mini and it ran like a toaster oven, but it
| worked just fine. Pretty fun. After putting the SSD in
| it, of course.
| officeplant wrote:
| Yeah smcfancontrol is a must. I keep the fan around
| ~3000rpm during moderate use and bump it up to 5000rpm or
| max it out if I'm going to game or render something. I've
| been tempted to look into TB2 to TB3 adapters and eGPU's
| but its a janky solution to extending the life of an 8+
| year old machine.
| kergonath wrote:
| I used to play WoW on a G4 PowerBook! To be honest, it
| was decent, but the resolution was not great. I remember
| vividly having to look at the ground and zoom in all the
| way just to be able to go from the bank to the AH at IF.
| Hopefully whatever Intel GPU you have in your Mini is
| better than the Radeon 9700 in my old laptop.
| reaperducer wrote:
| 11-inch 2011 MacBook Air here. It's my main machine.
|
| I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out
| with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| My desktop is 2010 vintage 6-core Phenom II 1100T with 16GB
| RAM, the motherboard is officially maxed out, but I've been
| told it can take 32GB just fine. It has been upgraded with
| an SSD and more recently a Radeon RX560, and it really does
| everything I need. Newer games do need lower settings, but
| it'll motor through most games at 720p. I added a PCIe
| USB-C interface card, so I'm not even stuck at USB 2.0
| anymore.
|
| I have considered replacing it with something smaller, now
| that all of my files are on a NAS and I don't need room for
| 5-6 drives in this machine. But I just don't feel like I
| would be getting enough of an improvement over what I
| already have, even with hefty new parts.
|
| My laptop is a 2011 vintage X220i, and that is starting to
| feel a little bit behind, mostly thanks to the i3 inside.
| But it connects to 5GHz WiFi and is fast enough for
| browsing and video playback, so for now it keeps on
| truckin'.
|
| Actually the best upgrade would be a decently powerful
| 12-14" laptop paired with an eGPU dock. That setup would
| handily replace both machines, but eGPUs just aren't a
| mature configuration yet, especially combined with Linux.
| Maybe in a few years.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > I think that is because the performance has been the same
| for the past 10+ years.
|
| Ah yes, the exaggerated funny phrase. On a serious note, the
| performance difference from an i7 7th generation (7700k) to
| an i7 10th generation (10700k) felt quite impressive.
| onli wrote:
| Not a surprise. Stronger cores and double the cores and
| threads. And that's not a theoretical difference, they had
| a performance uptick of up to 100% even in games [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.pc-
| kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...
| DCKing wrote:
| The 7700K and 10700K use virtually the same Skylake
| architecture cores with very minor tweaks between them.
| The only CPU performance gains Intel made in the
| 2015-2020 period were clock speeds, core counts and
| support for higher memory speeds. The 7700K and 10700K
| even share the same integrated graphics architecture.
| onli wrote:
| I think that's correct. But it is all true at the same
| time. The cores are stronger because of the higher clock
| they can achieve and how the turbo clock works, and the
| higher core count does make a big difference. Higher
| memory speed also helps (though the difference in
| practice on Z board should be just a matter of what was
| typically on the market). Intel UHD 630 is even usually a
| tiny bit faster than the Intel HD 630, even if that's
| also only from the clock difference - only now with the
| UHD 730 and 750 did they improve things there.
| toss1 wrote:
| Interesting marketing approach for sure. What I want to know are
| the economies of scale for using a single component, both at the
| chip fab level, the main board level, and overall product level.
|
| Still seems like Apple's typical under-powered per price point
| offerings, but does this close the price/performance gap a bit,
| or drive higher profits at the same price points, or do they
| really see it as just a good marketing play?
|
| While it sounds nice to have one chip in different machines, what
| is the benefit to the user who buys one machine, typically for
| efficiency or power? I suppose in some edge cases it might be
| nice to have a laptop with CAD-station power, but also able to
| stream movies or edit documents for a full intercontinental
| flight on a single battery charge?
| alberth wrote:
| ARM is not more efficient / faster because it's "newer".
|
| People imply ARM is relatively new and thus could correct for the
| misdirection x86 has gone.
|
| 1978 is when x86 was introduced.
|
| 1985 is when ARM was introduced.
|
| ARM isn't that much newer than x86.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
| viktorcode wrote:
| ARMv8 is new though. That's where the path to M1 started.
| runeks wrote:
| Honest question: could it be a matter of backwards
| compatibility?
|
| Intel has been piling stuff on top of old architectures in
| order to stay backwards compatible at each step, while Apple
| had the opportunity to develop their architecture from scratch?
| I don't know the answer, I'm just curious.
| protomyth wrote:
| ARM 64-bit is cleaned up from the 32-bit ISA and showed up in
| 2011.
| glhaynes wrote:
| People tend to lump them all together and just call them "ARM"
| but the 64-bit instruction set ("AArch64") first came out in
| 2011 and is hugely different than classical 32-bit ARM. And the
| chips Apple makes these days don't even implement the 32-bit
| instruction set anymore.
| franciscop wrote:
| While the M1 is great now, I'm very hopeful in what's to come. If
| Apple can maintain even a bit of their current improvements year
| over year, in 2-3 years it just won't make sense to use anything
| else; see this graph to know what I mean:
|
| https://miro.medium.com/max/1356/1*_aVjpbyBkMq-KIY8kbbP_w.pn...
|
| Even if Intel can catch up somehow, it'll take years to catch up
| to this, and by then it'd be too late. The only reason why Apple
| will not win is that they bundle software and hardware too
| strongly. This some times and for some markets is a big strength,
| but other times it's a weakness IMHO.
| f6v wrote:
| > The only reason why Apple will not win is that they bundle
| software and hardware too strongly.
|
| That is the major reason M1 is having such a momentum. I was
| pretty skeptical that niche x86 FORTRAN R extensions would work
| on M1. But here we are, Rosetta made it the smoothest ride
| possible. Now look at Microsoft and their Surface Pro X.
| franciscop wrote:
| Yes, it's great to grab a big chunk of the market, but it'll
| limit then to grab the whole market IMHO.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8
| gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the
| time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything
| more than facebook and instagram.
| thefz wrote:
| Don't forget the entry-level 256GB SSD. With 1TB drives around
| 90EUR at retail.
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| Apple always nickel-and-dimes storage. Overpriced storage is
| how they make probably 5-10% of their hardware profits.
|
| iPhone still have 64GB as their base storage in 2021...
| martin8412 wrote:
| The default is 128GB..
| oblio wrote:
| LOL: https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/specs/
| thehnguy wrote:
| Only on the pro's. The base iPhones still start at 64GB.
| But that's a heck of an improvement from a couple years
| back when the entry was 16 GB!
| pjmlp wrote:
| This laptop does Visual C++ and C# development in Web, UWP and
| Win32 just fine with 8 GB.
|
| Ah, and I also do stuff in Java/Eclipse/Nebeans, D and Rust
| equally fine.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I don't disagree that 8GiB for $1700 machine is absurd,
| however, I feel compelled to point out that MacOS is
| significantly more aggressive with memory compression than
| other operating systems and they come with blazingly fast SSDs,
| allowing devices to get away with less available memory.
| runeks wrote:
| A blazingly fast SSD is excruciatingly slow RAM.
| kaba0 wrote:
| In-memory memory compression is the most meaningful part of
| what parent comment said. And it helps tremendously on
| other systems as well, for example zram is quite underhyped
| on linux.
| rogers18445 wrote:
| zram is a game changer. I believed I needed to upgrade
| 16gb to 32gb, with zram and a decent cpu no I don't. 97%
| full memory + 20GB zram swap and no noticeable problems.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I am trying to figure out where I said anything on the
| contrary.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| You mentioned "they come with blazingly fast SSDs" as
| part of what is "allowing devices to get away with less
| available memory"
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I did indeed, I never said that SSDs are a replacement
| for RAM, I just said that having access to 2.5GiB/s RW
| operations allows you to offload many things into the
| SSD, yes, thrashing is an issue, but it is much more
| insignificant at those speeds than disks.
|
| I am not defending apple in any way whatsoever, I even
| mentioned in the first sentence of the comment. I stated
| that they are able to do that because they compensate
| with compression and SSDs, applications in the background
| can be thrown in the swap and the user will rarely
| notice.
| detaro wrote:
| 2.5GB/s isn't really all that extraordinary speed
| anymore.
| astrange wrote:
| The part you're skipping over is the memory compression,
| which is much more important than you think it is.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I think they are saying that you will start swapping to
| disk with that little ram.
| znpy wrote:
| I don't even bother reasoning with apple fans anymore. It's
| a losing game.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| It's not even an argument, their comment is a fact that
| does not change nor contribute anything.
| r00fus wrote:
| The M1 SoC interconnects are what makes their SSD seem like
| swapping to disk doesn't even feel slow.
| jeswin wrote:
| > and they come with blazingly fast SSDs...
|
| Actually, they're somewhat slow compared to the competition.
|
| A 500GB M1 SSD gives you about 3.1GB/s of write and 2.75GB/s
| of read performance [1]. In comparison - a $219 Samsung 980
| Pro benchmarks at 4.2GB/s of write and 5.2GB/s of read
| performance [2]. Both on Disk Test from Black Magic.
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/k2lhi8/ssd_speedte
| st_o...
|
| [2]: https://www.servethehome.com/samsung-980-pro-500gb-pcie-
| gen4....
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Oh wow, Gen4 NVMes are really fast. Thanks for the link!
| emptyfile wrote:
| > blazingly fast SSDs
|
| So like, 2 times as fast as any other SSD? No? The comment
| reads like marketing spiel.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 2.5GiB random RW per sec [1].
|
| [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/16/apple-silicon-
| macbook-a...
| necovek wrote:
| What makes you think it's random RW?
|
| Fastest SSDs barely reach 200MiB/s on 4k block random
| writes (reads are usually slower, likely because they
| can't be cached if they are truly random):
|
| - 124MB/s for Samsung 980 Pro
| (https://www.servethehome.com/samsung-980-pro-500gb-pcie-
| gen4...) - 211MB/s for Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus
| (https://www.servethehome.com/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-2tb-
| revie...) - 171MB/s for Intel 670p
| (https://www.servethehome.com/intel-670p-2tb-m-2-nvme-
| ssd-rev...)
|
| 32/64 queue depths generally do not apply to desktop
| computing since you are unlikely to read that many file
| streams simultaneously (or rather, your one program that
| you care about right now might be loading only a few
| files at once, which is what you'd perceive as the SSD
| speed: the fact that OS services might be accessing other
| stuff in the background does not help much there).
| danieldk wrote:
| BlackMagic tests video workloads using sequential
| reads/swrites. 2.2/2.7 GiB/s is pretty average for a
| modern NVMe SSD. Even consumer-level Samsung NVMe SSDs
| are faster.
| iSnow wrote:
| I am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-
| powered machines is, tbh. I am a bit more extreme in that I am
| not buying any machine below 32GB given RAM is no longer
| upgradable, but even if my mom came and asked me about those
| iMacs, I'd tell her to not buy.
|
| It's a shame that Apple is so great at greenwashing and at the
| same time spits on every way they could help create truly
| sustainable products by just dropping a few percent of their
| bottom line.
| throwawayzRUU6f wrote:
| Reading this discussion thread makes one psychological quirk
| clear. People, even well informed professionals, are rarely
| comparing Apple to the best available alternative on the
| market (arguably Ryzen U line processors). They're comparing
| 2021 Apple products to their last experience with an
| alternative, which for many ppl stuck in Apple's ecosystem
| could very well be from 2010.
|
| So what's Apple's end-game? Milking (predominately US)
| professional class in perpetuity. It's not like they're going
| to switch, especially if they perceive the alternative to be
| sluggish heavy bricks whose battery barely lasts 2 hours. For
| sales, perception is more important than reality.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > Reading this discussion thread makes one psychological
| quirk clear.
|
| Is that so clear? It sounds more like a huge assumption to
| me. It's not like having an Apple laptop makes it
| impossible to see how the competition is doing. Doubly so
| for people with friends in tech.
| thefz wrote:
| > I am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-
| powered machines is, tbh
|
| The lowest and highest tier exist only to shift consumers
| towards the middle tier, where Apple profits the most and
| where lies less value for the consumer. It is a marketing
| strategy invented by Apple IIRC (it's been a long time since
| my marketing exam).
| iSnow wrote:
| I know, but AFAIK those new iMacs ALL feature just 8GB of
| RAM? There isn't really a middle-tier, that what makes it
| so weird. you'd expect one machine with top SSD and 16 GB
| (and space grey, lol).
|
| Probably going to be the next iteration of the 27" iMac,
| spanning from 8GB/256GB (LOL) to 16 GB/1TB or something.
| tempay wrote:
| You can upgrade them to 16GB. Having been developing
| heavy applications in a M1 Mac mini for since they were
| released they're definitely adequate for most users.
| Obviously some people need ~100 cores and ~1TB of ram
| (myself included for other parts of my job) but that
| segment is always going to be better served by companies
| other than Apple.
| masklinn wrote:
| > AFAIK those new iMacs ALL feature just 8GB of RAM?
|
| No. But people are confused because the RAM is
| (annoyingly though not entirely nonsensically) tied to
| the SSD.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I don't think it is. They usually offer a couple of
| configurations at different prices, but you can get a BTO
| machine with just the upgrades you want. The SSD+RAM are
| tied together in the new M1 iPad.
| masklinn wrote:
| Ah you're right, i'm the one who confused the two and
| remembered the weird setup of the iPad, the iMac's Tech
| Specs page does just state "8GB (configurable to 16GB)"
| for the entire range (whereas it's quite clear that the
| "low end" iMac with only 7 GPU cores can only be BTO'd to
| 1TB SSD, versus 2 for the 8-cores).
| MobileVet wrote:
| The strategy is called 'anchoring'
|
| I had no idea it was invented by Apple. That feels a little
| too recent...
| czzr wrote:
| Of course it wasn't invented by Apple, that would be
| ridiculous.
|
| It was actually invented by Goldilocks.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| We are in a period of technological regress it is well
| documented that the trend is to power down your devices and
| make your computer into a passive experience like TV
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Apple has WAY more statistics about what kind of computers
| people buy and use.
|
| I'm pretty sure they're not nickle & diming people with 8GB
| RAM M1 machines, someone somewhere has calculated that as
| being enough for most users.
|
| HN hardly is the place to compare what is "min spec" :)
|
| (As I'm writing this, my i7 MBP sounds like a jet taking off,
| CPU capped near 100%. Normal day at the office.)
| thehnguy wrote:
| I think that's a bit dramatic. I'm using a 16GB M1 Macbook
| Pro as my daily driver doing standard, boring professional
| work (lots of email, tabs open, PDF manipulation, Word,
| Excel, etc). It performs as well if not better than the 2018
| Macbook Pro it replaced with 32 GB of RAM and an i7. And it
| cost less than that one.
|
| The iMac will perform comparably (probably a bit better due
| to better thermals). My point is that these are not _bad_
| machines and I don 't see why you'd steer someone away from
| them. However, the price is still quite high compared to
| other manufacturers and options. But that's always been the
| case.
| paulpan wrote:
| I wonder if Apple's strategy is to push macOS developers to
| optimize for certain SOC cadences, rather than having to
| traditionally target every system configuration possible.
| Therefore they opted to only have limited SKUs of the M1: only
| differentiated by RAM and GPU cores.
|
| Analogy is gaming consoles - the hardware is fixed for X years
| so game developers know exactly what to target and make better
| looking & performing games over the cycle of that console.
| Compared to, say, Windows 10 that has to run on an almost
| infinite number of hardware configurations.
|
| This is actually similar to their approach to iOS and iPhones -
| iOS versions span across multiple iPhone cycles, but they are
| limits. For example, iOS 13 was supported on iPhones 6S thru
| iPhone 11, or the A9 thru the A13 SOCs. There's probably some
| correlation between good performance and the tight SOC-to-OS
| coupling.
|
| We'll likely see similar, limited configurations for future
| Apple M* SOCs.
| nojito wrote:
| > This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan
| to do anything more than facebook and instagram.
|
| You'd be shocked looking at any telemetry data which says that
| the average ram is 8gb and average ram use is ~50% or so.
| astrange wrote:
| RAM use should always be 100% for reasonable definitions of
| "use". There's always more disk pages to be cached unless the
| machine has just booted. If they're not all being used, it
| means something temporarily flushed all the pages which is
| actually a bad thing.
| runeks wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to assume that OP was talking about
| user space applications, not kernel disk cache.
| astrange wrote:
| Adding up the memory use of apps isn't actually a good
| way to calculate RAM needs though. It undercounts
| (because file caching matters too) and overcounts
| (because many things are fine swapped out).
| GordonS wrote:
| I'd believe that - because the average user likely doesn't do
| anything more than Facebook, Instagram, general browsing,
| word processing etc.
|
| I'd also believe it, since the number of laptops available
| with only 8GB of RAM is ridiculous - I swear it's because
| _more_ prevelant in the past few years, presumably because of
| RAM prices.
| simonh wrote:
| I bought a new machine last year that came with 8GB and ordered
| a 16GB upgrade for it which didn't arrive for a few weeks. I
| literally just now remembered I've never got round to
| installing it.
| ghshephard wrote:
| The 8 gigabyte machine is fine for 90% of people. I've
| recommended just getting that platform to a number of people,
| and none of them have had issues.
|
| I've got an 8 Gigabyte MBAir, and it never stutters. Meanwhile,
| on my 16 GByte Dell XPS (Ubuntu 20.04) - I routinely live in
| fear of exceeding my chrome tab quota because I know it will
| bring the system to a crashing halt. Somewhere around 45 is the
| point it all comes down.
|
| Meanwhile, I don't even think about how many safari tabs I have
| open (hundred+) - and 8-10 applications open at the same time.
|
| Different operating system has different models of swapping and
| degrading performance. Apple has nailed it.
| intergalplan wrote:
| Safari vs. Chrome (or Firefox) is one part of why I can get
| so much more mileage out of a Mac's memory than I can under
| Linux or Windows. It's _wildly_ more respectful of system
| resources, across the board--memory, processor cycles, and
| battery.
|
| The rest of their software's mostly like that, too, with the
| possible exception of Xcode. I often forget Preview with a
| half-dozen PDFs is open, and Pages with a document, and
| Numbers. I wouldn't forget a single tab of Google Docs under
| Chrome, left open for weeks, because it would _make itself
| known_ in system responsiveness and battery use. Ditto MS
| Office. Mac Terminal 's got notably lower input latency than
| _most_ other terminal emulators, especially featureful ones.
|
| Apple, seemingly almost uniquely among major software
| vendors, gives a shit about performance, and it shows. I
| really, really wish they had competitors, but in so many ways
| they're the _only_ ones doing what they do, to the point that
| they can make periodic serious blunders and I 'm left going,
| "yeah, but what else am I gonna buy, that won't have a
| 'normal' that's overall-worse than Apple's 'broken'?"
| refactor_master wrote:
| Space and specs are becoming more and more meaningless to me,
| as all programming work is offloaded to the cloud anyway.
|
| Yet I have a gigantic laptop that does nothing but produce heat
| from opening python scripts.
| Tehnix wrote:
| I just went from a 32GB RAM Macbook Pro to an 8GB RAM M1
| Macbook Air...the difference is insane, I don't know what the
| hell the MB Pro is doing with its RAM, but it just felt like
| RAM was never enough on Intel Macbooks. Here on the M1, I don't
| feel my system crawling to a halt like I did on the MB Pro, and
| I'm doing the same workloads.
| thehnguy wrote:
| Exactly. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. 8GB of M1
| RAM is very different than 32GB of standard DIMM-like RAM.
|
| Sort of like when people compare nm of processes on the
| chips. You can't just say "oh, their number is smaller, it
| must be better."
|
| To be sure a device with 16GB of M1 RAM should be more
| competent than 8GB of M1 RAM, but now that's apples to
| apples.
| runeks wrote:
| > 8GB of M1 RAM is very different than 32GB of standard
| DIMM-like RAM.
|
| Go on... What's the nature of this great difference?
| danaris wrote:
| At this point, I don't think that's entirely clear.
| Something to do with the way Apple has tightly integrated
| the SoC parts and the OS's memory management lets them
| get massively more performance out of much lower-specced
| machines, and at least from what I've seen, no one has
| yet managed to truly unravel all that makes this
| possible.
| bredren wrote:
| I'm interested in this because I have a maxed 2018 intel
| mac mini and loaded it to 64gb of RAM. I want to ditch my
| eGPU and go to Apple Silicon on the next release.
|
| I wonder if the memory performance should be so surprising.
| Because haven't people been bemoaning the "low" amount of
| ram in iPhone / iPad?
|
| iPhone had 4GB on XS, and 11. And only went to 6GB on the
| Pro models. Yet the performance and benchmarking on these
| devices has seemed to garner praise with each successive
| generation.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/14/how-much-ram-
| iphone-12-...
| stepbeek wrote:
| I've just made a similar switch I went from a Pro (2018 i9
| Pro with 32GiB of RAM) to an M1 Air with 16GiB of RAM and its
| ridiculous.
|
| I've tried to look up what this difference might be, but all
| I've found is a hand-wavey answer about it being an SOC. If
| someone can ELI5 then I'd be super appreciative.
| Anther wrote:
| My feeling is that as everything is on chip, things are
| physically closer - less lanes on the motherboard - so
| latency from tasks is lessened. I would not have guessed it
| would be such a difference though.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I have an M1 from work (which I now mainly use for private
| stuff...) and it does have 16gb memory. It did cost a bit less
| than $1700 (after taxes) I believe, although I am not sure. I
| know it has some upgraded gpu compared to the standard model in
| some form, but didn't know about the memory.
|
| As for the device: It is neat, but not revolutionary to any
| degree. I do paint and model and can run blender/krita just
| fine, it is even quite performant. This is through emulation, I
| don't have native builds for arm. Maybe those have become
| available in the meantime, but you don't notice the emulation
| at all.
|
| But it won't be the end of x86 in my opinion. Why would it?
| thehnguy wrote:
| The M1 isn't what kills x86 (if it ever does completely). ARM
| kills x86.
|
| Microsoft is working on the ARM transition. ARM has good
| control of mobile hardware. And Apple will be only selling
| ARM hardware (in the form of Apple Silicon) in another 12-18
| months.
|
| M1 and Apple Silicon are just part of the trend.
| macintux wrote:
| > Microsoft is working on the ARM transition.
|
| And has been for years. Unlike Apple they don't have the
| ability (or the courage) to tell their partners to get on
| the train or get out of their way.
|
| It's not obvious they'll ever be able to leave x86 behind.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| The main feature for me isn't the ARM, it is that the
| device is passively cooled and still very performant. If
| that isn't possible with x68, ARM might have a chance
| perhaps. But 99% of my time is still spend on that
| platform.
|
| I just wish I could install Linux.... If MS and Apple just
| provide their locked down environments, it will never be
| more to me than a neat device and I would still
| crosscompile instead of binding myself to a manufacturer.
| rswail wrote:
| I ran Linux for years on laptops/desktops/servers, doing
| OLTP software that does millions txns/day. I adopted
| Linux back when Solaris was the way to go for backends.
|
| But moved to Mac (and OSX) about 8 years ago.
|
| I don't get the "locked down" thing. On my current macs
| (a 2020 iMac and a 2015 MBP) I run Macports that lets me
| install pretty much every bit of userland software that I
| want. I also get the advantages of the MacOS gui
| environment and the availability of most "user" software.
|
| Yes SIP and the new sandboxes lock down the MacOS part of
| the system, and things like VPNs (eg Wireguard) need to
| get a dev cert and distribution from Apple.
|
| But the "lockdown" is very lightweight. There's nothing I
| can't do on this devices that I used to do on my Linux
| environments.
|
| If I truly need a "native" Linux, then there are a number
| of VM and container environments also available.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| But there is no technical reason for it being locked
| down. I don't want to subject myself to more of this,
| which would be the result if I get dependent on it. Why
| would I? There are only disadvantages if I don't want to
| sell software for the ecosystem.
|
| I do some low level system developing and I doubt I would
| ever switch to MacOS for this. Higher level software?
| Maybe, but as I said, why give Apple any handle here and
| these sandboxes don't provide security for me. I will
| also not get a dev cert from anyone, that is just
| something that will never happen.
| my123 wrote:
| Then just turn SIP off via csrutil disable.
|
| You can then debug anything, load unsigned kernel
| modules...
| robthebrew wrote:
| http://vaibhavkaushal.com/ubuntu-focal-on-apple-
| silicon-m1/
| r00fus wrote:
| That ARM is on the cusp of finally dethroning x86, is
| really, for me, amazing me that Intel has kept it dominant
| for so long (3+ decades).
|
| Partially it's amazing they remained on top, and also
| partially that they never managed to cannibalize their own
| success (like Apple and later Microsoft have done).
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more
| than facebook and instagram
|
| Just stop.
| gambiting wrote:
| So my sister does professional photography, and went from a
| 16GB MacBook Pro(2016) to an 8GB Air, and reports no decrease
| of productivity - quite the opposite, in her experience all
| Adobe programs run much faster, and the machine is quieter and
| lighter to boot. So yeah, I'm not sure - maybe the ram amount
| isn't as a big deal as people make it out to be. On the other
| hand I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128GB of ram
| and I wouldn't accept any less.....so obviously it varies.
| presentation wrote:
| Web developer, I had an 8GB M1 MacBook Air and if I ran
| vscode with my 50kish typescript codebase and dev server for
| api and frontend + native postgres and redis at the same time
| I'd be right at the limit of my machine slowing to unusable
| levels. Switched it for a 16GB one and I've never had any
| noticeable performance issues since.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I think the efficiency of the new M1 is what blows everyone
| away.
|
| When the M1 first came out I was super super skeptical,
| seemed like an under powered chip compared to what's in the
| x86 world.
|
| Now I'm convinced that it's got some magic inside it.
| Everyone I've talked to said it chews throw whatever they
| throw at it.
|
| I'm consistently floored by Apple's ability to innovate.
| Solstinox wrote:
| It's funny you say "innovate." They certainly innovated
| with the M1, but with one key difference. They did so in
| public, step-by-step over the course of a decade.
|
| Perhaps more than any other Apple innovation, we have the
| greatest visibility into the process with the M1.
| bredren wrote:
| I consider ability to perform open development of future
| products a key differentiator for Apple.
|
| Like Jobs said in his Stanford speech, "You can't connect
| the dots looking forward; you can only connect them
| looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots
| will somehow connect in your future."
|
| It seems like Apple uniquely combines open development of
| technology in known products with secrecy around new
| product development.
|
| This allows people to be so surprised by the M1, when the
| late AX processors were obviously pointing toward massive
| capability.
|
| I believe there are other examples of this happening--
| specifically with the Apple Watch.
|
| On that product, the size limitations combined with
| increasing expectations of performance and functionality
| have allowed Apple learn and improve production-
| capability in many areas that will be in any forthcoming
| AR/VR products.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128GB of ram and
| I wouldn't accept any less
|
| What on earth are you programming?
| dundercoder wrote:
| >What on earth are you programming?
|
| Earth. He is programming the earth.
| shaan7 wrote:
| One example is linking QtWebEngine (basically Chromium)
| which can sometimes take upwards of 64 GB of RAM.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| How did chrome eat safari's launch when they were both
| based on WebKit. amazing !
| gambiting wrote:
| AAA video games do that for you :P Well, it isn't the
| programming part that uses the ram(although yes, building
| our codebase takes about 40 minutes and uses gigabytes of
| ram without using distributed build), but just starting up
| local server + client + editor easily uses 80-100GB of ram
| since _ALL_ of the assets are loaded in.
| hiq wrote:
| Did you have the chance to try your setup on an M1? If it
| worked for your sister, although you seem to have way
| higher requirements, is there anything to say it wouldn't
| work for you?
|
| I'm asking because I read a lot of comments when it was
| released that it just doesn't need as much RAM because
| $REASONS. I wouldn't put my money on this, but I'm
| curious if this assumption holds water now that people
| have had time to try it out.
|
| Edit: there are such comments further down the thread
| where it seems to still be a mystery:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643
|
| So I'd really like to know where this magic breaks down:
| if you're used to 128GB or RAM, will the M1 feel
| sluggish?
| dijit wrote:
| I doubt it's possible to try a AAA dev setup on OSX at
| all, and, for whatever it's worth 64G workstations were
| "hand-me-downs" at my previous gig (AAA gamedev), I doubt
| there's much magic that can make "64 gig is not nearly
| enough" go to "16G is fine"
| ianai wrote:
| I'd suggest people just get the larger ram unless they're
| tight on budget. I know Apple's trying to argue otherwise
| and people will agree with them. But I can't hear it as
| anything other than thinking molded to fit a prior
| decision. For what it's worth, and not scientific, but
| reported "percent used" statistics seem to grow slower
| for the 16 gig models than the 8 gig models (from the
| smart utils).
| gambiting wrote:
| Well, 100% of my development tools are Windows only so I
| can't really give it a try, sorry :-)
| darknavi wrote:
| When VS decides to disk bomb you or uses literally 120GB
| of ram because its auto scaling trips up.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm equal parts happy and terrified that MS announced x64
| version of VS recently, because I know it will just mean
| VS can now scale infinitely. At least right now the core
| process has to stay within the 4GB limit :P
| BunsanSpace wrote:
| Large code bases in an IDE, program dumps, large
| applications (the software I write will gladly use 10-20gb
| in some use cases), VMs, large ML training sets, &c.
|
| 128gb is likely overkill, but I can see a use case
| depending on what you're doing.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I think everyone should get more ram than they think
| they'll ever need. 32 gigs is that number for me, but if
| I thought I'd get even close to using 64 gigs, might as
| well go for 128.
| choeger wrote:
| He won't know until all the templates are instantiated...
| gambiting wrote:
| That's a fantastic joke, thank you :D
| qshaman wrote:
| Lol monster
| havernator wrote:
| In ~2018 I briefly used an old 4GB MacBook Pro for work. It
| was only untenable longer-term because I needed to run two
| electron apps or many-hundreds-of-MB-memory tabs at a time,
| sometimes.
| cigaser wrote:
| That machine is using swap file a lot, in couple of years SSD
| will die.
| nisegami wrote:
| Pretty sure that Apple considers this a feature.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Funny. Except there are fully supported MacBooks from
| 2013 running the latest version of macOS, still on their
| first battery, still bringing people joy and
| productivity.
| leoc wrote:
| Late-2013 MBPs still came with replaceable storage unlike
| the M1 Macs, no?
| asoneth wrote:
| Or in my case, a 2012 MacBook Air. I hope they'll support
| Catalina for another three or four years or at which
| point it's more than a decade old and can finally mature
| into a laptop's final stage of life as a Linux machine.
| officeplant wrote:
| They tend to support OS releases for three years.
| Catalina EOL is likely to be sometime in 2022.
| codydh wrote:
| Yup. My personal machine is a base Late 2013 15" MacBook
| Pro (8GB RAM). Original battery, original storage, it saw
| very heavy usage up until a a couple of years ago. Still
| fast, decent battery.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Web Developer here. Wouldn't accept anything less than 32GB
| for a work machine.
| maigret wrote:
| Now I know why all the websites I use are so slow :D
| octorian wrote:
| And why some of my past upgrades were driven by the web
| browser over-taxing the machine on certain sites, while
| nearly everything else was perfectly performant with
| absolutely no complaints.
| mehphp wrote:
| haha so true
| tazjin wrote:
| You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies
| gave their developers of client-facing software slower
| computers the resulting software would end up being
| faster.
| shynrou wrote:
| Yep because they would not get anything done ;)
|
| In my experience as a web dev, all the performance goes
| out the window as soon as the tracking scripts are added.
| sevencolors wrote:
| I had nearly a perfect Lighthouse score until the
| marketing team added GTM
| pdimitar wrote:
| It's not the end product itself that eats huge amounts of
| RAM or CPU. It's the dev tooling.
| tazjin wrote:
| We must be using very different websites.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Obviously a lot of the modern web is crazy and many sites
| are pretty heavy on resource usage.
|
| It's still not comparable with your average developer
| tooling in terms of footprint, was my point.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| I don't think it's the developers who are the problem. In
| my experience, they're usually the ones advocating to
| spend time improving performance.
|
| PMs and executives are the ones you should give slow
| machines to if you want more focus on performance.
| lghh wrote:
| But it would take them an order of magnitude longer to
| ship it. `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog.
| tazjin wrote:
| > `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog
|
| It may not be with fewer and less heavy dependencies!
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Anyone remembers the times when "web development" was
| something you could do on a pretty any computer available?
| jimbokun wrote:
| But have you benchmarked your workflow on x86+32GB vs
| M1+8GB?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| End of the day the Intel Macbooks of the last few years
| have been terrible low performance processors that get
| thermal constrained and have abysmal inconsistent battery
| life. So if all you use is Macs the M1 is going to feel
| amazing.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| I'm typing this response on a 8GB M1. It's great, but its
| no magic. Its limitations do start to show in memory
| intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads.
|
| Getting some down votes, which I attribute to reasonable
| skepticism, so hopefully this will allay your concerns.
|
| https://ibb.co/VM4Z1DY
| hiq wrote:
| > memory intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads
|
| Such as?
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Another webdev here. My second dev machine has 8 GB RAM and
| works fine for my purposes. JetBrains IDE, MariaDB, Puma,
| browser.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Throwing in some more anecdata:
|
| - 16GB MBP (Intel, not M1) - Running MacVim w/ coc.vim &
| coc-tsserver (so it's running partial TS compiles on
| save, much like VSCode)
|
| - One image running in Docker
|
| - Slack, Zoom (at idle), Safari (with a handful of tabs),
| and Mail.app running as well
|
| Per Activity Monitor, 8.97GB of 16.00GB is used with
| 4.97GB marked as "Cached Files" and another 2.04GB of
| swap used.
| cj wrote:
| (Curious) why? VScode, Chrome, and a terminal running a
| local server usually will do fine with 16gb or less. Are
| you testing with or querying massive data sets locally or
| something?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Chrome can fill all your ram, just add more tabs (I'm
| usually at 100-200+ unfortunately).
|
| With Firefox and auto tab suspend (addon), it's
| manageable.
| GordonS wrote:
| Yep, if you're running big IDEs (e.g. Rider/IntelliJ,
| Visual Studio), containers and VMs, 32GB is really a must.
| There always seem to be people in these threads claiming
| that 16GB or even 8GB is enough - I just don't understand
| how that could possibly be for most of the HN demographic.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I don't understand how a demographic as technically
| intelligent as HN could make the flawed assumption that
| GBs of RAM in isolation of the entire system is all that
| matters. Consider the fact that iOS devices ship with
| half the RAM of Android devices and feel as responsive,
| have better battery life, and have better performance.
|
| The Apple stack is better optimized to take advantage of
| the hardware they have. Indeed, one of the reasons is
| because they have so few SKUs to worry about it focuses
| the engineering team (for example, in the past,
| internally engineers would complain about architectural
| design missteps that couldn't be fixed because 32bit
| support wasn't dropped yet and was pushed out yet another
| year). Now, obviously in a laptop use-case this is
| trickier since the source code is the same as the x86
| version. It's possible that the ARM code generation was
| much more space efficient (using -Oz instead of
| previously likely set at -O3). It's also possible that
| they have migrated over to iOS frameworks in an even
| greater part than they were able to in the past,
| leveraging RAM optimizations that hadn't been ported to
| macos). There could also be RAM usage optimizations baked
| around knowing you will always have a blazing fast NVME
| drive. Now you may not even need to keep data cached
| around and can just load straight from disk. Sure, not
| all workloads might fit (and if running x86 emulation the
| RAM hit might be worse). For a lot of use cases though,
| even many dev ones, it's clearly enough. I wouldn't be
| surprised if Apple used telemetry to make an intelligent
| bet around the amount of RAM they'd need.
| GordonS wrote:
| > I don't understand how a demographic as technically
| intelligent as HN could make the flawed assumption that
| GBs of RAM in isolation of the entire system is all that
| matters
|
| I didn't claim it was all that matters, and I haven't
| seen anyone else do that either.
|
| I do take the point of the rest of your comment though,
| and it may well be the case that Apple does some clever
| stuff. But realistically there is only so far that
| optimisations can take it - DDR4 is DDR4, and it's the
| _workload_ that makes the most difference.
|
| > I wouldn't be surprised if Apple used telemetry to make
| an intelligent bet around the amount of RAM they'd need.
|
| Your average Apple user is likely not a developer though
| (as others are very often pointing out on HN, whenever
| they make non-dev-friendly hardware choices).
| Furthermore, I would think such telemetry would be a
| self-fulfilling prophecy; if you have a pitiful 8GB of
| RAM, you're not going to punish yourself by trying to run
| workloads you know it wouldn't support.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > But realistically there is only so far that
| optimizations can take it - DDR4 is DDR4, and it's the
| workload that makes the most difference.
|
| Except the M1 is a novel UMA architecture where the GPU &
| CPU share RAM. There's all sorts of architectural
| improvements you get out of that where you can void
| memory transfers wholesale. There's no "texture upload"
| phase & reading back data from the GPU is just as fast as
| sending data to the GPU. Wouldn't surprise me if they
| leveraged that heavily to get improvements across the SW
| stack. The CPU cache architecture also plays a big role
| in the actual performance of your RAM. Although
| admittedly maybe the M1 doesn't have any special sauce
| here that I've seen, just responding to your claim that
| "DDR4 is DDR4" (relatedly, DDR4 comes in different speeds
| SKUs).
|
| > Your average Apple user is likely not a developer
| though (as others are very often pointing out on HN,
| whenever they make non-dev-friendly hardware choices).
| Furthermore, I would think such telemetry would be a
| self-fulfilling prophecy; if you have a pitiful 8GB of
| RAM, you're not going to punish yourself by trying to run
| workloads you know it wouldn't support.
|
| No one is going to model things as "well users aren't
| using that much yet". You're going to look at RAM usage
| growth in the past 12 years & blend that with known
| industry movements to get a prediction of where you'll
| need to target. It's also important to remember that RAM
| isn't free (not looking at the $). I don't know if it
| matters as much for laptop use-cases as much but for
| mobile phones you 100% care about having as little RAM as
| you can get away with on your system since it dominates
| your idle power. For laptop/iMac use-cases I would
| imagine they're more concerned with heat dissipation
| since this RAM is part of the CPU package. RAM size does
| matter for the iPad's battery life & I bet the limited
| number of configs has to do with making sure they only
| have to build a limited set of M1 SKUs that they can
| shove into almost all devices to really crank down the
| per-unit costs of these "accessory" product lines
| (accessory in the sense of their volumes are a fraction
| of what even AirPods ships).
| [deleted]
| hkstm wrote:
| Do you think most of the HN demographic is actually
| running big IDEs, containers and VMs at the same time?
| I'm personally a CS student and never had to run more
| than a few lightweight docker containers + maybe one
| running some kind of database + VS Code and that has been
| working fine on a laptop with 8GB and pop_os. Could
| imagine that a lot of other people on HN are also just
| generally interested in tech but not necessarily running
| things that require a lot of memory locally.
| kortex wrote:
| I run like 50 chrome tabs, a half dozen Intellij panes,
| youtube, slack, and a bunch of heavy containers at the
| same time, and that's just my dev machine.
|
| My desktop is an ML container train/test machine. I also
| have ssh into two similar machines, and a 5 machine,
| 20GPU k8s cluster. I pretty much continuously have dozens
| of things building /running at once.
|
| Maybe I'm an outlier though?
| twodave wrote:
| Depending on the requirements of your job---just a single
| VS instance with chrome, postman and slack open takes
| around 5GB. Teams adds another GB or so. The rest
| probably another 2GB (SSMS and the like).
|
| On my particular team we also run a dockerfile that
| includes elastic search, sql server, rabbitmq and consul
| ---I had to upgrade my work laptop from 16GB to 24GB to
| make it livable.
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| Wouldn't you just have all the heavy stuff on a server? I
| don't understand the goal of running something like sql
| server and other server type apps on a desktop/laptop.
| leesalminen wrote:
| When I'm developing I don't want any network dependency.
| I love coding with no WiFi on planes, or on a mountain,
| etc.
| twodave wrote:
| Having a local environment speeds up development
| significantly.
| kaba0 wrote:
| If you are on linux, try out zram.
| MrDOS wrote:
| > lightweight docker containers
|
| If you're on macOS, there's no such thing as a
| "lightweight Docker container". The container itself
| might be small, but Docker itself is running a full Linux
| virtual machine. In no world is that "lightweight".
| taternuts wrote:
| I was going to say, I'm on a 16gb 2015 macbook pro (not
| sure what to upgrade to) and Docker for Mac is _brutal_
| on my machine, I can't even run it and work on other
| things at the same time without frustration
| mywittyname wrote:
| Yeah. I suspect most people here are software engineers
| (or related) and IDEs, Docker, and VMs are all standard
| tools in the SE toolbox. If they aren't using Docker or
| VMs, then they are probably doing application
| development, which is also pretty damn RAM hungry.
|
| I do most of my development in Chrome, bash, and sublime
| text and I'm still using 28GB of RAM.
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| CS PhD Student. Running a laptop with 16GB of RAM. I dont
| train ML models on my machine but whenever I have to
| debug stuff locally, I realize precisely how starved for
| RAM my computer is. I start by closing down FF. Just
| plain killing the browser. RAM down from 12GB to 7. Then
| I close the other IDE (usually working on two parallel
| repos). 7GB to 5. Squeeze out the last few megabytes by
| killing Spotify, Signal, and other forgotten Terminal
| windows. Then I start to load my model to memory. 5 times
| out of 7, its over 12-13 GB at which point my OS stops
| responding and I have to force reboot my system cursing
| and arms flailing.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| I could believe that for students because students are
| usually working on projects that are tiny by industry
| standards.
|
| 10 klocs is huge for a student project but tiny for a
| real-world project.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I do use intellij and similarly hungry IDEs all the time,
| with many other resource hungry processes without trouble
| on 8 GB of RAM.
|
| Though truth is that I use zram, which everyone should
| who is not fortunate enough to have plenty of RAM, but
| does have a decent CPU.
| uncletaco wrote:
| Anecdotal. I write client software for bioinformatics
| workflows. Usually web apps or clis. Right now with my
| mock db, Emacs, browser, and tooling I'm using ~5G of
| ram. At most I'll use ~8GB by the end of the day.
|
| I also shut down at the end of the day and make judicious
| use of browser history and bookmarks. If I were compiling
| binaries regularly I guess I could see the use in having
| more ram but as far as I'm concerned 8 is enough and so
| far people find what I put out perform at.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah 32gb is my baseline now. I could probably work on a
| 16gb machine now but last time I was using an 8gb machine
| the memory was nearly constantly maxed out.
| qaq wrote:
| Working on very enterprisy web app 100+ servics 30+
| containers my MBP 16GB is handling it fine
| Aperocky wrote:
| But why not 16G? It's a small price increase compared to base
| and it would basically make it much more usable in any
| extended amount of time, especially given the SSD write 'bug'
| that were exposed.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The sweet spot is 8GB for most people. I'd guess 80% 8GB/15%
| 16GB and 5% more. Even many types of developers are fine with
| 8.
|
| Apple collects a lot of metrics and I'm sure they know this
| well.
| jopsen wrote:
| Running a few Google Docs tabs and I can easily bring my
| 16GB Linux laptop down..
| cainxinth wrote:
| The M1 also means that Apple regains full stack control of
| its desktops and laptops. Their phones and tablets prove
| that when they develop both the main chips and operating
| systems themselves, they are able to eke out greater
| performance from lesser specs.
|
| Flagship iPhones always have less ram than flagship
| androids, but match or exceed their performance.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That may help a bit but unless they adopt that draconian
| policies that govern iOS runtime that impact is limited.
| Safari is an example of improved battery life when Apple
| owns the stack. It's a great feature, but not a game
| changer.
|
| Most business users were fine with 4GB 5-6 years ago.
| Electron apps like Teams and Slack pushed it up to 8. The
| next tier are folks with IDEs, docker, etc that are
| usually 16-32GB.
| guidoism wrote:
| I agree. Honestly electron used the main thing pushing up
| ram usage these days for most people.
| fortran77 wrote:
| It's the Gigabyte Myth! Less is more! Up is down! In is
| out!
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan
| to do anything more than facebook and instagram.
|
| Facebook and Instagram is probably the upper bound on memory-
| hungry apps. (The average webpage consumes more memory nowadays
| than gcc -O3.)
| Draken93 wrote:
| Thats the point, price/value does not fit for the majority of
| apple devices... But the M1 is amazing, I have to acknowledge
| that.
|
| I'll stay with AMD and wait for 5nm...
| agilob wrote:
| Yup, I have 16Gb of RAM on macbook 2011.
| igammarays wrote:
| X cores + X gigs of RAM does not mean better performance for
| higher values of X. That is the fundamental innovation of Apple
| Silicon, which people still struggle to grasp. The M1 upended
| how we think about CPU performance. It's not even a CPU, it's a
| unified memory architecture with hardware-level optimizations
| for macOS. You can't even cleanly compare the performance
| benefits of having memory and CPU on the same chip, because the
| time spent on copying operations is far less.
|
| The plain fabulous joke is that we've spent 30 years thinking
| that increasing cores and increasing RAM is the only way to
| increase performance while the objective M1 benchmarks blow
| everything out of the water. The proof is in the pudding.
| thehnguy wrote:
| Right. People are comparing Apples to Oranges.
|
| The salient question is: how long does each machine take to
| execute the processes I use on a daily basis?
| sto_hristo wrote:
| But we still live in a physical universe where there are
| voluminous things some of us need to put into ram. Things
| like big projects, application servers, database servers,
| IDEs, and for some of those - multiple instances of them. On
| top of that, browsers with tabs open, productivity tools.
| Can't benchmark out of that.
| micv wrote:
| Apple have done things to mitigate a lack of RAM
| (consistently using the fastest SSDs they can with a
| controller integrated into their custom chips and now into
| the M1 presumably, memory compression, using very fast RAM
| in the new M1, etc.) but yeah at some point you just need
| more room. 16GB has been enough for me for a while
| thankfully.
| hiq wrote:
| > Can't benchmark out of that.
|
| You still have to try it out and see. I'd welcome an
| article detailing a dev setup where the M1 isn't suitable
| because of performance reasons. So far we've seen mostly
| praise.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| I mean, that price tag is being swung in a kinda silly way. The
| Mini with 16GB of ram is like $899. At that price the CPU has 8
| Cores but 50% greater single core performance than basically
| anything in the price range. In lightly threaded or thread-
| racey tasks the M1 will outperform any chip on the market for
| most people working on their machine. In my case, we build,
| run, and run tests on a very large typescript app in half the
| time of any single Intel chip we have ever tested, including
| desktop i9. I'm not defending the pricing of their ram or
| storage upgrades, those are nuts. But the pricing you are
| comparing with here is for machines that include a LOT of gravy
| in the build sheet intended to draw your point such as a 4.5K
| Display or TBs of PCIe SSD.
|
| Did I mention that the case I was mentioning was in the very
| base Macbook Air with 8Gb ram cross-compared with an i9 64Gb
| machine?
|
| You are kinda making a blanket statement that is a little
| unfaithful to the intent of any of these machines. None of
| these machines are intended as 'pro' machines, even the
| 'Macbook Pro' is just the low end model and it is three times
| as powerful as the outgoing model. Sure you can spec one to the
| moon to make a price point, but that's the story of anything.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Really? I still use seven year old MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM.
| It's perfectly fine for developing in at least Python, Go or
| Nim, with a Docker container or two and MariaDB in the
| background.
|
| Sure, when/if I upgrade I'd go for 16GB of memory, but one
| should be careful about projecting ones own needs onto other.
| kart23 wrote:
| I have a 2015 MBP as well... it's HORRIBLE when I hook it up
| to a 4k monitor. Lag, freezing, etc. I can still get stuff
| done, but the experience is pretty bad.
|
| Perfectly fine on its own screen though, the dual-core in
| mine just isn't up to the task of a 4k external monitor.
| arvinsim wrote:
| What IDE are you using?
| mrweasel wrote:
| None, I use Vim or TextMate. But you have a point Xcode
| isn't fast on my laptop. You use it, but if I where to use
| Xcode professionally I'd get a newer machine with more
| memory.
|
| I have been working on a TVOS app, and it works fine, but
| there is some waiting involved.
| oblio wrote:
| Your web browser probably doesn't have many tabs open, and
| those that are open, are probably not web apps (think Slack,
| Facebook, WhatsApp, various internal corporate apps, etc.).
|
| I can't even remember a time when just my web browser used up
| less than 4-5 GB of RAM, on its own.
|
| Add at least 500MB - 1 GB for the OS itself, and we're
| talking about 2 - 3.5GB for apps. I'd immediately swap with
| just 8GB of RAM with an IDE and a DB running.
| mrweasel wrote:
| You're right, I can't mentally deal with more a few open
| tabs and I use none of those webapps at home. I might be an
| outline in the other direction, but there's a lot of room
| between using maybe 4GB of RAM in total an using that for a
| browser alone.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Auto-tab-discard on Firefox is your friend. Makes thousands
| of tabs possible with almost no memory use and seamless
| functionality.
| oblio wrote:
| I do visit 20-40 of those tabs regularly. They're SPAs so
| they use up a lot of memory.
| beagle3 wrote:
| How often? I set mine to discard after 60 minutes, except
| for slack, WhatsApp and a couple of others; cost is
| reload when I do venture into discarded tabs - e.g. I
| scan HN and Reddit headlines in the morning, open each
| interesting comments page in a tab; much later, when I
| have downtime, I visit them - but I used to reload to get
| the new comments. Now with ATD, they get reloaded
| automatically, so for that use it is even bette than the
| real thing.
| kolinko wrote:
| I have four browser windows filled crazy number of tabs on
| M1. I'm yet to experience any slowdowns.
| neximo64 wrote:
| Went from 64GB to 8GB. Didn't notice a difference - infact it
| is better. I kind of get your mindset but they have done some
| fuckery somewhere to get it to work so good.
| intergalplan wrote:
| My M1 Air with 16GB feels way more responsive and behaves
| better under load than my 64GB hex-core beast of a desktop I
| built late last year.
|
| It's like the old days when I could put BeOS on a Pentium
| with two-digit MB of memory and it'd _feel_ as good and
| responsive in actual use as a newer desktop clocked 6-8x
| higher and with 8x the memory, running Windows or Linux.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| Looking at core count and ram size isn't how to measure
| performance. You test and measure. But, the cores are just
| better on the m1 as has been shown through tons of
| benchmarking. Also, if the interconnects and busses are smarter
| (better cache coherency impl) then you'll be better in
| multithreading cases. Also because it's an SoC it has a way
| better implementation for the ddr interface (that's what they
| claim at least). I wouldn't be surprised if the latency hit for
| accessing RAM was way better than on x86 where you have to
| cross a long bus. For the workloads that people run on iMacs,
| light photoshop, some video editing, etc. We already know the
| new macbooks are amazing at it and this machine will have the
| same hardware, but with a dope screen (and cool colors. I want
| yellow >.>).
| Someone wrote:
| On the other hand "16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to
| do anything more than facebook and instagram" is something to
| cry about.
|
| Programmers working on products with a billion users should
| realize that every kilobyte they save decreases world-wide
| memory usage by a terabyte.
| fouric wrote:
| > decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte
|
| While true, that's not going to motivate anybody. Memory is
| not a very scarce resource, we're making more all the time,
| we can _continue_ to make more, and it 's reusable.
|
| Moreover, memory that isn't being used is almost completely
| useless - the only thing it does is act as disk cache.
|
| Better to use memory than CPU, as the latter actually
| consumes power (leading to climate change if not powered
| using renewables etc.) - although even better to use less of
| both.
|
| A more effective argument would be to look at the number of
| users on low-end devices, and point out that, the more memory
| you use, the less these users are able to run your
| applications.
|
| Not that I'm expecting companies like Slack to care - they
| design for the high-end user, and if your company forces
| Slack on you and you have an older device, there's nothing
| you can do, and they exploit that.
| Someone wrote:
| DRAM refresh takes power. I don't have the numbers, but I'm
| not sure that, in the average smartphone or tablet of today
| that energy usage is negligible compared to that of the
| CPU.
|
| Reason for that is that DRAM must be refreshed 24 hours a
| day, while the CPU is sleeping a lot of the time, even if
| the device is in use.
| jaytaylor wrote:
| For typical dimms it's about 2-3 watts per stick. Doesn't
| sound like much until you max out a SuperMicro (or other
| server grade) motherboard with 24 dimm sockets. :)
| kyberias wrote:
| Right! And imagine the number of ELECTRONS whey would save
| from moving! That's also a big number.
| skohan wrote:
| It's also not true. I don't know if I'm the only person not
| doing fluid simulations all day on my laptop, but I don't
| understand where this idea comes from
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Personally I think Apple has completed its shift from a computer
| manufacturer to a processor manufacturer who serves two internal
| clients the software division and the consumer electronics
| division.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| "Part of the reason Apple can get away with doing this is that --
| and let's be honest -- it's been selling badly underpowered
| systems at certain price points."
|
| There is also market share. Being more affordable to more people
| means more sales. True, Apple has always positioned itself as
| premium. That will remain. Now it will be a higher value as well.
| zelon88 wrote:
| Here we go again. Comparing a 10w mobile RISC CPU to a 100w x86
| CPU and somehow deducing that having a mobile CPU run desktop
| applications is a good idea.
|
| I wish all the Apple fanboys would just hurry up and buy one so
| they would realize they are comparing apples to oranges and sit
| back down.
|
| Nobody is buying an M1 to replace their gaming computer. And to
| insinuate that such a thing is possible or practical is
| disingenuous to the way PC hardware works.
|
| Additionally I think the article is of amateur quality. It takes
| on an Apple perspective and assumes that there will be no
| response from x86 vendors basically because "how could you
| possibly respond to something as astounding as the M1?"
|
| Don't worry. Apple hasn't taken over the desktop market yet, and
| they don't have the raw horsepower to do it anyway. And they
| don't want to. We are comparing embedded CPU's with proprietary
| north bridge architecture to industry standardized and socketed
| CPU's with an entire industry supporting it. Nobody in the market
| for a desktop PC is going to get a mobile Apple device just
| because the M1 is more efficient. Nobody goes out to buy a pickup
| truck and accidentally gets talked into a Prius. Just because you
| conflate efficiency with performance doesn't mean the M1 is
| capable of replacing a Ryzen 9.
| JoshTko wrote:
| A better analogy for the M1 is EVs. The M1 has near best in
| class single thread performance so similar to how Tesla's have
| crazy acceleration. Sure we've yet to see how efficiently M1
| will scale to multithreaded or GPU work loads but all signs
| point to a very scalable architecture given the jump from A12
| to M1. Simple extrapolation indicates that a M2 or M1x will
| match or beat most desktops while still consuming very little
| power.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > We are comparing embedded CPU's with proprietary north bridge
| architecture to industry standardized and socketed CPU's with
| an entire industry supporting it
|
| Eh? x86es have had an integrated northbridge for about a
| decade.
| bstar77 wrote:
| I don't think this comment is going to age well.
| zelon88 wrote:
| I'm sure there are comments from the 64 bit PowerPC days that
| aged just fine.
| nerdjon wrote:
| You are right that as of right now the M1 can't really replace
| a gaming PC, but I don't see Apple currently really targeting
| that. However the real question is if that is an issue with the
| M1 chip or just an issue of Mac not really having much of the
| gaming marketshare.
|
| That being said, personally I believe the gaming PC market is
| largely a niche market for the entire PC market.
|
| At its core I don't see any reason the M1 chip can't play games
| (in fact we are seeing some good numbers come out of games that
| have a proper migration), it is purely a software issue.
|
| It may not be able to compete with the top of the line custom
| built desktops, but the reality other gaming laptops that are
| far more expensive can't either.
| hu3 wrote:
| Apple does not care about non-mobile games.
|
| They stopped supporting OpenGL [0] and Vulkan support is a
| community effort [1].
|
| [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12894/apple-deprecates-
| opengl...
|
| [1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
|
| edit: If you have something to add to the conversation, feel
| free to enlighten us. It does gets tiring discussing anything
| Apple around here because of the sheer bias.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| Can't wait for an iPhone Pro with an M1 processor that I can plug
| into a thunderbolt/usbc dock, run monitors, a keyboard, ethernet,
| and have it running MacOS when in desktop mode.
|
| EDIT: A little context; when I am in the office, I use vscode
| over ssh to connect to my desktop PC at home. My desktop takes
| care of my language server, syntax highlighting, compilation and
| vscode forwards my ports and spins up terminals. All I will ever
| need is a low powered computer that can run my browser and
| tooling fast enough.
| eertami wrote:
| They could've done this with the iPad already, but have not
| shown any indication that they will do so.
|
| I suspect Apple don't want you to use your phone as a laptop
| replacement, they want you to buy one of their laptops.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > have not shown any indication that they will do so.
|
| I find it very suspicious that the new iPad has a 16GB RAM
| option. There's ~no use for that in iOS. Wouldn't be totally
| amazed if some sort of dual boot solution shows up at WWDC.
| runeks wrote:
| Also: how would you cool it? The passively cooled M1 MacBook
| Air throttles after 15 minutes of high CPU usage. So, perhaps
| a phone would throttle after a couple of minutes?
| dpatterbee wrote:
| This is the utopian future I dream of, but unfortunately there
| is 0 economic incentive for a company like apple to create a
| product like this. With how powerful our phones are, they could
| easily be the main workstations for millions, but they're
| forced to remain as toys. I'm somewhat surprised google don't
| try to push this more.
| novaRom wrote:
| Basically many modern Android phones today work perfectly well
| paired wirelessly with modern TV screen. Enable desktop mode,
| pair with a mouse and keyboard, and you have a kind of working
| environment: video chat, programming, text editing, office apps
| - all exists.
|
| That's actually how to watch youtube without ads, because non-
| Android TV has no freetube/newPipe apps.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| Sadly I can't use a terminal or VSCode on Android so I can't
| use it as a development environment.
| acka wrote:
| Have you tried installing[0] code-server[1] in Termux[2]?
| code-server is basically the VSCode app split into a
| backend which runs on NodeJS and a front end Web app which
| runs in an Android browser app and communicates with the
| backend running in Termux. It works pretty similar to the
| Electron app, but extensions don't come from Microsofts
| Marketplace because of licensing and usage restrictions.
| Most popular extensions are available though.
|
| [0] https://dev.to/codeledger/how-to-get-visual-studio-
| code-to-r... [1] https://github.com/cdr/code-server [2]
| https://termux.com/
| alexisread wrote:
| Termux, Andronix and (Wireless) Dex (Samsung phones only)
| work pretty well to bring a workable Linux desktop onto an
| external screen, with the phone as a separate screen for
| android.
|
| You can also connect a usb-c hub if you want hdmi in and
| out, network etc. It's even possible to drive 3D printers
| directly over USB.
|
| As an additonal bonus, for Galaxy Notes and some newer S
| devices you can use a stylus for art, signing PDFs etc.
| They also support splitscreen multitasking and virtual
| desktops which is quite practical if you work from the
| terminal (emacs).
|
| Certain phones can be very good replacements for a computer
| if you require the portability.
| ajayyy wrote:
| You can run vscode with termux and even a full X server,
| connecting over VNC.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And yet, for work I'd like to see something 10x as powerful as
| a phone still. The differences in performance between the two
| is quickly becoming less and nonexistent though.
| qshaman wrote:
| I hope that browser you want to run on a "low power" computer
| is not Chrome
| baq wrote:
| thermals would be quite bad for performance here, but the
| vision is quite appealing.
| Heliosmaster wrote:
| Isn't basically the same vision Canonical had for Ubuntu
| Touch/Phone?
|
| You carry your (main) computer with you in your pocket. If
| you're on the go, you use its screen. If at home, you plug it
| in better screens/inputs peripherals.
| iSnow wrote:
| I wish they had had the firepower to develop this. I'm not
| exactly unhappy with Android, but I'd bought that in an
| instant.
| [deleted]
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Many have had this concept, no one has actually executed
| well on it.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| My use case is pretty fine, I think. I use vscode's ssh
| development feature to remote into my desktop at home. My
| laptop just needs to run a browser and editor window which I
| think an M1 powered iphone would be fine at.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Certainly seems that way. It looks like there going to be an M1
| chip for 99% of folks, which works fine for all non-CPU-pegging
| work (Air, 13" MBP, 24"iMac, Mini), an M1.Large for stuff that
| pegs CPU (27"iMac, 16"MBP), and M1.XL for 0.01% Mac Pro folks who
| drop 5 figures USD on computers. But I'd expect the numbers to
| decrease logarithmically and the prices to be multiples. M1
| machines from $700 to $1700, M1.L from $2000 to $4000, and M1.XL
| from $6000 onwards.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Why does Apple bother with the 13 inch MacBook Pro if it has the
| exact same processing power as the MacBook Air? Touch bar and 2
| extra hours of battery life aren't enough to differentiate the
| two. My guess is that Apple does intend to differentiate the M
| line but hasn't been able to do it yet, for what reason I don't
| know.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| > _Apple's gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU
| performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that
| the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within
| a given product generation._
|
| This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of
| the MacBook and MacMini. Apple makes a lot of money by offering a
| range of processor options. At the moment we are early in the
| transition but I have no doubt there will be M2, M3, etc options
| for most of the range.
| grishka wrote:
| Did they also offer a range of processor options back when they
| were using PowerPC? I get the impression that they did not.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I seem to remember the Mac Pro had an option for more than
| one processor.
| grecy wrote:
| > _This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel
| versions of the MacBook and MacMini_
|
| They're only doing that until they can replace the entire line
| with "Apple Silicon", which they said will take less than 2
| years from when they announced the first M1 Macs. It's simply a
| stop-gap measure.
| dataking wrote:
| > This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel
| versions of the MacBook and MacMini
|
| I can think of other reasons some customers may prefer or need
| to buy the Intel version. AFAIK, you cannot run virtualized x86
| code (docker, parallels, vmware) on the M1 macs (yet?) or maybe
| you need a driver for HW that is not yet available for M1/ARM.
| You can't conclude that they sell Intel versions for
| performance reasons.
| djxfade wrote:
| Docker for Apple Silicon was just released. It uses emulation
| for x86 based images and works mostly seamless.
| elcomet wrote:
| But the point is that people do not care about the cpu in their
| mac. They care about screen size, price and other stuff.
|
| Apple is still selling intel versions, because either they are
| cheaper (older generations), or because the newest version does
| not have the M1 yet (like the 16" mac book pro).
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| That's not the only reason - the M1 is limited to 16GB which
| is fine for many workloads, but not for all. Plus not
| everything works on the M1 yet e.g. running Linux in a VM.
| johnklos wrote:
| It's so simple - Apple doesn't need to make money off of the M1 -
| they use the M1 to make money. For companies that sell CPUs
| instead of systems, it's the other way around.
| paulpan wrote:
| The article makes a good point on positioning, but I'm not sure
| if it's due to lack of data points.
|
| Sure Apple seems to be using the M1 in across every price segment
| for their products, but M1 is also literally the first iteration
| of their shift to running macOS on ARM and not x86 architecture.
| This mass push mainly serves to speed up the transition.
|
| No doubt there'll be a higher performing SOC for Apple's Pro
| lineup such as Mac Pro, Macbook Pro. History has confirmed this
| since Apple developed the A*X chips specifically for the Pro
| lineup of iPads. Main question is, how many concurrent SOCs will
| Apple maintain? Just 2 as they've done for the iPhone & iPad Pro
| divide or potentially more?
| evanmoran wrote:
| I believe you are 100% correct that when the M1X chips are
| released they will clearly differentiate the pro market. At the
| same time it would be impressive of Apple if the X chips
| capture MacBook Pro, iMac Pro and Mac Pro markets all with a
| single chip as well. So (as you point out) the article is only
| half the picture as it's missing the pro lineup. And yet the
| article's main point is true that Apple is satisfying an absurd
| number of products with (likely) only two processors.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > "Part of the reason Apple can get away with doing this is that
| -- and let's be honest -- it's been selling badly underpowered
| systems at certain price points."
|
| Well, they've been doing this for a long time, and were able to
| pull it off only because we got hooked up with their ecosystem
| and preferred more than the alternatives. What worries me though
| is the trend to make these machines totally unupgradeable: not
| only this is bad for the environment but will also decrease the
| long-term value of these expensive objects.
| giorgioz wrote:
| M1 is the fastest Apple CPU YET. I suspect in the fall they will
| release the M2 for MacBook Pro 15 inches.
|
| They have also delayed releasing the MacBook Pro 15inches with
| Intel on purpose in my opinion. When they will release the
| MacBook Pro 15 inches with M2 they will compare it with the Intel
| version with a 3 years old processor.
|
| I don't trust the Apple benchmarks much. They are choosing what
| to compare and what metrics. Let's wait 3 years when the dust has
| settled and we'll be able to compare apples with apples.
|
| Let's see also if Apple will be able to keep up the improvement
| of in-house built CPU+GPU with ALL COMPETING MANUFACTURERS OF
| CPU&GPU. What if Nvidia or AMD or Intel comes out with a huge
| leap, Apple then won't be able to take advantage of that. In my
| opinion the M1 is the new PowerPC. In 10-20 years from now Apple
| will have slow in-house built hardware and we'll be getting back
| off the shelf hardware like when Steve Jobs moved from PowerPC to
| Intel.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > M2 for MacBook Pro 15 inches
|
| 16" will be the size, like in the current gen. External form
| factor about the same size as the old 15", but smaller bezels.
|
| If they come up with a 16" M2 with 16GB+ of RAM they'll be out
| of stock for MONTHS, _everyone_ I know will be upgrading from
| their pre-touchbar Macbooks.
| speedplane wrote:
| The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law.
| It's an amazing processor, but a sad sign of things to come.
|
| The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from
| shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more
| performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose
| processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get
| performance gains is to build custom chips for common specific
| tasks. That's what we're seeing now with the M1. The M1 buys us a
| few more years of exponential-appearing performance gains, but
| it's a one-trick pony. You can turn code into an ASIC once, but
| after that, your performance is at the mercy of the foundry and
| physics.
|
| The death of Moore's law has many consequences, the rise of ASICs
| and custom co-processor chips is just one of them.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Death of moore's law? Hmm. Meanwhile I just got a R9 5950X and
| it is drastically faster than my 5 year old i7.
|
| There must be some doubling of transistors in there, right?
|
| Also maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of a new generation of
| ARM CPUs wasn't the wisest choice.
|
| Or maybe it is, idk.
| arvinsim wrote:
| 5950x is the last greatest chip on the AMD4 platform. I think
| their would be enough demand for it in the future for the
| price to stay high.
| [deleted]
| floatboth wrote:
| Maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of _DDR5_ , PCIeGen5 and
| TSMC's 5nm wasn't the wisest choice. Ehhhh seems like all
| that new stuff would still take lots of time to actually get
| ready, and the 5950X is the best CPU _now_.
| Retric wrote:
| Mores Law as originally stated said transistor density
| doubled every 18-24 months. Using larger CPU's for example
| let's you have more transistors, but has nothing to do with
| Mores Law.
|
| Clearly density has kept increasing, but the law refers to a
| rate of increase that we haven't been able to meet. The
| original 386 released in 1985 had 275,000 transistors, using
| the _slowest_ interpretation we would need to be at (2^18) =
| ~72+ Billion transistors today or (2^17) = 36+ Billion in
| 2019 which is close, but the chip would also need to be the
| size of a 386 which they aren't.
|
| AMD Epyc Rome is 1008 mm^2 vs a 386 at 104 mm^2. The M1 is
| 119 mm^2, but it's only 16 Billion Transistors. As such it's
| safe to say Mores Law is dead.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| Did Mores Law take into account 3D density or was it just
| single layer compactness?
| simonh wrote:
| Back in the old days you'd get that sort of improvement in
| 2-3 years, not 5. I used to expect at least a 4x improvement
| on my last machine every time I upgraded.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, I bought myself a new PC two years ago or so to
| replace a 5+ year old one, and the difference was... okay?
| If it was twice as fast (mostly for gaming) I'd already be
| impressed.
|
| Whereas back when (thinking of early 90's) you'd upgrade
| every three years and be taking massive leaps forward. 10x
| increase in disk space (40 MB to 500 MB), or going from
| diskettes (~1.5 MB? I don't even remember) to CD's (650MB).
| We went from Wolfenstein to Half-Life in just six years (it
| felt longer).
| Someone wrote:
| Let's not debate whether we really are at the end of Moore's
| law (not a foregone conclusion, given that the M1 is the first
| CPU at 5nm)
|
| Why do you find it sad that we now have a holistically designed
| system, rather than the glueing together of ever more powerful
| parts that desktop PCs have gotten away with for a few decades?
| nhourcard wrote:
| The death of moore's law made us wonder - there is so much
| effort trying to optimise hardware, but less emphasis on making
| software more efficient. Our view is that there is a lot to do
| with regard to software efficiency to mitigate the limitations
| in hardware progress... See the company we founded in my
| profile, this was one of the drivers to build it
| arvinsim wrote:
| Software optimization depends a lot on economical reasons.
| Which is why it is so hard to prioritize over new features
| IMO.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| On his recent Lex Fridman podcast appearance, Jim Keller speaks
| to exactly this mindset. He says that they've been heralding
| the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one
| trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that
| they will continue.
| speedplane wrote:
| > they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he
| started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He
| says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.
|
| The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest.
| Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer
| performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny
| new desktop was obsolete in 24 months.
|
| Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years. The "one-
| trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent performance" gap, but
| by definition, are implemented out of desperation. They
| aren't enough to keep Moore's law alive (it's already dead),
| and their very existence is evidence of the death of Moore's
| law.
| fredski42 wrote:
| Which is why Apple is moving revenue streams also to
| services.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years.
|
| The 2012 MacBook Pro 15-inch I'm typing this on is about
| 700 on Geekbench single-core, while the 2019 16-inch is
| about 950. 35% "improvement" in seven years!
|
| M1 13-inch is 1700 on single-core, which is why I hope to
| upgrade once the 16-inch Apple Silicon version comes out.
|
| >The "one-trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent
| performance" gap, but by definition, are implemented out of
| desperation.
|
| I don't think that's right. x86 hit an apparent performance
| barrier in the early 2000s, with the best available CPUs
| being Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Thunderbird, both horribly
| inefficient for the performance gains they eked out; those
| were very much one-trick ponies created from desperation.
| It took a skunkworks project by Intel Israel, which
| miraculously turned Pentium III into Core
| microarchitecture, to get out of the morass. Another
| meaningful leap occurred when going from Core Duo to Core
| i, but the PC industry has been stuck with Core i for
| almost a decade.
|
| We've finally smashed past this with Apple Silicon, but it
| is certainly not a one-trick pony; Apple could sell it to
| the world tomorrow and have a line of customers going out
| the door, just like it could have sold the A-series mobile
| processors to rivals. AMD Ryzen isn't quite the
| breakthrough Apple Silicon is, but it is good enough for
| those who need x86.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Apple's M1 is a good processor, but the only reason it
| "smashed past" previous macbook single core results is
| apple was using older Intel lower powered processors.
|
| It is not twice as fast as even mobile x86 stuff, as much
| as people seem to want to think otherwise.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Anecdata of one, but compiling our product at work on my
| three machines (a 2019 intel macbook pro, a 2020 10 core
| intel imac and an m1 mac mini), the macbook pro is the
| slowest, but the imac isn't that much faster than the
| mini. it's something like:
|
| - macbook pro: 9 minutes
|
| - mini: 5 minutes
|
| - imac: 4 minutes
| moreira wrote:
| Where the M1 really blows any other CPU away is single-
| threaded performance; multi-threaded performance is just
| normal. So it's not surprising that it's not faster than
| your 10-core iMac when compiling (which I assume is using
| 100% of every core).
|
| In fact, given that the M1 is an 8-core CPU and your iMac
| has a 10-core CPU, the fact that they take 5 and 4
| minutes respectively to compile seems to indicate that
| they're fairly similar in multi-threaded performance (and
| the iMac wins only because it has more cores).
| Simon321 wrote:
| This is false, computer performance has been doubling
| nearly every year. See for example
| https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/
| parsecs wrote:
| How is this calculated? It isn't very clear. Is this
| representative of individual devices or is it caused by
| more of the same devices?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| On the contrary, I think this is fantastic news:
|
| - It means consumers won't have to keep buying new
| electronic crap every couple years. Maybe we can finally
| get hardware that's built to be modular and maintainable.
|
| - It means performance gains will have to come from writing
| better software. Devs (and more importantly, the companies
| that pay devs) will be forced to care about efficiency
| again. Maybe we can kill Electron and the monstrosity of
| multi-MBs of garbage JS on every site.
|
| The sooner we bury Moore's Law and the myth of "just throw
| more hardware at it" the better.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Moore's law is only about the number of transistors per
| chip doubling every 24 months, not about the performance.
| Seeing that the trend is still happening, Moore's law is
| not dead, as so many have claimed.
| rini17 wrote:
| But what is it good for, if it does not improve
| performance? For example, increasingly larger and larger
| part of transistors on a chip is unused at a given time,
| due to cooling issues.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| It obviously does improve performance, otherwise why
| would people be buying newer chips? :) It doesn't mean
| we'll see exponential performance increases though. In
| specialized scenarios, like video encoding and machine
| learning, we do see large jumps in performance.
| pas wrote:
| It makes other workloads more economical.
|
| And as long as there's something to gain from going
| smaller/denser/bigger, and as long as the cost-benefit is
| good, we'll have bigger chips with smaller and denser
| features.
|
| Sure, cooling is a problem, but it's not like we're even
| seriously trying. It's still just air cooled. Maybe we'll
| integrate microfluidic heat-pump cooling into chips too.
|
| And it seems there's a clear need for more and more
| computing. The "cloud" is growing at an enormous rate.
| Eventually it might make sense to make a datacenter
| oriented well integrated system.
| jhgb wrote:
| I thought it was about number of transistors per chip at
| optimal cost level per transistor.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Is this a bad thing? This seems like a great outcome for
| consumers, and will reduce e-waste. I look forward to a
| future where people see less need to upgrade year after
| year.
| dannyw wrote:
| If you don't just look at the failing Intel, AMD has been
| doing 15-20% improvements year on year.
| [deleted]
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| "Moore's law" was strictly about the average cost of a
| transistor, not performance in general.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Even then Jim Keller is using a looser definition of Moore's
| law - i.e. he's saying there's a lot of scaling left rather
| than that the scaling will continue as it did in the past.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Moore's law is safe for at least two generations of chips, for
| which there are processes developed.
|
| As we speak people are putting together 3nm(TSMC) designs,
| which will ship once the infrastructure is there.
| slver wrote:
| > The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's
| law.
|
| I know most people misunderstand Moore's law, but this is HN,
| so I expect better:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor...
|
| Moore's law is quite alive and showing no signs of problems.
|
| > The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come
| from shrinking die size.
|
| Moore's Law is about number of transistors. Not about their
| size, and not about performance.
|
| And it's ESPECIALLY not about linear core performance.
|
| > That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general
| purpose CPUs.
|
| You don't need to, they're fast enough. Performance is
| expanding in other areas like GPU and ML.
|
| > The death of Moore's law has many consequences, the rise of
| ASICs and custom co-processor chips is just one of them.
|
| No, Moore's law is the very thing supporting them... You need
| extra transistors for those co-processors.
| CivBase wrote:
| > You don't need to, they're fast enough.
|
| You had me with everything except this. Any time someone
| claims the current state of computing hardware is "enough"
| I'm reminded of that fake 640K quote. There is no indication
| we are running out of applications for more compute power.
| slver wrote:
| I'm not saying we're running out of applications for more
| compute power.
|
| We're specifically running out of reasons to want faster
| linear (per core) general-purpose performance (in fact I'd
| say this happened some time ago). Everything else we get
| from here on in terms of smaller process etc. is just a
| bonus. We don't fundamentally need it to keep evolving our
| hardware for our ever-growing computation needs.
|
| And that's because as our problems multiply and grow,
| parallel execution and heterogenous cores tend to solve our
| problems much more efficiently on the watt, than asking for
| "more of the same, but faster".
|
| There's this Ford quote "if I had asked what people want,
| they'd have said faster horses". Fake or not, it reflects
| our tendency to stare at the wrong variables and miss the
| forest for the trees. The industry is full of languages
| utilizing parallel/heterogenous execution and you don't
| need a PhD to use one anymore.
|
| CPUs are effectively turning into "controllers" that
| prepare command queues for various other types of
| processing units. As we keep evolving our GPU/ML/etc.
| processing units, CPUs will have less to do, not more. In
| fact, I expect CPUs will get simpler and slower as our
| bottlenecks move to the specialized vector units.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/a/1395
|
| Explains it better than I could in a HN reply.
|
| Assuming our desired work to be done continues to grow,
| faster core speed* will eventually matter.
|
| * technically, net instructions per second after
| prediction/compute ahead etc
| slver wrote:
| Honestly that's a bit too abstract to make sense of.
|
| As a programmer to another, I'd rather ask... what's one
| example of a problem we have today that needs faster
| linear performance than our best chips (not in a nice-to-
| have way but in a must-have way).
|
| I'd rule out all casual computing like home PCs,
| smartphones, and so on, because honestly we've been there
| for years already.
|
| Also due to decades of bias we have serialized code in
| our programs that doesn't have to be serial, just because
| that's "normal" and because it's deemed easier. Also we
| have a huge untapped potential of better performance by
| being more data-oriented. None of this requires faster
| hardware. It doesn't even require new hardware.
|
| But anyway, I'm open to examples.
| CivBase wrote:
| Linear compute is the ideal solution. Parallelization is
| a useful tool when we run up against the limitations of
| linear compute, but it is not ideal. Parallelization is
| simply not an option for some tasks. Nine mothers cannot
| make a baby in a month. It also adds overhead, regardless
| of the context.
|
| Take businesses for example. Businesses don't _want_ to
| hire employees to get the job done. They want as few
| workers as possible because each one comes with overhead.
| There 's a good reason why startups can accomplish many
| tasks at a fraction of what it would cost a megacorp.
| Hiring, management, training, HR, etc... they are all
| costs a business has to swallow in order to hire more
| employees (ie parallelize).
|
| This is not to say parallelization is _bad_. Given our
| current technological limitations, adding more cores and
| embracing parallelization where possible is the most
| economical solution. That doesn 't faster linear compute
| is a "nice to have".
| fulafel wrote:
| Production quality multiplatform software is much much
| harder and less fun to make for GPUs due to inferior DX,
| rampant driver stack bugs unique for each (gpu vendor,
| os) combination, sorry state of GPU programming
| languages, poor os integration, endemic security problems
| (eg memory safety not even recognised as a problem yet in
| gpu languages), fragmentation of proprietary sw stacks
| and APIs, etc. Creation of performance oriented software
| is often bottlenecked by sw engineering complexity,
| effort and cost, and targeting GPUs multiplies these
| problems.
|
| tldr; we are not running out of reasons for wanting
| faster CPUs. GPUs are a crap, faustian bargain substitute
| for them.
| pshc wrote:
| Virtual reality, being so latency-sensitive, is always
| going to be hungry for faster raw serial execution. It
| seems like something that ought to parallelize alright
| (one GPU per eye!) but my understanding is that there are
| many non-linearities in lighting, physics, rendering
| passes, and so on that create bottlenecks.
| pcurve wrote:
| Maybe this is a bit cheating, but there's chip with 2.5
| trillion transistors. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/
| 20210420005955/en/Cer...
|
| https://wccftech.com/cerebras-unveils-7nm-wafe-scale-
| engine-...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I get your point but...
|
| > The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's
| law.
|
| It is a bit ironic since the M1 is a 5 nm processor, currently
| the finest process, and I think it plays no small part in its
| success. A very Moore's law-esque solution.
| imtringued wrote:
| Scaling will continue for at least another 10 years.
| sebyx07 wrote:
| At least on a x86, you can install Windows / Linux / Hackintosh.
| With m1 you have can install HackinWindows / HackinLinux / Mac,
| if you understand the joke.
|
| The good part with m1 is that force amd and intel better cpus.
| Competition in always good. The not so good part is that Apple
| might start a trend of higher prices for CPUs.
| othiagocruz wrote:
| I for one welcome our new ARM overlords, may x86 rest in peace
| along with other relics of the past. Saying this as both a gamer
| and intel/pc enthusiast but iphone owner.
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