[HN Gopher] The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and Mor...
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The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Efficient
Author : vanburen
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-10-04 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain by
| just removing IME and PSP. The framework and librem laptops show
| that there is a market of people willing to pay for upgradable
| devices which are independent from makers and free from out-of-
| the-box backdoors.
| least wrote:
| > Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain
| by just removing IME and PSP.
|
| On a very practical scale; none. It'd make some nerds happy but
| it's like a subset of a subset of a niche population.
|
| > The framework and librem laptops show that there is a market
| of people willing to pay for upgradable devices which are
| independent from makers and free from out-of-the-box backdoors.
|
| All it shows is that there is some market for it but I think
| you're either severely overestimating framework and librem's
| scale or are severely underestimating intel and AMD's. I'm
| extremely skeptical that either company cares about that niche
| nor do I think they'd rework all their processors just to
| satisfy that niche.
| marcodiego wrote:
| For siblings commenting that the librem and framework markets
| are small... You're right, it is small indeed. What is harder
| to measure is the impact of the goodwill they could gain. It is
| not very different from what they gain of sponsoring events. Of
| course changing behavior could be more expensive or
| complicated, but it may be worth in the long run.
|
| IME features maybe useful for some people. But there are people
| who don't want it. I don't think it would be expensive to make
| it possible to disable it via eFuses.
|
| Remember that linux was once much smaller than any commercial
| UNIX. So was Apache and Nginx. Linux is still very unpopular
| among gamers; that didn't prevented Valve from investing in
| what now is their lifeboat.
|
| A small market should not be seen as an excuse to not invest in
| something that will certainly bring goodwill.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Compared to the markets Intel serves, the Librem and framework
| markets are inconsequential. No good financial incentive for
| them to invest in such a move.
| acdha wrote:
| > Intel and AMD should consider how much goodwill they may gain
| by just removing IME and PSP.
|
| Too small to measure: the subset of privacy activists who are
| concerned about it is orders of magnitude smaller than the
| number of IT workers who use those features, and that's a tiny
| fraction of the number of people buying computers.
|
| Calling it as a backdoor is your choice but consider that using
| a term not following its standard definition is not likely to
| be effective or good for your credibility if you're trying to
| draw attention to something more important in the future.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I'll consider the advice.
| wronglebowski wrote:
| While seeing these deep dives on A series processors is
| fascinating I find how powerful they are to be highly
| disappointing.
|
| Here you have undoubtedly some of the finest processor technology
| available, manufactured in the hundreds of millions, wasted by
| the constraints of its platform. If the Pi foundation had access
| to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology
| the overall computing world would be so much more capable.
|
| Even beyond that, the iPhones themselves? Severely limited by the
| I/O they possess. As these devices age they could have several
| recycled general computing purposes but they're constrained by
| the single lighting port. iPhone use NVMe storage, they have PCIe
| lanes!
|
| All this work, effort and engineering for a platform who simply
| seeks to make more off of the revenue of whales in their app
| stores.
|
| Edit: I think my comment around Pis is a little misleading. What
| I meant is the general educational Linux community. Not
| specifically the Pi foundation. If after X years Apple unlocked
| the bootloader and you could install other operating systems to
| better leverage the hardware I'd feel better about the state of
| it.
| xoa wrote:
| > _wasted by the constraints of its platform_
|
| I mean, ignoring that there are some fairly serious number
| crunching things to do on iPhones (I think the lidar and basic
| 3D scanning features intro'd with the iPhone 12 Pro are already
| quite useful professionally for example, like cameras
| themselves on smartphones), how can you say this following
| Apple's switch of Macs to their chips too? Obviously the
| economies of scale and constraints generated by iPhone
| development has fed Apple's move up the stack in classic
| disruptive fashion to the iPad and then last year the Mac.
| Hwever you feel about smartphones themselves, it seems a little
| more than a little odd to see this comment now in 2021 given
| that it's going straight into more classic personal computers
| as well?
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I don't understand the comment wrt the MacBooks either.
|
| It looks more like sour grapes that one of the most
| prestigious computing companies on the planet is out-
| engineering the "foundation" spin-off of Broadcom, created
| (very successfully, I might add) to breathe life into an
| aging chip foundry.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "It looks more like sour grapes"
|
| He wants that chip in a raspberri pi, not sure what you
| call it, it's the quite the opposite of sour grapes
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| "sour grapes" (2): "feeling or expressing resentment,
| disappointment, or anger"
|
| Seems appropriate to me.
| wronglebowski wrote:
| I updated my post to reflect my feelings better.
| wronglebowski wrote:
| I'm excited about the M1 Macs and the fact they do have
| bootloaders which can be unlocked. This doesn't change the
| fact that there are a large magnitude more iPhones that exist
| that will never be used for their full potential.
|
| Everyone is buying a magical teleporter but it'll only take
| you down to the corner store. Doesn't matter if 95% would
| only use it for that anyway, the fact the other 5% can't is
| what makes me sad.
| xoa wrote:
| > _This doesn 't change the fact that there are a large
| magnitude more iPhones that exist that will never be used
| for their full potential._
|
| Depends I guess? Having a lot of power on tap can show up
| in transparent ways as well as obvious apps. Apple is
| definitely leaning heavily on their SoC for a lot of their
| computational photography stuff. Pros may prefer to just
| shoot RAW of course for decent reason, but having a system
| make "good shots" fairly point-and-shoot at the cost of a
| ton of compute is a real value add for lots of regular
| people. A lot of people also do some real gaming on their
| iPhones these days, and those can absolutely push the GPU.
| Maybe that doesn't fall into your definition of serious,
| but I don't think it's quite fair to dismiss any use-case
| valued by customers. There are also extremely practical
| energy saving issues like the race to sleep. Often the
| faster a chip can do a job and then return to hibernation,
| the better the energy efficiency. A lot of normal usage is
| very bursty, and like it or not on the modern web there are
| tons of sites that can hammer SoCs pretty hard. Everyone
| cares to some degree about battery life and responsiveness
| in handhelds.
|
| If there was some big cost for this that'd be one thing,
| but there really isn't given the economics of modern
| silicon design and fabrication. Apple amortizes R&D big
| time across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even stuff like the
| Apple TV. Relentlessly pushing forward the units on the
| phones feeds directly into everything else. And even if
| most people only use the full potential a fraction of the
| time that may be a very valuable fraction, and what will
| take off in the future that might use it isn't always
| clear.
|
| Though one thing that is clear is that wearable displays
| and serious AR/VR are the big next disruption/extension
| event for computing, and Apple like every other player
| needs to be ready. That's going to take a ton of compute
| power along with highly evolved environmental sensor usage
| and fusion. They have to be working towards that for years
| and years beforehand, and clearly are.
| mcphage wrote:
| > If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even
| pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world
| would be so much more capable.
|
| Even if they had access to it I don't think it would be
| anywhere near as affordable as the Pi foundation wants their
| devices to be. An M1-powered Raspberry Pi would be amazing, but
| also probably several hundred dollars.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| You've got a point. Back in the iPhone 4S days, I speculated
| that some day there could be a really interesting market for
| second-hand iPhone "motherboards" to be put to use in... oh I
| dunno... robotics, OLPC-type things, even blade servers... Of
| course I knew that Apple would fight rooting (and then the
| secure enclave came along) but it was fun to imagine.
|
| The article mentions that several leads from the Apple chip
| division bailed for Nuvia, so at least the future of non-Apple
| boards looks a bit brighter.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I get that these Apple chips are fast but has anyone spent
| anytime comparing how fast the Operating System is to other OS?
|
| macOS/iOS vs Windows or Linux.
|
| Usain Bolt is the fastest person on earth. But if he's wearing 5
| kilogram shoes, he's not going to be any faster than a normal
| person.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Interesting SPEC 2017 performance figures for the A15 performance
| cores vs x86 that the story's author posted in the story
| comments:
|
| >Comparative subsets would 5950X 7.29 int / 9.79 fp, 11900K 6.61
| int / 9.58 fp. versus 7.28 / 10.15 on A15
| flakiness wrote:
| I wonder if there are any reviews that measures their progress on
| the camera ISP, which occupies large amount of real estate on
| these smartphone SoCs. Clearly Apple invests a lot on the area,
| and it shows on their presos, yet almost no review mentions about
| how it progresses over time.
|
| Same for media codecs, and lesser extent, NPU kind of stuff.
| retskrad wrote:
| People love to ding Tim Cook for Apple's lack of innovation but
| the I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level
| as the first iPhone. Of course, it's not as sexy and in your face
| as the first iPhone but people in the industry and consumers
| immediately felt the impact of the shock wave.
|
| When you think about it, the M1 perfectly encapsulates Apple
| under Tim Cook. It didn't come out of nowhere. They have slowly
| improved on their A-series in the iPhones the last decade and it
| accumulated into the M1. That's exactly how Apple is run today.
| Inch by inch.
| jdub wrote:
| Revolutionary incremental improvement?
| pier25 wrote:
| Or rather "evolutionary"?
| lallysingh wrote:
| It makes them predictable and vulnerable.
| simonh wrote:
| Revolutionary is always going to be controversial. The first
| iPhone was dismissed as nothing special. There were touch
| screens before, after all, and it didn't even have a proper
| keyboard. The first 64-bit ARM SOC was argued not to be
| revolutionary because it offered only evolutionary levels of
| performance comparable to previous Apple CPUs.
|
| I don't think it's arguable that the M1 wasn't a game changer
| though. M1 firmly established Apple's design prowess at the
| laptop/desktop class chip game. It was no longer arguable that
| mere phone chips weren't comparable to desktop class CPUs. That
| claim is dead. It also enabled performance and power efficiency
| levels years ahead of the competition, giving tangible
| immediate benefits to customers.
|
| So revolutionary? It's a matter of opinion, but I think it was
| a watershed moment and permanently changed the technical
| landscape for CPUs running 'full blown' desktop class software.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > The first 64-bit ARM SOC was argued not to be revolutionary
| because it offered only evolutionary levels of performance
| comparable to previous Apple CPUs.
|
| It sounds like you are conflating AArch64 with Apple. Apple
| had nothing to do with AArch64, it was developed by ARM in-
| house; Apple simply released the first AArch64-compatible
| core (outside of ARM's Cortex series).
| simonh wrote:
| I'm fully aware of that. Apple released the first SOC
| implementing it.
| Thaxll wrote:
| M1 is an implementation detail.
| pohl wrote:
| * ...an implementation detail that makes the implementation
| possible.
| intrasight wrote:
| The M1 is evolutionary. What I think will truly revolutionary
| is the AR classes that Apple makes in a couple years using the
| next-generation of that silicon.
| okamiueru wrote:
| By what metric do you consider the M1 revolutionary? "Inch by
| inch" and "revolutionary" are a bit contradictory, no?
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| It is _still_ the fastest single-threaded performance
| available on any chip you can buy today: Laptop, desktop,
| server.
|
| https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
|
| (Available in a fanless ~$1k laptop, no less!)
| kllrnohj wrote:
| At passmark, anyway, in a chart that seems to have some
| rather questionable orderings to it. Like the Ryzen 5900 is
| according to that AMD's fastest single core performance
| CPU. But that's certainly not the case as it's just a
| power-restricted & clock-restricted version of the 5900X,
| and the 5950X has then an even higher clock ceiling.
|
| Similarly on the Intel side they have the 11900 ranked
| higher than the 11900K. Which again, there's no way that's
| true since the 11900K is literally an 11900 with a higher
| power limit & higher turbo frequency. And then the 11900KF,
| which is just an 11900K but with the iGPU disabled, is then
| somehow a lot faster than both?
|
| Actual binnings & achievable frequencies vary, of course,
| but these orderings aren't passing a sniff test, either.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673,
| https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637, and
| https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 are
| better comparison points here. The M1's single-core
| performance is of course _very_ strong, but I 'm not sure
| why you're surprised that it's "still" the fastest single-
| core CPU since these CPUs are all the same generation.
| There hasn't really been anything newer.
| pdpi wrote:
| When you look at the history behind the M1, it's been an
| inch-by-inch progression, grinding away at that CPU
| architecture. The culmination of that work is having one
| single CPU power iPads, macbooks and iMacs, which I think can
| reasonably be called revolutionary.
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's not. The release was somewhat revolutionary (it's not
| all it's made out to be, but there are many remarkable things
| about it).
|
| Before releasing it though, they worked up to it (in secret),
| 2.54 centimeters by 2.54 centimeters.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| How so? If I build a house with a revolutionary blueprint,
| but I build that house brick by brick to make sure it's the
| best representation of that blueprint possible, is it still
| not a revolutionary home?
| askonomm wrote:
| By the metric that I can have an entry level Macbook
| outperform maxed out Macbooks of a previous era. Oh and, do
| that with a ~20 hour battery life. And no fan.
| s0ss wrote:
| I see no contradiction.
|
| M1 powers by far the best arm based laptop available today -
| all arm laptops hence forth will be compared to it.
| revolutionary.
|
| Apple iterations on arm have been regular and consistent for
| a long time.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Not just arm. The M1 is a point of reference for any
| portable computer.
| nightski wrote:
| Well that's not true. M1 is great for certain workloads,
| but I'd take my G14 any day of the week with it's Nvidia
| GTX 3060.
| mwint wrote:
| And, I might add, all laptops of any architecture.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It was developed gradually: The A series is already at number
| 15!
|
| Macs suddenly switched to these ARM processors. That's the
| revolution, and the number is M1, but it's based on the
| gradually developed A series.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Do revolutions typically start over night or do they build up
| until there's a tipping point? Apple has been working towards
| a revolution, the M1 is the tipping point.
| ant6n wrote:
| Tipping towards what? How will having this laptop change
| your life over having another laptop? What can you do now
| that you couldn't do before?
| kgermino wrote:
| Good question. It completely untethers me from my desk.
| The battery life is so good I can get through an entire
| work day without worrying about power at any point. This
| frees me up to leave (e.g. for a meeting, to work in the
| park or just on a couch, or simply being frazzled and in
| a hurry) without even considering a power brick or when
| I'll be able to plug in again.
|
| To have that freedom in a 3 lb laptop with virtually no
| performance compromises is incredible.
| Jcowell wrote:
| I would take an M1 MacBook Pro over my intel MacBook Pro
| in a heart beat. It's a heating battery dying piece of
| shit to put it lightly
| cptskippy wrote:
| ARM replacing X86 as the desktop computing processor of
| choice.
|
| A revolution doesn't have to benefit you. This benefits
| Apple financially, any benefits you receive are
| secondary.
| jws wrote:
| The revolutionary aspect of the M1 is that the processor for
| a computer is once again under control of the computer
| designers. For thirty years it has been outsourced as a
| commodity and been optimized for the interests of the CPU
| producers. The centralization of CPU design had benefits of
| scale, but maybe at this time Apple's scale is big enough
| that taking control of the design is more advantageous.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Wouldn't you imagine every revolution is really a catalyst
| moment that follows years of hardly-noticed incremental
| changes that set the stage for it?
| Koshkin wrote:
| It is indeed revolutionary, because it is at the heart of the
| _first_ widely popular fully-functional powerful general-
| purpose ARM-based laptop ever being produced on a massive,
| industrial scale. If that 's not being revolutionary, I don't
| know what is.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.
|
| Nothing changes in the way people use their computers. It's
| a performance leap, but there have been many such in the
| past. Back when PCs and laptops got 2 cores instead of 1,
| "real" multitasking was finally possible and performance
| doubled almost overnight. That was IMHO a bigger leap than
| M1, but I don't hear people calling Core 2 Duo and Athlon
| X2 "revolutionary".
| latch wrote:
| > If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.
|
| Then you might want to look up the definition. A revolution
| is "radical" and makes "fundamental changes in the
| socioeconomic situation".
|
| Life after the printing press / steam engine / transistor
| fundamentally changed. Even if tomorrow, all x86 chips were
| replaced with ARM chips, what radical and fundamental
| changes to society would take place?
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| I love my M1 Air, but ultimately it's a moderately faster
| version of what I had before. The real benefit, so far, is
| that I have a fanless machine with the same kind of power
| as the previous pro level machines. Otherwise, it hasn't
| exactly changed what the computer is on a fundamental
| level.
| cglace wrote:
| The fact that I can forget my power cord and not care is
| a game changer.
| ajross wrote:
| > first widely popular fully-functional powerful general-
| purpose ARM-based laptop ever being produced on a massive,
| industrial scale.
|
| I submit if you need to qualify your use of the word
| "laptop" with fully eight adjectives or adjectival phrases
| to avoid ambiguity with pre-existing products, that it's
| probably not "revolutionary" by definition.
|
| The M1 is a good CPU. It's incrementally better than the
| Intel CPUs used in earlier versions of the same product.
|
| It is very _notable_ in that it was produced in-house and
| not purchased from Intel. And that says important things
| about the business climate in which Apple finds itself. But
| that 's not the same thing as "revolutionary" in a
| technological sense. It does what competing chips do,
| somewhat better.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > The M1 is a good CPU. It's incrementally better than
| the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions of the same
| product.
|
| I suppose everything can be called incrementally better
| by some viewpoint but calling it incrementally better
| than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions is wild to
| me. I specifically switched to my first ever Apple
| product because of how revolutionary the generational
| step was compared to what we've been getting on x86
| laptops year to year and no equivalent x86 laptops of the
| year came close. Not only is it comparable to my
| overclocked desktop in tasks from 1-4 cores it does so
| without kicking on fans and the battery life is
| astounding while it does it. It even runs emulated x86
| software faster than the native x86 version of the same
| year.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Here is what I find confusing. When people say the M1 is
| revolutionary, it really seems to suggest that the
| playing field is "available CPUs on the market". But,
| then some mean it to be "no, just compared to old CPUs in
| the previous generation of the same product".
| danudey wrote:
| > I submit if you need to qualify your use of the word
| "laptop" with fully eight adjectives or adjectival
| phrases to avoid ambiguity with pre-existing products,
| that it's probably not "revolutionary" by definition.
|
| I count five: It's the first "widely popular", "fully-
| functional", "powerful", "general purpose" ARM-based
| laptop ever being "produced on a massive, industrial
| scale"
|
| My counterpoint: it's revolutionary because it's the
| first ARM-based laptop which doesn't have to make a ton
| of compromises to make it out the door.
|
| It's got mass-market appeal ("widely popular", unlike the
| PineBook Pro).
|
| It's not limited in functional scope ("fully functional",
| unlike Chromebooks).
|
| It's not limited in computing power ("powerful", unlike
| any other ARM laptop).
|
| It's not restricted to a subset of tasks ("general-
| purpose", unlike the iPad Pro when treated as a laptop).
|
| It's being mass-produced for retail, i.e. it's not a
| limited-run or a prototype ("produced on a massive,
| industrial scale").
|
| Every other attempt at an ARM laptop has made one or more
| of these compromises; the M1 Macbooks (and the M1 Mini)
| don't have any of these compromises, meaning that it's
| fit-for-purpose for the vast majority of laptop users
| (those for whom a Macbook would have sufficed before the
| M1 line).
|
| I think being good and useful is pretty revolutionary; I
| haven't seen another ARM laptop offer that, and those are
| pretty important features.
| mettamage wrote:
| While I agree, I think you're not giving credit to RISC +
| Apple's vertical integration here. What does it do? It
| produces a lot less energy per instruction.
|
| I think that other manufacturers will look into their
| energy usage as well. That's quite revolutionary, because
| it seems to me that it has shown a proof of concept for
| which there's a lot of room to grow in. Less energy means
| less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.
|
| My thinking is simplistic but I think someone with more
| understanding of it will tend to agree with my high level
| view and tell you exactly why this is revolutionary.
|
| Note: I'm not giving Apple full credit here, I'm giving
| it half credit. The other half goes to the invention of
| ARM and RISC micro-architecture in general.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No, it doesn't. If it did we'd be seeing similar
| performance from other ARM CPU vendors, and we aren't.
| Apple pulling far ahead of Intel is largely independent
| of them using ARM and more a function of how much
| investment their poured into their own chips.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| That's still evolutionary not revolutionary. Every CPU
| intended for laptops over the last 20 years has been both
| increasing performance and reducing power consumption
| compared to the generation(s) before them. Apple didn't
| buck a trend, they didn't do anything _new_. They "just"
| had a really good execution of the standard, tried & true
| improvement path.
|
| This was the whole marketing push behind projects like
| Intel Centrino - to drive even lower system power
| consumption by mandating certain combinations of certain
| parts that worked well together. Which continued with
| things like Intel Atheno & Evo.
|
| Nothing Apple did with the M1 changed the game. It's the
| same game, it's the same race it's always been, they just
| are now in the lead of that race with their car. Which is
| impressive in its own right, but definitely not
| "revolutionary"
|
| > Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can
| crank up clock cycles.
|
| This goes the other way around. To improve efficiency you
| _reduce_ the clock cycles and increase IPC instead. That
| was the M1 's advancement over the status quo, a
| significant increase in IPC. Clock speeds didn't change -
| in fact, it regressed by a tremendous amount. This
| regression in clock speed is how the M1 consumes so
| little power by comparison.
| PeterisP wrote:
| IMHO for _every_ invention that 's the definition of
| "revolutionary" that matters.
|
| The first lightbulb isn't revolutionary, it's a nifty toy
| invention that doesn't affect anything, much less cause a
| revolution like the first practical efficient general
| purpose mass produced lightbulbs did.
|
| The first radio isn't revolutionary, the first practical
| efficient general purpose mass produced radios make the
| revolution.
|
| The same for computers, the same for smartphones - iPhone
| was revolutionary because it impacted the world; while
| its competing predecessors that had almost the same tech
| did not and so were not revolutionary.
| duped wrote:
| Even if that were true, it would still just be an
| incremental improvement. We've been mass marketing laptops
| for decades. Switching to a different architecture while a
| big engineering task isn't revolutionary.
|
| But it's not true. ARM based Chromebooks have been on the
| market for years already and cornered educational markets
| and had massive consumer success overseas.
| yoz-y wrote:
| One interesting thing about the M1 is that a single chip
| (currently) powers apple's tablet, entry level laptop, entry
| level desktop, and their most recent all-in-one desktop and
| high end pro laptop. The differentiation is done elsewhere.
| What is missing is the high end pro level hardware, but if
| the rumors are true those will have the same but "more of
| it". It's the first chip I know of that answers the "should
| we optimise for speed or for power consumption" by "yes".
| r00fus wrote:
| Simply by application of existing cutting-edge technology
| (mobile chipset) to a different use-case (laptops/desktops).
|
| The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade, but the
| execution required to achieve it is definitely remarkable.
|
| My M1 MBA is better than my 2020 Intel MBP (which cost over
| 2x) in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery
| life, and incredible responsiveness.
|
| And x86 will never catch up. That's why it's revolutionary -
| it has destabilized the existing regime.
| okamiueru wrote:
| In which particular area are you suggesting that the M1 is
| ahead for x86 to catch up?
| dralley wrote:
| The A15 performance cores seem to be equivalent in
| performance to AMD Ryzen 5950x desktop cores, at 1/5th of
| the power budget.
|
| True, AMD has a few tricks up their sleeve, and is a node
| behind Apple at TSMC, but on a purely technical level
| it's clear that Apple ahead of both AMD and Intel.
| okamiueru wrote:
| The power consumption is very impressive indeed. But, I
| think there are many compromises to be made when scaling
| up, so we'll see how the M2 performs in this regard.
| However, aside from power consumption, I find it
| interesting that people refer to it as such a revolution.
| Maybe I'm just imagining a unspoken "... for what is to
| come". Because as is, the only thing the M1 does better
| than it's competition is arguably the power consumption.
| The 5950x you mention, although an apples to oranges
| comparison will outperform highly parallelizable tasks by
| a factor of 4. Throw in a top end GPU and it becomes a
| factor of 14.
|
| Now, power consumption may be the end all be all for some
| people. If your work tasks actually don't require a lot
| of computational power, then I can see it being much more
| valuable to have the flexibility of a cool laptop with a
| long battery life.
|
| But, touting the M1 as revolutionary, because all that
| matters is power consumption, feels like a disconnect to
| me. I'm all for people liking stuff they like. But, I
| don't get what's revolutionary at all. I was interesting
| in hearing what people thought about it though.
| r00fus wrote:
| quoting my earlier post:
|
| > in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler,
| battery life, and incredible responsiveness.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| its the first ARM based PC that doesn't suck. Microsoft
| Windows ARM didn't move people to ARM based PC while Apple
| succeed.
| fulafel wrote:
| Early Acorn Archimedes users would like a word about that
| "first" claim, it misses by a few decades!
| ghshephard wrote:
| Not sure who downvoted you - I completely agree. People
| have been talking about Arm as the next generation for a
| long time. I would suggest that Amazon made it successful
| with Graviton in the cloud, and Apple made it successful on
| the laptop/desktop with the M1.
| cobookman wrote:
| 100% the m1 reminds me of the leap from a BlackBerry to my
| first iPhone. With my m1 laptop, I never have to worry about
| bringing my charger. My intel MBP always had slowdowns, with my
| M1 I've never noticed a slowdown.
|
| The m1's compute/watt will enable designers to change the
| dimensions of a laptop to be even smaller and compact. If the
| iphone's a15 starts to be near m1 compute-power, we could
| actually see the iPhone merge to become the device powering our
| monitors and keyboards. The new possibilities of such a
| revolutionary technology is endless!
| thefounder wrote:
| >> we could actually see the iPhone merge to become the
| device powering our monitors and keyboards.
|
| I highly doubt that because it means Apple will sell zero
| macbooks and they don't want less sales.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm not sure it's revolutionary but it is a remarkable device.
| The Air is the first laptop I've owned that I actually like
| using rather than tolerate.
| techrat wrote:
| > The Air is the first laptop I've owned that I actually like
| using rather than tolerate.
|
| Either you have been buying extremely crappy devices and
| expecting too much from them or this is some grade a, piping
| hot bullshit. While the differences under the hood exist,
| they're not substantial and when the hood is closed, it's
| still the same device with the same operating system.
|
| Intel MBAs and M1 MBAs are not so different overall that you
| would have to say you like using it versus _tolerating_ it,
| assuming you were using the Intel based MBAs before.
|
| Otherwise this comes off as a thinly veiled "Wintel ew, Apple
| good!" regurgitated bit of fanboy wank.
| spideymans wrote:
| > Otherwise this comes off as a thinly veiled "Wintel ew,
| Apple good!" regurgitated bit of fanboy wank.
|
| No, the M1 Air is just a substantially better product than
| the Intel variants. You can find dozens of HN threads where
| people explain exactly why.
| techrat wrote:
| And before the M1 variants ever existed, people moaned
| about how they only _tolerated_ the Intel MacBook
| /Air/Pro variants?
|
| Bullshit. It's fanboy revisionism.
| wayneftw wrote:
| Ryzen is where it's at. Zero loss of general computing
| freedom, 12 hour battery time on laptops and faster than
| Intel.
|
| You lose so much right now with an M1 and later you'll
| lose even more. Honestly, you'd have to be a fan boy to
| get behind this.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| What do you lose? You get iOS apps, much better battery
| life, fanless, a Unix os with the ability to install
| Linux. What is the loss you refer to?
| wayneftw wrote:
| Pffft. If you can't think of a single thing, I won't even
| bother arguing with you.
|
| Enjoy the dystopian future you're creating.
| techrat wrote:
| Openess.
|
| Apple is the #1 most restrictive company in the world.
| "the ability to install Linux" with zero commits and
| support from Apple themselves, all reverse engineered.
| Meanwhile Intel and AMD both contribute to the Linux
| kernel.
|
| How much kool aid do you have to drink to think that
| 'ability' is actually something you can say is a feature
| with Apple devices?
|
| Come back when I can unlock the bootloader of an iDevice
| and we'll talk about the 'ability' to install Linux.
| cromka wrote:
| > Apple is the #1 most restrictive company in the world
|
| You really will not gain much credibility here on HN by
| throwing in some random, made-up ranking results. And I
| can guarantee that 99.99% didn't even read past that
| sentence /s
| techrat wrote:
| Way to blow me over with facts and citations.
|
| Apple: Prevents sideloading without a host MacOS
| computer.
|
| Sideloading is temporary.
|
| Blocks third party app stores.
|
| Blocks any and all browsers using a non-Safari engine.
|
| Not one iPad or iPhone has _ever_ been bootloader
| unlockable.
|
| They've locked out iMessage people from being able to
| port their number out of the service for YEARS.
|
| Tell me what part of this screams openness.
|
| Even the most restrictive devices are less restrictive
| than Apple's. If the "ability to install Linux" is the
| benchmark here, guess what... that's nearly every single
| fucking device in the world. Except the majority of Apple
| devices, of course.
|
| Apple _explicitly_ has gone out of their way to prevent
| this.
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple
| -T2...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/11/06/bo
| oti...
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-must-be-done-to-bring-
| lin...
|
| Apple does _ZERO_ to allow people to use an OS outside of
| their sandboxes. With the Intel based systems, Bootcamp
| is still restricted and limits hardware access necessary
| to run Windows properly on their systems.
|
| Yes. Apple is restrictive as fuck. As far as Technology
| companies go, yes, I'd put them up at the top.
|
| Your turn with sources and citations.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| What do you lose? You get iOS apps, much better battery
| life, a cool and fanless computer, a Unix os with the
| ability to install Linux. What is the loss you refer to?
| ulfw wrote:
| The M1 Air is a lot faster than it's intel predecessor, the
| battery runtime is at least 50% longer in real use and the
| thing is fanless, silent and I haven't burned a single body
| part yet. That alone is revolutionary.
|
| Just because the machine hasn't changed in appearance (and
| sadly neither has it's so-so display), the chip difference
| alone makes it a whole different ballgame.
| techrat wrote:
| Fanboys have driven the word 'revolutionary' into the
| ground so deeply that it ceases to have any actual
| meaning anymore.
|
| Meanwhile, through temporal prescience, the previous
| Intel based Macbooks were simultaneously revolutionary
| and merely _tolerated_ before the M1 variants ever
| existed.
|
| Don't you guys ever get tired of twisting your Apple
| apologeticism thought processes into a gordian knot all
| the time?
| hajile wrote:
| Those efficiency cores are something to behold. They positively
| blow away the A55.
|
| A510 is the next best thing. Like bulldozer, it will have two
| integer units sharing a single floating point unit. I doubt
| companies will ship 8 A510 cores which means that overall little
| core performance will likely not be improving a huge amount.
|
| In fact, it's looking to me like A79 is going to be the "little"
| core while X2 will be the big core and a couple A510s will be
| strictly limited to secure low-level processes.
| paulpan wrote:
| This denotes how important TSMC and having the fabrication node
| advantage is for Apple. The A15 seems to be an all-around good
| chip, just not the magnitude of performance jumps (20%+) Apple
| has shown since the A7. For reference, this chip is on an
| improved TSMC 5nm (N5P) node but still 5nm nonetheless like last
| year's A14.
|
| Last year's M1/A14 cores had performance gains due to the
| combined architecture improvement and the shifting from TSMC 7nm
| to 5nm fabrication. At the time it was difficult to determine the
| % of gains attributable to either, so now it seems we have a
| better idea that node advantage could be the majority.
|
| It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next
| M-series chip announcement, e.g. M1X or M2. I still think it's
| plausible Apple switches the M-series chips to 3nm first in order
| to cement their superiority over Intel. That said, porting
| architectures across nodes is no small feat (as we saw in Intel's
| Rocket Lake, though that was small -> big).
| ksec wrote:
| Even though I am no longer an Apple Fan I was surprised at the
| sentiment on A15 after the Keynote and Reviews.
|
| Do people really expect revolutionary improvement every single
| year? ~20% Improvement YoY within the same power envelop is god
| damn impressive. And if this is not good enough? This is just
| layering ground work for next year's 3nm and LPDDR5. ( Or 4nm
| depending on circumstances )
|
| The E Core are interesting because they are a preview of what to
| expect in next generation Apple Watch.
|
| I was hoping there is some investigation on new Display Engine
| and Video Encoder / Decoder. Especially on power usage. But looks
| like these kind of interest are in the minority.
| adolfojp wrote:
| I think it's a normal reaction to the marketing. When every
| product launch is promoted as the second coming of Jesus Christ
| people become cynical and overly critical.
| [deleted]
| kergonath wrote:
| And yet you don't see this with any other competitor. Even
| Intel, who kept dropping the ball year after year. In
| contrast, Apple has been consistently realistic about their
| performance figures, and outperforming all their direct
| competitors for about 10 years.
|
| It's just a knee jerk reaction to about anything related to
| Apple. There is a lot to dislike about them, to be sure, but
| these reactions to independent benchmarks are just blind
| cynicism. It's cool to be a contrarian, and it is making the
| Internet a much worse place.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I was a little surprised that it seems to outperform the M1
| chip. This M1 chip has been an absolute joy to use since the
| moment I started using the Mac Mini. After 5 mins I decided
| that I am totally willing to burn the bridges. Lets drop x86 as
| the legacy arch that it is and don't look back. M1 Mac Mini was
| so snappy that I was taken back to the mid 2000s when new
| computers were extremely exciting again. It provided so much
| delight and joy.
|
| To think they are just casually outperforming their desktop
| chip in the benchmarks. Man I can't wait for the next M1X/M2 or
| whatever they call it.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| "Give up replaceable components and buy entire SoCs for all
| of your upgrades. Also forget about incremental upgrades"
|
| No, thank you, I'll keep a flawed x86 architecture. We could
| also stop writing shit software.
| danudey wrote:
| For what it's worth, all of the systems that Apple has
| shipped with the M1 are replacing systems which also did
| not have replaceable components and could not manage
| incremental updates.
|
| The main difference that I see is that the M1 chip is much
| faster and more power efficient than the systems it
| replaced (as well as much more expensive systems, for that
| matter; see M1 Air vs. Macbook Pro). I suspect that means
| that people who buy the M1 systems that Apple is selling
| won't replace their laptops as soon as people who bought
| x86 versions.
|
| Your point is taken, but this is a trend that Apple has
| been moving towards regardless; it's not something that's
| new to the M1 Macs. You haven't ever been able to swap out
| your motherboard or processor in a Macintosh with very few
| exceptions (including the Xeon Mac Pros), and we've yet to
| see what an M1 (or M2 or whatever) Mac Pro would look like,
| expandability-wise, anyway.
| posguy wrote:
| Its almost like Apple stuck with a CPU vendor that was
| trapped at 14nm while they were able to buy access to
| TSMC 5nm, a full 3 generations ahead of what was in older
| Macs, with each generation providing significant double
| digit improvements in density and power usage reduction.
| EricE wrote:
| >"Give up replaceable components and buy entire SoCs for
| all of your upgrades. Also forget about incremental
| upgrades"
|
| I used to think like that - until I analyzed all my PC
| builds over the last 12 years and realized with Intel
| changing sockets every generation the whole incremental
| upgrade thing was fond memories from the 80's, 90's and
| early 2000's. Once I realized incremental upgrades wasn't a
| hill worth dying on my choices increased and I've never
| been happier with the size/weight/speed/battery life that
| previous dogma prevented me from even evaluating.
|
| >We could also stop writing shit software.
|
| We could but people don't. Sentiments often don't survive
| contact with reality :p
| Mailtemi wrote:
| Totally agree. More than happy with the performance. I would
| worry about it if I can pair a 4K monitor to the iPhone , and
| it becomes a Mac, or at least an iPad. Until this killer
| feature, I prefer longer time between re-charge.
| kossTKR wrote:
| That would honestly be amazing and probably very feasible
| with the new chipsets.
|
| Imagine having a desktop setup and an "empty" laptop case
| with slide in dock.
|
| Everything in one place. Same system for the iPad.
|
| Will probably never happen though because that's less
| products to sell?
| orangepanda wrote:
| Microsoft already did that with Continuum. No one used it.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum
| danudey wrote:
| That's because:
|
| 1. No one used Windows Phone either
|
| 2. The use-case wasn't really clear.
|
| "Run Office apps on a regular computer-sized monitor!" I
| can already do that, using the computer-sized computer
| connected to my computer-sized monitor.
|
| "Setup is simple using Continuum-compatible accessories"
| So I have to buy a new keyboard/mouse/monitor/something
| else? (No, but it sounds like I might have to)
|
| The pitch was "You can use your phone kind of like a PC,
| assuming every app you need runs on Windows phone"
| (which, for almost everyone, is absolutely not the case).
| If there's one thing Windows phone was famous for, it was
| not having apps.
|
| Essentially, Microsoft was trying to pitch you a feature
| that let you use a phone + monitor and keyboard as a
| replacement for _some of_ the apps on your PC. Not a
| compelling pitch, except for presentations.
| [deleted]
| tpetry wrote:
| I would love that! The desktop part could still be another
| product with a more powerfull cpu and gpu which is using
| the iphone just as a bootable drive.
| acomjean wrote:
| samsung has the "phone to desktop" application for some of
| its devices. Called "Dex"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX
|
| makes sense when these devices are already more powerful
| (and expensive) than you Raspberry Pi.
| Osiris wrote:
| ARM SoC developed for Android devices, on the other hand, are
| consistently way behind in performance and are nearly all based
| on ARM designs.
|
| I've been waiting for years for someone other than Apple to make
| a fully custom ARM SoC that can compete with Apple.
|
| I suspect there isn't a lot of incentive for Qualcomm to do it as
| they as nearly a monopoly in the Android space.
|
| I've been hoping that AMD or Intel would step up and make an ARM
| core that crushes Qualcomm.
|
| I just got a used iPhone 7 for my so and despite being 5 years
| old is still really smooth running the latest iOS 15. It's the
| only iPhone I own (the rest are Android) and I'm a bit jealous.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Qualcomm dominates at radios, which matters far more than
| single-core CPU performance. So there's no pressure on Qualcomm
| to be better, and really all they do is take off-the-shelf ARM
| designs for the CPU cores anyway. So it'd really be ARM
| themselves falling behind. Perhaps Qualcomm is pressuring them
| to keep die sizes small, so ARM just isn't willing to make a
| proper "big" CPU core. Or maybe ARM themselves just don't have
| the right incentives to do so. Who knows.
|
| But the end result is nobody really wants to compete against
| Qualcomm in the mobile phone SoC space, since Qualcomm's radios
| means they win by default. Then in the laptop & server space,
| Intel & AMD have no incentive to switch to ARM instead of
| sticking with x86. At least not at this point in time.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| > Qualcomm dominates at radios, which matters far more than
| single-core CPU performance.
|
| that is nonsense. I switched from iPhone to a Pixel 4 post-
| CSAM scandal and the difference is night and day. My phone
| now makes me wait. Every single fucking day I wait. Wait Wait
| Wait. Slow Slow Slow. And this is a phone without the
| bloatware. Fucking miserably slow. Not in absolute terms
| necessarily, it would have been competitive 10 years ago. But
| in 2021, Qualcomm is fucking over every single Android user
| and their management should be ashamed.
|
| I assume nonsense about single core performance being good
| enough is how the industry (Apple aside) has ended up in such
| a sorry state.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| What distro?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Sorry for not being clear. I meant that radios matter far
| more to carriers & OEMs, the people who are actually
| Qualcomm's customers.
|
| For carriers this lets them get out that first 5G phone and
| all that nonsense. For OEMs this drastically reduces
| engineering complexity (and therefore improves margins) by
| avoiding a separate radio chip.
| stefandesu wrote:
| I updated my old first-gen iPhone SE to iOS 15 and it's still
| fast. Not nearly as snappy as the newer generations, but it's
| not laggy or anything.
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