[HN Gopher] Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
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Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
Author : emdashcomma
Score : 684 points
Date : 2021-10-18 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| dewiz wrote:
| ...and the Apple store is down lol :-)
| klelatti wrote:
| I think the M1 Max has more transistors than any commercially
| available CPU or GPU? In a $3499 laptop!
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| 57 billion transistors? a 5950x has under 20 a 3060ti has under
| 20
|
| are they counting the RAM?
| klelatti wrote:
| Does either have a 10 core CPU or large cache memory?
| wmf wrote:
| Yes, the 5950X has 16 big CPU cores and 64 MB of L3 cache.
| klelatti wrote:
| My mistake. But it doesn't have a 32 core GPU!
|
| Agreed these counts look high - but the fact that they
| can slot this into a $3,499 laptop is remarkable and must
| say something about the cost effectiveness of TSMC 5nm
| process.
| modulusshift wrote:
| Nope, RAM is off die but on package.
| hbn wrote:
| These things came at a great time for me. My late-2014 MBP just
| received its last major OS upgrade (Big Sur), so I'm officially
| in unsupported waters now. I was getting concerned in that era
| from 2015-2019 with all the bad decisions (butterfly keyboard, no
| I/O, touchbar, graphics issues, etc.) but this new generation of
| MacBooks seems to have resolved all my points of concern.
|
| On the other hand, my late-2014 model is still performing...
| fine? It gets a bit bogged down running something moderately
| intensive like a JetBrains IDE (which is my editor of choice), or
| when I recently used it to play a Jack Box Party Pack with
| friends, but for most things it's pretty serviceable. I got it
| before starting university, it carried me all the way to getting
| my bachelor's degree last year, and it's still trucking along
| just fine. Definitely one of my better purchases I've made.
| breiti wrote:
| You could easily upgrade macOS using
| https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-
| Patcher/MODELS.ht....
|
| On the hardware side, you could open it up, clean the fan, re-
| apply thermal paste (after so many years, this will make a big
| difference) and maybe even upgrade the SSD if you feel like it.
|
| That way, this laptop can easily survive another 1-3 years
| depending on your use-cases.
| dang wrote:
| All: let's keep this thread about the processors, and talk about
| the new MBPs in the other thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28908383.
|
| Edit: to read all the 600+ comments in this thread, click More at
| the bottom of the page, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28908031&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28908031&p=3
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I feel happy for the Apple community with these processors.
|
| But I can't stop to think my Intel machine. It feels like I am
| left in the dust and nothing seems to be coming that remotely
| looks like the M1.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Intel is years behind Apple, with no real strategy for catching
| up. Apple most likely already has the M2 ready, and the M3
| under heavy development.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| M2 was sent for manufacture earlier in the year, if you
| believe the rumor mill (and to be fair, they were spot on
| this time around)
| rpmisms wrote:
| The good news is that AMD is working their butt off on this,
| and seems to be much closer to Apple in terms of Watts/unit
| of performance. Intel needs to get in gear, now.
| terafo wrote:
| Intel was stuck on the same node for 6 years. Alder lake
| looks very promising, Alchemist GPUs same. They will have CPU
| performance crown on laptops in less than 6 months. Power
| usage will be much better than now. Their 3d stacking
| strategy is very promising, it will allow for many very
| interesting SKUs. I wouldn't count them out.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| Prediction for Mac Pros and iMac Pros: several SoCs on the
| mainboard, interconnected with a new bus, 16 CPU cores for each
| SoC, 4 SoCs max. The on SoC RAM will act as a L4 Cache and they
| will share normal, User replaceable DDR5 RAM for ,,unified"
| access.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Did they really just claim 30-series tier performance on the max
| GPU? If that's true that would be insane!
| [deleted]
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Equivalent to "the notebook with the fastest GPU we could find
| at half the power" is how I remember it...
|
| I'm just not entirely certain what GPU performance does for
| me...? I don't work with video, there aren't any games, and I'm
| not playing them, anyway. Does iTerm2 scrolling get better?
|
| I used to be quite happy with the GeForce 7xx(?) and
| tensorflow, and this seems like it would have quite a bit of
| power for ML. Unfortunately, the software just isn't there
| (yet?).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Something like this?
|
| https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/
| adtac wrote:
| the comparison was only on laptops, but still impressive if
| they did that with 70% (?) less power
| neogodless wrote:
| Well, no - they immediately followed the discrete laptop
| graphic comparison with a desktop graphic comparison,
| highlighting how much more power they draw for "the same"
| performance.
| smileybarry wrote:
| That wasn't for desktop graphics, it was for a top-end
| laptop graphics SKU (I think RTX 3080 Mobile on a
| ~135W-150W TDP configuration?). Otherwise the graph would
| extend all the way to 360W for a RTX 3090.
| ls612 wrote:
| And I think based on these numbers that a desktop 3090
| would have well over double the performance of the M1
| Max. It's apples to oranges, but lets not go crazy just
| yet.
|
| Now, I am extremely excited to see what they will come up
| with for the Mac Pro with a desktop thermal budget. That
| might just blow everything else by any manufacturer
| completely out of the water.
| neogodless wrote:
| Yup - I misheard while watching.
|
| The chart only shows a line up to about 105W, so it's not
| clear what they're trying to represent there. (Not that
| there's any question this seems to be way more
| efficient!)
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Well, no - they immediately followed the discrete laptop
| graphic comparison with a desktop graphic comparison_
|
| pretty sure the comparison was with "the most powerful PC
| laptop we could find", which makes sense because they then
| talked about how much it was throttled when running only on
| battery while the new M1 is not.
| Symmetry wrote:
| GPU workloads are very parallel. By throwing more transistors
| at the problem while lowering clock rates you can get pretty
| good performance even in a constrained power budget.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > claim 30-series tier performance on the max GPU? If that's
| true that would be insane!
|
| TDP, TDP, TDP!
|
| With big enough heatsink, the performance can be proportionally
| high (perf = sqrt(TDP))
| KarlKemp wrote:
| ...but they are claiming 50-70 % lower power usage, and
| therefore 50-70 % lower TDP as well.
| [deleted]
| spaceisballer wrote:
| Lots of junk comments, but I guess that happens with Apple
| announcements. Laptops seem impressive to me, I want to see the
| real world use metrics. Pushing hard on the performance per watt
| type metric and no doubt they have a lot of power and use less
| power. Seems like they listened to the outcry of people regarding
| the Touch Bar and more ports. Seems like this should sell well.
| Woden501 wrote:
| Seems they may have finally noticed the hit from a decent
| number of the pro's using their products migrating to different
| platforms, and realized they needed to take a few steps back on
| the more radical innovations to put out a solid working
| machine. Hell I haven't wanted an Apple machine since the early
| days of the unibody when other manufacturers started releasing
| the same form-factor. This has me considering one for my next
| development machine depending on the price premium over the
| competition.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Yup, waiting for the performance review embargo to lift.
| lvl100 wrote:
| I wonder if 64GB in unified memory will jumpstart ML developments
| for Macs. I cannot wait to run a Mac Mini farm.
| notquitehuman wrote:
| I'm waiting on Apple's final decision on the CSAM scanner before
| I buy any more hardware from them. These processors look cool,
| but I don't think they're worth the Apple premium if they're also
| spying for law enforcement.
| ostenning wrote:
| valid point
| Brakenshire wrote:
| Can the M1 MacBooks be used with Linux?
| [deleted]
| pantalaimon wrote:
| It's a work in progress. See https://asahilinux.org/blog/ for
| the latest updates.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And marcan42 has specifically promised to start bringup work
| on the M1 Pro next week:
|
| https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1450163929993269249
| Brakenshire wrote:
| This is interesting:
|
| > However, Apple is unique in putting emphasis in keeping
| hardware interfaces compatible across SoC generations - the
| UART hardware in the M1 dates back to the original iPhone!
| This means we are in a unique position to be able to try
| writing drivers that will not only work for the M1, but may
| work -unchanged- on future chips as well. This is a very
| exciting opportunity in the ARM64 world. We won't know until
| Apple releases the M1X/M2, but if we succeed in making enough
| drivers forwards-compatible to boot Linux on newer chips,
| that will make things like booting older distro installers
| possible on newer hardware. That is something people take for
| granted on x86, but it's usually impossible in the embedded
| world - and we hope we can change that on these machines.
| haberman wrote:
| I always thought it was strange that "integrated graphics" was,
| for years, was synonymous with "cheap, underperforming" compared
| to the power of a discrete GPU.
|
| I never could see any fundamental reason why "integrated" should
| mean "underpowered." Apple is turning things around, and is
| touting the benefits of high-performance integrated graphics.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| > I never could see any fundamental reason why "integrated"
| should mean "underpowered."
|
| There was always one reason: limited memory bandwidth. You
| simply couldn't cram enough pins and traces for all the
| processor io plus a memory bus wide enough to feed a powerful
| GPU. (at least not in a reasonable price)
| hajile wrote:
| We solved that almost a decade ago now with HBM. Sure, the
| latencies aren't amazing, but the power consumption numbers
| are and large caches can hide the higher access latencies
| pretty well in almost all cases.
| dragontamer wrote:
| PS4 / PS5 / XBox One / XBox Series X are all iGPU but with
| good memory bandwidths.
| terafo wrote:
| Only time that I can remember HBM being used with some kind
| of integrated graphics was strange Intel NUC with Vega GPU
| and IIRC correctly they were on the same die.
| fulafel wrote:
| The software side hasn't been there on x86 GP platforms, even
| though AMD tried. It's worked out better on consoles.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| What software is missing? I figured the AMD G-series CPUs
| used the same graphics drivers and same codepaths in those
| drivers for the same (Vega) architecture.
|
| My impression was that it was still the hardware holding
| things back: Everything but the latest desktop CPUs still
| using the older Vega architecture. And even those latest
| desktop CPUs are essentially PS5 chips that got binned out.
| cududa wrote:
| Perhaps with Vista? "Integrated" graphics meant something like
| Intel 915 which couldn't run "Aero". Even if you had the Intel
| 945, if you had low bandwidth RAM graphics performance still
| stuttered. Good article:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...
| throwawaywindev wrote:
| Video game consoles have been using integrated graphics for at
| least 15 years now, since Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
| monocasa wrote:
| Longer since integrated graphics used to mean integrated onto
| the north bridge and it's main memory controller. nForce
| integrated chipsets with GPUs in fact started from the
| machinations of the original Xbox switching to Intel from AMD
| at the last second.
| ip26 wrote:
| In that case, it's more like discrete graphics with
| integrated CPU :)
| gerardvivancos wrote:
| If you mean including PS3 and X360, these two consoles had
| discrete GPUs. The move to AMD APUs was on the Xbox One and
| PS4 generation
| terafo wrote:
| You are mistaken. On both PS3 and Xbox 360 CPU and GPU is on
| different chips and made by different vendors(CPU made by IBM
| and GPU by Nvidia in case of PS3 and CPU by IBM and GPU by
| ATI for Xbox 360). Nonetheless in PS4/XOne generation they
| both use single die with unified memory for everything and
| their GPU could be called integrated.
| gsnedders wrote:
| For the 360, from 2010 production (when they introduced the
| 45nm shrink), the CPU and GPU was merged into a single
| chip.
| cududa wrote:
| Yup. Prior they were absolutely different dies just on
| the same package
| mod wrote:
| Yeah, and vendors like Bungie are forced to cap their
| framerates at 30fps (Destiny 2).
| hunterb123 wrote:
| They capped PC as well.
| [deleted]
| satya71 wrote:
| Very simple: thermal budget. Chip performance is limited by
| thermal budget. You just can't spend more than roughly 100W in
| a single package, without going into very expensive and
| esoteric cooling mechanisms.
| gpt5 wrote:
| As the charts Apple shared in the event showed, you hit
| diminishing returns in performance/watt pretty quickly.
|
| Sure. It'd be tough to be the top performing chip in the
| market, but you can get pretty close.
| bla3 wrote:
| This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on
| the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're
| the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But
| it'll be interesting to see what they'll do for their desktops.
|
| Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-
| purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the
| vanilla M1, and some of the efficiency cores on the M1 became
| performance cores. So CPU-bound things like compiling code will
| be "only" 20-50% faster than on the M1 MacBook. The big wins are
| for GPU-heavy and codec-heavy workloads.
|
| That makes sense since that's where most users will need their
| performance. I'm still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose
| computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end.
|
| Nevertheless, impressive chips, I'm very curious where they'll
| take it for the Mac Pro, and (hopefully) the iMac Pro.
| klelatti wrote:
| In this context the absence of the 27 inch iMac was
| interesting. If these SoC were not deemed to be 'right' for the
| bigger iMac then possibly a more CPU focused / developer
| focused SoC may be in the works for the iMac?
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| Nah, it'll be the same M1 Max. Just wait a few months like
| with the 24" iMac.
| klelatti wrote:
| You're probably right. Maybe they have inventory to work
| through!
| sroussey wrote:
| Yeah, M1 Pro/Max on iMac 30" likely in 2022 H1. Mini
| also, I imagine.
| matthew_kuiash wrote:
| Yup. Once I saw the 24" iMac I knew the 27" had had it's
| chips. 30" won't actually be much bigger than the 27" if
| the bezels shrink to almost nothing - which seems to be
| the trend.
| nicoburns wrote:
| They might also have supply constraints on these new
| chips. I suspect they are going to sell a lot of these
| new MacBook Pros
| iSnow wrote:
| They also have a limited headcount and resources so they
| wouldn't want to announce M1x/pro/max for all machines
| now and have employees be idle for the next 3 months.
|
| Notebooks also have a higher profit margin, so they sell
| them to those who need to upgrade now. The lower-margin
| systems like Mini will come later. And the Mac Pro will
| either die or come with the next iteration of the chips.
| ellisv wrote:
| The Mac Pro might be blocked, or still progressing,
| through design changes more so than chip changes.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| I doubt they are going to make different chips for prosumer
| devices. They are going to spread out the M1 pro/max upgrade
| to the rest of the lineup at some point during the next year,
| so they can claim "full transition" through their quoted 2
| years.
|
| The wildcard is the actual mac pro. I suspect we aren't going
| to hear about mac pro until next Sept/Oct events, and super
| unclear what direction they are going to go. Maybe allowing
| config of multiple M1 max SOCs somehow working together.
| Seems complicated.
| klelatti wrote:
| On reflection I think they've decided that their pro users
| want 'more GPU not more CPU' - they could easily have added
| a couple more CPU cores but it obviously wasn't a priority.
|
| Agreed that it's hard to see how designing a CPU just for
| the Mac Pro would make any kind of economic sense but
| equally struggling to see what else they can do!
| spicybright wrote:
| I'm going to sound dumb for this, but how difficult do any of
| you think it would be to make a computer with 2 M1 chips? Or
| even 4?
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I think the problem would be how one chip can access the
| memory of the other one. The big advantage in the M1xxxx is
| the unified memory. I don't think the chips have any hardware
| to support cache coherency and so on spanning more than one
| chip.
| fulafel wrote:
| You would have to implement single system image abstraction,
| if you wanted more than a networked cluster of M1s in a box,
| in the OS using just software plus virtual memory. You'd use
| the PCIe as the interconnect. Similar has been done by other
| vendors for server systems, but it has tradeoffs that would
| probably not make sense to Apple now.
|
| A more realistic question would be what good hw multisocket
| SMP support would look like in M1 Max or later chips, as that
| would be a more logical thing to build if Apple wanted this.
| biggieshellz wrote:
| They're not meant to go together like that -- there's not
| really an interconnect for it, or any pins on the package to
| enable something like that. Apple would have to design a new
| Mx SoC with something like that as an explicit design goal.
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| The M1 is a system-on-a-chip so AIUI there's a bunch of stuff
| on there that you wouldn't want two of.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I think the issue is OS management of tasks to prevent cpu 1
| from having to access memory of cpu 2.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Actually no "extra" chip area in comparison to x86 based
| solution.
|
| They just throw away so much of cruft from the die like PCIE
| PHYs, and x86 legacy I/O with large area analog circuitry.
|
| Redundant complex DMA, and memory controller IPs are also
| thrown away.
|
| Clock, and power rails on the SoC are also probably taking less
| space because of more shared circuitry.
|
| Same with self-test, debug, fusing blocks, and other small
| tidbits.
| azinman2 wrote:
| This is very interesting and first time I've heard / thought
| about this. Wonder how much power efficiency comes from
| exactly these things?
| baybal2 wrote:
| PCI is quite power hungry when it works on full trottle.
|
| The seemed power efficiency when PCIE was going 1.0 2.0 3.0
| ... was due to dynamic power control, and link sleep.
|
| On top of it, they simply don't haul memory nonstop over
| PCIE anymore, since data going to/from GPU is simply not
| moving anywhere.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| The way I interpreted it is that it's like lego so they can add
| more fast cores or more efficiency cores depending on the
| platform needs. The successor generations will be new lego
| building blocks.
| cududa wrote:
| Edit: I was wrong! Thanks for pointing it out
|
| Not exactly. M1 CPU, GPU, and RAM were all capped in the same
| package. New ones appear to be more a single board soldered
| onto mainboard, with a discrete CPU, GPU, and RAM package each
| capped individually if their "internals" promo video is to be
| believed (and it usually is an exact representation of the
| shipping product)
| https://twitter.com/cullend/status/1450203779148783616?s=20
|
| Suspect this is a great way for them to manage demand and
| various yields by having 2 CPU's (or one, if the difference
| between pro/ max is yield on memory bandwidth) and discrete
| RAM/ GPU components
| modulusshift wrote:
| CPU and GPU is one die, you're looking at RAM chips on each
| side of the package. The M1 also had the RAM separate but on
| package.
|
| M1:
| https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Really curious if the memory bandwidth is entirely available to
| the CPU if the GPU is idle. An nvidia RTX3090 has nearly 1TB/s
| bandwidth, so the GPU is clearly going to use as much of the
| 400GB/s as possible. Other unified architectures have multiple
| channels or synchronization to memory, such that no one part of
| the system can access the full bandwidth. But if the CPU can
| access all 400GB/s, that is an absolute game changer for
| anything memory bound. Like 10x faster than an i9 I think?
| londons_explore wrote:
| I suspect the GPU is never really idle.
|
| Even simple screen refresh blending say 5 layers and
| outputting it to a 4k screen is 190Gbits at 144 Hz.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Don't know much about the graphics on an M1. Does it not
| render to a framebuffer? Is that framebuffer spread over
| all 4 memory banks? Can't wait to read all about it.
| modulusshift wrote:
| Apple put ProMotion in the built in display, so while it
| can ramp up to 120Hz, it'll idle at more like 24 Hz when
| showing static content. (the iPad Pro goes all the way down
| to 10Hz, but some early sources seem to say 24Hz for these
| MacBook Pros.) There may also be panel self refresh
| involved, in which case a static image won't even need that
| much. I bet the display coprocessors will expose the
| adaptive refresh functionality over the external display
| connectors as well.
| snek_case wrote:
| Don't Apple iPhones use an adaptive refresh rate nowadays?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Indeed ProMotion is coming to these new MacBooks too.
| hajile wrote:
| AMD showed with their Infinity Cache that you can get away
| with much less bandwidth if you have large caches. It has the
| side effect of radically reducing power consumption.
|
| Apple put 32MB of cache in their latest iPhone. 128 or even
| 256MB of L3 cache wouldn't surprise me at all given the power
| benefits.
| znwu wrote:
| Not sure if it will be available, but 400GB/s is way too much
| for 8 cores to take up. You would need some sort of avx512 to
| hog up that much bandwidth.
|
| Moreover, it's not clear how much of a bandwidth/width does
| M1 max CPU interconnect/bus provide.
|
| --------
|
| Edit: Add common sense about HPC workloads.
|
| There is a fundamental idea called _memory-access-to-
| computation_ ratio. We can 't assume a 1:0 ratio since it was
| doing literally nothing except copying.
|
| Typically your program needs serious fixing if it can't
| achieve 1:4. (This figure comes from a CUDA course. But I
| think it should be similar for SIMD)
|
| Edit: also a lot of that bandwidth is fed through cache.
| _Locality_ will eliminate some orders of magnitudes of memory
| access, depending on the code.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Don't know the clock speed but 8 cores at 3Ghz working on
| 128bit SIMD is 8 _3_ 16 = 384GB/s so we are in the right
| ball park. Not that I personally have a use for that =) Oh,
| wait, bloody Java GC might be a use for that. (LOL, FML or
| both).
| dragontamer wrote:
| But the classic SIMD problem is matrix-multiplication,
| which doesn't need full memory bandwidth (because a lot
| of the calculations are happening inside of cache).
|
| The question is: what kind of problems are people needing
| that want 400GB/s bandwidth on a CPU? Well, probably none
| frankly. The bandwidth is for the iGPU really.
|
| The CPU just "might as well" have it, since its a system-
| on-a-chip. CPUs usually don't care too much about main-
| memory bandwidth, because its like 50ns+ away latency (or
| ~200 clock ticks). So to get a CPU going in any typical
| capacity, you'll basically want to operate out of L1 / L2
| cache.
|
| > Oh, wait, bloody Java GC might be a use for that. (LOL,
| FML or both).
|
| For example, I know you meant the GC as a joke. But if
| you think of it, a GC is mostly following pointer->next
| kind of operations, which means its mostly latency bound,
| not bandwidth bound. It doesn't matter that you can read
| 400GB/s, your CPU is going to read an 8-byte pointer,
| wait 50-nanoseconds for the RAM to respond, get the new
| value, and then read a new 8-byte pointer.
|
| Unless you can fix memory latency (and hint, no one seems
| to be able to do so), you'll be only able to hit 160MB/s
| or so, no matter how high your theoretical bandwidth is,
| you get latency locked at a much lower value.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Doesn't prefetching data into the cache more quickly
| assist in execution speed here?
| dragontamer wrote:
| How do you prefetch "node->next" where "node" is in a
| linked list?
|
| Answer: you literally can't. And that's why this kind of
| coding style will forever be latency bound.
|
| EDIT: Prefetching works when the address can be predicted
| ahead of time. For example, when your CPU-core is reading
| "array", then "array+8", then "array+16", you can be
| pretty damn sure the next thing it wants to read is
| "array+24", so you prefetch that. There's no need to wait
| for the CPU to actually issue the command for "array+24",
| you fetch it even before the code executes.
|
| Now if you have "0x8009230", which points to
| "0x81105534", which points to "0x92FB220", good luck
| prefetching that sequence.
|
| --------
|
| Which is why servers use SMT / hyperthreading, so that
| the core can "switch" to another thread while waiting
| those 50-nanoseconds / 200-cycles or so.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I don't really know how the implementation of a tracing
| GC works but I was thinking they could do some smart
| memory ordering to land in the same cache-line as often
| as possible.
|
| Thanks for the clarifications :)
| monocasa wrote:
| Interestingly earlyish smalltalk VMs used to keep the
| object headers in a separate contiguous table.
|
| Part of the problem though, is that the object graph walk
| pretty quickly is non contiguous, regardless of how it's
| laid out in memory.
| znwu wrote:
| Yeah the marking phase cannot be efficiently vectorized.
| But I wonder if it can help with compacting/copying
| phase.
|
| Also for me the process sounds oddly familiar to vmem
| table walking. There is currently a RISC-V J extension
| drafting group. I wonder what they can come up with.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| GeekyBear wrote:
| A single big core in the M1 could pretty much saturate the
| memory bandwidth available.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
| terafo wrote:
| > _Not sure if it will be available, but 400GB /s is way
| too much for 8 cores to take up. You would need some sort
| of avx512 to hog up that much bandwidth._
|
| If we assume that frequency is 3.2Ghz and IPC of 3 with
| well optimized code(which is conservative for performance
| cores since they are extremely wide) and count only
| performance cores we get 5 bytes for instruction. M1
| supports 128-bit Arm Neon, so peak bandwidth usage per
| instruction(if I didn't miss anything) is 32 bytes.
| tkrsh wrote:
| More memory bandwith = 10x faster than an i9 ? this makes no
| sense to me doesn't clock speed and cores determine the major
| part of the performance of a cpu ?
| fotta wrote:
| I think the higher memory is also a huge win, with support for
| up to 64gb.
| christkv wrote:
| And the much higher memory bandwidth
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| 400GB/s available to the CPU cores in a unified memory, that
| is going to really help certain workloads that are very
| memory dominant on modern architectures. Both Intel and AMD
| are solving this with ever increasing L3 cache sizes but just
| using attached memory in a SOC has vastly higher memory
| bandwidth potential and probably better latency too
| especially on work that doesn't fit in ~32MB of L3 cache.
| amelius wrote:
| > 400GB/s available to the CPU cores in a unified memory
|
| It's not just throughput that counts, but latency. Any
| numbers to compare there?
| emsy wrote:
| Good point. Especially since a lot of software these days
| is not all that cache friendly. Realistically this means we
| have 2 years or so till further abstractions eat up the
| performance gains.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| The M1 still uses DDR memory at the end of the day, it's
| just physically closer to the core. This is in contrast to
| L3 which is actual SRAM on the core.
|
| The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow the
| memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal
| integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas the
| M1 uses 4266.
|
| The real advantage is the M1 Max uses 8 channels, which is
| impressive considering that's as many as an AMD EPYC, but
| operates at like twice the speed at the same time.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > The M1 still uses DDR memory at the end of the day,
| it's just physically closer to the core. This is in
| contrast to L3 which is actual SRAM on the core.
|
| But they're probably using 8-channels of LPDDR5, if this
| 400GB/s number is to be believed. Which is far more
| memory channels / bandwidth than any normal chip released
| so far, EPYC and Skylake-server included.
| duskwuff wrote:
| It's more comparable to the sort of memory bus you'd
| typically see on a GPU... which is exactly what you'd
| hope for on a system with high-end integrated graphics.
| :)
| dragontamer wrote:
| You'd expect HBM or GDDR6 to be used. But this is
| seemingly LPDDR5 that's being used.
|
| So its still quite unusual. Its like Apple decided to
| take commodity phone-RAM and just make many parallel
| channels of it... rather than using high-speed RAM to
| begin with.
|
| HBM is specifically designed to be soldered near a
| CPU/GPU as well. For them to be soldering commodity
| LPDDR6 is kinda weird to me.
|
| ---------
|
| We know it isn't HBM because HBM is 1024-bits at lower
| clock speeds. Apple is saying they have 512-bits across 8
| channels (64-bits per channel), which is near LPDDR5 /
| DDR kind of numbers.
|
| 200GBps is within the realm of 1x HBM channel (1024-bit
| at low clock speeds), and 400GBps is 2x HBM channels
| (2048-bit bus at low clock speeds).
| sounds wrote:
| Just to underscore this, memory physically closer to the
| cores has improved tRAS times measured in nanoseconds.
| This has the secondary effect of boosting the performance
| of the last-level cache since it can fill lines on a
| cache miss much faster.
|
| The step up from DDR4 to DDR5 will help fill cache misses
| that are predictable, but everybody uses a prefetcher
| already, the net effect of DDR5 is mostly just better
| efficiency.
|
| The change Apple is making, moving the memory closer to
| the cores, improves unpredicted cache misses. That's
| significant.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Just to underscore this, memory physically closer to
| the cores has improved tRAS times measured in
| nanoseconds.
|
| I doubt that tRAS timing is affected by how close / far a
| DRAM chip is from the core. Its just a RAS command after
| all: transfer data from DRAM to the sense-amplifiers.
|
| If tRAS has improved, I'd be curious how it was done. Its
| one of those values that's basically been constant (on a
| nanosecond basis) for 20 years.
|
| Most DDR3 / DDR4 improvements have been about breaking up
| the chip into more-and-more groups, so that Group#1 can
| be issued a RAS command, then Group#2 can be issued a
| separate RAS command. This doesn't lower latency, it just
| allows the memory subsystem to parallelize the requests
| (increasing bandwidth but not improving the actual
| command latency specifically).
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The physically shorter wiring is doing basically nothing.
| That's not where any of the latency bottlenecks are for
| RAM. If it was physically on-die, like HBM, that'd be
| maybe different. But we're still talking regular LPDDR5
| using off the shelf dram modules. The shorter wiring
| would potentially improve signal quality, but ground
| shields do that, too. And Apple isn't exceeding any specs
| on this (ie, it's not overclocked), so above average
| signal integrity isn't translating into any performance
| gains anyway.
| wmf wrote:
| _improved tRAS times_
|
| Has this been documented anywhere? What timings are Apple
| using?
| morei wrote:
| L3 is almost never SRAM, it's usually eDRAM and clocked
| significantly lower than L1 or L2.
|
| (SRAM is prohibitively expensive to do at scale due to
| die area required).
| Unklejoe wrote:
| L3 is SRAM on all AMD Ryzen chips that I'm aware of.
|
| I think it's the same with Intel too except for that one
| 5th gen chip.
| dragontamer wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, IBM is one of the few chip-designers
| who have eDRAM capabilities.
|
| IBM has eDRAM on a number of chips in varying capacities,
| but... its difficult for me to think of Intel, AMD,
| Apple, ARM, or other chips that have eDRAM of any kind.
|
| Intel had one: the eDRAM "Crystalwell" chip, but that is
| seemingly a one-off and never attempted again. Even then,
| this was a 2nd die that was "glued" onto the main chip,
| and not like IBM's truly eDRAM (embedded into the same
| process).
| kergonath wrote:
| > The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow
| the memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal
| integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas
| the M1 uses 4266.
|
| My understanding is that bringing the RAM closer
| increases the bandwidth (better latency and larger
| buses), not necessarily the speed of the RAM dies. Also,
| if I am not mistaken, the RAM in the new M1s is LP-DDR5
| (I read that, but it did not stay long on screen so I
| could be mistaken). Not sure how it is comparable with
| DDR4 DIMMs.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| The overall bandwidth isn't affected much by the distance
| alone. Latency, yes, in the sense that the signal
| literally has to travel further, but that difference is
| miniscule (like 1/10th of a nanosecond) compared to
| overall DDR access latencies.
|
| Better signal integrity could allow for larger busses,
| but I don't think this is actually a single 512 bit bus.
| I think it's multiple channels of smaller busses (32 or
| 64 bit). There's a big difference from an electrical
| design perspective (byte lane skew requirements are
| harder to meet when you have 64 of them). That said, I
| think multiple channels is better anyway.
|
| The original M1 used LPDDR4 but I think the new ones use
| some form of DDR5.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > The overall bandwidth isn't affected much by the
| distance alone.
|
| Testing showed that the M1's performance cores had a
| surprising amount of memory bandwidth.
|
| >One aspect we've never really had the opportunity to
| test is exactly how good Apple's cores are in terms of
| memory bandwidth. Inside of the M1, the results are
| ground-breaking: A single Firestorm achieves memory reads
| up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at
| 33-36GB/s. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60
| to 62GB/s depending if you're using scalar or vector
| instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can
| almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and
| something we've never seen in a design before.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
| rdw wrote:
| Your comment got me thinking, and I checked the math. It
| turns out that light takes ~0.2 ns to travel 2 inches.
| But the speed of signal propagation in copper is ~0.6 c,
| so that takes it up to 0.3 ns. So, still pretty small
| compared to the overall latencies (~13-18 ns for DDR5)
| but it's not negligible.
|
| I do wonder if there are nonlinearities that come in to
| play when it comes to these bottlenecks. Yes, by moving
| the RAM closer it's only reducing the latency by 0.2 ns.
| But, it's also taking 1/3rd of the time that it used to,
| and maybe they can use that extra time to do 2 or 3
| transactions instead. Latency and bandwidth are inversely
| related, after all!
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Well, you can have high bandwidth and poor latency at the
| same time -- think ultra wide band radio burst from Earth
| to Mars -- but yeah, on a CPU with all the crazy co-
| optimized cache hierarchies and latency hiding it's
| difficult to see how changing one part of the system
| changes the whole. For instance, if you switched 16GB of
| DRAM for 4GB of SRAM, you could probably cut down the
| cache-miss latency a lot -- but do you care? If you cache
| hit rate is high enough, probably not. Then again, maybe
| chopping the worst case lets you move allocation away
| from L3 and L2 and into L1, which gets you a win again.
|
| I suspect the only people who really know are the CPU
| manufacturer teams that run PIN/dynamorio traces against
| models -- and I also suspect that they are NDA'd through
| this life and the next and the only way we will ever know
| about the tradeoffs are when we see them pop up in actual
| designs years down the road.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| DRAM latencies are pretty heinous. It makes me wonder if
| the memory industry will go through a similar transition
| to the storage industry's HDD->SSD sometime in the not
| too distant future.
|
| I wonder about the practicalities of going to SRAM for
| main memory. I doubt silicon real estate would be the
| limiting factor (1T1C to 6T, isn't it?) and Apple charges
| a king's ransom for RAM anyway. Power might be a problem
| though. Does anyone have figures for SRAM power
| consumption on modern processes?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I wonder about the practicalities of going to SRAM for
| main memory. I doubt silicon real estate would be the
| limiting factor (1T1C to 6T, isn't it?) and Apple charges
| a king's ransom for RAM anyway. Power might be a problem
| though. Does anyone have figures for SRAM power
| consumption on modern processes?
|
| I've been wondering about this for years. Assuming the
| difference is similar to the old days, I'd take 2-4GB of
| SRAM over 32GB of DRAM any day. Last time this came up
| people claimed SRAM power consumption would be
| prohibitive, but I have a hard time seeing that given
| these 50B transistor chips running at several GHz. Most
| of the transistors in an SRAM are not switching, so they
| should be optimized for leakage and they'd still be way
| faster than DRAM.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the
| industry.
|
| They put a 32 megabyte system level cache in their latest
| phone chip.
|
| >at 32MB, the new A15 dwarfs the competition's
| implementations, such as the 3MB SLC on the Snapdragon
| 888 or the estimated 6-8MB SLC on the Exynos 2100
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-
| perfo...
|
| It will be interesting to see how big they go on these
| chips.
| rektide wrote:
| > Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the
| industry.
|
| AMD's upcoming Ryzen are supposed to have 192MB L3
| "v-cache" SRAM stacked above each chiplet. Current
| chiplets are 8-core. I'm not sure if this is a single
| chiplet but supposedly good for 2Tbps[1].
|
| Slightly bigger chip than a iphone chip yes. :) But also
| wow a lot of cache. Having it stacked above rather than
| built in to the core is another game-changing move, since
| a) your core has more space b) you can 3D stack many
| layers of cache atop.
|
| This has already been used on their GPUs, where the 6800
| & 6900 have 128MB of L3 "Infinity cache" providing
| 1.66TBps. It's also largely how these cards get by with
| "only" 512GBps worth of GDDR6 feeding them (256bit/quad-
| channel... at 16GT). AMD's R9 Fury from spring 2015 had
| 1TBps of HBM2, for compare, albeit via that slow 4096bit
| wide interface.
|
| Anyhow, I'm also in awe of the speed wins Apple got here
| from bringing RAM in close. Cache is a huge huge help.
| Plus 400GBps main memory is truly awesome, and it's neat
| that either the CPU or GPU can make use of it.
|
| [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16725/amd-
| demonstrates-stacke...
| znwu wrote:
| I'm thinking with that much bandwidth, maybe they will roll
| out SVE2 with vlen=512/1024 for future M series.
|
| AVX512 suffers from bandwidth on desktop. But now the
| bandwidth is just huge and SVE2 is naturally scalable.
| Sounds like free lunch?
| lkbm wrote:
| I'm guessing that's new for the 13" or for the M1, but my
| 16-inch MacBook Pro purchased last year had 64GB of memory.
| (Looks like it's considered a 2019 model, despite being
| purchased in September 2020).
| fotta wrote:
| Right the Intels supported 64gb, but the 16gb limitation on
| the M1 was literally the only thing holding me back from
| upgrading.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I don't think this is an apples to apples comparison
| because of how the new unified memory works
| bla3 wrote:
| I thought the memory was one of the more interesting bits
| here.
|
| My 2-year-old Intel MBP has 64 GB, and 8 GB of additional
| memory on the GPU. True, on the M1 Max you don't have to copy
| back and forth between CPU and GPU thanks to integrated
| memory, but the new MBP still has less total memory than my
| 2-year-old Intel MBP.
|
| And it seems they just barely managed to get to 64 GiB. The
| whole processor chip is surrounded by memory chips. That's in
| part why I'm curious to see how they'll scale this. One idea
| would be to just have several M1 Max SoCs on a board, but
| that's going to be interesting to program. And getting to 1
| TB of memory seems infeasible too.
| mlindner wrote:
| How much of that 64 GB is in use at the same time though?
| Caching not recently used stuff from DRAM out to an SSD
| isn't actually that slow, especially with the high speed
| SSD that Apple uses.
| sulam wrote:
| So, M1 has been out for a while now, with HN doom and gloom
| about not being able to put enough memory into them. Real
| world usage has demonstrated far less memory usage than
| people expected (I don't know why, maybe someone paid
| attention and can say). The result is that 32G is a LOT of
| memory for an M1-based laptop, and 64G is only needed for
| very specific workloads I would expect.
| derefr wrote:
| > but the new MBP still has less total memory
|
| From the perspective of your GPU, that 64GB of main memory
| attached to your CPU is almost as slow to fetch from as if
| it were memory on a separate NUMA node, or even pages
| swapped to an NVMe disk. It may as well not be considered
| "memory" at all. It's effectively a secondary storage tier.
|
| Which means that you can't really do "GPU things" (e.g.
| working with hugely detailed models where it's the model
| itself, not the textures, that take up the space) as if you
| had 64GB of memory. You can maybe break apart the problem,
| but maybe not; it all depends on the workload. (For
| example, you can't really run a Tensorflow model on a GPU
| with less memory than the model size. Making it work would
| be like trying to distribute a graph-database routing query
| across nodes -- constant back-and-forth that multiplies the
| runtime exponentially. Even though each step is
| parallelizable, on the whole it's the opposite of an
| embarrassingly-parallel problem.)
| Vomzor wrote:
| That's not how M1's unified memory works.
|
| >The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses
| 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted
| with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A
| SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a
| SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies. SDRAM
| operations are synchronised to the SoC processing clock
| speed. Apple describes the SDRAM as a single pool of
| high-bandwidth, low-latency memory, allowing apps to
| share data between the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine
| efficiently. In other words, this memory is shared
| between the three different compute engines and their
| cores. The three don't have their own individual memory
| resources, which would need data moved into them. This
| would happen when, for example, an app executing in the
| CPU needs graphics processing - meaning the GPU swings
| into action, using data in its memory. https://www.thereg
| ister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwid...
|
| These Macs are gonna be machine learning beasts.
| gamacodre wrote:
| Why 1TB? 640GB ought to be enough for anything...
| gamacodre wrote:
| Huh, I guess that was as bad an idea as the 640K one.
| saijanai wrote:
| How much per 8K x 10 bit color, video frame?
|
| Roughly 190GB per minute without sound.
|
| Trying to do special effects on more than a few seconds
| of 8K video would overwhelm a 64GB system, I suspect.
| jrk wrote:
| Video and VFX generally don't need to keep whole
| sequences in RAM persistently these days because:
|
| 1. The high-end SSDs in all Macs can keep up with that
| data rate (3GB/sec) 2. Real-time video work is virtually
| always performed on compressed (even losslessly
| compressed) streams, so the data rate to stream is less
| than that.
| gamacodre wrote:
| You were (unintentionally) trolled. My first post up
| there was alluding to the legend that Bill Gates once
| said, speaking of the original IBM PC, "640K of memory
| should be enough for anybody." (N.B. He didn't[0])
|
| [0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-
| say-640k-is-e...
| fotta wrote:
| I'm interested to see how the GPU on these performs, I
| pretty much disable the dGPU on my i9 MBP because it bogs
| my machine down. So for me it's essentially the same amount
| of memory.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| Just some genuine honest curiosity here; how many workloads
| actually require 64gb of ram? For instance, I'm an amateur
| in the music production scene, and I know that sampling
| heavy work flows benefit from being able to load more audio
| clips fully into RAM rather than streaming them from disk.
| But 64g seems a tad overkill even for that.
|
| I guess for me I would prefer an emphasis on
| speed/bandwidth rather than size, but I'm also aware there
| are workloads that I'm completely ignorant of.
| hatsubai wrote:
| Another anecdote from someone who is also in the music
| production scene - 32GB tended to be the "sweet spot" in
| my personal case for the longest time, but I'm finding
| myself hitting the limits more and more as I continue to
| add more orchestral tracks which span well over 100
| tracks total in my workflows.
|
| I'm finding I need to commit and print a lot of these.
| Logic's little checker in the upper right showing RAM,
| Disk IO, CPU, etc also show that it is getting close to
| memory limits on certain instruments with many layers.
|
| So as someone who would be willing to dump $4k into a
| laptop where its main workload is only audio production,
| I would feel much safer going with 64GB knowing there's
| no real upgrade if I were to go with the 32GB model
| outside of buying a totally new machine.
|
| Edit: And yes, there is does show the typical "fear of
| committing" issue that plagues all of us people making
| music. It's more of a "nice to have" than a necessity,
| but I would still consider it a wise investment. At least
| in my eyes. Everyone's workflow varies and others have
| different opinions on the matter.
| [deleted]
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I know the main reason why the Mac Pro has options for
| LRDIMMs for terabytes of RAM is specifically for audio
| production, where people are basically using their system
| memory as cache for their entire instrument library.
|
| I have to wonder how Apple plans to replace the Mac Pro -
| the whole benefit of M1 is that gluing the memory to the
| chip (in a user-hostile way) provides significant
| performance benefits; but I don't see Apple actually
| engineering a 1TB+ RAM SKU or an Apple Silicon machine
| with socketed DRAM channels anytime soon.
| ellisv wrote:
| > how many workloads actually require 64gb of ram?
|
| Don't worry, Chrome will eat that up in no time!
|
| More seriously, I look forward to more RAM for some of
| the datasets I work with. At least so I don't have to
| close everything else while running those workloads.
| dylan604 wrote:
| On a desktop Hackintosh, I started with 32GB that would
| die with out of memory errors when I was processing 16bit
| RAW images at full resolution. Because it was Hackintosh,
| I was able to upgrade to 64GB so the processing could
| complete. That was the only thing running.
| jackjeff wrote:
| Can't answer for music, but as a developer a sure way to
| waste a lot of RAM is to run a bunch of virtual machines,
| containers or device simulators.
|
| I have 32GB, so unless I'm careless everything usually
| fits in memory without swapping. If you got over things
| get slow and you notice.
| 00deadbeef wrote:
| Same, I tend to get everything in 32GB but more and more
| often I'm going over that and having things slow down.
| I've also nuked an SSD in a 16GB MBP due to incredibly
| high swap activity. It would make no sense for me to buy
| another 32GB machine if I want it to last five years.
| miohtama wrote:
| Don't run Chrome and Slack at the same time :)
| xcskier56 wrote:
| How do you track the swap activity? What would you call
| "high" swap activity?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Not many, but there are a few that need even more. My
| team is running SQL servers on their laptops (development
| and support) and when that is not enough, we go to
| Threadrippers with 128-256GB of RAM. Other people run
| Virtual Machines on their computers (I work most of the
| time in a VM) and you can run several VMs at the same
| time, eating up RAM really fast.
| FpUser wrote:
| I ran 512GB on my home server, 256GB on my desktop and
| 128GB on small factor desktop that I take with me to
| summer cottage.
|
| Some of my projects work with big in memory databases.
| Add regular tasks and video processing on top and there
| you go.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Memory is very stackable if needed, since the power per
| unit area is very low.
| ssijak wrote:
| And NVMe with 7.5gbps are like, we are almost not even note
| worthy haha Impressive all around.
| jeswin wrote:
| It's not that noteworthy, given that affordable Samsung 980
| Pro SSDs have been doing those speeds for well over a year
| now.
| nojito wrote:
| 980 pro maxes at 7.
| jeswin wrote:
| But it's also been around for at least a year. And
| upcoming pcie 5 SSDs will up that to 10-14GBps.
|
| I'm saying Apple might have wanted to emphasise their
| more standout achievements. Such as on the CPU front,
| where they're likely to be well ahead for a year -
| competition won't catch up until AMD starts shipping 5nm
| Zen4 CPUs in Q3/Q4 2022.
| nojito wrote:
| Apple has a well over 5 year advantage when compared to
| their competition.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| > I'm still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose
| computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end.
|
| They'll still do all workloads, but are optimized for certain
| workloads. How is that any different than say, a Xeon or EPYC
| cpu designed for highly threaded (server/scientific computing)
| applications?
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Surely the shared ram between cpu and gpu is the killer feature
| - zero copy and up to 64gb ram available for the gpu!
| the_arun wrote:
| Could we use M1 chips on non-apple boards? If yes, I wish Apple
| releases these for non mac os consumption. Eg. Running linux
| servers in the cloud.
| priyanmuthu wrote:
| Wasn't there a rumor that AMD was creating ARM chips? It will
| be great if we have ARM versions of EPYC chips.
| monocasa wrote:
| They were, but have stopped talking about that for years.
| The project is probably canceled; I've heard Jim Keller
| talk about how that work was happening simultaneously with
| Zen 1.
| zik wrote:
| I'd love to see someone do a serious desktop RISC-V
| processor.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Not a great fit. Something like Ampere altra is better as it
| gives you 80 cores and much more memory which better fits a
| server. A server benefits more from lots of weaker cores than
| a few strong cores. The M1 is an awesome desktop/laptop chip
| and possibly great for HPC, but not for servers.
|
| What might be more interesting is to see powerful gaming rigs
| built around the these chips. They could have build a kickass
| game console with these chips.
| culpable_pickle wrote:
| Why? There are plenty of server oriented ARM platforms
| available for use (See AWS Graviton). What benefit do you
| feel Apple's platform gives over existing ones?
| modulusshift wrote:
| Well, tons, there isn't another ARM core that can match a
| single M1 Firestorm, core to core. Heck, only the highest
| performance x86 cores can match a Firestorm core. and
| that's just raw performance, not even considering power
| efficiency. But of course, Apple's not sharing.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The Apple cores are full custom, Apple-only designs.
|
| The AWS Graviton are Neoverse cores, which are pretty good,
| but clearly these Apple-only M1 cores are above-and-beyond.
|
| ---------
|
| That being said: these M1 cores (and Neoverse cores) are
| missing SMT / Hyperthreading, and a few other features I'd
| expect in a server product. Servers are fine with the
| bandwidth/latency tradeoff: more (better) bandwidth but at
| worse (highter) latencies.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| My understanding is that you don't really need
| hyperthreading on a RISC CPU because decoding
| instructions is easier and doesn't have to be
| parallelised as with hyperthreading.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Hyper threading has nothing to do with instruction
| decode. It's for hiding memory latency. The sparc T line
| is 8 way threaded.
| monocasa wrote:
| It's slightly more general than that, hiding inefficient
| use of functional units. A lot of times that's totally
| memory latency causing the inability to keep FUs fed like
| you say, but i've seen other reasons, like a wide but
| diverse set of FUs that have trouble applying to every
| workload.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Okay, the whole RISC thing is stupid. But ignoring that
| aspect of the discussion... POWER9, one of those RISC
| CPUs, has 8-way SMT. Neoverse E1 also has SMT-2 (aka:
| 2-way hyperthreading).
|
| SMT / Hyperthreading has nothing to do with RISC / CISC
| or whatever. Its just a feature some people like or don't
| like.
|
| RISC CPUs (Neoverse E1 / POWER9) can perfectly do SMT if
| the designers wanted.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Don't think that is entirely true. Lots of features which
| exist on both RISC and CISC CPUs have different natural
| fit. Using micro-ops e.g. on a CISC is more important
| than in RISC CPU even if both benefit. Likewise
| pipelining has a more natural fit on RISC than CISC,
| while micro-op cache is more important on CISC than RISC.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't even know what RISC or CISC means anymore.
| They're bad, non-descriptive terms. 30 years ago, RISC or
| CISC meant something, but not anymore.
|
| Today's CPUs are pipelined, out-of-order, speculative,
| (sometimes) SMT, SIMD, multi-core with MESI-based
| snooping for cohesive caches. These words actually have
| meaning.
| chasil wrote:
| The DEC Alpha had SMT on their processor roadmap, but it
| was never implemented as their own engineers told the
| Compaq overlords that they could never compete with
| Intel.
|
| "The 21464's origins began in the mid-1990s when computer
| scientist Joel Emer was inspired by Dean Tullsen's
| research into simultaneous multithreading (SMT) at the
| University of Washington."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21464
| MaysonL wrote:
| Linux on M1 Macs is under development, running, last I heard.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/07/linux-is-now-usable-as-a-
| basi...
| neogodless wrote:
| > "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1
|
| Total cores, but going from 4 "high performance" and 4
| "efficiency" to 8 "high performance" and 2 "efficiency. So
| should be more dramatic increase in performance than "20% more
| cores" would provide.
| skohan wrote:
| Is there a tradeoff in terms of power consumption?
| hajile wrote:
| In A15, Anandtech claims the Efficiency cores are 1/3 the
| performance, but 1/10 the power. They should be looking at
| (effectively) doubling the power consumption over M1 with
| just the CPUs and assuming they don't increase clockspeeds.
|
| Going from 8 to 16 or 32 GPU cores is another massive power
| increase.
| barelysapient wrote:
| I wonder if Apple will give us a 'long-haul' mode where
| the system is locked to only the energy efficient cores
| and settings. I us developer types would love a computer
| that survives 24 hours on battery.
| modulusshift wrote:
| macOS Monterey coming out on the 25th has a new Low Power
| Mode feature that may do just that. That said, these Macs
| are incredibly efficient for light use, you may already
| get 24 hrs of battery life with your workload. Not
| counting screen off time.
| sulam wrote:
| Yes, it depends on what you're doing, but if you can
| watch 21 hours of video, many people will be able to do
| more than 24 hours of development.
| ksec wrote:
| Yes. But the 14" and 16" has larger battery than 13"
| MacBook Pro or Air. And they were designed for performance,
| so two less EE core doesn't matter as much.
|
| It is also important to note, despite the name with M1, we
| dont know if the CPU core are the same as the one used in
| M1 / A14. Or did they used A15 design where the energy
| efficient core had significant improvement. Since the Video
| Decoder used in M1 Pro and Max seems to be from A15, the
| LPDDR5 is also a new memory controller.
| cbarrick wrote:
| In the power/performance curves provided by Apple, they
| imply that the Pro/Max provides the same level of
| performance at a slightly _lower_ power consumption than
| the original M1.
|
| But at the same time, Apple isn't providing any hard data
| or explaining their methodology. I dunno how much we should
| be reading into the graphs. /shrug
| mlindner wrote:
| I think you misread the graph. https://www.apple.com/news
| room/images/product/mac/standard/A...
|
| The graph there shows that the new chip is higher power
| usage at all performance levels.
| derefr wrote:
| Not all; it looks like the M1 running full-tilt is
| slightly less efficient for the same perf than the M1
| Pro/Max. (I.e., the curves intersect.)
| jrk wrote:
| Yes, but only at the very extreme. It's normal that a
| high core count part at low clocks has higher efficiency
| (perf/power) at a given performance level than a low core
| count part at high clocks, since power grows super-
| linearly with clock speed (decreasing efficiency). But
| notably they've tuned the clock/power regime of the M1
| Pro/Max CPUs that the crossover region here is very
| small.
| gzer0 wrote:
| > M1 Pro delivers up to 1.7x more CPU performance at the
| same power level and achieves the PC chip's peak
| performance using up to 70 percent less power
|
| Uses less power
| mlindner wrote:
| That's compared to the PC chips, not M1. M1 uses less
| power at same performance levels.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standar
| d/A...
| SpelingBeeChamp wrote:
| Huge, apparently. I just spent a bit over $7,000 for a top-
| spec model and was surprised to read that it comes with a
| 140 watt power adapter.
|
| Prior to my current M1 MBP, my daily driver was a maxed-out
| 16" MBP. It's a solid computer, but it functions just as
| well as a space heater.
|
| And its power adapter is only 100 watts.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| the power supply is for charging the battery faster. the
| new magsafe 3 system can charge with more wattage than
| usb-c, as per the announcement. usb-c max wattage is 100
| watts, which was the previous limiting factor for battery
| charge.
| robert_foss wrote:
| USB-C 3.1 PD delivers up to 240watts.
| gumby wrote:
| USB Power Delivery 3.1 goes up to 240 W (or, I should
| say, "will go up" as I don't think anybody is shipping it
| yet)
| tantony wrote:
| They support fast-charging the battery to 50% in 30
| minutes. That's probably the reason for the beefy
| charger.
| [deleted]
| pier25 wrote:
| Anyone can comment on what Intel and AMD are going to do now?
|
| Will they be able to catch up or will Qualcomm become the
| alternative for ARM laptop chips? (and maybe desktop chips too)
| ksec wrote:
| >Anyone can comment on what Intel and AMD are going to do now?
|
| In the short term, nothing. But it isn't like Apple will
| magically make all PC user switch to Mac.
|
| Right now Intel will need to catch up with Foundry first. AMD
| needs to work their way into partnering with many people with
| GPU IP which is their unique advantage. Both are currently well
| under way and are sensible path forward. Both CEOs knows what
| they are doing. I rarely praise any CEOs, but Pat and Dr Lisa
| are good.
| neogodless wrote:
| This exact question was asked a year ago when the M1 was
| announced.
|
| In the year since, their laptop market share increased about 2%
| from 14 to 16%[0].
|
| The reasons for this are:
|
| 1. When deciding on a computer, you often have to decide based
| on use case, software/games used, and what operating system
| will work best for those use cases. For Windows users, it
| doesn't matter if you can get similar performance from a
| Macbook Pro, because you're already shopping Windows PCs.
|
| 2. Performance for _most_ use cases has been _enough_ for
| practically a decade (depending on the use case.) For some
| things, no amount of performance is "enough" but your workload
| may still be very OS-dependent. So you probably start with OS X
| or Windows in mind before you begin.
|
| 3. The efficiency that M1/Pro/Max are especially good at are
| not the only consideration for purchase decisions for hardware.
| And they are only available in a Macbook / Macbook Pro / Mini.
| If you want anything else - desktop, dedicated gaming laptop,
| or any other configuration that isn't covered here, you're
| still looking at a PC instead of a Mac. If you want to run
| Linux, you're probably still better off with a PC. If you want
| OS X, then there is only M1, and Intel/AMD are wholly
| irrelevant.
|
| 4. Many buyers simply do not want to be a part of Apple's
| closed system.
|
| So for Intel/AMD to suddenly be "behind" still means that years
| will have to go by while consumers (and especially corporate
| buyers) shift their purchase decisions and Apple market share
| grows beyond the 16% they're at now. But performance is not the
| only thing to consider, and Intel/AMD are not sitting still
| either. They release improved silicon over time. If you'd asked
| me a year ago, I'd say "do not buy anything Intel" but their
| 2021 releases are perfectly fine, even if not class-leading.
| AMD's product line has improved drastically over the past 4
| years, and are easy to recommend for many use cases. Their Zen
| 4 announcement may also be on the 5nm TSMC node, and could be
| within the ballpark of M1 Pro/Max for performance/efficiency,
| but available to the larger PC marketplace.
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-
| qua...
| klelatti wrote:
| These are unit market share numbers, so will include large
| numbers of PCs - both consumer and corporate - at price
| points where Apple isn't interested in competing because the
| margins are probably too low.
|
| I suspect by value their share is far higher and their % of
| profits is even bigger.
|
| The strategy is very clear and it's the same as the iPhone.
| Dominate the high end and capture all the profits. Of course
| gaming is an exception to this.
|
| The bad news for Intel is that they make their margins on
| high end CPUs too.
|
| For Intel and AMD there are two different questions: will
| Intel fix their process technology, and will AMD get access
| to TSMC's leading nodes in the volumes needed to make a
| difference to their market share?
| pier25 wrote:
| All good points but:
|
| 1) In the pro market (audio, video, 3d, etc) performance is
| very relevant.
|
| 2) Battery time is important to all types of laptop users.
|
| 3) Apple is certainly working on more desktop alternatives.
|
| 4) You don't need move all your devices into the closed
| ecosystem just because you use a Mac. Also, some people just
| don't want to use macOS on principle, but I'm guessing this
| is a minority.
|
| > _AMD 's product line has improved drastically over the past
| 4 years_
|
| My desktop Windows PC has a 3700X which was very impressive
| at the time, but it is roughly similar in perf to the "low
| end" M1 aimed at casual users.
|
| > _Their Zen 4 announcement may also be on the 5nm TSMC node,
| and could be within the ballpark of M1 Pro /Max for
| performance/efficiency, but available to the larger PC
| marketplace._
|
| That would be great.
| asdff wrote:
| In the pro market especially you have people who are stuck
| using some enterprise software that is only developed for
| PC like a few Autodesk programs. If you are into gaming
| many first party developers don't even bother making a mac
| port. The new call of duty and battlefield games are on
| every platform but switch and mac OS, and that's
| increasingly par for the course for this industry since mac
| laptops have been junk to game on for so long.
| neogodless wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I think the big thing to remember is that "performance
| crown" at any moment in time does not have a massive
| instantaneous effect on the purchasing habits across the
| market.
|
| I have no doubt that Apple will continue to grow their
| market share here. But the people that continue to buy PC
| will not expect ARM-based chips unless someone (whether
| Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or someone else) builds those chips
| _and_ they are competitive with x86. And x86 chips are not
| suddenly "so bad" (read: obsolete) that no one will
| consider buying them.
| elromulous wrote:
| As is typical for apple, the phrasing is somewhat intentionally
| misleading (like my favorite apple announcement - "introducing
| the best iphone yet" - as if other companies are going
| backwards?). The wording is of course carefully chosen to be
| technically true, but to the average consumer, this might imply
| that these are more powerful than any CPU apple has ever offered
| (which of course is not true).
| eqtn wrote:
| This time, they showed which laptop was used to compare the
| performance on the bottom left corner during presentation
| Trex_Egg wrote:
| Yeah, that is good ofcourse.
| ukd1 wrote:
| Which are more powerful?
| BitAstronaut wrote:
| >this might imply that these are more powerful than any CPU
| apple has ever offered (which of course is not true).
|
| Excuse my ignorance, what is?
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Can somebody check up on intel? Are they okay?
| nrjames wrote:
| I wish that these systems somehow could use/access the CUDA and
| DLSS pipelines from NVidia.
| sva_ wrote:
| I suppose the future of personal computing may be ARM then? For
| now
| kfprt wrote:
| If Nvidia buys ARM they'll flee like rats on a sinking ship.
| I'd bet on RISC-V.
| m15i wrote:
| Will the 64GB RAM max chip be practical for training deep
| learning models? Any benchmarks vs GTX 3090?
| andrewl-hn wrote:
| Their comparison charts showed the performance of mobile GPUs,
| not the desktop ones. So, I wouldn't call this "practical".
| Most likely depends on what kind of models you are building and
| what software you use and how optimized it is for M1.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| I'm so ridiculously happy with my first generation M1 I have zero
| desire to upgrade.
|
| Kind of wild to consider given how long it has taken to get here
| with the graveyard of Apple laptops in my closet.
| eugeniub wrote:
| Same. I am impressed with M1 Pro and M1 Max performance
| numbers. I ordered the new MBP to replace my 2020 M1 MBP, but I
| bought it with the base M1 Pro and I'm personally way more
| excited about 32gb, 1000 nits brightness, function row keys,
| etc.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| See, this is why you have kids. Now my kid gets my M1 Air, and
| I get a M1 Max!
| Unbeliever69 wrote:
| For sure. Mine has been the perfect dev machine. My Docker
| build times are the envy of the office.
| maxekman wrote:
| I was thinking the exact same thing! The fanless M1 Air is a
| dev monster in a mouse package. Couldn't be happier with that
| combo.
| dan1234 wrote:
| If the M1 supported 3 displays I would've bought an air last
| year.
|
| Feels like I'll have to pay a lot for that 3rd monitor!
| rcheu wrote:
| 400 GB/s is insane memory bandwidth. I think a m5.24xlarge for
| instance has something around 250 GB/s (hard to find exact
| number). Curious if anyone knows more details about how this
| compares.
| Andys wrote:
| Its still a bit unclear how much of the bandwidth the CPUs can
| use (as opposed to the GPUs)
| ryanjodonnell wrote:
| Is it possible to dual boot windows with the new m1 chips?
| aldanor wrote:
| You can most definitely use the latest Parallels IIRC, why dual
| boot?
| ryanjodonnell wrote:
| Mostly for gaming. I use bootcamp now to play MTG Arena and
| StarCraft 2 on windows which seems to have much better perf.
|
| I imagine gaming doesnt work well in parallels?
| cweagans wrote:
| I don't think I'd make that assumption. https://www.applega
| mingwiki.com/wiki/M1_compatible_games_mas... , for
| instance, has a number of games that do pretty well in
| Parallels.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| You can play SC2 via rosetta. Unfortunately not optimised
| for M1
| pantalaimon wrote:
| No.
| [deleted]
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| It makes me sad that no one will never be able to build anything
| with those chips.
|
| I imagine there could me many, many innovative products built
| with these chips if Apple sold them and supported Linux (or even
| Windows).
| zionic wrote:
| Imagine if apple was forced (via anti trust laws) to spin off
| their CPU division...
| userbinator wrote:
| ...or just released the full documentation for them. Apple
| being Apple and wanting full control over its users, I don't
| see that happening. I really don't care how fast or efficient
| these are, if they're not publicly documented all I think is
| "oh no, more proprietary crap". Apple might even make more $$$
| if it wanted to open up, but it doesn't.
| uerobert wrote:
| What do you mean? All the APIs (Xcode SDK, Metal, ML, etc)
| required to build on their devices are very well documented.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I'm not talking about apps on their devices, I'm talking
| about new types of devices based on their processors.
|
| If these were available for others to buy, I think we would
| be very surprised by the innovative new devices people
| would invent.
| soheil wrote:
| It's a bit concerning that the new chips have special purpose
| video codec hardware. I hope this trend doesn't continue,
| requiring laptops from different manufacturers to play different
| video formats or at least with a non-degraded quality.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Video encode and decode have been GPU and integrated GFX
| features for quite a long time now.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Apple headline: New chip is faster than old chip.
|
| HN: 54 points
|
| Slow news day.
| octos4murai wrote:
| MacBook announcements are the opposite of slow news days.
| Consumer tech outlets are literally scrambling to cover every
| aspect of these things because there is so much interest.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Not suggesting this is whats happening, but you can pay for
| this kind attention.
|
| On HN you probably don't have to though. Lots of fans of Apple
| things here.
| sk0g wrote:
| Now, if only Unreal Engine builds were available M1 native, I
| could get rid of my huge and heavy desktop entirely!
|
| Interestingly, some improvements to Rosetta were mentioned,
| extremely briefly.
| tehnub wrote:
| Same wish here. Last I tried a few months ago, I was unable to
| compile UE4 as well. These machines would be great for UE4 dev
| if only the compatibility was there. I wonder if the politics
| between Epic and Apple has made efforts in this area a lower
| priority.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| Apple very much against games, they've even broken OpenGL just
| because. Don't expect any type of gaming ecosystem around Apple
| anytime soon.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| So against games that they just became a Patron supporter of
| Blender [1]...
|
| [1] https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-
| developmen...
| manquer wrote:
| Blender has strong use case in the animation and movie
| ecosystems. RenderMan, Pixar has some strong connections
| with Jobs and in turn with Blender, games may not really be
| in their radar for Blender sponsorship.
|
| Besides supporting creator workflows (Final Cut Pro, best
| in class laptop graphics, Blender etc) doesn't mean they
| want to directly support gamers as buyers, just that they
| believe creators who produce games (or other media) are
| strong market for them go after.
|
| The marketing is designed strongly towards the WFH post
| pandemic designer market. They either had to ship their
| expensive Mac desktops to their home or come in and work at
| office last year. This laptop's graphics performance pitch
| is for that market to buy/upgrade now.
| dewey wrote:
| > Apple very much against games
|
| They are not against games, they just don't care about
| supporting anything else that's not coming through their
| frameworks and the app store. This can easily verified by the
| way-too-long segments of game developer demos at the annual
| WWDC.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| Thats not how industry works, thats not how any of this
| works. iPhone ecosystem is big enough to move itself
| forward, but desktop market plays by different rules.If you
| don't follow what majority of the market do, it's much
| cheaper to just ignore that tiny customer segment which
| requires totally alien set of technologies
| GeekyBear wrote:
| >If you don't follow what majority of the market do, it's
| much cheaper to just ignore that tiny customer segment
| which requires totally alien set of technologies
|
| iOS and Macs both use Metal.
|
| You can't refuse to support Metal without missing out on
| a very big slice of total gaming revenue.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| On mobile devices - definitely
|
| On desktop - missing what, 2% or less? Checked Steam
| stats - yep, about 2%
| boardwaalk wrote:
| That Steam stat is probably a chicken and the egg
| situation. I know I don't run Steam on my Macbook because
| there's nothing I want to play -- but I would if there
| was.
|
| Still the Mac marketshare is not that high (~15%?) but
| might start looking attractive to developers looking to
| "get in first" when hardware that can actually run games
| becomes available (cough).
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Metal is Metal. Once you support Metal for iOS games they
| also work under MacOS when running on Apple's chips.
|
| You can support traditional MacOS application chrome with
| little additional effort.
| terafo wrote:
| Desktop games and mobile games are not the same. On
| mobile pretty much every heavy game uses either UE or
| Unity. High end PC games use custom engines that are
| heavily tuned for x86 and use different APIs. Metal port
| would be expensive and not worth it.
| dewey wrote:
| Which is precisely what I said. They don't care that the
| larger gaming market ignores their platform. Apple Arcade
| and other gaming related endeavours all aim at the casual
| mobile gamer market.
| aroman wrote:
| They literally had a Unity developer in the showcase during
| the keynote.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Great update, I think Apple did the right thing by ignoring
| developers this time. 70% of their customers are either creatives
| who rely on proprietary apps, or people who just want a bigger
| iPhone. Those people will be really happy with this upgrade, but
| I have to wonder what the other 30% is thinking. It'll be
| interesting to see how Apple continues to slowly shut out
| portions of their prosumer market in the interest of making A
| Better Laptop.
| nharada wrote:
| I agree this is very targeted towards the creative market (i.e.
| SD card port, etc), but I'm curious as a developer what you
| would have liked to see included that isn't in this release.
|
| I guess personally having better ML training support would be
| nice, since I suspect these M1 Max chips could be absolute
| monsters for some model training/fine-tuning workloads. But I
| can't think of anything design-wise really.
| dmitriid wrote:
| As a developer and a power user, I'd love for them to stop
| iOS'ifying Mac OS.
|
| There's such a huge disconnect between what they do with
| hardware and what they do to MacOS.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Honestly a MacOS "Pro Mode" would be great. Let me run the
| apps I want, not use my mouse, and be able to break things,
| but keep the non-power user experience smooth and easy.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Seconding this. If both iOS and MacOS had a "Pro Mode"
| that didn't treat me like a toddler, I'd be jumping into
| the Apple ecosystem head-first.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| The big ticket items: Hardware-accelerated VSCode cursor
| animation. Dedicated button for exiting vim. Additional
| twelve function keys, bringing the total to 24; further,
| vectorised function key operations, so you can execute up to
| 12 "nmap <f22> :set background=dark" statements in parallel.
| Dedicated encode and decode engines that support YAML, TOML
| and JWT <-> JSON. A neural engine that can approximate
| polynomial time register allocation almost instantly. The CPU
| recognises when you are running Autoconf `./configure` checks
| and fast-forwards to the end.
|
| I would also like a decent LSP implementation for Siri, but
| the question was about hardware.
| smoldesu wrote:
| You could just say "I want Linux" and get the same point
| across.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Linux has offered the Virtual Function Key System since
| at least 1998, but there isn't a driver that uses the
| native 8-lane AVF instruction set on my 230% mechanical
| keyboard yet.
| pram wrote:
| Solid gold
| alberth wrote:
| Server Chips: if you removed the GPU, and added ECC - these would
| be dang nice server chips.
| ttul wrote:
| There is technically no reason Apple could not introduce a
| cloud computing service based on their silicon at some point.
| But would it generate the kind of profit margins they need? An
| interesting space to watch.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| 2 years when their contracts expire
| Weryj wrote:
| I was having a vision last night of a server rack filled with
| iPad Pros /w Ethernet through the USB-C. I still wonder what
| the performance per mm^3 would be in comparison to a
| traditional server.
| [deleted]
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I know Apple has a translating feature called Rosetta. But what
| about virtual machines? Is it possible to run Windows 10 (not the
| ARM edition but the regular, full Windows 10) as a virtual
| machine on top of an Apple M1 chip? It looks like UTM
| (https://mac.getutm.app/) enables this, although at a performance
| hit, but I don't know how well it works in practice. What about
| Parallels - their website suggests you can run Windows 10 Arm
| edition but doesn't make it clear whether you can run x86
| versions of operating systems on top of an M1 Mac (see old blog
| post at https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-m1/). I
| would expect that they can run any architecture on top of an ARM
| processor but with some performance penalty.
|
| I'm trying to figure out if these new MacBook Pros would be an
| appropriate gift for a CS student entering the workforce. I am
| worried that common developer tools might not work well or that
| differences in processors relative to other coworkers may cause
| issues.
| thoughtsimple wrote:
| Neither Apple, Microsoft, nor Parallels is planning to support
| x86-64 Windows on Apple silicon. You can run emulation software
| like QEMU and it works but it is very slow. UTM uses QEMU.
| amansidhant wrote:
| So if I want a new Macbook purely for software development and
| building mobile apps, what should I pick between the $2499 14"
| and the $3499 16"? Doesn't look like there's any difference in
| Xcode build times from their website
| rpmisms wrote:
| Probably depends on your eyesight. I like small laptops with
| very high resolution, but I have good eyes.
| methyl wrote:
| It's only a matter of your preference, whether you like more
| real estate on the screen or better portability.
| seviu wrote:
| 14" + M1 Max (24 GPU cores) with 32 Gb Ram is the sweet spot
| imho. It costs a bit more but you get twice the memory
| bandwidth and double the ram, which will always prove handy.
|
| I develop iOS apps and I think this is the sweet spot. I am not
| sure what impact the extra bandwidth of the M1 Max will have
| though. We will have to wait to see. For video editing is
| clear. For Xcode not so sure.
|
| 14 or 16 inches is up to personal preference. I just value more
| the smaller package and the reduced weight. Performance is
| about the same.
| symlinkk wrote:
| I'd get the 16", 14" is pretty small for something you'd be
| using every day
| titzer wrote:
| These chips are impressive, but TBH I have always been annoyed by
| these vague cartoon-line graphs. Like, is this measured data. No?
| Just some market doodle? Please don't make graphs meaningless
| marketing gags. I mean, please don't make graphs _even more_
| meaningless marketing gags.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I hate the naming.
|
| By name alone and without looking at specs, can you tell me which
| is the faster chip-- the M1 Max or the M1 Pro?
| billyhoffman wrote:
| In isolation, maybe. But it follows the naming convention of
| their iPhones models:
|
| base model < pro model < pro max model
| rbilgil wrote:
| Well I'm not necessarily a fan of the naming but assuming Max
| stands for maximum, it's pretty clearly the best one. The one
| you get if you want to max it out. But they should've called it
| Pro Max for consistency with the iPhones...
| twic wrote:
| The M1 Pro is faster. The M1 MAX is an M1, but with new control
| software which makes it keep crashing.
| btzo wrote:
| wrong
| 19h wrote:
| I assume it was a reference to the 737 Max..
| filoleg wrote:
| M1 Pro is on the cheapest model, and M1 Max is on the most
| expensive model. So I think you are just flat out wrong here.
| aroman wrote:
| You missed the joke they were making about the Boeing 737
| MAX.
| tyingq wrote:
| It would be odd for me if "Max" were not the "maximum".
| aqme28 wrote:
| That's still a bad naming convention. It won't be the maximum
| forever.
| singhkays wrote:
| But it will the the max M1 forever. When M2 comes around,
| that's a different class.
| eugeniub wrote:
| It appears that M1 Max itself comes in 24-core and
| 32-core GPU variants. So I guess some M1 Max chips are
| more maximum than other M1 Max chips.
| agluszak wrote:
| Ah yes, the naming. Instead of M2 we got M1 Pro & M1 Max. I'm
| waiting for M1 Ultra+ Turbo 5G Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-
| Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP
| Systems for Home, Office or Mobile [sic]
| euroderf wrote:
| Any guesses how long it will take for Apple to update the pre-
| existing M1 Macs ? (Price drop, performance boost)
| slayerjain wrote:
| maybe around next fall
| citilife wrote:
| Those power comparisons aren't really fair IMO. They're testing
| power consumption...
|
| They're using a "msi prestige 14 evo (intel CPU)" vs an optimized
| laptop using an M1.
|
| Further, where's AMD? They have a better power vs performance
| ratio.
|
| I'm not sure it's as good or not, but that's a lot of cherry
| picking.
| marricks wrote:
| Can you be more specific in how the M1 is optimized while MSI's
| isn't? Also why was MSI a bad comparison?
|
| It seems reasonable to me but I don't follow PC much these
| days.
| hydroreadsstuff wrote:
| How do they get 200/400GB per second RAM bandwidth? Isn't that
| like 4/8 channel DDR5. 4/8 times as fast as current Intel/AMD
| CPUs/APUs? (E.g.
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/201837/...
| with 45.8GB/s)
|
| Laptop/desktop have 2 channels. High-end desktop can have 4
| channels. Servers have 8 channels.
|
| How does Apple do that? I was always assuming that having that
| many channels is prohibitive in terms of either power consumption
| and/or chip size. But I guess I was wrong.
|
| It can't be GDDR because chips with the required density don't
| exist, right?
| G4E wrote:
| That sound like HBM2, maybe HBM3 but that would be the first
| consumer product to include it afaik.
|
| Basically the bus is really large, and the memory dies must be
| really close to the main processing die. Those memory were
| notably on the RX Vega from AMD, and before that on the R9
| Fury.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory
| hydroreadsstuff wrote:
| If that were the case you could probably see an interposer.
| And I think the B/W would be even higher.
| kingosticks wrote:
| And the price would be even higher.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| It's LPDDR5, which maxes out at 6.4Gbit/s/pin, on a
| 256bit/512bit interface.
|
| It's much easier to make a wider bus with LPDDR5 and chips
| soldered on the board than with DIMMs.
| hydroreadsstuff wrote:
| I hope we will see this on more devices. This is a huge boon
| to performance.
|
| Might even forebode soldering RAM onto packages from here on
| out and forever.
|
| Steamdeck will probably have a crazy 100gb/sec ram b/w. twice
| of current laptops and desktops.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Steamdeck is 88 GB/s using quad channel.
| ksec wrote:
| They are using LPDDR5.
|
| Not the usual DDR5 used in Desktop / Laptop.
| dragontamer wrote:
| DDR5 isn't common yet.
|
| DDR4 is the common desktop/laptop chip. LPDDR5 is cell-phone
| chip, so its kinda funny to see a low-power RAM being used in
| a very wide fashion like this.
| yboris wrote:
| Is there any VR for the Mac? Seems like the machine is more-than-
| ready for VR!
| smoldesu wrote:
| Apple had SteamVR support for a while, and even Valve Proton
| support for a while (meaning that Windows-only games were quite
| playable on Mac hardware). Unfortunately, Apple pulled 32-bit
| library support without offering a suitable alternative, so
| Valve was forced to scrap their plans for Mac gaming entirely.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| I maintain that this was to avoid the lack of support for
| 32-bit games being blamed on the Apple Silicon.
| thuccess129 wrote:
| Still have not solved the tinytiny inverted Tee arrow key
| arrangement on the keyboard. Need to improve on the former IBM's
| 6-key cluster below the right shift key, or arrange full sized
| key arrows in a crossplus pattern breaking out of the rectangle
| at the lower right corner.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to
| manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral.
|
| How is that even possible?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess it must be net, right? So maybe carbon offsets or
| providing more green energy than they consume, to the grid?
| strobe wrote:
| likely they not but is possible to say that because they buying
| a Carbon offsets or similar products to make it 100 neutral
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset
|
| (obviously apple can afford that)
| trenchgun wrote:
| With offsets.
| robocat wrote:
| There are two kinds of offsets: 1. existing offsets where you
| buy them but there is no net offset creation, 2. newly
| created offsets where your purchase makes a net difference.
| An example of (1) could be buying an existing forest that
| wasn't going to be felled. An example of (2) could be
| converting a coal electricity plant to capture CO2 instead of
| shutting the plant down.
|
| A quick skim of the Apple marketing blurb at least implies
| they are trying to create new offsets e.g. "Over 80 percent
| of the renewable energy that Apple sources comes from
| projects that Apple created", and "Apple is supporting the
| development of the first-ever direct carbon-free aluminium
| smelting process through investments and collaboration with
| two of its aluminium suppliers." --
| https://www.apple.com/nz/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-
| to-b...
| supertrope wrote:
| Collecting juicy tax credits for installing solar power. Carbon
| credits.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| This is roughly in line with what I expected, given the
| characteristics of the M1. It's still very power efficient and
| cool, has more CPU cores, a lot more GPU cores, wider memory
| controller, and presumably it has unchanged single core
| performance.
|
| Apple clearly doesn't mean these to be a high performance desktop
| offering though because they didn't even offer an Mac Mini SKU
| with the new M1s.
|
| But what I'm really curious about is how Apple is going to push
| this architecture for their pro desktop machines. Is there a
| version of the M1 which can take advantage of a permanent power
| supply and decent air flow?
| julienb_sea wrote:
| I don't think they are going to make desktop versions, they'll
| probably put the pro and max versions in a new iMac body during
| Q2 2022 and might add config options to mac mini. Might be for
| supply chain reasons, focusing 100% on macbook pro production
| to meet the absolutely massive incoming demand.
| gradys wrote:
| M1 Pro Max is only $200 more. I'm tempted, but do we think it
| will be more power hungry under the same workload than the Pro?
| alex504 wrote:
| On Apple's website, see the notes below the battery consumption
| claims.
|
| https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/#footnote-23
|
| They are using the m1 pro to get their battery claim numbers.
|
| I ordered an M1 Pro based on the slightly lower price and my
| assumption that it will be less power hungry. If it is only 200
| dollars cheaper why else would they even offer the M1 Pro? The
| extra performance of he max seems like overkill for my needs so
| if it has worse power consumption I don't want it. I could
| probably get away with an M1 but I need the 16" screen.
|
| We will find out in a few weeks when there are benchmarks
| posted by 3rd party reviewers, but by that time who knows how
| long it will take to order one.
| awill wrote:
| The full-blown Max they talked about is an $800 upgrade.
| https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch It's
| combined with double RAM (32GB), double GPU (32-core).
|
| The $200 upgrade is called 'Max', but is still 16GB RAM, and
| 'only' 24 core GPU.
| HunterWare wrote:
| Nah, 200-400 more and memory size is an independent thing.
| sharken wrote:
| So with 57B transistors for the M1 Max you can fit the AMD 5800H
| (10 B) and the RTX 3080 Ti (28 B) and have 19B transistors left.
|
| So the performance should be top notch but cooling and power
| requirements will be quite high.
|
| So battery life of 21 hours is quite the achievement.
|
| Still, i prefer the open architecture of the PC any day.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| I think memory is part of that, whereas it would be excluded
| for the other chips you mentioned.
|
| But OTOH 57B transistors for 64GB of memory means there would
| be less than one transistors per byte of memory - so I'm not
| sure how this works, but I'm not too knowledgeable in chip
| design.
| up6w6 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
|
| It seems to be way beyond any CPU for end users and even some
| servers like AWS Graviton 2
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I wish we had real open hardware with everything documented.
| Sadly that us very rare.
| throwaway879080 wrote:
| how does this new GPU and "neural engine" perform comparing to
| Nvidia GPUs, and do they support Tensorflow and something similar
| to CUDA SDK
| vimy wrote:
| The M1 gpu was comparable to a 1080.
| https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-...
| I believe they are working on PyTorch support.
| baybal2 wrote:
| I wonder what would the benchmark results be.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| For me, think about that memory bandwidth. No other CPU comes
| even close. A Ryzen 5950X can only transfer about 43GB/s. This
| thing promises 400GB/s on the highest-end model.
| Woden501 wrote:
| No consumer CPU comes close. Just saw an article about the
| next-gen Xeon's with HBM though that blows even this away
| (1.8TB/s theoretically), but what else would one expect from
| enterprise systems. Getting pretty damn excited about all the
| CPU manufacturers finally getting their asses into gear
| innovation-wise after what feels like a ridiculously long
| period of piss-warm "innovation".
| kzrdude wrote:
| Thanks to Apple in this case for taking a holistic approach
| to making a better computer.
| Thaxll wrote:
| And only 10 cores so a 5950x completely wreck an M1.
| defaultname wrote:
| As always, though, the integrated graphics thing is a mixed
| blessing. 0-copy and shared memory and all of that, but now the
| GPU cores are fighting for the same memory. If you are really
| using the many displays that they featured, just servicing and
| reading the framebuffers must be...notable.
|
| A high end graphics card from nvidia these days has 1000GB/s
| all to itself, not in competition with the CPUs. If these GPUs
| are really as high of performance as claimed, there may be
| situations where one subsystem or the other is starved.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Let's see how fast we'll see support for those in Asahi Linux
| humantorso wrote:
| I'll wait for the Linus benchmarks/comparisons.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| You mean Anandtech
| mem0r1 wrote:
| I really wonder if the CPU cores are able to access the memory
| with the specified high bandwith or if its just for the GPU
| cores.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Isn't almost every new Apple chip the most powerful chip Apple
| has ever built?
| epistasis wrote:
| They could have been optimizing for lower power consumption
| rather than more compute power. For example, the next iPhone
| chip will likely _not_ be the most powerful when it comes to
| compute, even if it beats the other iPhone chips.
| WithinReason wrote:
| And that's exactly why I put the word "almost" in the
| sentence!
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe currently, but they are only on their second
| generation of laptop chips.
|
| I guess going forward the current A-series chip will be
| lower power/performance than any reasonably recent M-series
| chip (given the power envelope difference).
| pastelsky wrote:
| Does this leap sound big enough to eat into the traditional
| windows pro laptop market?
|
| ITs going to have a tough time justifying purchases.
| octos4murai wrote:
| Do these new processors mean anything for those of us who need to
| run x86 VMs or is Apple Silicon still a no-go?
| sharikous wrote:
| you can always run an emulator such as QEMU if you really need
| x86 once in a while
|
| working with it would be a pain, however, if you absolutely
| need x86 better get an Intel mac (possibly used) or a PC
| [deleted]
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| Disingenuous for Apple to compare these against 2017 Intel chips
| and call them 2x and 3.7x faster.
|
| I would love to see how they fare against 2021 Intel and amd
| chips.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| The slide where they say its faster than an 8-core PC laptop
| CPU is comparing it against the 11th gen i7 11800H [1]. So it's
| not as fast as the fastest laptop chip, and it's certainly not
| as fast as the monster laptops that people put desktop CPUs in.
| But it uses 40% of the power of a not-awful 11th gen 8-core i7
| laptop. The M1 is nowhere near as fast as a full-blown 16 core
| desktop CPU.
|
| I am sure we will see reviews against high end intel and amd
| laptops very soon, and I wont be surprised if real world
| performance blows people away, as the M1 Air did.
|
| [1] https://live.arstechnica.com/apple-october-18-unleashed-
| even...
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| ... and neither is the M1 (in any configuration) a "full
| blown 16 core desktop CPU".
|
| Those will be called M2 and come later next year, according
| to the rumor mill anyway.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Sorry, that is what I meant. I'll edit.
| Rapzid wrote:
| When M1 first released they pulled some marketing voodoo and
| you always saw the actively cooled performance numbers listed
| with the passively cooled TDP :D Nearly every tech
| article/review was reporting those two numbers together.
| klelatti wrote:
| How is it disingenuous - defined in my dictionary as not candid
| - when we know precisely which chips they are comparing
| against?
|
| They are giving Mac laptop users information to try to persuade
| them to upgrade from their 2017 MacBook Pros and this is
| probably the most relevant comparison.
| eugeniub wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they are comparing them with 2019/2020
| MacBook Pros, which apparently have chips originally launched
| 2017.
| klelatti wrote:
| Looks to me like they are comparing against 2020 MBPs (at
| least for 13 inch) which use 10nm Ice Lake so nothing to do
| with 2017 at all!!
| james33 wrote:
| They did that to compare against the last comparable Intel
| chips in a Mac, which seems rather useful for people looking to
| upgrade from that line of Mac.
| peterkos wrote:
| Reminds me of AMD comparing their insane IPC increase when
| Ryzen first came out.
| 00deadbeef wrote:
| I thought they compared it with an i9-9980HK which is the top-
| end 2019 chip in the outgoing 16" MBP?
| ac29 wrote:
| Intel's 2021 laptop chips (Alder Lake) are rumoured to be
| released later this month (usually actual availability is a few
| months after "release"). I expect them to be pretty compelling
| compared to the previous generation Intel parts, and maybe even
| vs AMD's latest. But the new "Intel 7" node (formerly 10++ or
| something) is almost certainly going to be behind TSMC N5 in
| power and performance, so Apple will most likely still have the
| upper hand.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Can these drive more than one external monitor?
| masklinn wrote:
| 2x6K on the Pro, 3x6K + 1x4K on the Max. The 4K seems to be
| because that's the limit of the HDMI port.
|
| No mention of MST though.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| up to 4
| bredren wrote:
| XDR Pro Display was the only external monitor mentioned, and
| was shown connected a few times. Screenshots and below details
| here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pro-display-xdr-
| owners-...
|
| Also specific statements:
|
| - M1 Pro SoC supports two XDR Pro Display
|
| - M1 Max SoC was highlighted (Connectivity: Display Support ->
| 33:50): - Supports three XDR Pro Displays and
| a 4k television simultaneously - "75 Million
| pixels of real estate." - Highlighted still having
| free ports with this setup.
| rstupek wrote:
| It was shown driving 4 external monitors
| can16358p wrote:
| Yes. Up to three on Max.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Yes. The Pro and Max can drive 2 XDR displays.
| Kiro wrote:
| > XDR
|
| What does that mean?
| salamandersauce wrote:
| The 6K pro monitor Apple sells.
| Kiro wrote:
| Just so I don't misunderstand, does that mean I need XDR
| or will it work with any monitor? I was very surprised to
| see that the original M1 only supported one external
| monitor so just want to confirm before I press buy.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| No it will, it's just a very demanding monitor so if it
| can run multiple of those it will have no problem with
| random 1080p or 4K monitors.
| yarcob wrote:
| It will of course work with other monitors, but there
| aren't that many high res monitors out there. The Apple
| display is the only 6k monitor I know of. There are a few
| 5k monitors and lots of 4k monitors.
|
| There's one 8k monitor from Dell, but I don't think it's
| supported by macOS yet.
| [deleted]
| NovaS1X wrote:
| It's their marketing term for their HDR tech. The XDR
| displays are their flagship media productivity monitors.
| The new screens in the 14/16 inch MacBooks have "XDR" tech
| as well.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| Indeed. The M1 Max can drive 3 6K monitors and a 4K TV all at
| once. Why? Professional film editors and color graders. You can
| be working on the three 6K monitors and then Output your render
| to the 4K TV simultaneously
| cpascal wrote:
| Yes, the live-stream showed a MacBook Pro connected to many
| monitors
| LeSaucy wrote:
| The real question is can you plug in a display and not get
| kernel panics.
| CallMeMarc wrote:
| I see myself in this one and I don't like it.
| More-nitors wrote:
| yay more-nitors!
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Since these won't ship in non-Apple products, I don't see really
| the point. They're only slightly ahead of AMD products when it
| comes to performance/watt, slightly behind performance/dollar (in
| an Apples to apples comparison on similarly configured laptops),
| and that's only because Apple is head of AMD at TSMC for new
| nodes, not because Apple has any inherent advantage.
|
| I have huge respect for the PA Semi team, but they're basically
| wasting that talent if Apple only intends to silo their products
| into an increasingly smaller market. The government really needs
| to look into splitting Apple up to benefit shareholders and the
| general public.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I have huge respect for the PA Semi team, but they're
| basically wasting that talent if Apple only intends to silo
| their products into an increasingly smaller market.
|
| They design the SoCs in all iPhones and soon all Macs. They
| have the backing of a huge company with an unhealthy amount of
| money, and are free from a lot of constraints that come with
| having to sell a general-purpose CPUs to OEMs. They can work
| directly with the OS developers so that whatever fancy thing
| they put in their chips is used and has a real impact on
| release or shortly thereafter, and will be used by millions of
| users. Sounds much more exciting than working on the n-th Core
| generation at Intel. Look at how long it is taking for
| mainstream software to take advantage of vector extensions. I
| can't see how that is wasting talent.
|
| > The government really needs to look into splitting Apple up
| to benefit shareholders and the general public.
|
| So that their chip guys become just another boring SoC
| designer? Talk about killing the golden goose. Also, fuck the
| shareholders. The people who should matter are the users, and
| they seem quite happy with the products. Apple certainly has
| some unfair practices, but it's difficult to argue that their
| CPUs are problematic.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Our local office only uses macOS and Windows for desktop
| computers, GNU/Linux nowadays only for servers in some Amazon
| and Azure cloud instances.
|
| Apple will have plenty of customers.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| "They're only slightly ahead..." and "The government really
| needs to look into splitting Apple up to benefit shareholders
| and the general public." doesn't really seem to jive for me.
|
| If they're only slightly ahead, what's the point of splitting
| them up when everyone else, in your analysis, is nearly on par
| or will soon be on par with them?
| rpmisms wrote:
| This is a poorly considered take, no offense to you. I think
| you're failing to consider that Apple traditionally drives
| innovation in the computing market, and this will push a lot of
| other manufacturers to compete with them. AMD is already on the
| warpath, and Intel just got a massive kick in the pants.
|
| There's other arguments against Apple being as big as it, but
| this isn't a good one. Tesla being huge and powerful has driven
| amazing EV innovation, for example, and Apple is in the same
| position in the computing market.
| kzrdude wrote:
| ARM going mainstream in powerful personal computers was
| exciting enough as it was, with the release of the Apple
| Silicon M1. With time hopefully these will be good to use with
| Linux.
| fwip wrote:
| I wish that we could compare Intel/AMD at the 5nm process to
| these chips, to see how much speedup is the architecture vs the
| process node.
|
| Also, all of the benchmarks based on compiling code for the
| native platform are misleading, as x86 targets often take longer
| to compile for (as they have more optimization passes
| implemented).
| baybal2 wrote:
| Bad day for Intel(r)
| [deleted]
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Any indication on the gaming performance of these vs. a typical
| nvidia or AMD card? My husband is thinking of purchasing a mac
| but I've cautioned him that he won't be able to use his e-gpu
| like usual until someone hacks support to work for it again, and
| even then he'd be stuck with pretty old gen AMD cards at best.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| I wouldn't get one of those for games, better get a Windows PC
| and a M1 MacBook Air, cost should be about the same for both.
| Game support just won't be there if you care about gaming.
| neogodless wrote:
| The video moved a bit too fast for me to catch the exact
| laptops they were comparing. They did state that the M1 Pro is
| 2.5x the Radeon Pro 5600M, and the M1 Max is 4x the same GPU.
|
| The performance to power charts were comparing against roughly
| RTX 3070 level laptop cards.
| [deleted]
| rudedogg wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea M1 doesn't support eGPUs. I was planning on
| buying an external enclosure for Apple Silicon when I upgraded;
| thanks for pointing that out.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Not only that, but you're stuck with cards from 5 years ago
| with current macbooks. It's a shame too because the plug and
| play support is better than the very best e-gpu plug and play
| on linux or windows.
|
| I don't see Apple personally adding support any time soon,
| either. Clearly their play now is to make all hardware in
| house. The last thing they want is people connecting 3090s so
| they can have an M1 Max gaming rig. They only serve creators,
| and this has always been true. Damn waste if you ask me.
| rudedogg wrote:
| You could use the new AMD cards at least though right? I
| don't think Nvidia support will ever happen again though (I
| got burned by that, bought a 1060 right before they dropped
| Nvidia).
|
| I'm on a RX 5700XT with my Hackintosh, and it works well.
|
| Edit: Thinking about this more.. I bet third party GPUs are
| a dead end for users and Apple is planning to phase them
| out.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| I think I'd wait to see what the Mac Pro supports before
| coming to that conclusion. Could be something they're
| still working on for that product, and then when it's
| working on the Apple Silicon build of macOS will be made
| available on laptops as well.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I guarantee you this is them finally ripping the Band-Aid
| of having to support _any_ outside hardware
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Oh that's cool, last I checked the best AMD card you can
| use is a Vega 64.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Radeon 6900XT works with eGPU. But yes, intel macs only.
| And of course, you're not getting all 16 lanes!
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544
| ksec wrote:
| In terms of Hardware M1 Max is great. On paper you wont find
| anything match its performance under load. As even Gaming /
| Content Creation Laptop throttle after a short while.
|
| The problem is gaming isn't exactly a Mac thing. From Game
| selection to general support on the platform. So really
| performance should be the least of your concern if you are
| buying a Mac for games.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| He typically just dual-boots windows anyway so selection
| isn't much of an issue, though I also don't know if that is
| working yet on the M1 platform
| ksec wrote:
| >though I also don't know if that is working yet on the M1
| platform
|
| Dual booting isn't working and likely not any time soon as
| Microsoft does not intend to support Apple M1 [1]. And I
| doubt Apple have intention to port their GPU Metal Drivers
| to Windows. ( Compared to using AMD Drivers on Windows in
| the old days )
|
| He will likely need to use some sort of VM solution like
| Parallel. [2]
|
| [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/13/microsoft-
| says-wi...
|
| [2] https://www.engadget.com/parallels-desktop-17-m-1-mac-
| perfor...
| mlindner wrote:
| I'm not aware of a single even semi-major game (including
| popular indie titles) that run native on M1 yet. Everything
| is running under Rosetta and game companies so far seem
| completely uninterested in native support.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you're looking for some to test try EVE, WOW, or
| Baldur's Gate 3. That's about it as far as major games
| AFAIK.
| modulusshift wrote:
| Disco Elysium, EVE Online, Minecraft*, Timberborn, Total
| War: Rome Remastered, World of Warcraft.
|
| Minecraft is kinda cheating, because Java, and even
| considering that it takes a bit of hacking. Alternatively
| you can sideload the iOS version.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| World of Warcraft & Eve Online are both native.
| BitAstronaut wrote:
| The fine print:
|
| >Testing conducted by Apple in September 2021 using
| preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 Max,
| 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as
| production Intel Core i9-based PC systems with NVIDIA Quadro
| RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6, production Intel Core
| i9-based PC systems with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics with
| 16GB GDDR6, and the latest version of Windows 10 available at
| the time of testing.
|
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211018005775/en/Gam...
| eecc wrote:
| Sigh... back to eating ramen (joking... I'm Italian, I'd never
| cut on my food)
| yellowapple wrote:
| If Apple ever gets around to putting an M1 Max in a Mac Mini,
| that'd probably push me over the edge toward buying one.
| Andys wrote:
| Yeah, especially if it could run Linux. This would be a
| powerful little server.
|
| I decked out my workstation with a 16 core Ryzen & 96GB RAM and
| it didn't cost anywhere near the price of this new 64GB M1 Max
| combo. (But it may very well be less powerful, which is
| astonishing. It would be great to at least have the choice.)
| soheil wrote:
| Can't you buy a MBP 16" and connect it to whatever display you
| were going to connect your Mac Mini to?
| jb1991 wrote:
| But there's a huge difference in the price if you don't need
| all the other stuff that comes with the MacBook Pro.
| cmckn wrote:
| Agreed, and the mini has different I/O that you might
| prefer (USB-A, 10 gig eth). Also, it's smaller (surprise,
| "mini"). Plus, clamshell mode on a MacBook just isn't the
| same as a desktop for "always-on" use cases.
| [deleted]
| nodesocket wrote:
| > 140W USB-C Power Adapter
|
| Wait huh? My current 16" Intel Core i9 is only 95watts. Does this
| mean all my existing USB-C power infrastructure won't work?
| google234123 wrote:
| No, it would be just be slower to charge
| barelysapient wrote:
| Maybe its a typo and they mean the Magsafe3 connector? I though
| the USB-C standard was limited to 100 watts.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| They may have a usbC -> magsafe 3 connector. It lets you just
| replace the cable when it inevitably breaks instead of the
| whole brick.
| yarcob wrote:
| Instead of having to replace the mag safe power brick for
| 85EUR you can now just replace the cable for 55EUR.
|
| However, it my personal experience, I've never had the
| cable fail, but I've had 2 mag safe power supplies fail
| (they started getting very hot while charging and at some
| point stopped working alltogether).
| barelysapient wrote:
| That's exactly what it is.
| yarcob wrote:
| They recently introduced a new standard that allows up to
| 240W
| nly wrote:
| Dell USB-C power adapters have exceeded 100 watts in the past
| on e.g. the XPS 17
| can16358p wrote:
| It will work but it will charge slower and probably won't
| charge when maxing out the juice off the SoC.
| robertrbairdii wrote:
| I think the 140w power adapter is to support fast charging,
| they mentioned charging to 50% capacity in 30 mins, I'd
| imagine power draw should be much less than 140w
| miohtama wrote:
| It likely charges slower, though they is a minimum needed power
| - you cannot charge with a mobile charger.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| My guess is it will work like using a 65W adapter on a Mac that
| prefers 95W. It will charge if you're not doing much but it
| will drain the battery if you're going full tilt.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Just like USB-C cables can differ in capacity I'm finding a
| need to scrutinize my wall chargers more now. A bunch of
| white boxes but some can keep my MacBook Pro charged even
| when on all day calls and some can't. With PD the size isn't
| a great indicator anymore either.
| gpt5 wrote:
| It's interesting that the M1 Max is similar in GPU performance to
| RTX 3080. A sub $1000 Mac Mini would end up being the best gaming
| PC you could buy, at less than half the price of an equivalent
| windows machine.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| If only the Software compatibility was there. I'd love to be
| able to skip buying expensive desktop machines exclusively for
| gaming.
| burmanm wrote:
| But without games to play on it. Instead, you could just get an
| Xbox Series X for half that price.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| PS5! Not true apple owner buys a Microsoft product!
| smileybarry wrote:
| Similar to an RTX 3080 _Mobile_ , which is IIRC equivalent to
| somewhere around a RTX 3060 Desktop.
| neogodless wrote:
| The M1 Max starts at $2700 for the 16" 10-core CPU, 24-core
| GPU.
|
| The comparison to higher end graphics uses the M1 Max 32-core
| GPU which starts at $3500.
|
| I'm not seeing a way for a Mac Mini to have the M1 Max, and
| still be priced below $1000.
| [deleted]
| SalimoS wrote:
| Why no one is talking about the base 14" 8-Core CPU and 14-Core
| GPU but not a single mention in the presentation ?
|
| How the new M1 Pro 8 core compared the the M1 8 core ?
| masklinn wrote:
| The M1 has 4 small cores and 4 big while the Pro is 2/6. Didn't
| really see if they claimed difference in the performances of
| the cores themselves.
| bnastic wrote:
| I don't think the 'old' M1 13" Pro is long for this world - for
| PS100 more (16GB+1TB spec) you get a much better machine in the
| 14" model. But independent comparisons will follow.
|
| I'd love to see a Pro/Max Mac Mini, but that's not likely to
| happen.
| slayerjain wrote:
| Based on the numbers it looks like the M1 Max is in the RTX
| 3070-3080 performance territory. Sounds like mobile AAA gaming
| has potential to reach new heights :D
| smileybarry wrote:
| If Proton is made to work on Mac with Metal, there's some real
| future here for proper gaming on Mac. Either that or Parallels
| successfully running x64 games via Windows on ARM
| virtualization.
| MetricExpansion wrote:
| I've been looking into trying CrossOver Mac on my M1 Max for
| exactly this reason. After seeing the kinds of GPUs Apple is
| comparing themselves to, I'm very hopeful.
| notSupplied wrote:
| Elephant in the room is that an A15/M1 beefed up GPU is exactly
| the right chip for a Nintendo Switch/Steam Deck form factor
| device.
| threeseed wrote:
| Or an AV/VR headset.
| slayerjain wrote:
| And in the case for the M1 Pro, apple is showing it to be
| faster than the Lenovo 82JW0012US - which has a RTX 3050ti. so
| the performance could be between RTX 3050ti - RTX 3060. All of
| this with insanely low power draw.
| ant6n wrote:
| But still not fanless, right? Maybe they'll update the
| Macbook Air with some better graphics as well, so that one
| could do some decent gaming without a fan.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Air is already at the thermal limit range with the 8 core
| GPU, will probably have to wait until the next real
| iteration of the technology in the chip (M2 or whatever)
| which increases efficiency instead of just being larger.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| It's not a function of capability. I spent $4,000 on a 2019
| MBP, including $750 for a Vega 20. It plays Elder Scrolls
| Online WORSE than a friend's 2020 with INTEGRATED graphics. (I
| guess Bethesda gave some love to the integrated chipset, and
| didn't optimize for the Vega. It hitches badly every couple of
| seconds like it's texture thrashing.)
|
| Whatever AAA games that might have gotten some love on the Mac
| (and there are some), it's going to be even harder to get game
| companies to commit to proper support to the M1 models.
| Bethesda has said they won't even compile ESO for M1. So I will
| continue to run it on a 12-year-old computer running an ATHLON
| 64 and a nVidia 9xx-series video card. (This works surprising
| well, making the fact that my Mac effectively can't play it all
| the more galling.)
|
| I'm never going to try tricking out a Mac for gaming again. I
| should have learned my lesson with eGPU's, but no. I thought,
| if I want a proper GPU, it's going to be built in. Well, that
| doesn't work either. I've wasted a lot of money in this arena.
| modulusshift wrote:
| Well, Apple is selling M1 Macs like hotcakes, so it won't be
| too long until it'll be stupid _not_ to support them. Also,
| texture thrashing isn 't really an issue when you've got a
| shared CPU/GPU memory with 64 GB of space. Just cache like
| half the game in it lol
| smoldesu wrote:
| Apple had a shot at making Mac gaming a reality around
| 2019. They decided to axe 32-bit library support though,
| which instantly disqualifies the lion's share of PC games.
| You could still theoretically update these titles to run on
| MacOS, but I have little hope that any of these developers
| would care enough to completely rewrite their codebase to
| be compatible with 15% of the desktop market share.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Yeah, I was living with gaming on a Mac when that
| happened, and watched 2/3rds of my Steam library get
| greyed out.
| modulusshift wrote:
| Yeah, and they also deprecated OpenGL, which would have
| wiped out most of those games even if the 32-bit support
| didn't. I'm not expecting to see much backwards
| compatibility, I'm expecting forwards compatibility, and
| we're starting to see new titles come out with native
| Apple Silicon support, slowly, but surely.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I wouldn't hold your breath. Metal is still a second-
| class citizen in the GPU world, and there's not much
| Apple can do to change that. Having powerful hardware
| alone isn't enough to justify porting software, otherwise
| I'd be playing Star Citizen on a decommissioned POWER9
| mainframe right now.
| wolrah wrote:
| The major factor Apple has working in their favor with
| regards to the future of gaming on Macs is iOS. Any game
| or game engine that wants to support iPhone or iPad
| devices is going to be most of the way to supporting ARM
| Macs for "free".
|
| My older Intel Macs I'm sure are more or less SOL but
| they were never intended to be gaming machines.
| Thaxll wrote:
| There is 0% chance that game dev supports mac, it's a dead
| platform for gaming.
|
| The downvote police is there, am I missing something? are
| they any modern game on mac?
|
| https://applesilicongames.com/
| gremloni wrote:
| I love that game. Wonder why it gets some much hate online.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Based on the numbers it looks like the M1 Max is in the RTX
| 3070-3080 performance territory.
|
| The slides are comparing to a laptop with a 3080 Mobile, which
| is not the same as a normal RTX 3080. A desktop 3080 is a power
| hungry beast and will not work in a laptop form factor.
|
| The 3080 Mobile is still very fast as a benchmark, but the
| full-size 3080 Desktop is in another league of performance:
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-mobile-GeForce-RTX-3080-is...
|
| Still very impressive GPU from Apple!
| jjcon wrote:
| Mobile 3070-80 so around 1080 desktop for those that are
| interested. I'm curious what their benchmark criteria was
| though.
| hajile wrote:
| The 3080M has something around 20TFLOPS of theoretical f32
| performance. That's double that of Apple's biggest offerings.
|
| In theoretical compute, it's closer to the 3060M which is
| nothing to sneeze at.
| Ronson wrote:
| Not to disagree, but what gave you that impression?
| vesrah wrote:
| The slides with performance numbers list the comparison
| machines
| slayerjain wrote:
| based on the relative differences between the m1 and the m1
| pro/max, and also the comparisons shown by apple to other
| laptops from the MSI and Razerblade both featuring the RTX
| 3080.
| culopatin wrote:
| But do you need to play those games through rosetta? Does that
| make a difference?
| [deleted]
| mattfrommars wrote:
| I am in the market for a new laptop and bit skeptic for M1 Chips.
| Could anyone please tell me how is this not a "premium high
| performance Chromebook" ?
|
| Why should I buy this and not Dell XPS machine if I will be using
| it for web development/Android Development/C#/DevOps. Might soon
| mess with machine learning
| raydev wrote:
| Better battery life while performing faster than any Intel/AMD
| chip at equivalent power usage. Portability is the reason for
| the existence of laptops.
| azeirah wrote:
| For web dev it works very well, android development no clue, c#
| is primarily a windows-oriented development environment so
| probably not so great. For devops, well.. Mac is a linux-esque
| environment, it'll be fine?
|
| I have the m1 air and the big advantages are the absurd battery
| life and the extremely consistent very high performance.
|
| It's always cold, it's always charged, it's always fast.
|
| I believe you can get both faster cpu and gpu performance on a
| laptop, but it costs a lot in battery life and heat which has a
| bigger impact on usability than I believed before getting this
| one.
|
| Might want to add, this is my first ever apple laptop. I've
| always used Lenovo laptops, ran mostly windows/linux dual boots
| on my laptops and desktops over the years.
| avisser wrote:
| > c# is primarily a windows-oriented development environment
| so probably not so great.
|
| I'm not confident that is still true today. .net core is
| multi-platform all-the-way and is the future.
| Weryj wrote:
| That's a debate between OSX and alternatives, the M1 has little
| to do with that. Except maybe the Rosetta for unsupported x86,
| but I doubt that'll cause you any issues.
|
| Edit: C# support is there on OSX, Rider has Apple Silicon
| builds and .net core is cross platform now.
|
| ML is probably a let down and you'll be stuck to CPU sized
| workloads, that being said the M1 does pretty well compared to
| other x86 CPU
| sjroot wrote:
| I am a very satisfied Apple customer, but will gladly tell you
| that a Windows machine would make more sense for the use cases
| you've described.
| raydev wrote:
| C# is the only odd item there. Entire companies are doing
| everything else in that list using exclusively MacBook Pros.
| skohan wrote:
| Isn't C# quite available on mac?
| other_herbert wrote:
| Yes and dotnet 6 (release date scheduled for 11/9, but is
| available now as rc2) works natively on the m1... REALLY
| quickly I might add :)...
|
| I go between vs.code and JetBrains Rider (rider now has
| an EAP that runs natively on the m1)...
|
| I am going to upgrade just because I didn't get enough
| ram the first time around :)
| bengale wrote:
| Other than the ML work maybe. The Apple chips claim to be
| very performant with ML workloads.
| [deleted]
| yumraj wrote:
| $400 to upgrade RAM from 16GB to 32GB -- Ouch!!
| tyingq wrote:
| Also $400 to go from 32GB to 64GB if you start with the 16 inch
| MPB with the M1Max. So $400 in that case buys 32G extra instead
| of just 16GB extra.
|
| Interesting.
| Andys wrote:
| Except you already paid more to get the M1 Max, too, the
| upgrade to 64 is not available on any other models.
| asdff wrote:
| Apple has always been so stupid about RAM pricing. I miss the
| days where you could triple your base RAM by spending maybe $75
| on sticks from crucial and thirty seconds of effort.
| Decabytes wrote:
| What is it about the M1 architecture that makes it so speedy
| compared to x86 chips? Is it the Risc instruction set? The newer
| node process? Something else?
| [deleted]
| shartacct wrote:
| M1 pro and max are very likely the fastest consumer CPUs in the
| world, despite being stuck in a 30-40w power envelope. Apple is
| embarrassing AMD and Intel engineers right now.
| citilife wrote:
| I thought this link was far better:
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-an...
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed to that from
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/18/22726444/apple-m1-pro-
| ma.... Thanks!
| taurath wrote:
| Kind of surprising to me they're not making more effort towards
| game support - maybe someone can explain what the barriers are
| towards mac support - is it lack of shared libraries, x64 only,
| sheer number of compute cores?
|
| When I see the spec sheet and "16x graphics improvement" I go
| okay what could it handle in terms of game rendering? Is it
| really only for video production and GPU compute tasks?
| modulusshift wrote:
| The gaming capability is there, but Apple only officially
| supports their own Metal on macOS as far as graphics languages,
| meaning the only devs with experience with Metal are the World
| of Warcraft team at Blizzard and mobile gaming studios.
| MoltenVK exists to help port Vulkan based games, but generally
| it's rough going at the moment. I'm personally hoping that the
| volume of M1 Macs Apple has been selling will cause devs to
| support Macs.
| thcleaner999 wrote:
| Price you can't win the gaming market with 2000+$ product
| terafo wrote:
| Have you seen GPU prices lately? Desktop 3070 level
| performance in portable laptop for 3500$ is not that bad of a
| deal. If they make Mac Mini around 2500$ it would be pretty
| competitive in PC space.
| terafo wrote:
| They never before had good graphics in mainstream products. And
| there's no official support for any of the industry standard
| API(to be fair there is MoltenVK, but not much traction yet),
| yes, there is support for Metal in UE4/5 and Unity, but AAA
| games use custom engines and cost/benefit analysis didn't make
| much sense, maybe now it will change.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Is there any reason to believe these will have improved single-
| core performance? Or are these just more M1 cores in the same
| package?
| eugeniub wrote:
| FWIW initial Geekbench scores that surfaced today do not show a
| significant improvement in the single-core performance for M1
| Max compared to M1.
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/18/first-m1-max-geekbench-...
| 41209 wrote:
| Has anyone tried extremely graphically intense gaming on these
| yet, I actually would love to consolidate all of my computer
| usage to a single machine, but it would need to handle everything
| I need it to do. $2000 for a laptop that can replace my desktop,
| is not a bad deal. Although that said I'm in no rush here.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Gaming is a non-starter on MacOS since 2018. You _can_ get
| certain, specific titles working if you pour your heart and
| soul into it, but it 's nothing like the current experience on
| Linux/Windows unfortunately.
| 41209 wrote:
| Darn.
|
| Hard pass then. I already have a pretty fast Windows laptop.
| The only real issue is it sounds like an helicopter
| underload. ( It also thermal throttles hard ).
| thecleaner wrote:
| Naive question - is this chip purely home-made at Apple or does
| it use Arm licensed IP ?
| modulusshift wrote:
| Apple has an architecture license from ARM, so they're allowed
| to create their own ARM-compatible cores. They do not license
| any core designs from ARM (like the Cortex A57), they design
| those in house instead.
| thoughtsimple wrote:
| Apple uses the Arm Aarch64 instruction set with Apple silicon
| which is Arm IP. I don't believe that any Apple silicon uses
| any other Arm IP but who really knows since it is likely Apple
| would have written any contracts to prevent disclosure.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| There appears to be a sea change in RAM (on a Macbook) and its
| affect on the price. I remember I bought a Mac Book pro back in
| 2009, and while the upgrade to 4gb was $200, the upgrade to 8gb
| was $1000 IIRC! Whereas the upgrade from 32GB to 64GB was only
| $400 here.
|
| Back then, more memory required higher density chips, and these
| were just vastly more expensive. It looks like the M1 Max simply
| adds more memory controllers, so that the 64GB doesn't need
| rarer, higher priced, higher density chips, it just has twice as
| many of the normal ones.
|
| This is something that very high and laptops do: have four slots
| for memory rather than two. It's great that Apple is doing this
| too. And while they aren't user replaceable (no 128Gb upgrade for
| me), they are not just more memory on the same channel either:
| the Max has 400GB/s compared to the Pro 200Gb/s.
| throwawaywindev wrote:
| The M1 Max is drool worthy but Mac gaming still sucks. Can't
| really justify it given that I don't do video editing or machine
| learning work.
| lisper wrote:
| "Apple's Commitment to the Environment"
|
| > Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations,
| and by 2030, plans to have net-zero climate impact across the
| entire business, which includes manufacturing supply chains and
| all product life cycles. This also means that every chip Apple
| creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon
| neutral.
|
| But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and
| repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace
| it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the
| chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the _packaging_ that
| is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid.
| [deleted]
| itsangaris wrote:
| As others have said, the option to easily configure the
| computer post-purchase would make a massive difference in terms
| of its footprint
| threeseed wrote:
| I just used Apple's trade-in service for my 2014 MacBook Pro
| and received $430.
|
| So there is another, quite lucrative, option besides discarding
| it.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Good to know and thanks! Looking forward to doing the same as
| I have a 2014 MBP that works and is in good condition.
| remir wrote:
| Isn't most of the components in MacBooks recyclable? If I
| remember correctly, Apple has a recycling program for old Macs
| so it's not like these machines goes to landfill when their
| past their time or broken.
| iSnow wrote:
| AFAIK their recycling is shredding everything, no matter if
| it still works and separating gold and some other metals.
| threeseed wrote:
| When you trade-in your Mac you are asked if the enclosure
| is free of dents, turns-on, battery holds charge etc.
|
| Strange that they would ask these questions if they were
| simply going to shred the device.
| peatmoss wrote:
| I believe Apple tries to use mostly recyclable components.
| And they do have a fairly comprehensive set of recycling /
| trade-in programs around the globe:
| https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/
|
| That being said, I haven't read any third-party audits to
| know if this is more than Apple marketing. Would be curious
| if they live up to their own marketing.
| simonh wrote:
| >so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few
| years
|
| Except you and I surely must know that's not true, that their
| machines have industry leading service lifetimes, and
| correspondingly high resale values as a result. Yes some pro
| users replace their machines regularly but those machines
| generally go on to have long productive lifetimes. Many of
| these models are also designed to be highly recyclable when the
| end comes. It's just not as simple as you're making out.
| cududa wrote:
| Right. Im not speaking to iPhones or iPads here, but the non-
| serviceability creates a robustness pretty unmatched by
| Windows laptops in terms of durability.
|
| Was resting my 2010 MBP on the railing of a second story
| balcony during a film shoot and it dropped onto the marble
| floor below. Got pretty dented, but all that didn't work was
| the ethernet port. Got the 2015 one and it was my favorite
| machine ever - until it got stolen.
|
| 2017 one (typing on now) is the worst thing I've ever owned
| and I'm looking forward to getting one of the new ones. 2017
| one: -Fries any low voltage USB device I plug in (according
| to some internal Facebook forms they returned 2-5k of this
| batch for that reason) -When it fried an external drive
| plugged in on the right, also blew out the right speaker.
| -Every time I try and charge it I get to guess which USB-C
| port is going to work for charging. If I pick wrong I have to
| power cycle to power brick (this is super fun when the
| laptops dead and there's no power indicator, as there is on
| the revived magsafe) -Half-dime shaped bit of glass popped
| out of the bottom of the screen when it was under load - this
| has happened to others in the same spot but user error..
|
| Pissed Apple wouldn't replace it given how many other users
| have had the same issues, but this thing has taken a beating
| as have my past laptops. I'll still give them money if the
| new one proves to be as good as it seems.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but one of them doesn't cost a ton to implement (what
| they're doing) and the other one would cost them a ton through
| lost sales (what you're asking for).
|
| Always follow the money :-)
| grenoire wrote:
| Erhh... I think OP gets it, he's just calling out the
| greenwashing.
| ink404 wrote:
| agree with your point, but one could also look at the
| performance/power savings and use that in an argument for
| environmentally friendliness
| coryfklein wrote:
| > it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the
| environment, stupid.
|
| Of all the garbage my family produces over the course of time,
| my Apple products probably take less than 0.1% of my family's
| share of the landfill. Do you find this to be different for
| you? Or am I speaking past the point you're trying to make
| here?
| sudhirj wrote:
| All of my Apple laptops (maybe even all their products) see
| about 5 to 8 years of service. Sometimes with me, sometimes as
| hand-me-downs. So they've been pretty excellent at not winding
| up in the trash.
|
| Even software updates often stretch as far back as 5 year old
| models, so they're pretty good with this.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Big Sur is officially supported by 2013 Mac models (8 years).
|
| iOS 15 is supported by the 6s, which was 2015. So 6 years.
|
| And I still know people using devices from these eras. Apple
| may not be repair friendly, but at the end of the day, their
| devices are the least likely to end up in the trash.
| patall wrote:
| And here I am sitting at my 2011 Dell Latitude wondering what
| is so special about that. My sis had my 2013 Sony Duo but
| that's now become unusable with its broken, built-in battery.
| Yes, 5 to 8 years of service is nice, but not great or out of
| norm for a $1000+ laptop.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Because they run windows.
|
| If you look at android phones, you're looking at a few
| years only.
|
| Because of software
| patall wrote:
| Parent is talking about laptops, I am talking about
| laptops, why are you talking about smartphones? Though I
| also had my Samsung S2plus from 2013 to 2019 in use, and
| that was fairly cheap. I do not know any IPhone users
| that had theirs for longer.
| [deleted]
| moralestapia wrote:
| >This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless.
|
| You have a point but if they were actually truly neutral it
| wouldn't matter if you make 100,000 of them and throw them
| away.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| It absolutely doesn't render the carbon-neutrality of the chip
| useless. Concern about waste and concern about climate change
| are bound by a political movement and not a whole lot else.
| It's not wrong to care about waste more, but honestly its
| emissions that I care about more.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > It's not wrong to care about waste more, but honestly its
| emissions that I care about more.
|
| Waste creates more emissions. Instead of producing something
| once, you produce it twice. That's why waste is bad, it's not
| just about disposing of the wasted product.
| savanaly wrote:
| Is there an estimate of what the externality cost is for the
| packaging per unit? Would be useful to compare to other things
| that harm the environment like eating meat, taking car rides,
| to know how much I should think about this. E.g. if my iphone
| packaging is equivalent to one car ride I probably won't
| concern myself that much, but if it's equivalent to 1000 then
| yeah maybe I should. Right now I really couldn't tell you which
| of those two the true number is closer to. I don't expect we
| would be able to know a precise value but just knowing which
| order of magnitude it is estimated to be would help.
| nojito wrote:
| >But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and
| repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace
| it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the
| chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the packaging that
| is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid.
|
| Mac computers last way longer than their PC counterparts.
| gruez wrote:
| Is apple's halo effect affecting your perception of the mac
| vs PC market? iPhones last longer because they have much
| longer software updates, and are more powerful to start with.
| None of these factors apply to macs vs PCs.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Apple, the company that requires the entire panel to be
| replaced by design when a 6 dollar display cable malfunctions,
| is proud to announce its latest marketing slogan for a better
| environment.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Obsession with emissions has really made people start to miss
| the forest from the trees.
| jedberg wrote:
| Emissions affect everyone on the planet, no matter where
| they happen. But polluting the ground or water only happens
| in China, so a lot of Americans that care about emissions
| don't care about the other types of pollution, because it
| doesn't affect them.
| someperson wrote:
| You would be surprised just how much food you eat has
| been grown in China using polluted land and water.
|
| It's not so much fresh vegetables, but ingredients in
| other types of food -- especially the frozen fruit,
| vegetables and farmed seafood that finds its way into
| grocery store and restaurant supply chains.
| castis wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?
| supertrope wrote:
| I'm guessing they mean greenwashing statements about
| lower CO2 emissions glosses over more "traditional"
| pollution as heavy metals, organic solvents, SO2, NOx.
| Taming overconsumption is greener than finding ways to
| marginally reduce per unit emissions on ever more
| industrial production.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Not OP. Personally, I've had Dell, HP and Sony laptops.
| But the macs have been the longest lasting of them all.
| My personal pro is from 2015.
|
| It has also come to a point where none of the extensions
| makes sense _for me_. 512GB is plenty. RAM might be an
| issue - but I honestly don 't have enough data on that.
| The last time I had more than 16GB RAM was in 2008 on my
| hand built desktop.
|
| As long as the battery can be replaced/fixed - even if
| it's not user serviceable, _I 'm_ okay with that. I'd
| guess I'm not in the minority here. Most people buy a
| computer and then take it to the store even if there's a
| minor issue. And Apple actually shines here. I have
| gotten my other laptop serviced - but only in
| unauthorized locations with questionable spare parts.
| With Apple, every non-tech savvy person I know has been
| able to take to an Apple store at some point and thereby
| extend the life.
|
| That's why I believe having easily accessible service
| locations does more to device longevity than being user-
| serviceable.
|
| (In comparison, HTC wanted 4 weeks to fix my phone plus
| 1wk either way in shipping time _and_ me paying shipping
| costs in addition to the cost of repair. Of course, I
| abandoned the phone entirely than paying to fix it.)
|
| We could actually test this hypothesis - if we could ask
| an electronics recycler on the average age of the devices
| they get by brand, we should get a clear idea on what
| brands _actually_ last longer.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Apple don't offer cheaper laptops. No one doubt it lasts
| longer in average.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Not to mention all the eWaste that comes with the AirPods.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Who's doing better to mitigate e-waste?
|
| > _" AirPods are designed with numerous materials and
| features to reduce their environmental impact, including
| the 100 percent recycled rare earth elements used in all
| magnets. The case also uses 100 percent recycled tin in the
| solder of the main logic board, and 100 percent recycled
| aluminum in the hinge. AirPods are also free of potentially
| harmful substances such as mercury, BFRs, PVC, and
| beryllium. For energy efficiency, AirPods meet US
| Department of Energy requirements for battery charger
| systems. Apple's Zero Waste program helps suppliers
| eliminate waste sent to landfills, and all final assembly
| supplier sites are transitioning to 100 percent renewable
| energy for Apple production. In the packaging, 100 percent
| of the virgin wood fiber comes from responsibly managed
| forests."_
| partiallypro wrote:
| Weird that they leave out the parts about the battery and
| casing waste; and are design to only last on average of
| 18 months to force you to buy new ones.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/neaz3d/airpods-are-a-
| tragedy
| rdw wrote:
| Just because you're not getting that panel back doesn't mean
| it's destroyed and wasted. I figure that these policies
| simplify their front-line technician jobs, getting faster
| turnaround times and higher success rates. Then they have a
| different department that sorts through all the
| removed/broken parts, repairing and using parts from them. No
| idea if this is what they actually do, but it would be the
| smart way to handle it.
| zelon88 wrote:
| Apple does nothing to improve front line technician
| procedures. They aren't even an engineering factor. If you
| happen to be able to replace something on an Apple product,
| it's only because the cost-benefit ratio wasn't in favor of
| making that part hostile to work with.
|
| Apple puts 56 screws in the Unibody MBP keyboards. They
| were practically the pioneer of gluing components in
| permanently. They don't care about technicians. Not even
| their own. They have been one of the leaders of the anti-
| right-to-repair movement from day one.
| stirlo wrote:
| > Apple does nothing to improve front line technician
| procedures.
|
| I'm not a fan of planned obselence and waste but this is
| clearly wrong. They've spent loads of engineering effort
| designing a machine for their store that can replace and
| reseal and test iPhone screen replacements out back.
| modulusshift wrote:
| Oh hey they went back to screws on the keyboards? that's
| nice, they used to be single use plastic rivets, so at
| least you _can_ redo that.
|
| Also Apple's glue isn't usually that bad to work with.
| Doesn't leave much residue, so as long as you know where
| to apply the heat you can do a clean repair and glue the
| new component back in.
| schleck8 wrote:
| The reasoning was to make the device as thin as possible
| according to Verge iirc. The cable degrades because it's
| too short and can't be replaced.
|
| Says it all pretty much.
| m4rtink wrote:
| It seems like they will rather shredded perfectly good
| parts than to let thirt party repair shops use them to help
| people at sane prices:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-
| g...
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-
| iphon...
| nojito wrote:
| So because a company stole devices to sell them makes
| Apple the bad guy?
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| As long as they plant a tree every time they replace a panel,
| it should be fine?
| soheil wrote:
| They would make less money if they made the chip repairable.
| This doesn't have to make them evil. Apple being more
| profitable also means they can lower the cost and push the
| technological advancement envelop forward faster. Every year we
| will get that much faster chips. This is good for everyone.
|
| This doesn't mean Apple's carbon footprint has to suffer. If
| Apple does a better job recycling old Macbooks than your
| average repair guy who takes an old CPU and puts in a new one
| in a repairable laptop then Apple's carbon footprint could be
| reduced. I remember the days when I would replace every
| component in my desktop once a year, I barely thought about
| recycling the old chips or even selling them to someone else.
| They were simply too low value to an average person to bother
| with recycling them properly or reselling them.
| mlindner wrote:
| This isn't relevant to the chips. Take this to the other
| thread.
| merpnderp wrote:
| My family has 3 MBP's. 2 of them are 10 years old, 1 of them is
| 8. When your laptops last that long, they're good for the
| environment.
| jjcm wrote:
| > what they wont do is put the chip in an expandable and
| repairable system
|
| Because that degrades the performance overall. SoC has proven
| itself to simply be more performant than a fully hotswappable
| architecture. Look at the GPU improvements they're mentioning -
| PCIe 5.0 (yet unreleased) maxes out at 128GB/s, whereas the SoC
| Apple has announced today is transferring between the CPU/GPU
| at 400GB/s.
|
| In the end, performance will always trump interchangability for
| mobile devices.
| sktrdie wrote:
| Won't that make the chip bigger and/or slower? I think the
| compactness where the main components are so close together and
| finely tuned that makes the difference. Making it composable
| probably means also making it bigger (hence won't fit in as
| small spaces) and probably slower than what it is. Just my two
| cents though am not a chip designer.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Just making the SSD (the only part that wears) replaceable
| would greatly increase the lifespan of these systems, and
| while supporting M.2 would take up more space in the chassis,
| it would not meaninfully change performance or power.
| Grustaf wrote:
| This only makes sense if you presume people throw away their
| laptops when they replace them after "a few years". Given the
| incredibly high second hand value of macbooks, I think most
| people sell them or hand them down.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| You're talking about selling working devices but parent was
| also talking about repairing them.
|
| Seems like a huge waste to throw away a $2000+ machine when
| it's out of warranty because some $5 part on it dies and
| Apple not only doesn't provide a spare but actively fights
| anyone trying to repare them, while the options they
| realistically will give you out of warranty being having your
| motherboard replaced for some insane sum like $1299 or having
| you buy a new laptop.
|
| Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice glass
| over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000 lighter since
| there's no way to take it apart and clean the sticky mess
| inside.
| jrockway wrote:
| > Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice
| glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000
| lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the
| sticky mess inside.
|
| Thanks to the Right To Repair, you can take the laptop to
| pretty much any repair shop and they can replace anything
| you damaged with OEM or third-party parts. They even have
| schematics, so they can just desolder and resolder failed
| chips. In the past, this sort of thing would be a logic
| board swap for $1000 at the very least, but now it's just
| $30 + labor.
|
| Oh, there is no right to repair. So I guess give Apple
| $2000 again and don't drink liquids at work.
| amelius wrote:
| > and don't drink liquids at work.
|
| Which is ironic given that Apple laptops are often
| depicted next to freshly brewed cafe lattes.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half.
| threeseed wrote:
| _Seems like a huge waste to throw away a $2000+ machine_
|
| There are other options besides throwing it away.
|
| You can (a) trade it in for a new Mac (I just received $430
| for my 2014 MBP) or (b) sell it for parts on eBay.
|
| _Or what if you 're a klutz and spill your grape juice
| glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000
| lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the
| sticky mess inside._
|
| You can unscrew a Mac and clean it out. You can also take
| it into Apple for repair.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| My F500 company has a 5 year tech refresh policy, and old
| laptops are trashed, not donated or resold.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I cannot imagine that represents the majority of the
| market.
| [deleted]
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Exactly, corporate never risks them getting into wrong
| hands, no matter how theoretical risk that might be. Same
| for phones
| lizknope wrote:
| We used to remove the hard drives which takes about 20
| seconds on a desktop that has a "tool-less" case. Then
| donate the computer to anybody including the employees if
| they want it.
|
| It takes a few minutes to do that on a laptop but it's
| not that long.
| oneplane wrote:
| Doesn't that mean that the problem is the policy of the
| F500 company and not whatever the supplier had in mind?
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Are these M1 Pro/Max based on the A14 or A15?
|
| Does "M1" == "A14" or does it mean "M1" == "5nm TSMC node"?
| supermatt wrote:
| m1 is already very different to A14/15. Why do you think they
| are "based" on the mobile SoCs?
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Because CPU tears downs show that "Apple's M1 system-on-chip
| is an evolution of the A14 Bionic" [0]
|
| [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/apple-m1-vs-
| apple-m14-...
| Joeri wrote:
| They share the core design, icestorm for efficiency cores and
| firestorm for performance cores, but these are recombined into
| entirely different systems on chip. To say the m1 max is the
| same as a14 is like saying a xeon is the same as an i3 because
| they both have skylake-derived cores.
| wmf wrote:
| The differences between the A14 and A15 are so small it doesn't
| matter. I suspect the CPU/GPU cores come from the A14 but the
| ProRes accelerator comes from the A15.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| >The differences between the A14 and A15 are so small it
| doesn't matter.
|
| The testing shows increases in performance and power
| efficiency.
|
| >Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here -
| usually increases in performance always come with some sort
| of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple
| here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing
| performance, meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17% on
| the peak performance states versus the A14. If we had been
| able to measure both SoCs at the same performance level, this
| efficiency advantage of the A15 would grow even larger. In
| our initial coverage of Apple's announcement, we theorised
| that the company might possibly invested into energy
| efficiency rather than performance increases this year, and
| I'm glad to see that seemingly this is exactly what has
| happened, explaining some of the more conservative (at least
| for Apple) performance improvements.
|
| On an adjacent note, with a score of 7.28 in the integer
| suite, Apple's A15 P-core is on equal footing with AMD's
| Zen3-based Ryzen 5950X with a score of 7.29, and ahead of M1
| with a score of 6.66.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-
| perfo...
|
| Having your phone chip be on par with single core Zen 3
| performance is pretty impressive.
| sunaurus wrote:
| I would like to upgrade to Apple silicon, but I have no need for
| a laptop. I hope they put the M1 Max in a Mac Mini soon.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| Seems reasonable. They still sell the Intel Mac mini, despite
| having an M1 powered Mac mini already. The Intel one uses the
| old "black aluminum means pro" design language of the iMac Pro.
| Feels like they are keeping it as a placeholder in their line
| up and will end up with two Apple silicon powered Mac mini's,
| One consumer and one pro
| deltron3030 wrote:
| I doubt that we'll see a really powerful Mac Mini anytime
| soon. Why? Because it would cannibalize the MacBook Pro when
| combined with an iPad (sidecar).
|
| Most professionals needing pro laptops use the portability to
| move between studio environments or sets (e.g home and work).
| The Mini is still portable enough to be carried in a
| backpack, and the iPad can do enough on it's own to be viable
| for lighter coffee shop based work.
|
| Not many would do highend production work outside a studio or
| set without additional periphery, meaning that highend
| performance of the new MBP isn't needed for very mobile
| situations.
|
| A powerful mini and an iPad would therefore be the much
| better logical choice vs. a highend MacBook Pro. There where
| you need the power there's most likely a power outlet and
| room for a Mini.
| willis936 wrote:
| There were rumors that it was supposed to be today. Given that
| it wasn't, I now expect it to be quite a while before they do.
| I was really looking forward to it.
| franciscop wrote:
| > M1 Pro and M1 Max also feature enhanced media engines with
| dedicated ProRes accelerators specifically for pro video
| processing
|
| Do we know if this includes hardware encoding/decoding of AV1?
| I've found it to be quite lackluster on my M1, and would love to
| jump formats.
| ngngngng wrote:
| The benchmark to power consumption comparisons were very
| interesting. It seemed very un-Apple to be making such direct
| comparisons to competitors, especially when the Razer Blade
| Advanced had slightly better performance with far higher power
| consumption. I feel like typically Apple just says "Fastest we've
| ever made, it's so thin, so many nits, you'll love it" and leaves
| it at that.
|
| I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart when
| people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for me to
| give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively to linux
| for the past couple years.
| zepto wrote:
| They are selling these to people who know what the competition
| is, and care.
| kergonath wrote:
| FWIW, they are in general quite accurate with their ballpark
| performance figures. I expect the actual power/performance
| curves to be similar to that they showed. Which is interesting,
| because IIRC on the plots from Nuvia before they were bought
| their cores had a similar profile. It would be exciting if
| Qualcomm could have something good for a change.
| zaptrem wrote:
| If we can get an actual Windows on ARM ecosystem started
| things will get really exciting really quickly.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Apple used to do these performance comparisons a lot when they
| were on the PowerPC architecture. Essentially they tried to
| show that PowerPC-based Macs were faster (or as fast as) Intel-
| based PCs for the stuff that users wanted to do, like web
| browsing, Photoshop, movie editing, etc.
|
| This kind of fell by the wayside after switching to Intel, for
| obvious reasons: the chips weren't differentiators anymore.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I think that Apple took a subtle, not so subtle stand: power
| consumption has to do with environmental impact.
| jeswin wrote:
| Apple almost single-handedly made computing devices non-
| repairable or upgradable; across their own product line and
| the industry in general due to their outsized influence.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| It's almost like it's just about marketing and not much
| else...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Single handedly?
|
| >According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn't repairable
| at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and
| was labeled a "glue-filled monstrosity."
|
| The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all
| previous iterations of the Surface Pro
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-
| labels-s...
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| And they get away with it because Apple normalized it.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| One might argue that Surface laptops were Microsoft's
| answer to MacBooks.
| pb7 wrote:
| If repairability was important to consumers, it would be
| a selling point for competitors. But it's not.
| paavohtl wrote:
| If Apple actually cared about sustainability, they would
| make their devices repairable.
| pb7 wrote:
| They are repairable, but not by consumers in most cases.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| They are mostly not repairable even by authorized repair
| providers.
|
| Basically, they can only change a few components
| (keyboard, display (with assembly), motherboard, and
| probably the aluminium case), but that's it.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| You literally cannot replace the battery in that Surface
| Laptop without destroying the whole thing.
|
| It's made to be thrown away, instead of repaired.
| pb7 wrote:
| Conversation is about Apple.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Just today I got one 6s and one iPhone 7 screen repaired(6s
| got the glass replaced, the 7 got full assembly replaced)
| and battery of the 6s replaced at a shop that is not
| authorized by Apple. It cost me 110$ in total.
|
| Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using an SSD
| and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon.
|
| What's that narrative that Apple devices are not upgradable
| or repairable?
|
| It simply not true. If anything, Apple devices are the
| easiest to get serviced since there are not many models and
| pretty much all repair shops can deal with all devices that
| are still usable. Because of this, even broken Apple
| devices are sold and bought all the time.
| deltaci wrote:
| newer MacBooks have both the SSD and RAM soldered on
| board, it's no longer user upgradable, unless you have a
| BGA rework station and knows how to operate it.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| In modern Apple laptops (2018 and later), the storage is
| soldered as the memory has been since 2015. Contrast this
| with a Dell XPS 15 you can buy today within which you can
| upgrade/replace both the memory and the storage. This is
| the case with most Windows laptops. The exception is
| usually the super thin ones that solder in RAM Apple-
| style, but there are some others that do as well.
|
| There's also the fact that Apple does things like
| integrate the display connector into the panel part. So,
| if it fails - like when Apple made it too short with the
| 2016 and 2017 Macbook Pros causing the flexgate
| controversy - it requires replacing a $600 part instead
| of a $6 one.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Just today I got one 6s and one iPhone 7 screen
| repaired_
|
| Nice, except doing a screen replacement on a modern
| iPhone like the 13 series will disable your FaceID making
| your iPhone pretty much worthless.
|
| _> Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using
| an SSD and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon_
|
| Nice, but on the modern Macbooks, the SSD is soldered and
| not replaceable. There is no way to upgrade them or
| replace them if they break, so you just have to throw
| away the whole laptop.
|
| So yea, parent was right, Apple devices are the worst for
| reparability period since the ones you're talking about
| are not manufactured anymore therefore don't represent
| the current state of affairs and the ones that are
| manufactured today are built to not be repaired.
| jolux wrote:
| > Nice, but on the modern Macbooks, the SSD is soldered
| and not replaceable. There is no way to upgrade them or
| replace them if they break, so you just have to throw
| away the whole laptop.
|
| I mean, you can replace the logic board. Wasteful, sure,
| but there's no need to throw out the whole thing.
| mrtksn wrote:
| People also replace IC's all the time. Heat it, remove
| the broken SSD chip, put the new one, re-heat.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Hardware people are crafty, they find ways to transfer
| and combine working parts. The glass replacement(keeping
| the original LCD) I got for the 6S is not a procedure
| provided by Apple. Guess who doesn't care? The repair
| shop that bought a machine from China for separating and
| re-assembly of the Glass and LCD.
|
| Screen replacement is 50$, glass replacement is 30$.
|
| iPhone 13 is very new, give it a few years and the
| hardware people will leverage the desire of not spending
| 1000$ on a new phone when the current one works fine
| except for that broken part.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| And how will the crafty HW people replace the SSD storage
| on my 2020 Macbok if it bites the dust?
| mrtksn wrote:
| By changing chips. There are already procedures for fun
| stuff like upgrading the RAM on the non-retina MacBook
| Airs to 16GB. Apple never offered 16GB version off that
| laptop but you can have it[0].
|
| if there's a demand there would be a response.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgEfMzMxX5E
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| You clearly don't have a clue how modern Apple HW is
| built and why stuff that you're talking about on old
| Apple HW just won't work anymore on the machines build
| today.
|
| I'm talking about 2020 devices where you can't just
| "change the chips" and hope it works like in the 2015
| model from the video you posted.
|
| Modern Apple devices aren't repairable anymore.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I would love to be enlightened about the new physics that
| Apple is using which is out of reach to the other
| engineers.
|
| /s
|
| Anyway, people are crafty and engineering is not an
| Apple-exclusive trade. believe it or not, Apple can't do
| anything about the laws of physics.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I would love to be enlightened about the new physics
| that Apple is using but is out of reach for the other
| engineers._
|
| Watch Luis Rosmann on youtube.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I know Luis, he made a career of complaining that it's
| impossible to repair Apple devices when repairing Apple
| devices.
|
| Instead of watching videos and getting angry about Apple
| devices being impossible to repair, I get my Apple
| devices repaired when something breaks. Significantly
| more productive approach, you should try it.
| [deleted]
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I get my Apple devices repaired when something breaks_
|
| Your _old_ Apple devices, that are known to be vert easy
| to repair. You wouldn 't be so confident with the latest
| gear.
|
| But why spoil it for you? Let's talk in a few year when
| you find it out the hard way on your own skin.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Louis makes "Apple impossible to repair" videos since
| ever. It's not an iPhone 13 thing, give it a few year and
| you can claim that iPhone 17 impossible to repair, unlike
| the prehistoric iPhone 13.
|
| Here is a video from 2013, him complaining that Apple
| doesn't let people repair their products:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdlZ1HgFvxI
|
| He recently moved to a new larger shop in attempt to grew
| his Apple repair operations. Then had to move back to a
| smaller shop because as it turns out, it wasn't Apple who
| is ruining his repair business.
| kuschku wrote:
| > I would love to be enlightened about the new physics
| that Apple is using which is out of reach to the other
| engineers.
|
| That's known as private-public key crypto with keys burnt
| into efuses on-die on the SoC.
|
| You can't get around that (except for that one dude in
| Shenzhen who just drills into the SoC and solders wires
| by hand which happen to hit the right spots). But
| generally, no regular third party repair shop will find a
| way around this.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I know about it, it simply means that someone will build
| a device that automates the thing that the dude in
| Shenzhen does or they will mix and match devices that
| have different kind of damage. I.e. if a phone that has
| destroyed screen(irreparable) will donate its parts to
| phones that have the face id lens broken.
|
| You know, these encryption authentications work between
| ICs and not between lenses and motors. Keep the coded IC,
| change the coil. Things also have different breaking
| modes, for example a screen might break down due to the
| glass failure(which cannot be coded) and the repair shop
| can replace the broken assembly part when keeping the IC
| that ensures the communication with the mainboard. Too
| complicated for a street shop? Someone will build a
| service that does it B2B, shops will ship it ti them,
| they will ship it back leaving only the installation to
| the street shop.
|
| Possibilities are endless. Some easier some harder but we
| are talking about talent that makes all kind of replicas
| of all kind of devices. With billions of iPhones out
| there, it's actually very lucrative market to be able to
| salvage 1000USD device, their margins could be even
| better than the margins of Apple when they charge 100USD
| to change the glass of the LCD assembly.
| iSnow wrote:
| Apple is using SOCs now where CPU and RAM are one chip
| package. How are you going to upgrade RAM here even with
| the mother of all reflowing stations?
| mrtksn wrote:
| You don't. It's a technological progress similar to one
| where we lost our ability to repair transistors with
| introduction of chips. If this doesn't work for you you
| should stick with the old tech, I think the Russians did
| something like that on their soviet era plane
| electronics. There are also audiophiles who don't even
| switch to transistor and use vacuum tubes. Also the Amish
| who stick to the horses and candles who choose to
| preserve their way of doing things and avoid the problems
| of electricity and powered machinery.
|
| You will need to make a choice sometimes. Often you can't
| have small efficient and repairable all the time.
| time0ut wrote:
| Only if Apple wants to let them as far as I have seen.
| The software won't even let you swap screens between
| iPhone 13s. Maybe people will find a work around, but it
| seems like Apple is trying its hardest to prevent it.
| threeseed wrote:
| _Nice, except doing a screen replacement on a modern
| iPhone like the 13 series will disable your FaceID making
| your iPhone pretty much worthless._
|
| Only if you go to someone who isn't an authorised Apple
| repairer.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| True, but you are talking about devices that are 4-6
| years old. Storage is now soldered. Ram has been soldered
| for a while now, and with Apple Silicon its part of the
| SoC.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Perhaps leading to fewer failures and longer device
| lifespans.
|
| As far as I understand, the less components and heat, the
| longer the electronics keep working.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| For context, Apple started soldering RAM in 2015 and
| soldering storage in 2018.
| masklinn wrote:
| Weirdly these machines have a "6.1 repairability rating"
| when you go in their store. I wonder what ifixit will think
| of them.
| [deleted]
| ssijak wrote:
| Yeah this is the first time they actually compared to something
| with the possibly bigger performance.
| mdasen wrote:
| I think that for the first time, Apple has a real performance
| differentiator in its laptops. They want to highlight that.
|
| If Apple is buying Intel CPUs, there's no reason making direct
| performance comparisons to competitors. They're all building
| out of the same parts bin. They would want to talk about the
| form factor and the display - areas where they could often out-
| do competitors. Now there's actually something to talk about
| with the CPU/GPU/hardware-performance.
|
| I think Apple is also making the comparison to push something
| else: performance + lifestyle. For me, the implication is that
| I can buy an Intel laptop that's nicely portable, but a lot
| slower; I could also buy an Intel laptop that's just as fast,
| but requires two power adapters to satisfy its massive power
| drain and really doesn't work as a laptop at all. Or I can buy
| a MacBook Pro which has the power of the heavy, non-portable
| Intel laptops while sipping less power than the nicely portable
| ones. I don't have to make a trade-off between performance and
| portability.
|
| I think people picked apart the comparisons on the M1 and were
| pretty satisfied. 6-8 M1 performance cores will offer a nice
| performance boost over 4 M1 performance cores and we basically
| know how those cores benchmark already.
|
| I'd also note that there are efforts to get Linux on Apple
| Silicon.
| ngngngng wrote:
| I was casually aware of Asahi before this announcement. Now
| I'm paying close attention to its development.
| xur17 wrote:
| > I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart
| when people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for
| me to give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively
| to linux for the past couple years.
|
| I really enjoy linux as a development environment, but this is
| going to be VERY difficult to compete with..
| modulusshift wrote:
| Asahi Linux is making great strides in supporting M1 Macs,
| and they're upstreaming everything so your preferred distro
| could even support them.
|
| https://asahilinux.org/
| frogblast wrote:
| You can always run Linux in a VM too
| xur17 wrote:
| That's just not the same.
| vmception wrote:
| I'm not going to wait for the comparisons this time. Maxing
| this baby out right now.
| BitAstronaut wrote:
| Honest question, what do you do where a $6,099 laptop is
| justifiable?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I mean, the Audi R8 has an MSRP > $140k and I've never been
| able to figure out how that is justifiable. So I guess
| dropping $6k on a laptop could be "justified" by _not_
| spending an extra $100k on a traveling machine?
|
| To be clear, I'm not getting one of these, but there's
| clearly people that will drop extra thousands into a
| "performance machine" just because they like performance
| machines and they can do it. It doesn't really need to be
| justified.
|
| Truthfully, I'm struggling to imagine the scenario where a
| "performance laptop" is justifiable to produce, in the
| sense you mean it. Surely, in most cases, a clunky desktop
| is sufficient and reasonably shipped when traveling, and
| can provide the required performance in 99% of actual high-
| performance-needed scenarios.
|
| If I had money to burn, though, I'd definitely be buying a
| luxury performance laptop before I'd be buying an update to
| my jalopy. I use my car as little as I possibly can. I use
| my computer almost all the time.
| vmception wrote:
| I skip getting a Starbuck's latte, and avoid adding extra
| guac at Chipotle.
|
| I'm kidding, that stuff has no affect on anything.
|
| Justifiable, as in "does this make practical sense", is not
| the word, because it doesn't. Justifiable, as in, "does it
| fit within my budget?" yes that's accurate. I don't have a
| short answer to why my personal budget is that flexible,
| but I do remember there was a point in my life where I
| would ask the same thing as you about other people. The
| reality is that you either have it or you don't. That being
| said, nothing I _had been_ doing for money is really going
| to max this kind of machine out or improve my craft. But
| things that used to be computationally expensive won 't be
| anymore. Large catalogues of 24 megapixel RAWs used to be
| computationally expensive. Now I won't even notice, even
| with larger files and larger videos, and can expand what I
| do there along with video processing, which is all just
| entertainment. But I can also do that while running a bunch
| of docker containers and VMs... within VMs, and not think
| about it.
|
| This machine, for me, is the catalyst for greater
| consumptive spending though. I've held off on new cameras,
| new NASs, new local area networking, because my current
| laptop and devices would chug under larger files.
|
| Hope there was something to glean from that context. But
| all I can really offer is "make, or simply have, more
| money", not really profound.
| BitAstronaut wrote:
| Thank you for a very honest and thorough answer.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's also future-proofing to some degree. I'll
| probably get a somewhat more loaded laptop than I "need"
| (though nowhere near $6K) because I'll end up kicking
| myself if 4 years from now I'm running up against some
| limit I underspeced.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Not your father's currency. If you think of them as pesos,
| the price is easier to comprehend.
|
| Not to mention if it makes a 200k salary worker 5% more
| productive, its a win. (Give or take for taxes.)
| dymk wrote:
| It's a win for a worker who's compensated based on their
| work output, which is pretty much the opposite of what a
| salaried worker is.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Productivity is productivity, doesn't matter how one is
| paid.
| dymk wrote:
| ...then why mention a salary at all?
| eli wrote:
| A few thousand dollars per year (presumably it will last
| more than one year) is really not much for the most
| important piece of equipment a knowledge worker will be
| using.
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's still a waste if you don't need it though. This
| money could be spent on much more useful things.
| pb7 wrote:
| Like what?
| ngngngng wrote:
| Guac at Chipotle
| threeseed wrote:
| If it improves compilation speeds by 1% then it's not a
| waste.
|
| My time is worth so much more to me than money.
| postalrat wrote:
| Then why are you using a laptop?
| threeseed wrote:
| Why even bother with such an inane answer ?
|
| It's because I need to use my computer whilst not
| physically attached to the same spot i.e. between
| work/home, travel.
|
| You know the same reason as almost everyone else.
| syspec wrote:
| If you don't max out the HDD space, but max out all the
| portions which effect performance, it only about half that.
| stouset wrote:
| IIRC bigger SSDs in previous generations had higher
| performance.
| wtallis wrote:
| That's fundamental to how NAND flash memory works. For
| high-end PCIe Gen4 SSD product lines, the 1TB models are
| usually not quite as fast as the 2TB models, and 512GB
| models can barely use the extra bandwidth over PCIe Gen3.
| But 2TB is usually enough to saturate the SSD controller
| or host interface when using PCIe Gen4 and TLC NAND.
| eppsilon wrote:
| I assume "vmception" requires a lot of power...
| artfulhippo wrote:
| Dude this is Hacker News. I'm surprised when I meet an
| engineer who doesn't have a maxed out laptop.
| dcdevito wrote:
| No M1 Pro/Max Mini announced and my conspiracy theory on that is:
| they couldn't justify a high price tag for it and instead are
| pushing pro users to the MacBook Pro and eventually Mac Pro and
| maybe iMac Pro. If they did an M1 Pro Mini would cannibalize
| these MacBook pros.
|
| I'm glad I pulled the trigger two weeks ago and I just received
| my M1 mini last week, I am relieved and will be continuing to
| enjoy it
| [deleted]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Does anyone want to guess their packaging arch? Is it CoWoS? How
| are they connecting memory with 200 Gb/s bandwidth? Interposer?
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