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Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#221

Post by Amorymeltzer »

nimeshneema wrote: post #82

No mention of processor speeds, just like iOS devices. This is the new normal now for Macs.

I think it's a much more useful metric. At the very basic level, I don't know what 2GHz or 5GHz will mean for my computer aside from bigger is better, but anyone can understand "2x faster."

Beyond that though, processor speed is increasingly useless as a single metric. This thing has eight cores, half high-performance and half high-efficiency; GPUs are everywhere and doing seemingly everything; and RAM is always important. The speed cannot be summarized in Hz, but in standardized tests and "The stuff you care about is way faster now."

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#222

Post by Gaelan »

jonplackett wrote: post #42

The pricing is pretty impressive. Shame no 16 inch pro though. Surely they need to update that quick because who is going to want a 16 inch intel Mac now?

IIRC, the 16 inch MacBook Pro had a discrete GPU. Maybe that’s why?

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#223

Post by TkTech »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #141
cornstalks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 8-core, but they're 4 performance and 4 low-power cores, so it's not your normal 8-core chip. It's more like a big.LITTLE chip.

Anyone know how you interact with these cores as a developer/user? Say if I'm running some C code with OpenMP parallelism, can I bind it to three of the fast cores?

With ARM, yes, and you can also selectively turn on and off cores. For example when travelling with my pinebook pro I turn the big cores off to drastically improve battery life. However it's up to Apple to expose this functionality, and we all know how much control apple wants you to have of the computers you "license" from them.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#224

Post by pinewurst »

91edec wrote: post #192
greenpresident wrote: post #89

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

I bought a Mac mini 2 weeks ago and I was sweating when they announced the new Mac mini, not anymore now that its only max 16GB. Apple has effectively killed expandable storage and memory in all of their line up. No doubt in the future they will offer larger memory options when they release the 16" Macbook pro. Need 32GB a year later down the road for your mini? Just buy a new one!

The current Intel Macbook Pros aren’t expandable either, though. 16GB is a disappointment for me too.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#225

Post by ameen »

kevindong wrote: post #186

Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming: There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch https://w…

I guess the cooling let’s them tweak the CPU clocks accordingly? Wonder if we can hack the Mac mini with water blocks and squeeze higher clocks. The memory limitation makes it a dud though.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#226

Post by RandallBrown »

bochoh wrote: post #114
azhenley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they have an Intel emulator (Rosetta I think they called it) and are pushing developers to produce "universal apps".

Rosetta 2 is the newest version. The universal apps are just an export in XCode from what the presentation made it seem like. Developers exclaiming it took 10 minutes to do the universal app build.

Universal apps have existed since the transition from PowerPC. For most apps it's simply recompiling in Xcode and it creates a fat binary with both architectures.

Any apps that rely on specific intel libraries will have a bit more work to do.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#227

Post by whynotminot »

vmception wrote: post #177
whynotminot wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSD performance with their integrated IO controller might close the gap here, the same way that pretty fast storage on their iPhones makes the lack of RAM there not so debilitating. But yeah, agreed that not having a 32GB option is somewhat disappointing. (sent from my MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM)

mmmmm yeah, I will let you all be the guinea pigs here and check back next month. I am very curious about the performance. If the macbook air is editing 6k videos and scrubbing smoothly, I am optimistic.

Heh, I have no intention of being in the initial round of beta testing! I explicitly upgraded to an ice lake machine this summer in order to get the best Intel Mac while waiting for the dust to settle.

But I do believe the dust will settle, and I'm optimistic about the future of Apple Silicon.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#228

Post by WanderPanda »

jonplackett wrote: post #198
kayson wrote: post #161

I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...

They can probably out perform them, but only for a few seconds/minutes. That's why they put a fan in the pro.

Which actually sounds like a good fit for a dev machine, where you only compile once in a while, but do not sustain high loads

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#229

Post by Shivetya »

greenpresident wrote: post #89

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

what is interesting to me is they all use the same chip but don't reveal their operating frequency. I am hoping I am just overlooking this.

I expect the Pro to run faster as it has a fan to support it but how much faster than the Air would it be?

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#230

Post by vmception »

modeless wrote: post #121
greenpresident wrote: post #89

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

Wow, that's actually a pretty big limitation. I guess it's tough to do 64 GB with their on-package unified memory. I wonder if they're working on a version with discrete memory and GPU for the high end? They'll need it if they ever want to get Intel out of the Mac Pro.

Let's think about that a little bit. If the RAM is fast and the SSD is fast and the virtualization options are limited, then this is good enough?

Or, inspire me. Which processes really require occupying and allocating bigger blocks of RAM?

I personally don't want to purchase another machine with 16gb RAM but that's mainly because I want the option of having a powerful Windows guest or two running at the same time. But if you take out that possibility, for now, what if the paradigm has changed just a tad.

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