Also, mb air has no touch bar, but includes fingerprint scanner. I’m sure a lot hackernews will be pleased with that, despite it not being in a machine with the pro moniker.
I was so hoping the Pro might have the same option, but no.
Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
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Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy cow, that's true. New 2020 Mini with a 16GB RAM, seriously?
Especially head scratching when you consider that a lot of folks still have 2012 Mac minis with 16GB of RAM. I think 16GB is the bare minimum for a professional machine. Apple clears the bar here, but doesn't exceed it. Maybe next year's machines? As a first product, I think it's good enough. And the performance gains elsewhere--if what Apple says is true--are actually pretty radically impressive.
It's possible to do development on 8 GB, you just can't use Electron apps.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#283Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
8GB and 16GB configurations seem more than enough..
I had a quad-core Mini with 16GB in 2011. Almost 10 years later we should be much further, especially as the Intel Mini allows up to 64GB. (Which you probably would use only if you upgraded the memory yourself).
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#285So I guess Windows won't run on M1, so none of my Windows software/Steam games will work either. Will software developers start dropping support for Mac now that they'd need to maintain an ARM version as well? It's not clear how long Apple will support emulation with Rosetta before cutting it off. What's the Linux landscape look like for this chip? It's great that there's performance and battery life improvements, bu…
Windows has an arm build, so I wouldn't count it out entirely.
Edit: Never-mind, it looks like they are not porting bootcamp.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#286The 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?
After seeing how big a downgrade these machines are over their intel counterparts (16 GB max RAM, max 2x thunderbolt, max 1 external display on the laptops, no 10 GbE on the mini), I'd absolutely buy an Intel machine now to tide me over until Apple can catch up in a generation or two
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#287Completely 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 noticed the slides kept saying "Up to" 8 GPU cores. That left me wondering if there are different variants of the M1 with different core counts. (Note: It always said 8 CPU cores)
Looks like there's two variations of the Air: one with 7 GPU cores and one with 8 GPU cores.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#288Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.
I'm expecting 16" MBP and iMac to support more along with an M1X chip or something along those lines.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#289I'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...
Apple's A series chips have been decimating the competition in phones for years now, what makes you think they can't do the same in this space?
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#290Earlier 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?
The macOS SDK exposes a processor affinity API that you can program against.
There isn't an option like taskset on Linux to pin or move tasks among different cores, or like anything that's exposed in Linux's sysfs.