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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

#301

Post by CraftThatBlock »

mrguyorama wrote: post #245
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...

Read the fine print at the bottom, the claims they are making seem very..... not backed up by their testing. They chip they say they beat that makes them the best in the world is the last gen mackbook with an i7

Which was severely underpowered because the cooling solution was knee-capped. This is partly Intel's fault, but they made their last-gen so underwhelming that this _had_ to be better

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

#302

Post by dotBen »

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…

The MBP now only has 2 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports which would support this theory.

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

#305

Post by lowbloodsugar »

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.

Right? "Oh we can't give you a 64GB MBP because Intel can't use low power dram yet". Launches Apple Silicon with 16Gb.

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

#306

Post by danudey »

wmf wrote: post #86
ojosilva wrote: post #28

Apple mentions TensorFlow explicitly in the ongoing presentation due to the new 16-core "Neural Engine" embedded in the M1 chip. Now that's an angle I did not expect on this release. Sounds exciting! Edit: just to clarify, the Neural Engine itself is not really "new": > The A11 also includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Neural Engine". This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billio…

It's kind of sad that AMD spent years to get mediocre TensorFlow support and Apple walks in with this. It really shows how huge Apple is.

In fairness, it's been possible to convert a TensorFlow model to a CoreML model for a while, and in April TensorFlow Lite added a CoreML delegate to run models on the Neural Engine.

https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/04/tensorflow-lite-core-ml-...

So don't think of it as Apple walked right in with this so much as Apple has been shipping the neural engine for years and now they're finally making it available on macOS.

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

#307

Post by smileybarry »

mlindner wrote: post #219
jeffbee wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite as insulting as their $800 2TB SSD.

I mean if it's SLC chip, that can explain the price.

It's not, Apple most likely use TLC 3D NAND. There's no definitive source but the only remaining SLC drives being made are enterprise (and a few at that), and I think MLC is the same by now. (Even Samsung's Pro series moved to TLC)

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

#308

Post by Skunkleton »

vmception wrote: post #230
modeless wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Bu…

I have a project that won’t compile on systems with less than 32 GiB of RAM, and I refuse to refactor the hideously overgrown C++ template magic that landed me here.

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

#310

Post by jonplackett »

Gaelan wrote: post #222
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?

I mean because they're going to bring out another one really soon, that will, presumably, be drastically better. I'm guessing (hoping) that beefing up the graphics is why the 16 is coming later.
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