541–550 of 1001 posts
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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)
According to the tech specs on the Apple site, the Air is available with 7 or 8 GPU cores. All other new Macs have 8.
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If you compare the M1 Air and Pro, the only difference seems to be the addition of the Touchbar, 10% better battery life, and a "studio" speaker/mic on the Pro. https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/ I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.
Pro has one extra GPU core as well.
The M1 is basically what would Apple would call A14X / A14Z if it was on iPad Pro. So they decided to reuse the A14X / M1 across all three products. And the only differentiation are their TDP cooling. The MacBook Air is 10W TDP, and both Mac Mini and MacBook Pro are likely ~35W range. The did mention MacBook Air's SSD performances is now twice as fast, so this isn't exactly an iPad Pro with Keyboard. That is great ex…
To put another way. They could have taken an iPad Pro, expanded the screen to 13.3 inches, added a keyboard and put MacOS on it instead of iOS and it would be probably 1.8lbs. I don't know what the tradeoffs would be but I was excited by that possibility. It didn't happen though.
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 impo…
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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.
Wouldn't be surprised if the cooling solution was serialised and it had a detection whether the cooling is originally programmed for the particular unit like they do now with cameras and other peripherals (check iPhone 12 teardown videos). I bet that the logic would check the expected temperature for given binning and then shut down the system if it is too cool or too hot. Apple knows better than the users what hardw…
I expect it would work the other way, too. Improve the cooling and performance under load would improve.
Out of curiosity, how many people are actually constrained by 16GB of RAM? What applications are you using it for that 16GB vs 32GB is actually a deal breaker for you? Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processin…
I've bought One Plus 3 (6GB RAM) in 2016, still strong. Computing power has not changed much, limiting factor is RAM.
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While compute performance and power efficiency seems to be really good, the M1 chip is apparently limited to 16GB RAM, 2TB storage and 2 Thunderbolt/USB4 controllers. In other words, M1 is for the majority of consumers. - power efficiency - 16GB RAM - 2TB storage - 2 Thunderbolt/USB4 That looks like a really good feature set for ordinary consumers. My guess is that there's going to be 2 "Pro" variants for a high powe…
> My guess is that there's going to be 2 "Pro" variants for a high powered laptop and a professional workstation. My guess is that they'll introduce one other ARM-based chip for Macs in 2021, targeted at all remaining Macs (except for the Mac Pro). I believe the differences in performance can be achieved with a single chip simply by binning and different power envelopes. I expect (or rather I hope) that chip then sup…
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I'm confused of their new pricing scheme / spec tiers for Macbook Pros. There's no more core i7 for Macbook 13. You have to go to Macbook 16. I'd rather get a Dell XPS or other Core i7/Ryzen 7 ultrabooks. So now, spec-wise, Macbook Air and Macbook Pro are too close.
it's there, you just have to configure it