Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

9to5mac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 1001 posts

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

#681

Post by lukifer »

noncoml wrote: post #273
rewtraw wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they got it wrong. I would pay money to NOT have the touchbar.

I intentionally took a performance hit by moving from a Pro to an Air almost entirely for this reason (although the low power and light weight are pleasant benefits). I'm glad that the new Air still has F-keys with Touch ID; but I'm flabbergasted that they're still not making the Touchbar optional for the Pro series, given how polarizing it's been, and the underwhelming adoption of new Touchbar functionality by third-party developers.

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

#682

Post by marmaduke »

forgot-my-pw wrote: post #407
rewtraw wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Specs don’t tell you the thermal story. You can buy an i9 in a thin laptop and feel good about it until it throttles down to 1GHz after 30s.

The MBP should be built with better thermals to avoid throttling since you might be running simulations or movie encoding all day. The air should throttle after a certain amount of time.

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

#683

Post by hajile »

jacquesm wrote: post #661
marta_morena_28 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that. At 5nm there will also be yield problems. I.e they will put the best yield into high end and the worst yield into low end.

That's now how yield works. Yield is the number of functioning chips that you pull out of a wafer. I think what you are trying to refer to is frequency binning.

That's only partially true.

For example, AMD sells 12 and 16 core CPUs. The 12 core parts have 2 cores lasered out due to defects. If a particular node is low-yield, then it's not super uncommon to double-up on some parts of the chip and use either the non-defective or best performing one. You'll expect to see a combination of lasering and binning to adjust yields higher.

That said, TSMC N5 has a very good defect rate according to their slides on the subject[0]

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-tha...

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

#684

Post by wffurr »

2ion wrote: post #648
xienze wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or not I guess as it means I won't be buying anything today Honestly, people who don't use their computers as Facebook machines or have very specific things they want to do with the ML engine should probably stay away from Arm Macs for a couple years. There's bound to be plenty of software that doesn't work or doesn't work well, Docker will have ~limited usefulness until more and more people publish Arm images, etc…

Will Apple to transparent emulation (x86-on-ARM) or just not run x86 binaries?

Rosetta 2 is a x86_64 to ARM64 translation layer.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

Some things still won't run though. Among other issues, there's a page size difference (16 kb vs 4 kb) that bit Chrome (since fixed): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110219...

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

#685

Post by jjmarinho »

taf2 wrote: post #349

Amazing when Steve announced the transition to Intel, he also mentioned the transition to Mac OS X and how that should set up up for at least the next 20 years... That was almost 20 years ago... I can see a new OS for Mac soon that maybe brings OSX even closer to iOS?

That's Big Sur. It's actually versioned as Mac OS 11 and brings macOS much closer to iOS in terms of feel and looks.

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

#686

Post by Closi »

isoprophlex wrote: post #150
ericls wrote: post #140

I don't know if this will be a big success, but if it is, I think ARM will take over a large amount of server/cloud market.

Will the presence of ARM silicon over Intel mean these macbooks will be poorer developer machines?

Depends what you are developing for - if you are developing for mobile then by that standard it's significantly better.

If you are developing for web... it depends what you are writing and how you are deploying it, but it probably won't have much impact dependent on your toolchain.

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

#688

Post by gburdell3 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #552
sz4kerto wrote: post #467

"Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction MacBook Air systems with Apple M1 chip and 8-core GPU, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 55-second clip with 4K Apple ProRes RAW media, at 4096x2160 resolution and 59.94 frames per second, transcoded to Apple ProRes 42…

The literally benchmarked the slowest 10th Gen i7 CPU on the market. And I got so excited about it...

Which means that, according to Apple, it's better than the CPUs in the other laptops it's competing against. That slow i7 is typical for thin+light 13" machines. I fail to see how this is a bad thing or even sneaky marketing.

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

#689

Post by kingnothing »

Aperocky wrote: post #517
harha wrote: post #507

Is there any information on what type of software will run? Will it run things like R, Julia, Postgres, Docker (which I can work with reasonably well on my late 2013 MBP) and will we see any of the speed improvements or will some of the packages that work fairly well on the Intel-based models just not work?

I'm sure a good amount of things won't work on ARM the first time around. But I also think they'll be fixed quickly. RIP my dependency packages...

There's a translation layer, so I'm hopeful everything will just work.
Post reply on HN