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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

#701
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 chip page shows that 10 watts is the thermal envelope for the Air

So I get the whole performance-per-watt spiel, but if they're targeting the same 10W as with Ice Lake Y-series[1], it's gonna be hot during continuous workloads like screen sharing, since they've seemingly decided to get rid of even the "chassis fan" they've had on 2019 Air. [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196596/...

Worth noting that Intel doesn't actually honor those 10W listings, and often boosts above it for significant portions of usage.

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

#702
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm guessing the MBP13 is now a legacy model, being refreshed more to satisfy direct-product-line lease upgrades for corporate customers, than to satisfy consumer demand. Along with the MBP16 refresh (which will use the "M1X", the higher-end chip), we'll probably see the higher-end MBP13s refreshed with said chip as well, but rebranded somehow, e.g. as the "MacBook Pro 14-inch" or something (as the rumors go: same si…

These are transitional products so it makes sense. I'm looking forward to see the replacement of the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. Will be interesting to see what those include.

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

#703

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…

Adobe Premiere Pro barely works on 32GB, let alone 16GB. Perhaps not "normal people", but it is a Pro device. And bear in mind, due to the UMA, that 16GB is shared between GPU and CPU. I have 74GB on my system (10GB of which is GPU) so I can run my dev env (Kubernetes, PGSQL, Visual Studio), data science, machine learning and do 6K video editing. But then, there's also zero chance that I would consider doing this on…

> Adobe Premiere Pro barely works on 32GB, let alone 16GB

Which is why I use Final Cut Pro. It was a little sluggish from time to time on my Air with 8GB of RAM, now on my mid-2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM it never stutters or slows down. Editing 1080p.

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

#704

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 recently got an Air after using a MBP13. Aside from the loud fan and slow performance which should be fixed in this release, my biggest complaint is that they only have the usbc plugs on one side of the laptop. Really obnoxious when the outlet is in a difficult spot. Unclear whether the new MBP13 also has this problem... Edit: the new M1 MBP13 has both usbc ports on the same side. No option for 4 (yet). Ugh.

The two-port and four-port 13" MacBook Pros have been separate product lines since their introduction. This new A1 MBP only replaces the two-port version. Presumably the higher-end one will share an upgraded processor with the 16".

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

#706

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…

This makes sense. Most likely this is why the CPUs are all limited to 16GB. It's likely when they unwrap the 16 inch MacBook Pro, it will open up more configurations (more RAM in particular!) for the 13" MacBook Pro and hopefully the mini.

RAM limits are pretty easy to explain. 16GB chips cost disproportionately more and use more power.

I wonder if they use 2 4GB chips or 1 8GB chip in the low-end SKU?

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

#707
post #691

So Apple will be shipping 5nm chips while Intel is barely able to produce 10nm? Must hurt to be Intel right now.

while it certainly hurts to be Intel right now, be aware that the generation notation does not mean what it used to. They just mark new generations, not actual transistor size. Intel's 10nm is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7mn, and Intel 7nm should be equivalent to TSMC 5nm. So yes, Intel is behind, but not as much as it might seem.

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

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see how something that tiny can compete in any meaningful way with a giant nVidia type card for training. I'd imagine it's more for running models that have been trained already, like all the stuff they mentioned with Final Cut.

Can anyone who knows about machine learning hardware comment on how much faster dedicated hardware is as opposed to, say, a vulkan compute shader?

That depends entirely on the hardware of both the ML accelerator and the GPU in question, as well as model architecture, -data and -size.

Unfortunately Apple was very vague when they described the method that yielded the claimed "9x faster ML" performance.

They compared the results using an "Action Classification Model" (size? data types? dataset- and batch size?) between an 8-core i7 and their M1 SoC. It isn't clear whether they're referring to training or inference and if it took place on the CPU or the SoC's iGPU and no GPU was mentioned anywhere either.

So until an independent 3rd party review is available, your question cannot be answered. 9x with dedicated hardware over a thermally- and power constrained CPU is no surprise, though.

Even the notoriously weak previous generation Intel SoCs could deliver up to 7.73x improvement when using the iGPU [1] with certain models. As you can see in the source, some models don't even benefit from GPU acceleration (at least as far as Intel's previous gen SoCs are concerned).

In the end, Apple's hardware isn't magic (even if they will say otherwise;) and more power will translate into higher performance so their SoC will be inferior to high-power GPUs running compute shaders.

[1] https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/article...

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

#709
post #436

I’m really worried that we have finally reached the point in computing where you can buy a machine that is fast/efficient, or you can buy a machine that is private. Apple sends the hash of every binary you execute to Apple in current (and presumably future) macOS, and the changes in macOS 11 mean that Little Snitch will continue to work for all processes, except OS/system processes . This means that it may be impossi…

My AMD Ryzen running Linux is pretty fast, efficient and private. No? Granted, it's rather hard to use in Starbucks, being a desktop.

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

#710

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?

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

I'm going to be pretty sad if they don't keep releasing Intel MBPs, I need to at least be able to run x86 Windows in a VM on my laptop.
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