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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

#781

Post by jfb »

0-_-0 wrote: post #767
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…

According to the Anandtech benchmark the A14 (what's in the latest iPhone) is 8% below the Ryzen 5950X. M1 is likely faster than that. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... Quote: "In the overall SPEC2006 chart, the A14 is performing absolutely fantastic, taking the lead in absolute performance only falling short of AMD’s recent Ryzen 5000 series. The fact that Apple is able to achieve this…

This is stupefying to me. Like, when Anand did the A12 or A11 reviews, I wrote:

"The craziest thing is how close [to 1/56th of a Xeon 8176] they get at 3W. That's the part that's staggering. What could Apple do with, say, laptop thermals? Desktop thermals? The mind creeps closer to boggling." -- me, 5 October 2018

Guess we're finding out.

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

#782

Post by yborg »

heisenbergs wrote: post #765

The responses here seem to not really acknowledge what a rabbit apple has been pulling out of the hat. 2-3x the performance both from a CPU and GPU perspective, whilst being far more energy and thermally efficient. Of course this was kind of known and rumoured, but now we know. Finally real competition for intel. If only these chips were available to others. they are literally running laps around the competition. Cur…

>Real competition for Intel

AMD would like a word.

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

#783

Post by sneak »

switch007 wrote: post #709
sneak wrote: 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25054291

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

#784

Post by darsnack »

mmm_grayons wrote: post #607
jonplackett wrote: post #99

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?

On the NVidia A100, the standard FP32 performance is 20 TFLOPs, but if you use the tensor cores and all the ML features available then it peaks out at 300+ TFLOPs. Not exactly your question, but a simple reference point.

Now the accelerator in the M1 is only 11 TFLOPs. So it’s definitely not trying to compete as an accelerator for training.

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

#785

Post by xsmasher »

BossingAround wrote: post #370
dschuler wrote: post #352

The most important feature of an M1-based Mac will likely be OS support into the distant future. I'm still using a 2012 rMBP, which was the first-gen retina version, and it's held up much better than any other computer I've ever bought, partly due to OS support into 2020. I imagine Apple will stand behind this new generation for a long time as well. The new M1 SOCs max out at 16GB RAM, which seems like a major limita…

> Overall, at the price they're offering the Mac mini (haven't really considered the other models for myself), I think it's ok to take the plunge. I thought the same. I actually wonder whether the low prices aren't due to the App support being extremely limited at this point (basically only first party stuff)

Applications for intel macs will still run by way of Rosetta 2, so I wouldn't say " App support [is] extremely limited."

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

#786

Post by jacurtis »

karpodiem wrote: post #734
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.

Surely they have different clock rates, but Apple isn't referencing clock rates in their marketing material for Macs with M1 chips.

Yeah I am surprised more people are ignoring this. If the two computer models have identical chips, then why does Apple even bother putting a fan in the pro?

To me the fact that the Air is fanless and the pro has a fan would indicate to me that they have different clock rates on the high end. I am sure the Air is capped lower than the Pro in order to make sure it doesn't overheat. It is probably a firmware lock, and the hardware is identical. But once we do benchmarks I would expect that the pro outperforms the air by a good margin. They added a fan in the pro so that it can reach higher speeds.

Surely the Air is capped so that users don't ruin their computers by running a process that overheats the computer.

But of course Apple doesn't want to reveal clock speeds. The best they can give us is "5x faster than the best selling PC in its class". What does that mean? The $250 computer at Walmart that sells like hotcakes for elementary age kids that need a zoom computer or the Lenovo Thinkpad Pro that business buy by the pallet? Who the hell knows.

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

#787

Post by saagarjha »

unethical_ban wrote: post #756
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…

Hmmm... What is the day 1 ability for, say, a systems programmer to run VSCode/golang development locally? It'd be neat to find out. The fact that they don't say doesn't tell me much, either it's "not a problem" or it's "such a problem we won't talk about it".

Both should work in Rosetta for now and I expect them to become native in the next few months.

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

#789

Post by ziml77 »

kmonsen wrote: post #474
noncoml wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I got one of the MBP with the touchbar this year after holding out for many years (changed jobs so had to change laptop). Man it is so much hard to do the volume changes, and there has so far for me been zero benefit.

That's actually one of the things I like better on the touchbar. Just press down on the volume icon and slide.

I continue to be disappointed about the lack of haptics though. It's such a strange thing to not have when they've proven to know how to make very convincing haptic feedback. It works very well in both the Apple Watch and the MacBook's trackpad.

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

#790

Post by YetAnotherNick »

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?

For app and web development, likely it will be par or better. For system development, there could be some issues at least for the near term. Till now many homebrew core formulas are not working for apple silicon, specially related to compilers.
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