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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

#801

Post by Teknoman117 »

I didn't see any units for their "the GPU has 2.6 TFLOP/s of throughput". 2.6 TFLOPS/s at what precision? FP16, FP32, something else? Nvidia labels their Tegra AGX Xavier part as 5.5 TFLOP/s (FP16) and AMD's APUs say 1.8 TFLOP/s (FP32).

They also say "up to" 3.5x CPU performance (total performance) of previous generation macs, then make references to a Mac with a 1.2 GHz quad core Core i7 (MacBook Air) and a quad core 3.6 GHz Core-i3 (Mac Mini).

I would like to see some independent benchmarks personally...

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

#802

Post by laurent92 »

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…

Are servers important anymore? Seems to me that servers are made to automatically scale on AWS, and that is it. 8vCPU may be equivalent to 1x M1, it doesn’t really matter as long as you can have 4 of them.

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

#803

Post by fomine3 »

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…

Nowadays power efficiency for performance is nearly equal to the performance. So the M1 is the performance king for mobile and SFF. I'm exciting to see how Apple Silicon works for power hungry desktop/workstation area.

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

#804

Post by tw04 »

jacurtis wrote: post #786
karpodiem wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They said in the presentation for sustained workloads. I get the impression they're the same peak clock speed but the air throttles faster.

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

#806

Post by codelord »

The chip seems to be A14 + 2 extra high performance cpu cores + 4 gpu cores. That's cool, but that's not a great leap for Apple. The real news here is that macOS now runs on ARM processors. Keep your old tablets around, you may soon be able to make it into a hackintosh.

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

#807

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jfb wrote: post #781
0-_-0 wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would this be good a chip for a data warehouse?

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

#808

Post by [deleted] »

therealmarv wrote: post #525
belval wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal opinion, no insider info I think it's a good CPU, but I don't think it'll be a great CPU. Judging by how heavily they leaned on the efficiency, I am pretty sure that it will be just good enough to not be noticeable to most Mac users. Can't wait to see actual benchmarks, these are interesting times.

You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. But I agree... let's wait for the benchmarks (btw. iPads already overturns nearly all laptop CPUs)

[deleted]

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

#809

Post by easde »

reader_mode wrote: post #571
acchow wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably beat AMD/Intel on perf/power efficiency, which is why it makes sense for MBA and 13" MBP. The smaller machines are also likely held back by cooling solutions, so if you have Intel beat on power efficiency in a tiny form factor, you can boost your clock speed too.

Considering how AMD also beats intel on power/perf by a wide margin and they compared their results against Intel CPUs I wouldn't be surprised if their power/performance was close to AMD (they do have heterogeneous CPU cores which of course is not the case in traditional x86)

Apple's perf/watt is much higher than AMD. Anandtech has the A14 within a few percent of the 5950X on single threaded workloads. Power consumption is 5 watts (entire iPhone 12) versus 49 watts (5950X package power).

Normalizing for performance (say A14 vs 5950X at 4.5GHz instead of 5GHz) would close the gap somewhat, but it's still huge. Perhaps 4x instead of 10x - those last 500MHz on the AMD chip cost a ton of power.

Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering Apple is using both a newer process and gets nearly 60% higher IPC.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

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

#810

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

codelord wrote: post #806

The chip seems to be A14 + 2 extra high performance cpu cores + 4 gpu cores. That's cool, but that's not a great leap for Apple. The real news here is that macOS now runs on ARM processors. Keep your old tablets around, you may soon be able to make it into a hackintosh.

Maybe we can also get MacOS emulation working on Raspberry Pi soon.
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