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Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

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Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#391
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This really flips the argument that Mac hardware is overpriced and underpowered on its head. This doesn't excuse years behavior not respecting their customers on (price + performance) divided by bugs.

Customers seem to be pretty happy with Apple in general so I can’t imagine they feel disrespected by the price and performance.

I’ve done this exercise a couple times: pick a random Apple laptop configuration and find an equivalent from another vendor: they’re frequently so close price-wise it doesn’t matter (depends on what you want, but I’m willing to pay $200 or so for macOS and not having to deal with Linux power management.)

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#392
post #189

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy m…

Pretty sure content creators are the core of the Pro series. It's not uncommon to have multiple design apps open at the same time, along with team apps, multiple browsers each running multiple apps, and multiple monitors. And that's just web design. Now open your eyes and look around your room. Everything you see was designed by someone, most likely on a Pro.

Unlikely. Most CAD users are on Windows.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#393
Impressive, but pretty unsurprising given the A series. 100 points higher than the A14 is a less than 10% improvement.

From Apple’s somewhat uninformative slides, we should expect peak power draw around 15W? The A series draws half that for > 90% monocore performance, so scaling seems on target.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#394

The 16GB max ram still seems a head scratcher. Not what would suppose I want for video editing.

The three models Apple chose are all the consumer, low-end ones. You will see much higher specs on the Mac Mini Pro, MacBook Pro 14/16 and Mac Pro planned for next year.

Timing is important here, M1 is not going to give you 32GB+, 1 year gap doesn't sound to me. M1 to M2 (whatevername) gap should be 2 years+

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#396

Can somebody explain how is M1 going to work on larger GPU tasks (rendering, encoding etc) with it's memory bandwidth M1 total memory bandwidth is 68.2 GB/s (128 bit LPDDR4x-4267) AMD Radeon Pro 5600m memory bandwidth is 394.2 GB/s (2048 bit HBM2) https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-5600m.c3612

It's not clear, but here's some knowledgeable speculation: - All M1 models only have 1 Thunderbolt Controller, thus can only handle 2 Thunderbolt ports on all announced models so far. - All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K. - No M1 model supports >16GB of RAM or 10GB Ethernet. All of the above seem like bandwidth limitations to save cost that a future "M1X" or "M2" or "X1" would be extremely likely to f…

> - All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K.

Where did you find this? In the Macbook Pro 13 landing page I find the specs per Thunderbolt port which states the display capabilities for each while not restricting anywhere to just one monitor.

So I'd would expect 1x monitor per Thunderbolt port leading to total 3 displays for the Pro ARM model: one internal and two external displays. I assume the restriction you refer to just applies to the Air model.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK... but let's say it's 95% there, even. How much power does an M1 draw compared to a 5950X? It's not even funny. And the M1 is running at a lower clock.

It’s very impressive. It seems like the open computing platforms where you have control of your hardware/ os are in real trouble. I use Mac at work, but Linux at home, if the hardware isn’t competitive....

- Mac has ~10% of the global market for end user machines. It doesn't now, never has, and never will own the market nor does it desire to sell cheap enough machines to do so.

- Given that you can't add ram after the fact and 256GB is anemic the cheapest laptop that is a reasonable choice is $1400.

- The cheapest desktop option is $6000 with an 8 core cpu or 8000 with a 16 core.

- The average end user spends $700 on a computer

- We literally have marketing numbers and a worthless synthetic benchmark.

I think it entirely fair to say that the new macs are liable to be fantastic machines but there is no reason to believe that the advent of apple cpu macs marks the end of open hardware. Were you expecting them to sell their cpus to the makers of the cheap computers most people actually buy?

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be sooner than that. Just wait for "M1X" or "X1" or whatever Apple calls the increased-bandwidth variant that goes into their 16-inch model and desktops.

Sure, call it what you want. This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy. It won’t be full throttle. I’m excited for whatever is next.

> This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy. It won’t be full throttle.

Apple has been running a version of OS X on these CPUs for 10 years now. The only thing which is "beta" here is Rosetta.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#399

Go ahead, buy into that and before long Apple will lock the OS down so tight you will only be able to install software from the app store. Apple, it's been good knowing you, time to move on.

That will eventually happen and they will claim 'security'. They'll make it harder to install 3rd party software. Indie devs are going to suffer because of this tight control.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was AnandTech, but an analysis suggested that Apple's BOM price for the M1 (which of course excludes R&D costs, software dev costs, profit, it's just the raw manufacturing cost) to be about $64.

Sure, and AMD's is probably similar. The difference being that Apple only sells theirs inside of $1000+ computers, and AMD has to make up the entire margin on their CPU alone. Behold, the power of vertical integration.

The power of vertical integration means that Apple could sell their hardware at a loss, to get you inside the Walled Garden TM and then keep 30% of all you spend inside it.

I'm not saying they do that, considering how much their products cost, I'm saying they could. That's what vertical integration brings to their table, above all else.

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