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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

#481

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…

I share an office with quite a few “professional users” I guess you’d call them. There are directors and 3D graphics people using mac pro towers and I’m sure they’d fit the definition, in that performance is a significant bottleneck for them and their output is tied to their hardware.

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

#482

Looking at Geekbench charts, I see that my Samsung phone has a faster processor than my $3000 gaming rig, and it sure as hell draws less power ... so why aren't datacenters just use phones instead of Xeon and Epyc servers, what am I missing?

Apple shit when they saw M1 benchmarks and delayed their data center for years to fill it with their own server chips. https://businessrecord.com/Content/Default/All-Latest-News/A...

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

#483
post #370

This really flips the argument that Mac hardware is overpriced and underpowered on its head. Now Apple computers are a premium product from a performance perspective, as well.

This is salient, and almost upsetting frankly as I (and others?) have been looking for a 'way off' the platform after years of grievance. This is might just be good enough to keep their core platform value in place. It's a shrewd move in their part, it's been a while since we've seen this level of core innovation on their non-iOS offers.

I'd expect their performance features, such as the wide execution and L2 etc, to be copied by amd/intel within a couple of years.

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

#485
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What in the world is an actual professional? I would say that generally , a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity. A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete. In all these cas…

I'm a professional programmer... hardware constraints aren't exactly the limiting factor when i use vim all day.

What if you wanted to drive a few more monitors for logging, monitoring and docs or have a local k3s cluster running for development or run some exploratory scripts on large data sets or build a large project from source? Professional programming is a vast and varied field.

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

#486
post #478

Looking at Geekbench charts, I see that my Samsung phone has a faster processor than my $3000 gaming rig, and it sure as hell draws less power ... so why aren't datacenters just use phones instead of Xeon and Epyc servers, what am I missing?

Probably due to overheating. Your phone can do bursts of processing every now and then, but if you let it execute heavy compute operations, the phone would probably overheat and shut itself off.

So would a Xeon if you pulled the heatsink off.

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

#487

Looking at Geekbench charts, I see that my Samsung phone has a faster processor than my $3000 gaming rig, and it sure as hell draws less power ... so why aren't datacenters just use phones instead of Xeon and Epyc servers, what am I missing?

Are you sure that you compared results from the same major Geekbench version? (v4 and v5 have quite different results).

I'm just looking at the charts, v5

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

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it still makes it very clear: a properly implemented ARM core can easily bury an X86 of equivalent size because of inherent advantage of not having to pay interest on 40 years of technical debt in the ISA.

ISA has very little to do with it, ARM is almost as old as x86.

AArch64/ARM64 was developed from the ground up, not bolted on to the old 32-bit ISA

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

#489
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably due to overheating. Your phone can do bursts of processing every now and then, but if you let it execute heavy compute operations, the phone would probably overheat and shut itself off.

So would a Xeon if you pulled the heatsink off.

So pull the insides of the phone out, attach a heatsink ... heatsinks cost less than LCD screens I reckon.
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