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

macrumors.com

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

#981

Post by ubermonkey »

greatpatton wrote: post #873
ubermonkey wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down" Citation Needed . Apple detractors LOVE to bring this idea up, but there's nothing to it in any real sense. Do Macs ship with a checkbox filled in that limits software vendors? Yes. This is a good thing. Is it trivial to change this setting? Also yes. Anyone who buys a Mac can run any software on it they like. There is no lockdown.

There is a lockdown as you cannot even boot linux anymore...

I guess that may count for you, but I mean lockdowns within the OS itself.

I don't care that I can't run Linux on my Mac. If I wanted to run Linux, I'd have different hardware.

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

#982

Post by kgermino »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #974
randycupertino wrote: post #964

Dang, you do a very nice job of moderating here. Light touch approach, helpful guidance and enforcement when needed. Just wanted to let you know it's appreciated!

To be honest, I think that these comments evidence a failure of the HN website UI. Wouldn't it be easier to just create standard pagination links at the top of the comments page, rather than manually forcing a mod to post this "list of pages" comment on each and every article?

I think dang would agree.

1) there is a more link at the bottom of the page, Dan started making these comments because the UI is too subtle and a lot of people miss the link

2) I believe that he’s said they are working on performance improvements so that all the comments can be shown on a single page to solve the problem completely.

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

#983

Post by 0-_-0 »

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #978
mrgordon wrote: post #977

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes similarly I’ve started to notice that other users never notice I’ve replied to their comments since there are no notifications. A bit sad since sometimes quite a bit of effort is put into the replies.

https://hnreplies.com/

RSS version:

https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds

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

#984

Post by wmf »

tedd4u wrote: post #499
andy_threos_io wrote: post #281

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

They were waving their hands around a bit saying that in addition to on-package RAM with high bandwidth, they have done optimizations inside driver, OS and APIs to eliminate 1 or even 2 or more RAM to RAM copies for common tasks. So maybe there is a higher effective bandwidth when comparing to Wintel machines. It was very vague. Would love to read a detailed article comparing the systems.

Intel and AMD theoretically also support zero-copy but I wonder if it gets used in reality since most apps are probably optimized for discrete GPUs.

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

#985

Post by dcchambers »

SubjectToChange wrote: post #971
dcchambers wrote: post #841

It's funny - x86 has been the king of computing for basically my entire life, and we're finally seeing that change. This is kind of like a throwback to the early days of innovation in the CPU space, before everything ran on the same ISA. I'm both nervous and excited. Excited because x86 has been stagnant for years . I'm not an EE but my understanding is that its a pretty messy architecture with lots of "glue and duct…

x86 is an extremely messy ISA, but what about it has been stagnant? New instructions are pretty much every year.

I guess I shouldn't say that development on it has been stagnant - certainly engineers at Intel and AMD must be doing something - but performance improvements have stagnated, especially compared to the rapid improvements we're seeing from Apple in the ARM space.

I am not at all an expert in this field so my remarks are based on my own observations and performance benchmarks from experts in the industry. For example, this graph from Anandtech shows the stagnation (or at least slow improvements) in x86 performance gains while performance gains from Apple have been massive.

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png

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

#986

Post by dang »

randycupertino wrote: post #964

Dang, you do a very nice job of moderating here. Light touch approach, helpful guidance and enforcement when needed. Just wanted to let you know it's appreciated!

Thank you! and sorry to proceed by detaching your comment, but it's best for this subthread not to be at the top. (I could collapse it, but think of the non-JS users...)

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

#987

Post by dang »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #974
randycupertino wrote: post #964

Dang, you do a very nice job of moderating here. Light touch approach, helpful guidance and enforcement when needed. Just wanted to let you know it's appreciated!

To be honest, I think that these comments evidence a failure of the HN website UI. Wouldn't it be easier to just create standard pagination links at the top of the comments page, rather than manually forcing a mod to post this "list of pages" comment on each and every article?

Oh yes but there are two failures: (1) the UI doesn't display pages clearly; (2) the software is too slow to render entire threads. #2 is the real problem, and I don't want a temporary workaround to become too easy.

The real prize is getting the software fast enough to just render entire pages again, which is what it did for most of HN's existence.

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

#988

Post by diebeforei485 »

rem1313 wrote: post #744
diebeforei485 wrote: post #741

Unless you happen to need a new MacBook right now, I think the right move for most people is to hang on to their existing MacBook another year or two (get a battery replacement if necessary). A future MacBook with an M2 chip will be an even better buy, and software availability will be even better.

There will be always something better next year. The general advice I give is - wait as long as you can before you buy and then buy the best version you can afford.

Not all annual improvements are equal. The current M1 laptops have some real disadvantages- old industrial design, only two Thunderbolt ports, limited RAM, and limited software support for many apps. There are real compromises to switching to an M1 device as your main machine right now (unless you also have a separate x86 device).

MacBooks are due for a new industrial design, so it makes sense to wait. If you absolutely need a new computer, that's a tricky place to be right now.

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

#990

Post by Beached »

crazygringo wrote: post #317
justinator wrote: post #26

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

What do you need more memory for with video editing? Video editing's all done on disk isn't it? It's not like editing programs are loading a 20 GB file into memory? Even just 8 GB has never given me any problems with video editing. What am I missing here?

editing programs are loading a ton into memory though. edits are done in memory before their final output is saved to disk. if your viewing it on the screen, it is almost certainly in memory, and if your working with high res video you very well could exceed 16gb. more memory means larger (longer clips or higher res) video files loaded to memory means faster and more efficient working
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