271–280 of 529 posts
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I think he's joking as in the early Microsoft/Bill Gates statement about memory.
I hope so. I'm sitting at 68% memory utilization on a 16GB MBP _without_ any VMs running. Everytime a manufacturer limits a new model in 2020 to a max of 16GB, I wonder if they really understand with high end work laptops or desktop are really being used for.
I think Apple have screwed themselves over a bit here by sticking ARM-based Apple silicon in their lower-end/entry level devices first. I mean what's the point in spending £5k on a fully tricked out 16-inch MBP, as I'd been considering, when an entry level Macbook Air or Mac Mini is going to run rings around it? The reason I'm not going to buy one of these lower end Macs (the Mini would be the best fit) is that I can…
No they didn't. There is simply too much complex, professional software that will take time to be ported to ARM versus the relative straightforward needs of entry-level users e.g. Go, Photoshop, Docker. And they need a large install base to push developers to invest the necessary resources.
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Uh, unless there's some new Qualcomm chip I haven't heard of, the Qualcomm chips are all being utterly crushed by Apple's offerings in geek bench and specperf.
Guess we'll see (maybe) in December (Snapdragon 875 will be announced December 1st at Qualcomms Digital Summit) - or a bit later, but the 875, now also on 5nm, supposedly will be quite a bump. Leaked (supposed) benchmarks show 30%+ improvement, which would be A14 territory. I also have my doubts, but would be great for the market. (New Exynos 2100 supposedly also being up there.)
So Qualcomm won't be quite so far behind Apple, but it's still pretty significant.
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I may be wrong, but the ecosystem does not really change here right? I mean, memory management should be roughly the same between x86_64 and arm regarding the amount of ram used, so I guess 16gb of ram under old macbooks is the same as 16gb under the new ones
"Controlling the ecosystem" and "integration" and such are just wishful-thinking rationalizations. Chrome and Electron will use however much RAM they use; Apple can't magically reduce it. If you need 32GB you need 32GB.
I think Apple have screwed themselves over a bit here by sticking ARM-based Apple silicon in their lower-end/entry level devices first. I mean what's the point in spending £5k on a fully tricked out 16-inch MBP, as I'd been considering, when an entry level Macbook Air or Mac Mini is going to run rings around it? The reason I'm not going to buy one of these lower end Macs (the Mini would be the best fit) is that I can…
Apple’s ‘low end’ segment is the lion’s share of both revenue and profit. A decade ago, the Intel Mac Pro also came out after the rest of the product line. For awhile you could only get a Powermac G5.
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> You can't get an M1 configuration right now larger than 16GB which is a table-stakes baseline dev requirement today. Everyone on my team has been using 15" MacBook Pros with 16GB RAM for the past 3 years. I suspect most developers run with 16GB of RAM just fine. I'm not arguing "16GB is fine for all developers everywhere!", but it's absolutely not a hard requirement. I suspect for a lot of us, the difference in per…
> Regardless, the thing which is kind of stunning about this chip is that they are getting this kind of performance out of what is basically their MacBook Air CPU. Or to put it a different way: this is the slowest Apple Silicon system that will ever exist.
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I think if you have a very specific role where your workload is constant it makes sense. I am an independent contractor and work across a lot of different projects. Some of my client projects require running a full Rails/Worker/DB/Elasticsearch/Redis stack. Then add in my dev tools, browser windows, music, Slack, etc... it adds up. If I want to run a migration for one client in a stack like that and then want to swit…
At some point it is easier to have something sitting in a rack somewhere. That way you dont have to cook your ultrabook to run that stuff.
Having a CPU "in the cloud" is usually more expensive and slower than just using cycles on the CPU which is on your lap. The economics of this hasn't changed much over the past 10 years and I doubt it's going to change any time soon. Ultimately local computers will always have excess capacity because of the normal bursty nature of general purpose computing. It makes more sense to just upscale that local CPU than to rent a secondary CPU which imposes a bunch of network overhead.
There are definitely exceptions for things which require particularly large CPU/ GPU loads or particularly long jobs, but most developers will running local for a long time to come. CPUs like this just make it even more difficult for cloud compute to be make economic sense.
I'm at the point where I need a new Macbook Pro and I can't help thinking I want the last generation of the x86_64 architecture, not the first generation of something new. Those have never paid off for me. At work, Intel would clearly be better. We do a growing amount of Docker work destined for Intel machines. But at home it's fuzzier, since I've been playing with k3s on a cluster of Pi clones. It's going to come do…
If you require Docker, the Apple Silicon machines are not an option, and won't be for at least a little while. https://www.docker.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-chips-and-docke...
Is anyone else thinking, what the f*ck? Are we in a new era of computing? It certainly feels that way when looking at these desktop class ARM chips, where performance doubled every year or so, just like back in the 80s and 90s.
I was until I tried doing the test myself. It takes 82 seconds to compile on my i5-4200M. I'm not sure this test is deserving of the breathless headline and commentary, especially since the original tweeter later follows up with: > Extra info: The M1 macbooks (air/pro) can't drive 2 external screens, and the air throttles a bit after 3+ minutes sustained compute (20-30%) https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/132875317…
What makes you think that given sufficient cooling, it will not perform exactly the same as the M1 in the MBA but sustained? It’s not like the ARM architecture changes anything in the thermodynamics of cooling cpus compared to an x86 chip, right?
I’d wager that under load an i9 with passive cooling wouldn’t even last 30 seconds without throttling below even its base clock, if it doesn’t just shut down to prevent frying itself