421–430 of 529 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point being made is that the processors that they will package with more memory are going to exist on larger dies. When you increase die size you decrease yield so you need to have a mature process.
Why does that follow? 4 cores and 32GB makes fine sense.
The real competition is no longer Intel. Its AMD. Or if you're just buying Apple because you like them then there is no competition, you buy what they offer. I like fanless systems so I'll be watching Apple closely.
I can't help but chuckle whenever I read these comments on HN about how doomed Intel is. Intel just does this . Every now and then, they get so far ahead that the rest of the market just totally disintegrates, which allows them to screw around and juice up their margins while failing to actually innovate. Their brand is so strong it takes years for it to erode, even when they do suck, and when they have actual compet…
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…
Go hard and go low to make CERTAIN that this transition is for the best.
If this were the high-end, some folks could have say: "Yeah, sure cost the same than i9 but you fork $$$$$$$, when go low you will get less and still pay $$$$".
With this, instead, you rest the case!
Anyone else worried that while these performance improvements are really good, that this is further locking people into Apple's ecosystem? No self-repairs, no bootcamp support, etc
The new hardware is cutting edge cool. But very proprietary, so not for me.
I'm curious about it. Its the first time in a long time that custom silicon outperforms the volume X86 manufacturers. For a long time custom chips (Sparc/ PA-RISC/Alpha) where the fastest, till commodity x86 chips took over being faster and cheaper and those chips are extinct. I think it helped that there were multiple vendors of these X86 CPUs.
But competition is good for us. As long as there is competition we'll get better performance for less power usage/cost.
Apple silicon is not a riskless. Apple need to continue to execute on design and hope that their manufacturer can get the yields they need. Its on the newest chip making process, so if there is a hiccup in the supply it could cause problems. (I think of the harddrive supply drying up 10 years ago because of earthquakes.). Nvidia is buying ARM now, so who knows what might happen if agreements need to be negotiated. It can give them a advantage, but they have to keep executing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, this has little to do with it being ARM. 30 years ago ARM had a significant micro architectural advantage in performance per watt, but in this era of 10 billion transistor chips, that advantage has disappeared. x86_64 rationalized the x86 architecture and decode is such a small fraction of the power budget that it really doesn't matter anyways. What does matter, IMO: - assembling a killer team - 5nm process - hi…
I'm no expert, but the only big architectural differences are a massively larger decoder and a reorder buffer that's several times as large as x86 designs. If these are actually the reasons for the performance difference, and it's difficult to do these on x86 because of the instruction set, it seems to this amateur that ARM64 really does have an advantage over x86.
Nearly universal praise for the M1 versus it's predecessor but I don't see how this really changes Apple's position the way he implies. Their machines are still far more expensive than Windows and can't use high-powered GPUs like AMD/Nvidia. The people who choose PC, still have the same incentives to do so. For most users, the faster performance will probably not be very noticeable. The reduced power consumption is t…
> Nearly universal praise for the M1 versus it's predecessor but I don't see how this really changes Apple's position the way he implies. Their machines are still far more expensive than Windows It was never about being cheaper or the best bang for the buck. Mac was always playing at the expensive end of the market, for people who want/appreciate (most of) what they get (macOS, the hardware/software integration, the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every modern general purpose computer already has multiple layers of memory. This would just be an additional layer. The virtual memory subsystems in the OS will handle this. At the end of the day it's just caches all the way down. A workstation with 16GiB of "on-chip" memory would be like a huge L4 cache for the say 512GiB of "standard" DDR4. I really like OSTEP's chapters on virtual memory if you're interested in r…
Yet, is it a requirement in a memory hierarchy to copy the lower level in the upper one? Like, all the stuff in you L1 cache has to be also in your L2 cache. E.g. if you would have 32gb of external DDR it would add only 16gb more to the packaged 16gb?
Relatedly, I've heard of using Intel Optane as "slow RAM" for cold pages, and I think the idea there is also that it'd be in one or the other but not both. (Optane can be thought of as very expensive/fast flash or very slow/cheap RAM.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 it just me or are the current offering of M1 chips not developer machines anyway? They max at 16GB RAM. That's a huge limiting factor by itself. If they can work out Docker before 32GB memory MBP, then it seems fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ray Tracing I'm not someone into the inner-working of chips much, but is "ray tracing" a new term used for something in microprocessors now? Or is this the same graphic "ray tracing" we were doing back in the 80's on Amigas and Atari STs?
We're crossing the threshold this year where real-time ray tracing in hardware isn't just some theoretical concept, it's actually useful and available in affordable consumer hardware (NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as the PS5 and new Xbox all have it). Yes, the NVIDIA 2xxx RTX series had it two years ago, but this is the year where it's actually viable and not so gimmicky.
I remember playing with a number of demos on my intel core 2 duo macbook (not pro) a decade ago.
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…