461–470 of 529 posts
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14nm was delayed, 10nm was massively delayed, 7nm is delayed again. That's a fairly long run of underperformance. Sure, they sit on enough money that they can recover if they do it right. But there currently aren't any signals that they're getting things right.
Lots of executivees have been fired and Intel has a new CEO. That is certainly a sign that things will... be different.
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You mean "the current M1-equipped Macs are a non-starter", then. I have no doubt that either the first or second generation of Apple's high-end chips will support 2 external displays.
The M1 Mac Mini also supports two displays, one of them just needs to be through HDMI.
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If your CPU always runs at its steady-state temperature that means it sucks and it leaving performance on the table. A CPU that can run at a steady 3 GHz (or whatever) should be capable of 5+ GHz momentarily given the right initial conditions.
Thermals are not the only factor that limits clock speeds. For instance, gate switching times are also a factor. Although if you're saying the M1's performance "sucks", I can't wait to see the next iteration.
Sure, the critical path setup and hold time limit clock speeds, but that's not the reason for throttling a chip that can turbo at a higher clock. Even if it were, certain operations with a shorter critical path could run at faster clock even when hot.
If thermals weren't the dominant factor, you wouldn't need better cooling to overclock.
My perspective (correct me if wrong):
Hot semiconductors can damage themselves, and this becomes more important as the lithography shrinks. Binning is designed to identify which silicon can be pushed harder and which is not quite up to the task.
I agree with the other guy that if your CPU always runs at its steady-state temperature that means it is leaving performance on the table.
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…
The people who care most about using specific applications that are designed for x86, are the same people who buy the upper-end MBP13 and the MBP16. It makes sense to flesh out the software ecosystem and snag a free iteration on M chips before moving those devices to Apple Silicon.
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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.
Adobe has a native M1 Photoshop in beta now and plans to port Premiere after the first of the year. You may be overestimating the effort to “port” to M1. For most apps, it is just a new compile target and a bunch of regression testing.
And it wouldn't be possible to run an M1 beta if there were no M1 products on the market.
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We already know that Rosetta2 doesn't support everything.
Do you have any links? Other than virtualization, I hadn't heard about any limitations. Edit: Looks like kernel extensions aren't supported either.
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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.
We've been able to do realtime ray tracing in software since forever though and the shadertoys and whatnot have been full of hardware accelerated demos, that's not so interesting. I remember playing with a number of demos on my intel core 2 duo macbook (not pro) a decade ago.
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I don't think the M1 chip is a great choice for the 16" MacBook Pro. It's designed for lower power devices. It may do well on certain workloads like compilation, but may even regress (in terms of performance, not performance-per-watt) on other workloads. Their future iterations would be much better suited to a higher power device. It does create this weird short-term demand planning issue, but plenty of corporate cus…
> I don't think the M1 chip is a great choice for the 16" MacBook Pro. It's designed for lower power devices. It may do well on certain workloads like compilation, but may even regress (in terms of performance, not performance-per-watt) on other workloads. What workloads do you think won't run better in some manner (faster, lower power consumption, etc.)? It's a general purpose CPU. Apple's own benchmarks talked abou…
I think one of the advantages of M1 is its single-thread access to lots of RAM. That advantage kind of starts to fall off when your workload is heavily multi-threaded, which is often the case for buyers of larger machines with more compute cores.
I also believe that the advantages of low power consumption (or equivalently, thermal efficiency) fall off a little bit when you have a larger thermal envelope, because with a larger device (A) you can fit better cooling, and (B) bursts of compute take a longer time to bring the device to throttle temperatures.
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> 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.
Laptop or desktop: likely, but even if the next Apple Watch will be faster, which I doubt, their smart speakers and headphones probably can do with a slower CPU for the next few years.
I know other people have retroactively applied the term “Apple Silicon” to other Apple-designed processors, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything from Apple that does this. Have you?
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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.
Qualcomm chips don't have on-chip DRAM at the highest clock rate possible. If they did the same things Apple is doing in that way, the performance advantage of M1 shrinks. There's no real "magic" in the M1 or Apple, it's a reality distortion field that is hitting everyone right now. It's entirely possible to outperform the M1, there just hasn't been a need to do that until now - no major OS would have benefitted from…