ARM is the future, at least in laptops. Apple lead the fray again, it's incredible.
people have been saying that for over a decade.
Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
991–1000 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#992Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Kinda my thought exactly. Although most any video editing software uses proxy files, so you don't have to load in the original hi-res footage.
It's just that... swapping data in and out of ram is far slower than clock speed, right? So if the bottleneck is RAM, would it make sense to get the most RAM? (ie: Intel Mac)
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#993Earlier quoted context omitted.
if I recall correctly, the geekbench score does run on small bursts and it's designed to find the peak performance without taking the thermal limitations in account.
SPEC, on the other hand, takes hours to run. Of course the iPhone chip isn't as beefy as the M1, but the results still speak for themselves. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
Apple has since explained that M1s are slightly different between the Air, Pro and Mini, accounting for the different thermal chassis. (In the case of the Pro they enable an 8th GPU core.) It sounds like they are three different chips rather than the same chip in different configurations --I think he said that in marketing speak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lK0ySxQyrs
Apple makes it clearer that in the real world, these machines are only going to offer their incredible performance on Metal, iPad/iPhone apps and for any Mac apps that happen to have been ported over to M1 by their developers (using Xcode). These machines will only offer similar performance to existing Intel Macs when running existing Intel Mac apps because the incredible performance will be reserved for Apple's Rosetta2 software to make those unmodified apps compatible.
But what went unsaid, except during the part where they say they 'learned from their experience in the past processor transitions', is that by introducing the chip at the low-end of the lineup first, they create a market for the (few remaining relevant) Mac developers to invest in porting their code over to ARM and likewise, because these new machines run iPad apps at full speed on upto 6K displays, there is incentive for the iPad/iOS-only devs to expand the functionality beyond what their wares can do on a tablet/phone. (Any Mac dev that drags their feet porting may find that there are 50 iPad apps that now run fullscreen performing 75% of their functionality, costing them sales in the big volume accounts where they buy licenses by the thousands.) Meanwhile, the type of users who can get by with two USB ports, 16GB of RAM and a single external monitor probably don't run many third-party Mac apps and are going to have an awesome experience with the iPad apps and Apple's native apps.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#994Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without doubt, the Apple M1 has the highest single-threaded performance of any non-overclocked CPU, being a little faster than AMD Zen 3 and Intel Tiger Lake. Nevertheless, because Apple has chosen to not increase their manufacturing costs by including more big cores, the multi-threaded performance is not at all impressive, being lower than that of many much cheaper laptops using AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPUs. So for any pr…
But given that M1 is clearly the basic CPU for low cost, thin-and-light devices, we can strongly infer that Apple’s next M chip will be significantly more capable. Chips with eight or more performance cores would be a certainty for the upper tier of laptops and iMacs.
Given that the M1 is a full node ahead of Zen 3 and two nodes ahead of whatever Intel has to offer, one would think that when on same node, Intel and AMD will be just as capable.
But the truth is comparing to future offerings is bullshit, and we have to stick to what's available today. Impressive power/performance and all that, I have to say. We will see how sustained load looks like and how it runs non-optimized software. But to put in perspective 1 CCX of zen 3 performs better on 7nm (but draws up to 65W). With approximately the same die size (although w/o GPU and other things, the M1 has).
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#995Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did you pay a fortune for 32GB RAM, a larger screen, and a dGPU if you don't need it? You could have bought a 13" MBP and saved enough cash to get the new Air and now have 2 laptops.
1. How do you know he didn’t need it? 2. Even if he didn’t need it, why assume he didn’t want it? 3. Why are you assuming that money is an issue for him?
It is a general theme, people say how they are switching their specced out 2019 16inch MBP to these new M1 Macbooks, then getting all upset when people point out, they are probably not the professionals the top-end MBPs were aimed at.
A lot of people run around with way more powerful laptops than they actually need for whatever they are doing, because it's through a business or it's deductible, but news flash, buying a Macbook Pro doesn't make you a pro.
A question, if ALL pros were fine with 16GBs of RAM, why does Apple offer 4x as much? Answer, because a lot of people will actually need it.
I am happy for people who will get these new devices an be happy with it, I might get one too. But truth be told, most of us getting these devices could make it work with the latest iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard just as well. (OK, I do need to code occasionally, but even for that there is pretty ok apps for iPad I could use)
The expectations have to come the fuck down from where they are today, because the expectations put on these devices are just crazy. It's so overhyped that I think many will be disappointed, when compatibility issues surface and when people realise that the 3x, 5x, 7x performance digits are mainly down to Fixed Function Hardware and Accelerators and general performance increase is just slightly above the generational leap we are used to, with a bigger increase in efficiency.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#996Earlier 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.
Catalina already broke a TON of legacy software and you cannot downgrade newer Macs to Mojave (at least not without some serious hacking efforts, and I know at least one person who tried and failed).
So the choice is between running an older OS version that will go EOL sooner, or abandoning the ability to dual-boot? How is that OK?
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#997Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? as a power user I will not be touching anything apple ARM until all my hundreds of software apps are certified to work exactly the same as on x86_64. i will not rely on rosetta to take care of this. i need actual testing. besides this, 8GB of RAM is how much a single instance of chrome uses. i…
> it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus Depends on the definition of "power user". Music producers, video editors, and iOS developers will be served quite well. > lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for. When making that calculation, one should also take powe…
"Video editors" are going to buy a machine with 8GB RAM? (Which, I assume, will be soldered to the motherboard, like all recent Apple products.) Good luck to them, I guess.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#998Earlier quoted context omitted.
The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?
> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? - locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows - virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines - only 2 thunderbolt ports - limited to 16GB RAM - no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards - no AAA gamin…
>- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows
This has been a claim made about the Macs since the T2 chip came out. It was strictly false then (you just had to boot into Recovery Mode and turn off the requirement that OSes had to be signed by Apple to boot) and we still don't know for sure now. Apple has stated in their WWDC that they're still using SecureBoot, so it's likely that we can again just turn off Apple signature requirements in Recovery Mode and boot into ARM distros.
Whether or not that experience will be good is another thing entirely, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple made it a bitch and a half for driver devs to make the experience usable at all.
>- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines
True, but this isn't a strictly unsolvable limitation of AS and more like one of those teething pains you have to deal with, as it is the first-generation chip in an ISA shift. By this logic, you could say that make doesn't even work yet. Give it some time. In a few months I expect all of these quirks to be ironed out. Although, I suppose if you're concerned about containers it sounds like you want to be in the server market, not the laptop market.
>- only 2 thunderbolt ports, limited to 16GB RAM, no external gpu support/drivers, can't use nvidia or amd cards, can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static
See above about "give it some time".
>- no AAA gaming
I mean, if you're concerned about gaming, you shouldn't buy any Mac at all. Nor should you be in the laptop market, really. Although, this being said, the GPU in the new M1 is strong enough to be noted. In the Verge's benchmarks, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was running on the M1 MacBook Air at 38FPS at 1920x1200. Yes, it was at very low settings, but regardless – this is a playable framerate of a modern triple-A game, in a completely fanless ultrabook ... running through a JIT instruction set translation layer.
>- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down
I disagree. I know we were talking about the M1 specifically, but Apple has shown that the future of ARM on desktop doesn't have to be as dismal as Windows made it out to be. Teething pains aside, the reported battery life and thermal performance on the new AS machines have been absurdly fantastic. I think, going down the road, we'll stop seeing x86 CPUs on all energy-minded machines like laptops entirely.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#999Is there a common linear algebra benchmark? Would love to see a non-Intel chip + OpenBLAS beating out Intel + MKL
Why would you use OpenBLAS rather than Apple's Accelerate.framework? Since you're already using the Intel MKL, the only fair comparison is Accelerate.framework.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
#1000A matter of time until Apple releases a ChromeBook competitor - a cheap plastic laptop for schools/students, similar in spirit to the iPhone SE, perhaps running on A14 instead of M1, and a 12" screen. This would be great for marketshare gains and to get more young people into the Apple ecosystem. Perhaps something that looks like the polycarbonate MacBook introduced in 2006?
Maybe reintroduce the iBook? Ha!
Yes, that's the name I couldn't recall!