141–150 of 391 posts
Although I’m definitely not convinced enough to make the jump yet, those emulation benchmarks are impressive (and seem to also apply somewhat to general use based on another review I read). Running x86 code faster than native equivalents, using an ARM chip, that will probably be consuming significantly less power doing it is something I did not expect to see in gen 1 of this switch.
Copy-pasted the comment I left at another forum: The the M1 is Zen3 5600X performance in an ultra-portable form factor. Whether that's revolutionary or not particularly noteworthy depends on the individual use case. If you're don't care that much about power/heat/fan-noise, it's neat but not (yet) world shattering. Bit if you live your life on a small laptop, it may well be. According to rumors, we'll see Apple's 8 F…
> The the M1 is a Zen3 5600X in an ultra-portable form factor. Well, also without x86 baggage, and with tons of SOC co-preccessors added, and a unified memory.
> It slowly became clear that one day Apple’s processors would come for Intel.
Yeah, that became clear sometime back in 2005... but what does that have to do with the matter at hand?!
(and with new video cards, and new consoles, there are too many things vying for my money right now anyway)
I have a 2017 MBP 15". Can't wait to get an M1 Pro, and I don't even care that much for the battery life -- it's all about the better performance on NLE software for me...
Reviews (including this one) all say webcam sucks pretty bad though. Why Apple chose to release a laptop with a subpar webcam in 2020 is a mystery to me. This isn't even hard or expensive. Spend a couple dollars more on that webcam, Apple, don't be so greedy.
Can't it be because MacBook lids are absurdly thin? How thick are the lids of comparable machines (the XPS etc.)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, Zen3 is AMD's just released latest architecture, and currently the highest performing x86 implementation. The 5600X is the the mainstream 65W 6-core desktop Zen3 CPU. It has nothing to do with ARM or Apple. I left the comparison as a reference point for people who follow desktop PC performance and may not be as well aware of Apple's.
It’s also a 7nm design that has to deal with things like PCI busses, external memory on a narrower bus etc. so actually it do very well compared to the m1. I’m interested to see how Apple can make this scale, can you get a Mx laptop with 64 Gb? Or will that has to be soc external memory for the process to scale?
Memory is already external to the SoC on the M1; it's on the same package but it's not a single chip.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, Zen3 is AMD's just released latest architecture, and currently the highest performing x86 implementation. The 5600X is the the mainstream 65W 6-core desktop Zen3 CPU. It has nothing to do with ARM or Apple. I left the comparison as a reference point for people who follow desktop PC performance and may not be as well aware of Apple's.
It’s also a 7nm design that has to deal with things like PCI busses, external memory on a narrower bus etc. so actually it do very well compared to the m1. I’m interested to see how Apple can make this scale, can you get a Mx laptop with 64 Gb? Or will that has to be soc external memory for the process to scale?
64GB will come for future laptops. And Apple can scale with a single package beyond 64GB too, very high performance solutions included. See the A100 80GB from NVIDIA with 2TB/sec of memory bandwidth, with RAM as part of the package, just not in the same die.
Copy-pasted the comment I left at another forum: The the M1 is Zen3 5600X performance in an ultra-portable form factor. Whether that's revolutionary or not particularly noteworthy depends on the individual use case. If you're don't care that much about power/heat/fan-noise, it's neat but not (yet) world shattering. Bit if you live your life on a small laptop, it may well be. According to rumors, we'll see Apple's 8 F…
> the M1 is Zen3 5600X performance in an ultra-portable form factor. It’s astonishing. I just hope they someday put in a good GPU. Something comparable to an Nvidia 3060 would be great. I’d love to see Apple go HAM with their ARM chips in an iMac Pro or some such. Give me 12 firestorm cores and bump the GPU cores from 8 to 64.
The GPU in the M1 is perfectly good for the power targets it's trying to hit.
Either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Apple is unlikely to be able to do with the GPU what they did with the CPU. That is, there's no legacy in either Nvidia nor AMD's GPUs that Apple can cut out to get wins. And similarly, neither Nvidia nor AMD slowed down their progress or is suffering from fab issues like Intel did & is on the CPU side of things.
I don't doubt Apple can hit an RTX 3060 level of performance, but they'll get there with roughly similar to RTX 3060 level of power draw. Which means it ain't fitting in a MacBook Air or MBP 13", either. And judging by the existing MBP 16" cooling solution, not really going to go well in that chassis.