171–180 of 391 posts
After 6 years away from being "all in" on Apple, yesterday my base spec MacBook Air M1 arrived. Battery life is the key takeaway for me. Performance is fine but I'm used to a powerful desktop so it's not blowing me away but the battery life definitely is blowing me away. To run things under rosetta there's an arch command: e.g. arch -x86_64 brew install xxx - the arch preference is inherited by sub processes. I'm kin…
I just bought a MacBook Air. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this redefines how we think about a laptop. Whereas previously a laptop was something that spent the bulk of its time plugged in, and only capable of short bursts of number-crunching/gaming due to thermal and battery limitations, I can literally get a good few hours of gaming untethered on this machine. And this is a base-level MacBook Air, I…
What kind of gaming are we talking about?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
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The MacBook Air that GP mentioned doesn't even have a fan! That's certainly a nice benefit.
I'm pretty convinced my i9 mac does not have a fan either. A noise maker, yes... but the 2018 model just seems to have a loud audible indicator that docker started. :)
I just bought a MacBook Air. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this redefines how we think about a laptop. Whereas previously a laptop was something that spent the bulk of its time plugged in, and only capable of short bursts of number-crunching/gaming due to thermal and battery limitations, I can literally get a good few hours of gaming untethered on this machine. And this is a base-level MacBook Air, I…
What kind of gaming are we talking about?
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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?
Apple chips have PCIe since forever too, in fact Wi-Fi + BT is plugged over PCIe on them. Thunderbolt with two 40Gb/sec links isn't tiny either. 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.
It comparatively is. Thunderbolt is basically a PCI-E Gen 3 x4 slot but over a (very) short cable. Commonly more like an x2 link since getting the x4 speeds is difficult. Commonly 2 thunderbolt ports also share a single controller, so it's a 40Gb/sec combined maximum not per-port (either port can saturate, but you can't hit 80Gb/s total). It's unclear what the M1's controller actually is here, if it's dedicated lanes per port or just bifurcation.
But lets say the M1 is full on 2 TB3 controllers, for a combined 80Gb/s over those 2 ports. That's still not much. By comparison the 5600x has 24 PCIe Gen 4 lanes on it. That's 380 Gb/s of bandwidth off of the CPU. These are all things Apple would need to heavily beef up when they make the Apple Silicon variants of the larger class products. You can't do a Mac Pro replacement with 80 Gb/s of I/O. That'd be a joke. Apple obviously will scale up the I/O, but that costs power, too. It won't be free.
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It arrived with 69% charge, by this morning 11am i had reached 21%. I left the screen brightness on the default setting and usage was a mix of installing software (mostly I/O i suppose), a lot of safari, around 4 hours of Citrix remote desktop, around 90 minutes of zoom, some light gaming last night to see if it works. If you do anything that's heavy on I/O (packaging jar files in my case), this laptop is faster than…
8GB integrated memory spec?
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> the lack of a del key and placement of the fn key alone make me never buy a macbook again What do you mean by these?
Macbooks and Apple keyboards in general lack a physical del key (in ibm keyboard terms). They only have a backspace, which they label delete. Fn+backspace works as a shortcut, but they’re on completely different ends of the keyboard so you need 2 hands. Ctrl+D also sometimes works but is inconsistent across applications. Also, unlike all other vendors, Apple places the fn key on the far end of the keyboard, instead o…
- Portables in the Mac world do lack a delete key (the delete-forwards key, that is) on the built-in keyboard, but that's more of a space-constraint than anything else. Mac keyboards in general do not lack the delete key; he usual full-size keyboard certainly has a delete key.
- Keyboards are a personal thing, and it's very easy to plug in any normal USB keyboard, and then get all the benefits of the [delete] key as usual. There's nothing else to do, just plug in your favourite keyboard..
[Mine came this morning: https://i.imgur.com/at1mGiT.jpg]
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Unified memory is pretty normal on non-desktop systems and has been for a while.
Not sure which those "non-desktop" systems are. If you mean "smartphones and tablets", ok. But this is a laptop, not a mobile phone, and it's new development there. If you mean "laptops" then, no, they didn't have unified memory, much less have it be "pretty normal".
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Do you mind sharing what battery life you are seeing for your real life workloads? And also an idea of what those work loads are?
It arrived with 69% charge, by this morning 11am i had reached 21%. I left the screen brightness on the default setting and usage was a mix of installing software (mostly I/O i suppose), a lot of safari, around 4 hours of Citrix remote desktop, around 90 minutes of zoom, some light gaming last night to see if it works. If you do anything that's heavy on I/O (packaging jar files in my case), this laptop is faster than…
Tt's got a rather fast NVME SSD, 2.7GB/s reads and 2.2GB/s writes (Intel version was 1.3 and 1). Don't know if the IOPS & latency improved, but it wouldn't surprise me much.
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Apple chips have PCIe since forever too, in fact Wi-Fi + BT is plugged over PCIe on them. Thunderbolt with two 40Gb/sec links isn't tiny either. 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.
> Thunderbolt with two 40Gb/sec links isn't tiny either It comparatively is. Thunderbolt is basically a PCI-E Gen 3 x4 slot but over a (very) short cable. Commonly more like an x2 link since getting the x4 speeds is difficult. Commonly 2 thunderbolt ports also share a single controller, so it's a 40Gb/sec combined maximum not per-port (either port can saturate, but you can't hit 80Gb/s total). It's unclear what the M…
For those Ryzen parts, the thing that hikes power use a lot is having a separate northbridge in the same package instead of an SoC, with the vast majority of that additional power use being due to that.
