Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M1 Macs Review

sixcolors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 391 posts

Re: M1 Macs Review

#191

Post by kllrnohj »

brundolf wrote: post #125
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #91

The benchmark that's blown me away most so far: Marco Arment on Accidental Tech Podcast says the new Macbook Air is significantly faster to compile Overcast (a pretty big iOS app) than his 10 core $6000+ iMac Pro with 64GB RAM and a 160W CPU. https://overcast.fm/+R7DWXqqm0/1:08:11

I/O-bound, maybe? Could be misleading but still impressive

Compilation tends to benefit heavily from bigger caches & faster memory, yes. It's an area that Zen 2 & 3 have been absolutely fantastic at thanks to their huge caches as well.

The iMac Pro's relatively slow 2666MHz RAM can't be saved by the also relatively small (these days) cache in the Xeon-W it uses.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#192

Post by dragontamer »

brundolf wrote: post #125
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #91

The benchmark that's blown me away most so far: Marco Arment on Accidental Tech Podcast says the new Macbook Air is significantly faster to compile Overcast (a pretty big iOS app) than his 10 core $6000+ iMac Pro with 64GB RAM and a 160W CPU. https://overcast.fm/+R7DWXqqm0/1:08:11

I/O-bound, maybe? Could be misleading but still impressive

Xeon W is 7 years old at this point, and the Apple M1 is a pretty darn good modern chip.

Today's desktops are as good as servers from 5 years ago. Today's laptops are as good as desktops 5 years ago. Today's phones are as good as laptops 5 years ago.

---------

The Apple M1 makes a leap with a huge L1 cache, very wide execution, at a very low clock rate (2.8 GHz for power-efficiency).

But when you pair such a leap with a 7-year technology jump, yeah, things look quite silly.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#193

Post by nanna »

A concern in my University department is that some of the FOSS/small scale software we teach on won't work on our students' shiny new M1 Macs. Should we be worried?

Re: M1 Macs Review

#195

Post by rrss »

masklinn wrote: post #184
TillE wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a distinction between shared graphics memory (an ancient and still very common thing) and "unified memory"?

Yes, they're absolutely nothing alike. Shared memory means the CPU and the GPU share physical memory in different address space, so 512MB RAM with 64MB shared means the CPU gets 448MB and the GPU gets 64, and data has to be copied from one chunk to the other. Unified memory means both CPU and GPU not only share physical memory but share the address space , all memory is accessible to both at the same time. This means…

> data has to be copied from one chunk to the other.

With iGPUs, it is pretty standard to be able to map "CPU memory" into the GPU's address space and access it directly, without copies.

See section 5.7 here: https://software.intel.com/content/dam/develop/public/us/en/...

I don't think Apple has provided enough information to say if the M1 "unified memory" is actually novel or not. Automatic mirroring between CPU and GPU page tables would be pretty novel, but I don't think there's any info currently available to suggest that happens.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#196

Post by rado »

This is the revolution we needed in a technology landscape that promotes waste (x86, Electron), however belittled by the haters. It's real and changes everything.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#197

Post by alberth »

nanna wrote: post #193

A concern in my University department is that some of the FOSS/small scale software we teach on won't work on our students' shiny new M1 Macs. Should we be worried?

I'd say the bigger concern is long term, will Apple even ALLOW you to even run non-App store software? E.g. FOSS

On iOS they don't.

And with this new direction of macOS & ARM, it's not out of the question the same will happen on the desktop.

EDIT: why the downvotes? Seriously - what's wrong with what I said ... I'm genuinely curious.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#198

Post by kzrdude »

Steve Jobs would be proud. I imagine Apple didn't say anything like that, but I really think he would be stoked with this, especially a cooler computer (no fan) and a leg up all competitors.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#199

Post by chungus_khan »

masklinn wrote: post #186
coldtea wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> Not sure which those "non-desktop" systems are. Consoles have used unified memory since last generation I think? AMD APU have supported unified memory since kaveri I think, and Intel iGP have supported limited version of data sharing for a while, but I don't think one can call UMA "pretty normal".

Why not? The vast majority of laptops sold today have iGPUs that support it. Both Intel and AMD docs even refer to it using the term "Unified Memory Architecture", and document use, including things like zero-copy. Is being available in most modern computers by sales volume not good enough?

Re: M1 Macs Review

#200

Post by kzrdude »

x87678r wrote: post #22

I'm blown away with how good they seem to work. I was about to buy a Lenovo x86 laptop on Black Friday but put it on hold. I presumed M1 was going to be like a Surface X. With Ryzen laptop chips slowly arriving too, next year should be a good one.

What hope do we have that M1-like chips are available soon in regular non-apple notebooks? I guess the chance is zero.
Post reply on HN