M1 Macs Review • Hacker News Board

Re: M1 Macs Review

#231

Post by mekster » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

rsanheim wrote: post #140

CraigJPerry wrote: post #3

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…

Yeah so far the performance is very close to my 10 core iMac Pro I use for day to day development. This is on a MacBook Air with no fan, and so far I haven't felt the machine even get warm even when compiling _and_ also running tests or importing data in other processes. This is when running a decently sized Rails monolith w/ PostgreSQL & Redis, so a fairly typical modern Rails setup. It's seriously impressive.

Does it mean you can no longer easily tell if a process has gone crazy and takes high CPU usage without a fan and you also can't even feel the slow down.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#232

Post by robin_reala » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #119

addaon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the challenges of using a large-screen device in the sun is that most screen technologies (including transmissive LCD and OLED, but excluding eInk and transflective LCDs) are inherently "black" -- they absorb light energy that hits them. Even when they're displaying a white screen, they're absorbing nearly all of the light hitting them, and then emitting their own energy. One of my mild annoyances with the iPh…

> One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option. There is for the iPhone 12 non pro and mini [0]. The pro comes in what looks like a fairly light silver. Disclaimer: I haven't seen those in real life, I'm going by the apple store website. [0] https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4982/as-images.apple...

I have a white 12; it’s got a gold tint to the white that gives it a warm feel, but I’ve seen mixed reactions to it.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#233

Post by tpush » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

Soooo... If anyone wants the last Intel MacBook Pro with 4 Thunderbolt ports, hit me up :D. I'm really wanting the new Air.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#234

Post by Tagbert » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #21

mojzu wrote: post #6

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.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is mainly because Apple does mostly translation, while Windows on Arm is pure emulation. This combined with the fact that Arm-based Windows PCs have mostly used mobile chips not optimized for the desktop use-case and form factor, is why the new Arm-based Macbooks leave any Arm-based Windows PCs in the dust in terms of performance.

Also, Apple has tuned the M and A series chips to perform well with Objective-c and Swift as used by iOS and Mac OS. One example is that they made some object operations 5x faster than on Intel chips. This speeds up loops and garbage collection significantly. Those are very common operations.

Other vendors are using generic chips that were not tuned for the OS.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#235

Post by mikechen233 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

BooneJS wrote: post #79

“New Intel chips were often delayed and offered only small improvements over previous generations.” As noted on HN and elsewhere, Intel’s struggle has been in manufacturing. They minimized risk (“got lazy”) when Moore’s Law reigned and their fabs were 1-2 generations ahead of everyone else, but have since squeezed every last architectural drop out of 14nm. Put Tiger Lake on TSMC 5nm and a lot of M1’s lead goes away.…

I found say intel not just failed in the process nodes. It also failed to see the rise of the dedicated fab (tsmc) and fabless business model as a more efficient model. Intel also failed at innovating on lower power designs and the gpu. Even at 14nm, there are so much that could be done to improve igpu performance. From color compression, to the more efficient shader array. The nintendo switch runs Nvidia tegra x1. It's a 20nm chip, and look at the performance of the gpu. Intel could have also put their markshare weight to put the alternative to cuda be it opencl or even their own API to really gain market traction. They could have their dedicated gpu. Yet they just ignored the whole massive simd compute market. I think for intel, lossing mobile to arm and see the improvements in mobile year over year should be a wake-up call. Yet they didn't do anything to increase their moat for the past 10 years. Or maybe they did try, but their strategies are just flawed. The strategists at Intel just don't have enough foresight and vision.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#236

Post by Tagbert » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #228

nunez wrote: post #219

Once Docker works on ARM, I’m gonna make the switch. I was very very close to trading in my 2020 MBP and eating the loss, especially after seeing the insane WebKit compilation times and battery usage. I loathe the Touch Bar and am very excited about having a MBA that doesn’t suck. The only concern I have is this: it is my understanding that the arm7 instruction set differs slightly from vendor. Is that true? I’m thin…

Docker on mac runs in a VM anyway, so I would imagine you're still going to run it in x86 mode.

VMs are only expected to run ARM clients. There is no cross-architecture VM support. That might come but it would require something more like software emulation of x86/64 processors which is a bigger tasks.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#237

Post by klelatti » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

mikechen233 wrote: post #235

BooneJS wrote: post #79

“New Intel chips were often delayed and offered only small improvements over previous generations.” As noted on HN and elsewhere, Intel’s struggle has been in manufacturing. They minimized risk (“got lazy”) when Moore’s Law reigned and their fabs were 1-2 generations ahead of everyone else, but have since squeezed every last architectural drop out of 14nm. Put Tiger Lake on TSMC 5nm and a lot of M1’s lead goes away.…

I found say intel not just failed in the process nodes. It also failed to see the rise of the dedicated fab (tsmc) and fabless business model as a more efficient model. Intel also failed at innovating on lower power designs and the gpu. Even at 14nm, there are so much that could be done to improve igpu performance. From color compression, to the more efficient shader array. The nintendo switch runs Nvidia tegra x1. I…

Feels like execution rather than strategy: they've tried at mobile, gpus, foundry etc - the right calls - but just haven't delivered. Apple / AMD / TSMC have executed much better.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#238

Post by hyperpallium2 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

Instead of selling the M1 to manufacturers, Apple will create additional consumer devices with it, and take over everything. For example, in a few years, a console:

Apple will finally enter the game console market, with such a leap in CPU and GPU, that its premium-pricing will be value-for-money.

The higher price will be acceptable to consumers, via monthly plans (as for iphones) - it will be locked down, so the App store will be the only way to use it.

Technologically, they have great SP, they just need great MP. Same for GPU. They can do it.

Games: ARM-based machines are certainly capable - consider the AAA ports to the Switch. They can port again. iPhone GPUs have been more powerful than its 500GFLOPS (undocked) for a while. They also have many games - and developers - on the App store.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#239

Post by Joeri » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #11

rimliu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original comment mentions MB Air, Air has no fans (now that sounds funny :)

Of all the things unveiled during the launch event no-fan thing completely blew me away. That, I was not prepared for! I now wonder, does that mean that MB Air has no moving parts inside it at all?

The keyboard is still a big mess of moving parts, but there is indeed one less moving part to break.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#240

Post by jimnotgym » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

It is funny to read the comments full of excitement.

To me the M1 thing fills me with dread.

To me I just see problems for the IT team. I already know our corporate VPN doesn't run on Big Sur. I have no hope for the monitoring app, or the Antivirus.

Apple is such a pain for corporate IT