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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#241

Post by Joeri »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #96
sgillen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder whether we need to reset expectations on memory amounts. From seeing the reviews where they launch every application installed on the 8gb air and it remains smooth I am suspecting that the unified memory and optimized storage interface means that for M1 macs 8 gb behaves like 16 gb on intel cpu’s.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#242

Post by Lio »

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.…

Interestingly, Intel could also control the whole stack.

They make NUC hardware[1] and Intel Clear Linux[2].

They could tune that stack for a new purpose designed chip... if they wanted to, but it seems unlikely.

1. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...

2. https://clearlinux.org/

Re: M1 Macs Review

#243

Post by mikechen233 »

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.

Rosetta 2 probably also have a JIT mode to deal with software that JIT produces x86 instructions like browsers and java VM. And of course you can do AOT or trans compile static x86 executables. I feel a lot of success of rosetta comes from the sheer perf of the m1 so even the jit and transcompile process is fast, and the execution of not well optimized code is fast. The firestorm cores is at least 60% faster than snapdragons cores per annandtech

Re: M1 Macs Review

#244

Post by hawk_ »

klelatti wrote: post #211
hawk_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: as had been pointed out here there is no x86 code generation happening so this doesn't apply. Yes I have seen claims from people along the lines of 'x86 code has more optimization paths in mainstream compilers for historic and other reasons'. Not sure about that, certainly can't imagine such a significant difference.

But it's emitting ARM64 code in both cases to optimisation paths not relevant here.

You're right there no x86 emitting going on here, so not relevant.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#245

Post by reader_mode »

jstummbillig wrote: post #31
yhersk0vitz wrote: post #16

I feel like this may the first time that Macbooks might actually be worth their premium from a purely hardware perspective. Before people jump on this, I mean that for example the previous Intel MB Pro with i5 would cost like $1,500, which is far more than almost any windows laptop running the same specs.

What you are looking at, tho, is not the pure hardware perspective, but the pure hardware numbers perspective, which excludes ergonomics, design, build quality and hardware/software integration as well as stuff like speakers and screens which might not be comparable because no other vendor does them exactly alike. I always found this strange, when looking at personal computers – or, in fact, most anything in life. As…

I have a 2018 core i9 5000$ MBP 15, it is by far the worst experience from a premium device I've ever had - when I turn on docker and an IDE people in the office start turning their heads towards me, the fan noise is insane - I need to power limit the device using third party software to make it usable it's ridiculous.

Apple sold the old MacBook air (2015 one?) untill 2018 ? And charged like 1000$ for it ? Have you used that crap ? My wife has it and I was laughing my ass off at how terrible the device was - the viewing angles on the screen were better on 400$ HP devices.

Apple keyboards have long been subpar, they have no touchscreen or 2in1 offering which is a perfect form factor for my mobile computing (iPad pro is nice but iOS only that's a deal breaker for almost any professional).

And the beloved macos was super rough in Catalina.

I need to develop for iOS occasionally so I'm forced to use a Mac or swap arround, but I'm sorry - Apple laptops were a bad deal for a long time from most perspectives - I would personally get an X1 over any previous MBP.

M1 and pricing change that for the first time in a long long time - I would recommend this laptop to anyone buying a device in this category.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#246

Post by whalesalad »

Tagbert wrote: post #236
whalesalad wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What limitation exists? Just the fact that right now the M1 doesn't do virtualization?

At some point full x86 virtualization will need to exist on this platform and when that happens you'll be able to run an x86 virtual machine on your mac to back the underlying Docker engine. This is what is happening right now with Hypervisor.framework on a Mac, for instance.

If you develop a lot of ARM for sure run it all in ARM configuration but if you are a dev deploying to the current status quo you would want to continue working with x86 images if possible.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#247

Post by sg47 »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #96
sgillen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do they still ship these Airs with 720p webcams from the 2000s? I have a 2020 Macbook Air that has a terrible webcam.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#248

Post by tomaskafka »

shmoogy wrote: post #13
snazz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MacBook Air that GP mentioned doesn't even have a fan! That's certainly a nice benefit.

I really want the air for when I work outside in the summer. I worked from an iPad quite often with the magic keyboard, and it started throttling and sometimes overheated to the point of failure while outside in the sun. It's too cold in Chicago to test, but I would love to see if the MacBook Air can work while outside in direct hot sun - it's the only reason I'm considering the MBP.

+1 - I love the MB12, but then a summer arrived and I found out that stays under 1 GHz basically all the time when I'm outside.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#249

Post by syspec »

Tagbert wrote: post #234
mtgx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MacOS / iOS apps are not garbage collected

Re: M1 Macs Review

#250

Post by QuotedForTruth »

niea_11 wrote: post #63
seqastian wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People on the car forum comparing bmw with the same horse power as a fiat will agree with you.

I think it's more fair to say comparing a bmw 3 series and a toyota supra. Both are good cars but one is known for its premium finish and quality, and the other for the customization possibilities you can have. :)

This is a funny comparison since BMW actually builds the Supra. Its basically a rebranded Z4.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a310046...

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