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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#341

Post by mlindner »

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.…

Then how is M1 beating _desktop_ top end AMD chips in single core performance? Ignoring Intel here.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#342

Post by to11mtm »

mlindner wrote: post #340
Fnoord wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones). I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had…

Those early SSDs if I remember right had very low cycle limits, the limits now are over 10x better than they were then.

Depends which age/tech.

Every additional 'Level' in the flash decreases the overall life cycle. Mind you, oftentimes drive controllers are fancier, often doing things like treating one of the sections as a less dense flash type to improve write cycles, and keep/move longer held data into the regions treated as QLC.

But, that means that some heavy write patters will indeed wind up worse on a modern drive than the better MLC/TLC models.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#343

Post by glhaynes »

addaon wrote: post #220
tpush wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option. But there is a white iPhone 12? I have one myself. Or is not white enough/too matte or something?

Whoops! My mistake, thanks for that! I has been looking only at the Pro out of habit, but this might push me towards the non-Pro this generation.

Would the "Silver" Pro (white glass with a silver band) be that different?

Re: M1 Macs Review

#344

Post by zepto »

singhrac wrote: post #316
alwillis wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s by the rest of the industry figuring out how to collaborate on delivering similar gains without vertical integration. This is one of the smartest things I've seen on HN in a long time. This is exactly what has to happen if the other companies don't want Apple to eat their lunch.

The thing is... doesn't Samsung already do this with their Exynos chips? And even with Qualcomm, they must already build them with Android (even a particular phone) in mind, right? Yet somehow the A14 is faster than a Snapdragon 865. I think strategically if Exynos put pressure on Qualcomm in a nontrivial way (e.g. Samsung switched entirely, and started selling Exynos chips to their competitors) that would change the…

I don’t see Samsung doing this. It’s one thing knowing that you are going to run Android.

It’s entirely another to decide to be able to invest years in optimizing reference counting in collaboration with the compiler team committing to ARC.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#345

Post by rasz »

mlindner wrote: post #340
Fnoord wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones). I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had…

Those early SSDs if I remember right had very low cycle limits, the limits now are over 10x better than they were then.

Its the other way around. Early SSDs had huge P/E numbers in tens of thousands (SLC). Now we are down in the low hundreds.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#346

Post by rasz »

mlindner wrote: post #341
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.…

Then how is M1 beating _desktop_ top end AMD chips in single core performance? Ignoring Intel here.

It isnt. In Cinebench its up there behind middle of the road Ryzen 5600X in single core, and ~two times slower in multi.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#347

Post by bzbarsky »

brundolf wrote: post #116
ojosilva wrote: post #17

Here's looking at getting one. But I wonder what's the currently compatibility status of the dev stack: node, git, go, java, nginx, databases (pg, mongo, maria...), editors (macvim, vscode...), iTerm, et al. And the brew family of installs, which was covered as part of yesterday's thread [1]. Macos ships with some interpreters pre-installed as part of BigSur, including Ruby, Python and Perl. And most source distribut…

What I've heard is that for the most part, even x86 apps run quite well. Exceptions include weird cases like Docker (virtualization) and web browsers (JavaScript JIT), but as you say Firefox/Chromium have native updates available and Docker is working on it. Docker has no ETA though, so if you depend on that regularly it might be a temporary blocker.

For what it's worth, Rosetta 2 does claim to support JITs (which is a pretty neat trick), and the release notes for Firefox 83 claim it should work fine under Rosetta 2 on the M1.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#348

Post by longnguyen »

Zarel wrote: post #209
longnguyen wrote: post #147

I want M1 MacBook Pro _without_ TouchBar

What's wrong with the M1 MacBook Air?

Nothing wrong. But the Pro is slightly better in term of performance[1] (due to the fan I guess). As reviewed by John Gruber[2], looks like it's not really a fan but "active cooling system" - very quiet. It would be perfect for me if there exists a MacBook Pro without TouchBar. Otherwise I guess I will go with the M1 MacBook Air.

TouchBar might be useful for others but is beyond useless to me.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

[2]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs

Re: M1 Macs Review

#349

Post by cwhiz »

bstar77 wrote: post #48
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.

It's interesting you say "not convinced", curious what you are skeptical of? I'm not upgrading because I just bought a 16" Mbpro 2 months ago, but I'm more than convinced this new architecture is the real deal. Unfortunately for me my 6 year old MacBook just died and I have to have something for work.

Not OP but Apple Gen1 products have a horrible track record.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#350

Post by ActorNightly »

Lio wrote: post #269
ActorNightly wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now this is the case. Before, Dell XPSs were VERY good laptops with same performance for a cheaper price. And thats not including thermal throttling, the bullshit Apple pulls with background OS stuff like checking executable hashes online, being restricted to what software you can run, and so on.

Are you sure? A Dell XPS13 with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,349[1]. An Apple MacBook Air with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,249[2]. The XPS13 is great, I have one myself with Linux on. They're definitely in the same price range as the Apple laptops though. I think the other points you've raised have been addressed else where. There's no restriction on what software you run. You can even replace the OS with Linux if you like by…

I dunno if you are serious or not, but the XPS is a big step above the Air in performance.

Even with current M1 Macs, outside of the battery life, you have sub 2k laptops that blow the M1 out of the water

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15333968

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