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Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

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21–30 of 201 posts

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#21
post #10

I do give Apple credit for a terrific design. It would be interesting to know how much of the performance is attributable to the smaller process size, on-package memory, etc. Things others will be able to replicate. It's not clear to me how much of it is true competitive advantage.

This article gives a pretty good overview of the components that make the M1 different (nb. I'm not a hardware person):

https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#22
post #14

I have seen so many articles on HN in front page about M1 over the past few weeks. Like a curious child I read all of them because somewhere in me I want to believe there exists a possibility of a giant leap for Desktop/Laptop. Having tried it myself, I should say this is going to be remembered just like the iPhone in 2007.

I doubt that very much. The iPhone was a true revelation: in user interface, in form factor, in the things it allowed you to do. The M1 is amazing but it doesn’t compare. Performance (both raw and thermal) is a big boost but it’s not going to reinvent computing.

It won't reinvent UI, but it signaled the change to ARM and by extension, RISC.

To a normal consumer, that's not a big deal (although 17 hour battery life is already pretty huge). To future PC hardware and server/backend infrastructure, that's a huge deal.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#23
post #14

I have seen so many articles on HN in front page about M1 over the past few weeks. Like a curious child I read all of them because somewhere in me I want to believe there exists a possibility of a giant leap for Desktop/Laptop. Having tried it myself, I should say this is going to be remembered just like the iPhone in 2007.

I doubt that very much. The iPhone was a true revelation: in user interface, in form factor, in the things it allowed you to do. The M1 is amazing but it doesn’t compare. Performance (both raw and thermal) is a big boost but it’s not going to reinvent computing.

I disagree... laptops and desktops have been “dead” forever. The release cycles are boring and the computers even more so. This chip is a big change - Apple came out of the gate offering it in 3 form factors. That’s meaningful.

For the task worker populations at my employer, we only committed serious cash to upgrades when Windows 10 started cutting off support. The funny thing is in some ways the newer devices are slower than the old Haswell stuff. Cheaper laptops are lighter but have awful thermals.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#24
post #13

> Will Microsoft now offer an official Windows 10 on ARM that can run on M1 Macs?...This could create trouble in the x86 PC world. Or will Microsoft, less committed to Windows than it is to its applications running everywhere, be content to see Office and more run (and generate revenue) on M1 Macs…and how will HP, Asus, Dell and others react? This is just the beginning of a new competitive layout. Could this be good…

Why? If everyone gives up and just builds everything on the web then it's an indirect boon for Linux, but M1 will probably never ever properly support Linux. Unless Apple have a complete change of heart, if it ever does it will be as a result of far too much work done for free

Early days, but Hypervisor.framework patches are being built that allow QEMU to run an Arm build of Linux (and Windows) at native speed.

https://twitter.com/jonmasters/status/1333555759737663489

The reality is that some of the drivers for the M1 chip will never arrive, but that if you want to run Linux (or Windows) Arm code then you can do so soon.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#25
post #19

> Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD, or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property I keep seeing this line and wonder - "did people miss the news about Nvidia buying Arm?". Sure, there are still plenty of hurdles to pass until it's official, but take a look at the initial piece written by Nvidia about the acquisition: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for... Spe…

Won’t be the first or the last acquisition to say everything will stay the same.

> Won’t be the first or the last acquisition to say everything will stay the same.

Then change it a year or so down the road, requiring you to have an account on some other non-related service in order for your hardware to work. /sarcasm

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#26
Since these keep floating up, I'm already exhausted with this specific rebuttal to Morehead's review:

> As pointed out in John Gruber’s hard takedown of Moorhead’s piece, most of the problems he encountered were software problems, not M1 hardware issues.

Morehead's allegiances and work are relevant biases, as are Gruber's. But Morehead's review wasn't of the M1 processor or architecture as a technology. It was a review of the 13" M1 MacBook Pro as an end-user device.

Software problems _are_ worth raising in a review of who should buy an M1 MacBook, and why someone shouldn't.

Because of the architecture change, the M1 has to come up — to omit its role in requiring Rosetta would be lying through omission. It's not an indictment of the technology, and shouldn't be controversial, for an end-user review to say the first OS revision targeting the first generation of a piece of hardware maybe isn't ready for every task thrown at it, especially those that rely on the newest of the new software components. It's why my workplace isn't even mostly on Catalina yet, much less Big Sur.

For the love of whatever stupid internet points people are trying to win, let Morehead's review go. It's contributor report on Forbes, which makes it only slightly more relevant than a Reddit post. Folks can absolutely find better things to squabble over about these computers.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#27

I have seen so many articles on HN in front page about M1 over the past few weeks. Like a curious child I read all of them because somewhere in me I want to believe there exists a possibility of a giant leap for Desktop/Laptop. Having tried it myself, I should say this is going to be remembered just like the iPhone in 2007.

I have an M1 air 8-core 16gb ram model and yes, yes it will. I said something similar when it launched and people dismissed it. Article upon article online of PC die-hards dismissing it, Apple fanboys praising it.

It’s a leap for sure. It’s a really really good chip. We’ll look back from 2027 and see.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#28

I have seen so many articles on HN in front page about M1 over the past few weeks. Like a curious child I read all of them because somewhere in me I want to believe there exists a possibility of a giant leap for Desktop/Laptop. Having tried it myself, I should say this is going to be remembered just like the iPhone in 2007.

The iPhone literally changed everyone's life. History books will differentiae between the pre and post smartphone eras. This is nowhere close to a lifechanging product, although it's definitely a big leap.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#29

I have seen so many articles on HN in front page about M1 over the past few weeks. Like a curious child I read all of them because somewhere in me I want to believe there exists a possibility of a giant leap for Desktop/Laptop. Having tried it myself, I should say this is going to be remembered just like the iPhone in 2007.

I think the M1 is more analogous to the release of the 64-bit A7 CPU. Which doesn’t diminish it’s importance at all. The A7 was the inflection point that had the competition scrambling [unsuccessfully] to catch up to Apple ever since.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#30

> Will Microsoft now offer an official Windows 10 on ARM that can run on M1 Macs?...This could create trouble in the x86 PC world. Or will Microsoft, less committed to Windows than it is to its applications running everywhere, be content to see Office and more run (and generate revenue) on M1 Macs…and how will HP, Asus, Dell and others react? This is just the beginning of a new competitive layout. Could this be good…

I think it will benefit Linux but not that way. It will force the x86 vendors to adopt the microarchitectural aspects of the M1 that make it fast in practice, instead of spending so much area/power budget chasing SPEC benchmarks. We will get better chips through competition.
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