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Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

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Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#181

Post by copascetic »

totalZero wrote: post #179
copascetic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Moorhead's review literally contains this sentence: > The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect- it has many warts, that nearly nobody is discussing. He then proceeds to describe not war…

A reviewer cannot in good faith separate M1 silicon from its end-user product experience, because it is not a standalone product. M1 is not available off the shelf. It is only available in a couple of small laptops and the Mac Mini.

It's easy to rewrite that sentence to make that separation clear, and he doesn't. Gruber goes into detail about the author's history of being wrong and misleading in the past regarding Apple's processors, so in that context I think it's fair to take that part of the review in bad faith.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#182

Post by copascetic »

chii wrote: post #127
copascetic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Moorhead's review literally contains this sentence: > The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect- it has many warts, that nearly nobody is discussing. He then proceeds to describe not war…

> rather warts of the 3rd party software ecosystem. which is the result of the change in processor. There is, of course, an undertone of bias in the review against the M1. It's like someone reviewing a tesla car and complain that it's difficult to charge because there's not enough chargers in the road networks and gas stations don't cater for electric vehicles. A valid complaint about the tesla car, but not caused di…

Yes, and if you wrote such a review, and many have I'm sure, you wouldn't say that the electric drivetrain itself "has warts".

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#183

Post by totalZero »

czzr wrote: post #18
untog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’s not the same, but this is significantly accelerating the end of x86, and the end of Intel (at least the end of the current dominance of both). Such shifts don’t come along that often.

To put your comment in perspective:

Intel has 90+% market share in servers.

Apple has 15% market share in personal computers.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#184

Post by lostmsu »

wyldfire wrote: post #49
amelius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I should say this is going to be remembered just like the iPhone in 2007. I hope people will not forget about TSMC who made this all possible.

Is that really the case? Apple's design of the CPU itself seems like it's a bigger unique factor than the fab. Doesn't TSMC make competitors chips that are benchmarking much poorer than M1? Qualcomm got rid of their mobile ARM CPU designs a while back. Can the snapdragon cx / SQ2 series hope to compete using ARM reference designs, with Apple out so far ahead?

We will only know once AMD APUs on TSMC 5nm will come out. If you look at 7nm options, A12Z and AMD Ryzen 7 4800U, the former has better single thread, but the later has much higher multicore.

Unfortunately, I could not find any data on TDP of A12Z under full load, so it is impossible to guesstimate at the moment which design is superior.

UPD. Actually, there's this: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

If I am to believe the successor to 4800U will gain 10% perf from switching 7nm -> 5nm, design-wise it matches M1.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#185

Post by gamblor956 »

alwillis wrote: post #168
gamblor956 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what business you're in. If you're in the content creation business, you're good to go [1]. I am definitely going to differ on that. My last job (until this summer) was in Hollywood for a content creation company (live broadcast + streaming) and I worked very heavily with the content creation guys and the digital production team (as a result of working on them for R&D tax credit documentation purposes. Tha…

The exception doesn’t prove the rule.

It's not the exception, it's the rule.

These guys didn't choose to switch away from Mac because they wanted to complicate their lives and have to learn a new OS; they did so because the switchover was industry-wide and and they'd already made the switch at their previous jobs. The studios got burned by Apple's lack of support for a decade, combined with the Mac's excessive costs and switched to nix and Windows (primarily nix) starting during the Great Recession.

Generally, Windows is in the mix simply because a lot of the software that the (non-technical) artists use is stabler or easier to support on Windows than it is on nix, like Maya, 3DS, Premiere, etc., and running these on Windows is a quarter of the cost, or less, of running the same software on Mac.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#186

Post by totalZero »

breck wrote: post #4

The name rang a bell so I just double checked: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gassée He knows what he’s taking about.

This feels cynical to say, but I don't know whether to listen to Gassee wholeheartedly or to take his perspective with a grain of salt. On the one hand, he has deep experience with Apple and great knowledge of the computing industry, but on the other, he is an elderly technologist who was pushed out of Apple decades ago [1] and is no more relevant to M1 than anyone else in the industry.

In either case, I tend to disagree with Gassee's attack on the Morehead review, and I don't believe that there is any need to connect Morehead's M1 opinion with his 64-bit iPhone opinion. M1 should indeed be judged on its instruction set limitations because that is one of its major differences versus x86. It would be careless to consider personal computing hardware while forcibly ignoring the sofware ecosystem that it supports.

I also think it's a cheap shot to accuse Morehead of choosing his opinions based on a financial interest in the supremacy of x86.

[1] https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-13-firing-frank...

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#187

Post by Recurecur »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #180
gabereiser wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, it’s not a new form factor. It doesn’t have that shiny “new thing” feeling. My Air looks like every other 2018+ air. What’s different is what you don’t see. Being able to code all day on battery and only using 18%. The CPU-core power to watt ratio is just unbelievable. I get it though, without the new form factor it lacks that defining moment. The moment came for me when I realized I wasn’t plugged in all day a…

If the battery life is the main point, why were thinkpads with slice batteries and powerbridge ("up to 30 hours" in 2018) not more successful? I think it is more about the fact that apple successfully makes things "mainstream". For instance, the air form factor had been done before by Sony (and those even had hires screens), but only got popular after the air.

Battery life alone isn't the main point!

Extreme battery life + extreme performance is the main point!

The Thinkpads with extra battery weren't in the same "small and light" class as the Air and MBP 13. These "small and light" laptops with 20 hour video playback are faster than current workstation class laptops!

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#188

Post by totalZero »

copascetic wrote: post #181
totalZero wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reviewer cannot in good faith separate M1 silicon from its end-user product experience, because it is not a standalone product. M1 is not available off the shelf. It is only available in a couple of small laptops and the Mac Mini.

It's easy to rewrite that sentence to make that separation clear, and he doesn't. Gruber goes into detail about the author's history of being wrong and misleading in the past regarding Apple's processors, so in that context I think it's fair to take that part of the review in bad faith.

Morehead isn't asking us to take his word for it. He used the device for a few days and shared his review as a counterpoint explicitly intended to balance against the pro-M1 hype. I thought it was a pretty nice assessment because Morehead focused on product usability instead of raw benchmarks, and I used his review as part of the process of informing my recent decision to buy an Intel MBP13 rather than an M1 model.

It seems obvious that Morehead's opinion seven years ago about 64bit being unnecessary in mobile was incorrect, mainly because today's mainstream phones ship with more RAM than 32bit would support, but that doesn't mean every word Morehead types is now ritually unclean. He was wrong about something; it hurts his credibility but doesn't banish him from the conversation.

Besides, unless we think Morehead doctored his screenshots, it's pretty hard to argue that his review is nonfactual in its entirety.

More specifically to your point, I don't see why there has to be a separation between hardware quality and software experience when the user (A) can't buy the hardware without paying for the OS too, and (B) can't use the hardware without using the OS too.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#189

Post by Recurecur »

jeffbee wrote: post #151
alwillis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about being starved for anything; it’s that Intel and AMD have legacy issues they can’t get around. They’ve pretty much out of bullets: more cores, higher clock frequencies, better manufacturing, etc. The point they can’t process as many instructions per clock cycle and there’s nothing they can do about it. They can’t match the M1’s performance per watt. And certainly there’s no Intel/AMD laptop processor wi…

Intel's current generation CPUs have the same dual-channel LPDDR4X memory that Apple uses. Memory is not "on the same die" for either company because you don't make DRAM on the same process where you make CPUs.

The grandparent used the wrong term. The memory isn't on the die, but it is in the package (MCM). I don't think that provides faster throughput, but it should help latency.

Regardless, the big win was giving unified access to that memory using a memory fabric. That lets the GPU (for instance) access graphics assets with no copying - it just uses them in place.

AMD can absolutely do the same thing, if it desires. Intel can too, but it has a hill to climb WRT GPU performance.

Apple's AI chiplet is another matter...

Re: Apple Silicon M1 Disruption

#190

Post by copascetic »

totalZero wrote: post #188
copascetic wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to rewrite that sentence to make that separation clear, and he doesn't. Gruber goes into detail about the author's history of being wrong and misleading in the past regarding Apple's processors, so in that context I think it's fair to take that part of the review in bad faith.

Morehead isn't asking us to take his word for it. He used the device for a few days and shared his review as a counterpoint explicitly intended to balance against the pro-M1 hype. I thought it was a pretty nice assessment because Morehead focused on product usability instead of raw benchmarks, and I used his review as part of the process of informing my recent decision to buy an Intel MBP13 rather than an M1 model. I…

If you just bought a new Intel MBP then you got a horrible deal by comparison. I also didn't say the review was nonfactual, just that it contains within it an inaccurate framing and conflation of M1 as a processor and the overall product. It's worth noting though that many others' experiences with it, and Rosetta 2 specifically, were quite different than Moorhead's, so unless you're using the specific set of software Moorhead mentioned in his review, it's very possible you would have been better served by an M1, even today.
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