421–430 of 467 posts
The fact that we are even able to realistically compare a CPU in an ultralight laptop with no fan to an i9 is absolutely amazing. To me that would be an upgrade even if performance is a complete wash.
You're not wrong but the article is still a 9th gen laptop i9. A desktop i9 is quicker - https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9880H-vs... .
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I sit here with 24GB memory usage just from my browser, a couple PDFs and two IDEs (Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code).
Your computer always uses as much memory as possible. That’s not evidence it wouldn’t work with less.
As always, it depends what you're doing.
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I mean can you imagine the uproar it would cause if Apple did that?
There wouldn't be any uproar if they're sold as a cheaper lower spec model. Apple could be stockpiling them for later, having led with the higher performance chips for marketing purposes.
We're trying to understand why did the existing M1 Mini perform worse in some of those tests than the M1 Air did, while there is no known reason for it. Some speculate that they inexplicitly sell subpar/low freq chips, which would mean that they were selling an official 7-core, an official 8-core and a faster but otherwise non-advertised version of 8-core. And on top of that, the latter would be installed in Mac Air that has the worst (passive) cooling solution from all current M1 offerings...
That doesn't make sense on any level and is just something Apple could not do and successfully hide from everyone, especially that they already have an explicit binning process.
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The X1 Carbon, which is what I assume you're referring to with Thinkpad, is 2.6Lbs vs 2.8Lbs for the 2020 Macbook Air. That's 90g of difference ... I'd say that qualifies for Ultralight still.
The new X1 nano is 907g (1.99 lbs), so the Macbook Air at 1.29kg is 42% heavier. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/coming-soon/ThinkPad-X1-Nano/p/...
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Yeah seeing a MacBook Air beat an i9 is hilarious. I think this should put arguments over X86 efficiency disadvantages to bed. The X86 is obviously a huge boat anchor. There is no other explanation for this monstrous of a performance efficiency gap... unless Apple has invented something fundamentally new that has never been done in the entire history of CPU design. I doubt that.
I doubt the instruction set is the only (or even the main) advantage M1 has. Apple just has been hiring some of the best talent in the field for a long time now that have been working on their phone/tablet chips and now used their talents on the M1. There is a lot you can do to improve a CPU without changing the instruction set or manufacturing process just by doing a better job at designing the CPU itself. (look at…
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Yeah, but then you lose the benefits of the integrated memeory. How they're gonna solve that is the big question.
There actually aren't really any benefits outside of manufacturing. Trace length is a marginal factor in memory performance/latency, and having the memory on-package versus only slightly further away doesn't mean much. I'm not sure exactly where the idea that having the memory on-package was so beneficial came from, especially considering the M1 actually has fairly poor memory latency (though within the expected norm…
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Devil's advocate: anything that says Compaq on it is probably e-waste anyway, standards notwithstanding. Being standards-compliant isn't enough to save a machine from the landfill by itself; if those machines can't keep up with users' expectations, they too will end up discarded. Most devices that people throw away are "serviceable" machines. The people who rescue old hardware with linux and put it back into service…
I used Compaq in my example because they were the first company to reverse engineer and IBM bios through some legal slight of hand (one group reverse engineered the entire BIOS and wrote a spec, an entirely different group re-implemented that spec, and the first PC compatible was born). I wasn't commenting on the quality of the brand at all.
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There wouldn't be any uproar if they're sold as a cheaper lower spec model. Apple could be stockpiling them for later, having led with the higher performance chips for marketing purposes.
But we're not speculating about what would happen if Apple did that explicitly . We're trying to understand why did the existing M1 Mini perform worse in some of those tests than the M1 Air did, while there is no known reason for it. Some speculate that they inexplicitly sell subpar/low freq chips, which would mean that they were selling an official 7-core, an official 8-core and a faster but otherwise non-advertised…
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I have been trying to explain to people that having the DRAM chips physically next to the SOC on the package does not actually meaningfully improve memory latency. I get that people on this site are excited, but please be excited about the right things.
People seem to have dramatically missed the point here; it's almost certainly done for power reasons.
The chip area can be re-used for compute-sized transistors and wires (much, much smaller than interface transistors and wires, so there can be many more of them).