111–120 of 942 posts
I think Apple will keep selling x86 Macs forever. For heavy-duty workstation workloads, M1 just doesn't cut it.
8 high performance 4 low performance cores? Yes please. Or maybe we’ll get 16-16
Disrupt the hosting market, Apple. We're ready for your EC2. Achieving a quantum power/performance leap without swinging for server market share is an massive wasted opportunity. But Apple is Apple. I'll keep dreaming. Oh look, an AWS invoice.
Heat and energy savings only apply to the direct user (in this case Apple Hosting) and unlikely to be passed onto you (since it’s Apple).
We’ve already seen this with M1 computers which are simpler and less expensive but did not have a lower retail price.
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That struck me as an extremely odd metric to differentiate products by, given its low relevance to non-technical users who don't know what a GPU core even is (except gamers, but they are not buying iMacs). Additionally, most people are going to think adding one more core is hardly worth the price upgrade, and its quite strange to see an odd number of cores.
It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact. When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.
Perhaps one reason for using a single model of chip for everything is because the design costs for a 5nm SoC are estimated to be ~$500 million. For comparison, revenue for Apple Mac computers in 2020 was ~$30 Billion. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263428/apples-revenue-fr...
The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law. It's an amazing processor, but a sad sign of things to come. The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get performance gains is to build custom chips for com…
Death of moore’s law? Hmm. Meanwhile I just got a R9 5950X and it is drastically faster than my 5 year old i7. There must be some doubling of transistors in there, right? Also maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of a new generation of ARM CPUs wasn’t the wisest choice. Or maybe it is, idk.
Assuming the M1 performance extrapolates to desktop power/cooling it's going to be a monster chip. If that is the case I think apple will not stop at having the fastest watch/phone/tablet/laptop/PC. Why not go after the datacenter and leave money (a ton of money) on the table?
- 5800U, mobile (10-25W), 1400(S), 7000(M)
- 5800, desktop (65W), 1600(S), 9000(M)
- 5800X, desktop (105W), 1700(S), 11000(M)
and
- M1, mobile (10W), 1700(S), 7000(M)
Everyone's going gaga over the fact that the passively cooled M1 can trade blows with big desktop towers. But mobile Zen3 is not that far behind those towers either, so I think much more thermal headroom buys you less than people assume.
You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn't thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back eithe…
Why not? It's basically back to where we were in 1980 when "everything" had a Z80 or 6502 (or both!) in it, and the major differences were in what else was in the system.
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if you are not using an apple phone, your smartphone likely uses an ARM-licensed chip, and chromebooks/windows RT devices ran ARM cores the only thing holding back wider adoption is legacy x86 software
Gaming is still x86 territory and that includes 2 of the 3 main competing gaming consoles isn't? Hard to think of a PS5 as legacy stuff.
Earlier consoles used a boatload of different CPU and GPU architectures (PowerPC, SuperH, IBM Cell, other proprietary stuff, x86), nowadays consoles have converged to essentially a locked down, glorified x86 PC on one side (Xbox One, Xbox S/X, PS4, PS5) and ruggedized ARM-based tablets (Nintendo Switch) on the other side.
On the mobile gaming space, ARM already has achieved utter dominance with Switch + iPhone + Android... all it needs for ARM to conquer the console market is for someone to tape out an extremely powerful chip and actually sell it - Apple won't.
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say - M1s are differing in clock speed, number of cores and number of GPU cores across Apple products as well. "M1" is basically equivalent to "Core i" designation from Intel - except that Apple just doesn't tell you about the other part.
No? That's the entire point of the article. The only difference is whether you get a 7 core or 8 core GPU. > If you want to buy a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, Apple will sell you an M1. Want a Mac Mini? You get an M1. Interested in the iMac or the new iPad Pro? You get an M1. It’s possible that the M1 CPUs inside the iMac will have different thermal or clock behavior than those inside the systems Apple has already lau…
Why does Apple put different amount of cores and clocks into different products if the choice doesn't matter? It seems like there are performance differences there if they choose to install differently configured SoCs in different devices and even split them by pricing on the iMac.
So, please, explain where's this big difference? (With more than a single sentence of your words if possible.)