131–140 of 942 posts
I think Apple will keep selling x86 Macs forever. For heavy-duty workstation workloads, M1 just doesn't cut it.
The m1 is built specifically to sip power and run cool. You don't think apple could come up with an arm processor that can keep up or exceed desktop x86 when those constraints are removed?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue. The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months. Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in tw…
Moore's law is only about the number of transistors per chip doubling every 24 months, not about the performance. Seeing that the trend is still happening, Moore's law is not dead, as so many have claimed.
x86 is dead - first in consumer, then in cloud. It is hard to see to me how this ends any other way. The creative class (us) will quickly have largely all ARM computers within 4 years. Its not hard to see from there how software will be even more optimized for ARM variants than x86 and that the scale of both mobile and consumer computing will push x86 out of the datacenter slowly as old software that relies on x86 is…
Creative class is a lot more than programmers. Look at boutique system integrators like Puget Systems... do you see Apple/ARM Hardware? Heck no you don't! These guys sell hardware to a LOT of the companies that comprise the credits in movie production, game production, laboratories, university science departments, ML researchers, big energy, and soooooo much more. These guys are not rewriting their software stack for…
But the M1 is already a huge hit in the music and design community, which is pro-performance oriented. If subsequent Mnx chips provide enough of a speed bump they're going to destroy the high end Xeon market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue. The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months. Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in tw…
Moore's law is only about the number of transistors per chip doubling every 24 months, not about the performance. Seeing that the trend is still happening, Moore's law is not dead, as so many have claimed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years. The 2012 MacBook Pro 15-inch I'm typing this on is about 700 on Geekbench single-core, while the 2019 16-inch is about 950. 35% "improvement" in seven years! M1 13-inch is 1700 on single-core, which is why I hope to upgrade once the 16-inch Apple Silicon version comes out. >The "one-trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent performance" gap, but by definition, are imp…
Apple's M1 is a good processor, but the only reason it "smashed past" previous macbook single core results is apple was using older Intel lower powered processors. It is not twice as fast as even mobile x86 stuff, as much as people seem to want to think otherwise.
- macbook pro: 9 minutes
- mini: 5 minutes
- imac: 4 minutes
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.
Personally I'd like them to offer alternative versions of their CPU to cloud providers, I imagine that the current core configurations are not ideal for the sorts of workloads the big cloud providers need from a single processor.
But this will require serious heavy lifting and would likely require official linux support for Apple's hardware (undoubtedly they have internal systems running bare metal linux on Apple silicon), however I don't see Apple wanting to do this in the open and in public.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? They've only replaced the lower tier of Macbooks and iMacs with the current M1 board, which suggests to me that they're working on a variant with more CPU and GPU cores that will go into the higher tiers of those machines.
I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that. Since M1 products are selling very well, they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1. A higher performance M1 would have a bigger die size. It would have a lower yield and get fewer dies per wafer. The same capacity would sell fewer products. Apple probably earns more profits by simply sell…
Got any proof or something? This is a bold claim to make.
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.