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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

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Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#231

Post by oblio »

emteycz wrote: post #192
the_duke wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the marketing effort is immense, and it's really surprising to me how many eagerly lap up the angle Apple is pushing without much reflection, even on HN. Like the good old Apple hype days. Now to be fair, the M1 is an impressive iteration on the A* chip line. But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field.

But there isn't a 5nm version of those... And laptop battery life is vastly different between these two.

The difference isn't that big: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKN9nvXTGHE

And for 5nm, I'm quite sure AMD already has contracts for that with TSMC. So the gap should be even smaller.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#232

Post by truculent »

the_duke wrote: post #204
emteycz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there isn't a 5nm version of those... And laptop battery life is vastly different between these two.

Can you link a good test result that proves this? The 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile chips are not very power hungry either.

Is this relevant?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5bAMoQt7EQ

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#233

Post by noir_lord »

klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

It could be clearer but I suspect they do it on purpose for a purpose I've never understood.

I've always thought that a system like

    i7-4-8-10-M (4 cores, 8 threads, 10th gen - Mobile)
    i5-8-8-11-H (8 cores, 8 threads, 11th gen - High perf/Desktop)
There has to be a reason they haven't just been explicit with it.

When I shop for a cpu I care about a handful of things, manufacturer, cores, threads, generation, model

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#234

Post by anthk »

thesandlord wrote: post #60
lstamour wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page you're citing contradicts that statement -- they will not be 100% off x86, but instead will offer 100% of their products with the option of buying an Apple ARM chip: > This transition will also establish a common architecture across all Apple products, making it far easier for developers to write and optimize their apps for the entire ecosystem. > Apple plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the e…

I'm sure they will support x86 for years, but I have a feeling they will stop selling new products with x86 rather quickly. If you look at the PPC to x86 transition [0] it happened faster than predicted, and OS support only lasted 3 years after it was done. IMO Microsoft is the company that heavily prioritizes backwards compatibility, while Apple is happy to drop support where necessary to move forward. [0] https://e…

Yes, but in the PPC era Apple published amazing quality products several times superior to W98SE, W2000 and even XP.

Now, until the M1, Intel Macs where pretty much mediocre, even against a (fully configured OFC) KDE [3-5] BSD/Linux setup. Even with their iThingie ecosystem integration.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#235

Post by oblio »

the_duke wrote: post #189
klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

Yeah the marketing effort is immense, and it's really surprising to me how many eagerly lap up the angle Apple is pushing without much reflection, even on HN. Like the good old Apple hype days. Now to be fair, the M1 is an impressive iteration on the A* chip line. But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. A 5nm version of the AMD stuff should be reasonably close to the M1.

The main bottleneck is the production capacity, we badly need more manufacturers of high end chipsets.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#236

Post by matwood »

CrLf wrote: post #125
outside1234 wrote: post #13

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…

> People won't want to develop on x86 and deploy to ARM. It's still too early to say if people want to develop on ARM to deploy on x86. The 90's with all their "better than x86" chips couldn't beat the fact that people want to develop on the same architecture to which they deploy. Back then that meant displacing all these other chips from the server side because there was no option but x86 for us mortals to have as P…

> ARM server chips are weak

For AWS cloud customers, I don't think this is true anymore. Graviton2 is quite capable with better performance in some instances for less money. I've already started moving some Java services to Graviton2 for the cost savings.

AWS is positioning the the Graviton2 in such a way that everyone using AWS will end up on them if they can.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#237

Post by arvinsim »

gambiting wrote: post #203
sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

So my sister does professional photography, and went from a 16GB MacBook Pro(2016) to an 8GB Air, and reports no decrease of productivity - quite the opposite, in her experience all Adobe programs run much faster, and the machine is quieter and lighter to boot. So yeah, I'm not sure - maybe the ram amount isn't as a big deal as people make it out to be. On the other hand I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128…

Web Developer here. Wouldn't accept anything less than 32GB for a work machine.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#238

Post by refactor_master »

sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

Space and specs are becoming more and more meaningless to me, as all programming work is offloaded to the cloud anyway.

Yet I have a gigantic laptop that does nothing but produce heat from opening python scripts.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#239

Post by Joeri »

emteycz wrote: post #190
klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

There's a value in that too - people know immediately that i7 is powerful, and everyone [that cares] already knows that processors are renewed frequently. Though yeah, perhaps something like 7i1, 7i2 would've been better. Apple solved this nicely (given the naming is confirmed) with M1X.

It is very confusing because typically the previous generation’s i7 performs the same as the current gen’s i5, within the same tdp tier, and i5’s from a higher tdp can vastly outperform i7’s from a lower tdp within the same generation. Typically at any one time there are two or three processor generations in actual laptops being sold, as well as three or more tdp classes, so there is basically no good way of knowing how different laptops in the store compare performance-wise except by looking up benchmarks.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#240

Post by arvinsim »

mrweasel wrote: post #214
sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

Really? I still use seven year old MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM. It’s perfectly fine for developing in at least Python, Go or Nim, with a Docker container or two and MariaDB in the background. Sure, when/if I upgrade I’d go for 16GB of memory, but one should be careful about projecting ones own needs onto other.

What IDE are you using?
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