Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

Post by masklinn » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:21 AM UTC

iSnow wrote: post #217

thefz wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-powered machines is, tbh The lowest and highest tier exist only to shift consumers towards the middle tier, where Apple profits the most and where lies less value for the consumer. It is a marketing strategy invented by Apple IIRC (it's been a long time since my marketing exam).

I know, but AFAIK those new iMacs ALL feature just 8GB of RAM? There isn't really a middle-tier, that what makes it so weird. you'd expect one machine with top SSD and 16 GB (and space grey, lol). Probably going to be the next iteration of the 27" iMac, spanning from 8GB/256GB (LOL) to 16 GB/1TB or something.

Post by kolinko » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:22 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #247

mrweasel wrote: post #214

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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.

Your web browser probably doesn't have many tabs open, and those that are open, are probably not web apps (think Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp, various internal corporate apps, etc.). I can't even remember a time when just my web browser used up less than 4-5 GB of RAM, on its own. Add at least 500MB - 1 GB for the OS itself, and we're talking about 2 - 3.5GB for apps. I'd immediately swap with just 8GB of RAM with an ID…

Post by dmos62 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #266

apexalpha wrote: post #257

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I like to read news and keep up to date on silicon development but when it comes down to buying a laptop with an Intel CPU I really can't tell how good it is from the name. I usually end up putting it into cpubenchmark to get any sort of comparable numbers. Nowadays a chip from 2014 and 2019 can both be named i5, and the 2014 can have higher clockspeed while being half as slow... You just can't tell, and maybe that's…

Keep in mind this is all fallout from the 90s/really 00's where "clockspeed was king" which AMD worked hard to disabuse the market of. We've never really recovered from that.

Post by mhh__ » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:26 AM UTC

titzer wrote: post #46

tyingq wrote: post #30

I remain interested in seeing how much of Apple's lead is the process size, and how much is engineering prowess. That is, would a more generic new ARM Neoverse on 5nm perform at roughly the same clip? I suppose AWS's Graviton 3 would be the first place to see that, or something close to it.

The CPU microarchitecture is truly a quantum leap ahead of x86 processors. The fixed-width nature of arm instructions means there's way more front-end bandwidth for decode, which can then feed a much larger out-of-order engine. Having memory so close is also a huge win. TBH, I don't know what wizardry they have managed to get power consumption so low, but wow. 15W TDP and trouncing desktop processors pulling 12x that…

Post by slver » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

_xnmw wrote: post #262

the_duke wrote: post #189

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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.

Apple Silicon is NOT just an ARM CPU. It's also a deep integration with macOS, and a unified memory architecture (less unnecessary copying on the bus). For example on the M1, certain very common operations for macOS apps, like freeing Objective C pointers, which happens millions of time per second, are optimized at the hardware level. The M1 is not a CPU. So no, the Ryzen 5000 with 5nm would NOT level the field.