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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

#281

Post by Macha »

apexalpha wrote: post #257
noir_lord wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Just be aware those kind of sites aren't always impartial, particularly in how they weight actual metrics to come to the composite single score, e.g. userbenchmark: https://ownsnap.com/userbenchmark-is-not-trusted-by-tech-ent...

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

#282

Post by xiphias2 »

smiley1437 wrote: post #27
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…

Are there examples of Arm designs OTHER than the M1 which are suitable for consumers? Yes, the M1 is a remarkable product and it will certainly make inroads against x86 on the desktop but it is from a single company. Will Apple M1 (2, 3 etc) replace all x86 devices in a decade? That’s hard to swallow. Now, if we see another Arm product released that ALSO kicks x86 butt, from another player, then maybe I’d believe a c…

Lots of software have been ported to ARM architecture in the last half year, so the clock started ticking for great ARM based Windows laptops. But it's clear that ARM's memory ordering has won.

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

#283

Post by adrianmsmith »

elcomet wrote: post #130
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #101

> Apple’s gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation. This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini. Apple makes a lot of money by offering a range of processor options. At the moment we are early in the transition but…

But the point is that people do not care about the cpu in their mac. They care about screen size, price and other stuff. Apple is still selling intel versions, because either they are cheaper (older generations), or because the newest version does not have the M1 yet (like the 16" mac book pro).

That's not the only reason - the M1 is limited to 16GB which is fine for many workloads, but not for all. Plus not everything works on the M1 yet e.g. running Linux in a VM.

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

#284

Post by dmos62 »

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…

> I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128GB of ram and I wouldn't accept any less

What on earth are you programming?

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

#286

Post by Macha »

dmos62 wrote: post #275
XorNot wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate? I do remember clockspeed being the main thing you looked at and then being surprised that changed, but didn't really have any insight.

Pipelining was really kicking off in a big way and suddenly IPC made as big a difference at a time amd led in that regard as clock speed so amd started numbering their cpu models with a number that was based on the MHz they'd expect an Intel CPU to need to reach to match it.

Of course intel also released new CPUs and AMD didn't want their newer CPUs to have lower numbers than their old one, so that number eventually got inflated.

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

#287

Post by skohan »

slver wrote: post #279
_xnmw wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are objective c pointers handled?

From what I understood, ARC operations are cheaper on M1 because of weaker memory ordering constraints. But I thought this was and ARM thing, not M1 specific, but I could be wrong

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

#288

Post by skohan »

_xnmw wrote: post #262
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.

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.

But from what I understand, there's a much smaller gap between ryzen and M1 than intel

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

#289

Post by fireattack »

I was always taught ARM (and M1), being a RISC architecture, isn't as "capable" as x86 in some way, whatever it means.

I am no longer sure if that's still the case, since they seem to work just as good, if not better (energy efficiency). Of course, it's not exactly an apple to apple comparison since Apple upgraded so many other things, but I just didn't see any mention about the limitation of being RISC in these articles.

Could someone enlighten in this respect for an average Joe who knows nothing about hardware?

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

#290

Post by arvinsim »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #109
speedplane wrote: post #69

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.

5950x is the last greatest chip on the AMD4 platform. I think their would be enough demand for it in the future for the price to stay high.
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