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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

#301

Post by bashinator »

tarsinge wrote: post #143
solatic wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? Apple is iPhone-izing (for lack of a better word) the rest of their product lines. If for the last ten years, the market hasn't really cared about the speed of the phone's processor within the same generation, but rather about physical differentiators (e.g. screen size, number of camera lenses, adding facial recognition), and the non-professional market is overwh…

> the non-professional market is overwhelmingly characterized by light-usage applications I'm not sure social networks and most modern sites or apps qualifies as light-usage nowadays. Browsing Reddit or Facebook put my pro to its knees. The difference of CPU speed in phones is clearly visible for consumers (but maybe you don't notice it if you only use iPhones, because an SE from 2015 is still fast, but try an Androi…

That’s because new Reddit is laden with ads and JS and crap. Try https://old.reddit.com

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

#302

Post by ndiddy »

foldr wrote: post #264
oblio wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has less battery life and less performance (judging by Cinebench, at least), so it is a fairly substantial difference. And it's quite possible that Apple will remain one TSMC process ahead of AMD for the next few years, even if AMD do put out 5nm chips in the near future.

The surface laptop has a Ryzen 4000 CPU, not Ryzen 5000.

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

#303

Post by thehnguy »

mysterydip wrote: post #211
emteycz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fine if you're buying new. Is there an i5 that beats an older i7 in performance? When buying a used laptop or desktop, how much extra research do I need to do to figure out which processor I'm actually getting? There's been 13 years of i7's.

This was a situation I ran into a lot when buying simple Intel-based nuc's for family. It got more complex when the difference between and i5 and i7 got really close due to thermal constraints.

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

#304

Post by thehnguy »

Tehnix wrote: post #300
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.

I just went from a 32GB RAM Macbook Pro to an 8GB RAM M1 Macbook Air...the difference is insane, I don't know what the hell the MB Pro is doing with its RAM, but it just felt like RAM was never enough on Intel Macbooks. Here on the M1, I don't feel my system crawling to a halt like I did on the MB Pro, and I'm doing the same workloads.

Exactly. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. 8GB of M1 RAM is very different than 32GB of standard DIMM-like RAM.

Sort of like when people compare nm of processes on the chips. You can't just say "oh, their number is smaller, it must be better."

To be sure a device with 16GB of M1 RAM should be more competent than 8GB of M1 RAM, but now that's apples to apples.

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

#305

Post by Grustaf »

oblio wrote: post #235
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.

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.

So a future hypothetical AMD processor could be as good as the M1, and that shows how M1 is just marketing hype?

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

#306

Post by BadOakOx »

skohan wrote: post #292
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.

Which Ryzen laptop currently competes with the latest macbooks in terms of form factor, performance, battery life and build quality? I'm honestly asking, I've been thinking about getting a Linux laptop in a while and I would be curious to see what the playing field is like

Dave2D just reviewed the new surface laptop comparing it to the new MacBook Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKN9nvXTGHE ...and he got pretty good battery life (11 hours on his own benchmark).

edit: form factor, performance, build quality.. is also up there, I just didn't mention it, because I think the battery life is the killer feature of the M1.

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

#307

Post by scoopertrooper »

jimbokun wrote: post #293
arvinsim wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But have you benchmarked your workflow on x86+32GB vs M1+8GB?

I'm typing this response on a 8GB M1. It's great, but its no magic. Its limitations do start to show in memory intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads.

Getting some down votes, which I attribute to reasonable skepticism, so hopefully this will allay your concerns.

https://ibb.co/VM4Z1DY

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

#308

Post by thehnguy »

_xnmw wrote: post #270
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.

X cores + X gigs of RAM does not mean better performance for higher values of X. That is the fundamental innovation of Apple Silicon, which people still struggle to grasp. The M1 upended how we think about CPU performance. It's not even a CPU, it's a unified memory architecture with hardware-level optimizations for macOS. You can't even cleanly compare the performance benefits of having memory and CPU on the same chi…

Right. People are comparing Apples to Oranges.

The salient question is: how long does each machine take to execute the processes I use on a daily basis?

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

#309

Post by ethbr0 »

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.

Parent is probably referring to ~2000 to ~2010.

Generally speaking, AMD had some more advanced microarchitecture features than Intel, leading to better per-clock performance.

Intel marketing struck back by emphasizing GHz, GHz, GHz. At least until Pentium 4 scaling hit a brick wall.

Then, a chip was sold as a "Pentium 4" "2.8 GHz" (or a "Pentium II" "300 MHz"). No other codes.

By the end of that range, the multicore era had started, and both Intel and AMD had moved to new systems of processor labelling.

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

#310

Post by cj »

arvinsim wrote: post #237
gambiting wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Curious) why? VScode, Chrome, and a terminal running a local server usually will do fine with 16gb or less. Are you testing with or querying massive data sets locally or something?
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