Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by jbverschoor » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:08 PM UTC

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.

No reflection? The iPad Pro running the Axxx soc was already insanely powerful. x86 is a monster with this huge legacy. Sounds to me more like the usual anti-apple speak..

The whole article is about not having to choose between performance and powerusage. With "5000", which 5000 do you mean? A 100W cpu of about the full cost of a macmini?

This is the whole point of the article. Apple made a monster move. Next up: Apple Cloud. M1 based cloud computing. Will save them a couple billion per year on aws which expires in '22 or '23 iirc.

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

#352

Post by boboche » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:09 PM UTC

eertami wrote: post #344

skohan wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking. I think people are a little too nostalgic when talking about Apple build quality. There's a 2011 MBP here that still works well. But recent releases... no better than the competition really.

AMEN to that. I still use my fully repairable MBP 2010 for web surfing and light tasks (with 8GB and a SSD its fine). On the Keyboard note, I've bought an expensive Eurocom (Clevo) Xeon laptop that had keyboard issues after a few years. Its not only apple that did bad with bad keyboard on expensive products (Fortunately I could repair it myself for 50$). Today apple product should ship with rossman videos and a SMD workstation if you plan to use them more than 3yrs ;)

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

#353

Post by eertami » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:10 PM UTC

apatheticonion wrote: post #154

Can't wait for an iPhone Pro with an M1 processor that I can plug into a thunderbolt/usbc dock, run monitors, a keyboard, ethernet, and have it running MacOS when in desktop mode. EDIT: A little context; when I am in the office, I use vscode over ssh to connect to my desktop PC at home. My desktop takes care of my language server, syntax highlighting, compilation and vscode forwards my ports and spins up terminals. A…

They could've done this with the iPad already, but have not shown any indication that they will do so.

I suspect Apple don't want you to use your phone as a laptop replacement, they want you to buy one of their laptops.

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

#354

Post by gambiting » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:11 PM UTC

dmos62 wrote: post #284

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…

> 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?

AAA video games do that for you :P Well, it isn't the programming part that uses the ram(although yes, building our codebase takes about 40 minutes and uses gigabytes of ram without using distributed build), but just starting up local server + client + editor easily uses 80-100GB of ram since ALL of the assets are loaded in.

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

#355

Post by nnadams » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:11 PM UTC

fireattack wrote: post #289

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 art…

You are right that CISC processors (like x86) have more capabilities, i.e. more instructions. You as the programmer get to take advantage of the "extra" very specific instructions, so overall you write less instructions.

Less instructions sounds great, but with CISC you do not know how long those instructions will take to execute. RISC has only a handful of instructions, that all take 1 clock cycle (with pipelining). This makes the hardware simple and easy optimize. The instructions you lose can just be implemented in software. That space on chip can be used for more registers and cache, for a huge speed up. Plus nowadays, shared libraries and compilers do a lot of work for us behind the scenes as well. Having tons of instructions on chip only is a benefit for a narrow group of users today.

We've found that for hardware it's better to reduce clock cycles per instruction, rather than reduce total number of instructions.

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

#356

Post by gambiting » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:11 PM UTC

choeger wrote: post #332

dmos62 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

He won't know until all the templates are instantiated...

That's a fantastic joke, thank you :D

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

#357

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:12 PM UTC

eertami wrote: post #344

skohan wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking. I think people are a little too nostalgic when talking about Apple build quality. There's a 2011 MBP here that still works well. But recent releases... no better than the competition really.

Are you aware that the latest generation has a new keyboard? It's not the fiasco that the previous super-slim one was.

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

#358

Post by bakatubas » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:13 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #227

mysterydip wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't ever imagine why manufactures of > don't use dates. Product lines 1 - 10. Bigger is better. A minimal number of qualifiers next to the numbers, ideally just 1 of them next to a product line number (Pro/Home/Hobby/Enterprise/whatever). Date, month and year format if you really want flexibility. OblioCorp Oblio 1 Home 2020.06. Oblio 10 Enterprise 2021.04. How hard is that? Not that hard, from where I'm standing…

It makes sense for software release versions, but I think this lacks marketing prowess.

Consider; “hey man check out my new M1 machine!” Versus: “hey man check out my M1 2021.04”

Even with the Core series it’s short and sweet.

“10th gen. Core i7” still sounds futuristic and always will.

Ryzen 7 also.

Honestly I think folks here are overthinking this stuff. It’s easy enough to compare the specs on a 10th gen cpu vs 8th gen. I think that’s easier than comparing different product names.

For instance, just by the names: Pentium 5 versus Core i5 it’s not quite clear unless folks were old enough to remember Pentiums. Whereas, everyone knows current generation has better processing than previous generation.

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

#359

Post by bredren » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:14 PM UTC

jbverschoor wrote: post #351

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.

No reflection? The iPad Pro running the Axxx soc was already insanely powerful. x86 is a monster with this huge legacy. Sounds to me more like the usual anti-apple speak.. The whole article is about not having to choose between performance and powerusage. With "5000", which 5000 do you mean? A 100W cpu of about the full cost of a macmini? This is the whole point of the article. Apple made a monster move. Next up: App…

I had wondered what their first Apple Silicon powered data center would be.

I thought the company would wait and deploy a later gen chip. Though with the standardization of M1 across such a wide array of products makes me think it is going to be the M1.

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

#360

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:15 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #319

Grustaf wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the OP is saying that it could be a mistake to focus on the processor so much when it might turn out that worthy competition is just around the corner. Apple have ever focused on processor like this before, instead opting to focus on the whole product, fit and finish, etc. Which arguably still very few rival them on even today.

Yes competitors may have worthy opponents to the M1 "just around the corner".

But do you think that Apple stopped innovating after releasing the M1 last year? Don't you think the M2 (or M1X whatever it's called) is well into design and prototyping at this point?