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

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

#471

Post by ben7799 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

api wrote: post #377

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 didn’t buy the hype until I tested an actual M1. It exceeded the hype. It feels like when I was a kid and went from a 386SX to a Pentium at 4X the speed, except the M1 was also a quarter the power consumption. It’s the first time in a over a decade I’ve felt a revolutionary step forward in a chip and the only time it has ever come with less power. Process node is a factor but I find it hard to believe it’s the only…

Excellent analogy, I'm old enough to remember those old generational jumps and the M1 feels like that to me.

Last time it felt like there was a jump this big was around 2005-2006 when the Core 2 Duo started becoming common.

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

#472

Post by CivBase » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

slver wrote: post #411

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…

> The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law. I know most people misunderstand Moore's law, but this is HN, so I expect better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor... Moore's law is quite alive and showing no signs of problems. > The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. Moore's Law is about number of transistors. Not about their…

> You don't need to, they're fast enough.

You had me with everything except this. Any time someone claims the current state of computing hardware is "enough" I'm reminded of that fake 640K quote. There is no indication we are running out of applications for more compute power.

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

#473

Post by hu3 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

nerdjon wrote: post #422

zelon88 wrote: post #412

Here we go again. Comparing a 10w mobile RISC CPU to a 100w x86 CPU and somehow deducing that having a mobile CPU run desktop applications is a good idea. I wish all the Apple fanboys would just hurry up and buy one so they would realize they are comparing apples to oranges and sit back down. Nobody is buying an M1 to replace their gaming computer. And to insinuate that such a thing is possible or practical is dising…

You are right that as of right now the M1 can't really replace a gaming PC, but I don't see Apple currently really targeting that. However the real question is if that is an issue with the M1 chip or just an issue of Mac not really having much of the gaming marketshare. That being said, personally I believe the gaming PC market is largely a niche market for the entire PC market. At its core I don't see any reason the…

Apple does not care about non-mobile games.

They stopped supporting OpenGL [0] and Vulkan support is a community effort [1].

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12894/apple-deprecates-opengl...

[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

edit: If you have something to add to the conversation, feel free to enlighten us. It does gets tiring discussing anything Apple around here because of the sheer bias.

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

#474

Post by kaba0 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

hkstm wrote: post #361

GordonS wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, if you're running big IDEs (e.g. Rider/IntelliJ, Visual Studio), containers and VMs, 32GB is really a must. There always seem to be people in these threads claiming that 16GB or even 8GB is enough - I just don't understand how that could possibly be for most of the HN demographic.

Do you think most of the HN demographic is actually running big IDEs, containers and VMs at the same time? I'm personally a CS student and never had to run more than a few lightweight docker containers + maybe one running some kind of database + VS Code and that has been working fine on a laptop with 8GB and pop_os. Could imagine that a lot of other people on HN are also just generally interested in tech but not nece…

I do use intellij and similarly hungry IDEs all the time, with many other resource hungry processes without trouble on 8 GB of RAM.

Though truth is that I use zram, which everyone should who is not fortunate enough to have plenty of RAM, but does have a decent CPU.

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

#475

Post by ascagnel_ » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

bashinator wrote: post #301

tarsinge wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Or one of any third-party native iOS apps (Apollo[0] is my preference) that are both faster and feel better than the official app and mobile site.

[0] https://apolloapp.io

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

#476

Post by kaba0 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

twodave wrote: post #393

hkstm wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think most of the HN demographic is actually running big IDEs, containers and VMs at the same time? I'm personally a CS student and never had to run more than a few lightweight docker containers + maybe one running some kind of database + VS Code and that has been working fine on a laptop with 8GB and pop_os. Could imagine that a lot of other people on HN are also just generally interested in tech but not nece…

Depending on the requirements of your job—-just a single VS instance with chrome, postman and slack open takes around 5GB. Teams adds another GB or so. The rest probably another 2GB (SSMS and the like). On my particular team we also run a dockerfile that includes elastic search, sql server, rabbitmq and consul—-I had to upgrade my work laptop from 16GB to 24GB to make it livable.

If you are on linux, try out zram.

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

#477

Post by toss1 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

Interesting marketing approach for sure. What I want to know are the economies of scale for using a single component, both at the chip fab level, the main board level, and overall product level.

Still seems like Apple's typical under-powered per price point offerings, but does this close the price/performance gap a bit, or drive higher profits at the same price points, or do they really see it as just a good marketing play?

While it sounds nice to have one chip in different machines, what is the benefit to the user who buys one machine, typically for efficiency or power? I suppose in some edge cases it might be nice to have a laptop with CAD-station power, but also able to stream movies or edit documents for a full intercontinental flight on a single battery charge?

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

#478

Post by kube-system » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

webmobdev wrote: post #382

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.

Let's look beyond the hype: - With M1, Apple has finally closed the loop and created a fully closed system that it has control over vs an x86-64 platform that is more open and gives us users more choice and control. - All new devices with M1 SoC score very poorly on repairability and upgradebility vs the x86-64 platform that still allows you to repair / upgrade RAM, memory, CPU's and other parts in an affordable mann…

> the x86-64 platform that still allows you to repair / upgrade RAM, memory, CPU's

Have you opened many x86 devices of a similar form factor to the current M1 devices? I haven’t seen a socketed CPU in a laptop in over a decade, and the vast majority of ultrabooks and thin-and-lights have soldered RAM now too. The latest trend has been to start soldering SSDs as well.

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

#479

Post by twodave » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

aNoob7000 wrote: post #429

twodave wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the requirements of your job—-just a single VS instance with chrome, postman and slack open takes around 5GB. Teams adds another GB or so. The rest probably another 2GB (SSMS and the like). On my particular team we also run a dockerfile that includes elastic search, sql server, rabbitmq and consul—-I had to upgrade my work laptop from 16GB to 24GB to make it livable.

Wouldn't you just have all the heavy stuff on a server? I don't understand the goal of running something like sql server and other server type apps on a desktop/laptop.

Having a local environment speeds up development significantly.

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

#480

Post by numlock86 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

hutrdvnj wrote: post #378

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…

> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.

> I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.

Ah yes, the exaggerated funny phrase. On a serious note, the performance difference from an i7 7th generation (7700k) to an i7 10th generation (10700k) felt quite impressive.