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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

#491

Post by Spooky23 »

cainxinth wrote: post #401
Spooky23 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sweet spot is 8GB for most people. I’d guess 80% 8GB/15% 16GB and 5% more. Even many types of developers are fine with 8. Apple collects a lot of metrics and I’m sure they know this well.

The M1 also means that Apple regains full stack control of its desktops and laptops. Their phones and tablets prove that when they develop both the main chips and operating systems themselves, they are able to eke out greater performance from lesser specs. Flagship iPhones always have less ram than flagship androids, but match or exceed their performance.

That may help a bit but unless they adopt that draconian policies that govern iOS runtime that impact is limited. Safari is an example of improved battery life when Apple owns the stack. It’s a great feature, but not a game changer.

Most business users were fine with 4GB 5-6 years ago. Electron apps like Teams and Slack pushed it up to 8. The next tier are folks with IDEs, docker, etc that are usually 16-32GB.

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

#492

Post by havernator »

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…

In ~2018 I briefly used an old 4GB MacBook Pro for work. It was only untenable longer-term because I needed to run two electron apps or many-hundreds-of-MB-memory tabs at a time, sometimes.

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

#493

Post by naravara »

danaris wrote: post #339
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?

This has always been the line people use against Apple, at least since the days when it was no longer credible to use the "beleaguered" line on them. There have been just so many genuine tech news articles of the form, "Future Apple Competitor Product Beats Current, Widely Successful Apple Product".

> There have been just so many genuine tech news articles of the form, "Future Apple Competitor Product Beats Current, Widely Successful Apple Product".

It's the twin brother of all the "Currently, successful Apple product feature technically existed on [not-Apple] Product years ago (even though basically nobody used it)."

People read those articles and conclude it's all marketing hype but never ask themselves why it seems to happen again and again where simply checking off the box for having a specific feature never seems to actually lead to broad adoption. And if it truly is ONLY marketing hype leading to those ecosystem effects, then maybe you should start thinking of marketing hype as a feature?

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

#494

Post by tester34 »

jean_tta wrote: post #426
hutrdvnj wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Most people have no need to compare CPUs between mobile/non mobile or generation. They just need to know if the laptop they're looking at has the high end / middle end / low end CPU. You'd be comparing a new laptop with latest(-ish) CPUs. The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that. You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.

what???

>The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.

there are i7s that are terrible

there are i5s that are terrible

there are decent i3s

"i3" "i5" "i7" doesn't tell you anything itself about perf

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

#495

Post by onli »

numlock86 wrote: post #480
hutrdvnj wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not a surprise. Stronger cores and double the cores and threads. And that's not a theoretical difference, they had a performance uptick of up to 100% even in games [0].

[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...

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

#496

Post by mrweasel »

oblio wrote: post #247
mrweasel wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’re right, I can’t mentally deal with more a few open tabs and I use none of those webapps at home. I might be an outline in the other direction, but there’s a lot of room between using maybe 4GB of RAM in total an using that for a browser alone.

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

#497

Post by klelatti »

earthboundkid wrote: post #447
klelatti wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision that people think about most is when to upgrade (by definition it stretches over a longer time period than the single point purchasing decision). That's why we have iPhone 7/8/9...13 and similarly for Samsung etc. If your i3/i5/i7 designation gives no clues then that's not helpful.

Yes, this point is so obvious, I feel like I've got to be missing something. I am a professional programmer. I am vaguely aware that Intel chips have X-Lake based codenames. I have no idea how to compare the chip in my current laptop to a new laptop based on Intel's marketing names. To convince myself to upgrade, I just go to Geekbench, because nothing else in the marketing tells me the new chip is better. Seems like…

I think Intel's marketing may have fallen down because:

- At one point everyone upgraded their PC every few years anyway.

- Just having Intel on the box was sufficiently impressive to make the sale.

Now they really need to push their latest CPUs as the latest and greatest.

I like the Lake names but I've never understood from a marketing perspective (what have chips got to do with lakes - were they designed near these lakes?) they feel more like code names that accidentally got leaked.

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

#498

Post by jclardy »

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.

But by the time "just around the corner" happens, we will be comparing it to the M2.

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

#499

Post by adwn »

userbinator wrote: post #451
baybal2 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not look too bad best to say. Even if we add a one node advantage, we still have a ~15 watt chip making 20W-30W chips sweat. If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get M1 beating it by double digit margin. M1 is simply a way more efficient chip than any X86 chip can be because…

latest x86 chips have patently gigantic decoders metastasising into backend. It's still a tiny percentage of the area. The caches are the biggest.

Area isn't what affects power usage, switching activity is. [1] Besides, the cache size doesn't negatively influence or constraint the design of the core logic, but highly complex instruction decoding absolutely does.

[1] Well, mostly. There is such a thing as static power draw, but I suspect that the transistors in the L3 cache are optimized to have lower static leakage than the transistors in the core logic, which are optimized to be fast.

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

#500

Post by kaba0 »

runeks wrote: post #182
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that 8GiB for $1700 machine is absurd, however, I feel compelled to point out that MacOS is significantly more aggressive with memory compression than other operating systems and they come with blazingly fast SSDs, allowing devices to get away with less available memory.

A blazingly fast SSD is excruciatingly slow RAM.

In-memory memory compression is the most meaningful part of what parent comment said. And it helps tremendously on other systems as well, for example zram is quite underhyped on linux.
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