Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 942 posts

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

#501

Post by danaris »

runeks wrote: post #392
thehnguy wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 8GB of M1 RAM is very different than 32GB of standard DIMM-like RAM. Go on... What’s the nature of this great difference?

At this point, I don't think that's entirely clear. Something to do with the way Apple has tightly integrated the SoC parts and the OS's memory management lets them get massively more performance out of much lower-specced machines, and at least from what I've seen, no one has yet managed to truly unravel all that makes this possible.

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

#502

Post by leoc »

Toutouxc wrote: post #330
nisegami wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that Apple considers this a feature.

Funny. Except there are fully supported MacBooks from 2013 running the latest version of macOS, still on their first battery, still bringing people joy and productivity.

Late-2013 MBPs still came with replaceable storage unlike the M1 Macs, no?

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

#503

Post by BunsanSpace »

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?

Large code bases in an IDE, program dumps, large applications (the software I write will gladly use 10-20gb in some use cases), VMs, large ML training sets, &c.

128gb is likely overkill, but I can see a use case depending on what you're doing.

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

#504

Post by geraltofrivia »

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…

CS PhD Student. Running a laptop with 16GB of RAM. I dont train ML models on my machine but whenever I have to debug stuff locally, I realize precisely how starved for RAM my computer is. I start by closing down FF. Just plain killing the browser. RAM down from 12GB to 7. Then I close the other IDE (usually working on two parallel repos). 7GB to 5. Squeeze out the last few megabytes by killing Spotify, Signal, and other forgotten Terminal windows. Then I start to load my model to memory. 5 times out of 7, its over 12-13 GB at which point my OS stops responding and I have to force reboot my system cursing and arms flailing.

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

#505

Post by onli »

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…

From what did you upgrade? Apple had no competitive product with modern processors. Where is the Zen3 macbook with which you compared that? Did the laptop you compared with had an equivalent fast SSD?

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

#506

Post by oblio »

nl wrote: post #365
oblio wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because approximately no one in the whole supply chain wants to be stuck with a part dated last year. And product lines are speced 12 months in advance. So you need precise demand prediction all the way along your supply chain for this to work.

Who's ever going to use the full date in the marketing material?

Apple never says iPad 2019 on their website, until you start digging really hard.

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

#507

Post by clukic »

Macha wrote: post #483
earthboundkid wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Intel CPU numbering: iX-YYZZZ[Suffix] X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better, more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing. Suf…

Well...this is incredibly useful information that is remarkably obscure.

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

#508

Post by rvanlaar »

What I find lacking in the article is an apt comparison with AMD's Ryzen chips.

Those are all the same chiplets, just binned differently. High performance ones go into the 5800x and 5950x. Lower performance ones into the 5600x and 5900x.

Which seems to be the same thing apple does, with a slight naming difference. Calling everything M1, instead of naming the CPUs.

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

#509

Post by vel0city »

Macha wrote: post #483
earthboundkid wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Intel CPU numbering: iX-YYZZZ[Suffix] X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better, more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing. Suf…

They might not do it anymore but they also previously used P for GPU-less CPUs as well, i.e. 3350P.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/69114/i...

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

#510

Post by ascagnel_ »

monkmartinez wrote: post #26
stephenr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment didn’t say “we’ll all be using Apple” He said ARM.

I edited my comment as I think in the context of the larger discussion, ARM and Apple are basically interchangeable.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Apple is probably the "first, best" case of ARM, but there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from making a similar investment in ARM hardware. Indeed, Amazon is already doing so with Graviton, and we're seeing similar improvements in both raw speed and in perf/watt like what we're seeing with M1 chips vs. Intel[0]. And that's one of the best parts of ARM -- the design itself is available for licensing, unlike x86, so anyone can pony up the cash and build up their own customized chips that maintain compatibility with base ARM code (maybe needing a recompile to take advantage of new hardware features).

[0] https://dev.to/dnx/arm-vs-intel-a-real-world-comparison-usin...

Post reply on HN