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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

591–600 of 942 posts

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

#591
What’s also lacking from a marketing perspective is the “Intel Inside” campaign - which was incredibly successful for the Wintel monopoly in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Seeing the sticker or hearing this slogan used to imply a premium or cachet to the product/hardware to the average Joe or Joanne.

No longer, Intel’s brand recognition has really taken a hit in the past decade.

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

#592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Now I know why all the websites I use are so slow :D

And why some of my past upgrades were driven by the web browser over-taxing the machine on certain sites, while nearly everything else was perfectly performant with absolutely no complaints.

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

#593
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s because 99% of regular computer tasks don’t need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second. The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind. My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only…

Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core per Chrome tab.

Yeah, 2500 cores per CPU sure would be nice.

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

#594
I really do wonder what would Apple create in order to be able to offer ARM workstations.

Maybe chiplet / modular design like AMD? Only this time one of the chiplets is going to be a full M1/M2/M3 ARM CPU + some RAM and everything else usually included, and the other chiplets would be extra RAM or dedicated GPUs?

I am looking forward to their first ARM workstation offering.

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

#595
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%...

The 7700K and 10700K use virtually the same Skylake architecture cores with very minor tweaks between them. The only CPU performance gains Intel made in the 2015-2020 period were clock speeds, core counts and support for higher memory speeds. The 7700K and 10700K even share the same integrated graphics architecture.

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

#596

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 am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I w…

Yep and take computer from 2001 and run it in 2011, you wouldn't have been nearly as happy with the performance. There have been incremental upgrades but mostly just the core count which is great for handling server stuff but not nearly as noticeable as Hz counts increases

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

#597
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s because 99% of regular computer tasks don’t need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second. The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind. My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only…

Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core per Chrome tab.

My new M1 constantly freezes, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of chrome. Or the secret SSD thrashing design flaw that Apple is hoping nobody talks about till they quietly fix it.

Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.

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

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I w…

My gaming PC is almost 10 years old and is with an i7 3770. Only upgrade was a GTX 980 five or six years ago. That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through. One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.

Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my gaming system (4970k and a GTX1080ti) but past wanting to play at 4k and experience ray tracing there is almost no reason to do so.

Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away from happening.

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

#599
post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you have the chance to try your setup on an M1? If it worked for your sister, although you seem to have way higher requirements, is there anything to say it wouldn't work for you? I'm asking because I read a lot of comments when it was released that it just doesn't need as much RAM because $REASONS. I wouldn't put my money on this, but I'm curious if this assumption holds water now that people have had time to tr…

Well, 100% of my development tools are Windows only so I can't really give it a try, sorry :-)

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

#600
post #247

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…

Auto-tab-discard on Firefox is your friend. Makes thousands of tabs possible with almost no memory use and seamless functionality.
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