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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

#611

Post by pas »

londons_explore wrote: post #91
dehrmann wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple's margins are already so high they don't care?

Binning requires more design work for the chip. I would guess the M1 was designed rapidly and probably they decided that hundreds of different bins for different types of defects wasn't worth the complexity if it meant delaying tape out for a few weeks. It also leads to extra product complexity (customers would be upset if some macbooks had hardware AES and others didn't, leading to some software being unusably slow…

> I would guess the M1 was designed rapidly

How rapidly? And so how come it has such spectacular performance? Or the shortcomings of the x86 arch were so, so soooo obvious, but nobody had the resources to reaaallly give a go to a modern arch?

Or maybe, simply the requirements were a lot more exact/concrete and clear? (But the M1 performs well in general, no?)

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

#612

Post by vesrah »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #597
chrisco255 wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the the 8GB model? I had the same issue with my workload and found that it was always under high memory pressure, upgrading to a 16GB model fixed it for me.

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

#613

Post by katbyte »

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…

> kill switch

can you elaborate?

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

#614

Post by officeplant »

randomopining wrote: post #538
api wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What about it is so amazing? Did you test the 8gb or the 16gb version? Is it really a gamechanger for surfing, coding, videos, etc? Curious because I might grab the base mac mini 8gb for music production, surfing, Java coding etc.

It's a game changer if you can wholly devote yourself to the ecosystem. I can tell you that even third party applications with M1 support (ie. Google Chrome) can be a mixed bag and still run kinda clunky.

Also you said music production so verify before hand that your DAW, etc of choice will work fine. I use Reason and the visuals in the DAW itself are still laggy, but it isn't M1 native yet.

Other things like the fact that World of Warcraft runs at medium settings on a 1440P monitor feel kinda magical given I can barely feel any heat leaving the M1 Mini.

In the end I returned my M1 Mini (8gb/256gb) because my personal experience still felt half baked at this time. Once we hit the next generation a lot more software will have caught up.

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

#615

Post by api »

randomopining wrote: post #538
api wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What about it is so amazing? Did you test the 8gb or the 16gb version? Is it really a gamechanger for surfing, coding, videos, etc? Curious because I might grab the base mac mini 8gb for music production, surfing, Java coding etc.

I'd get 16gb. The memory options are disappointing. I am waiting for 32gb to switch my daily driver, and also giving the ecosystem a bit of time to catch up. I have an M1 Mini but that was for us to test our software on and make sure our Mac ARM builds were correct.

Apple's memory and storage options tend to always be on the disappointing side.

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

#616

Post by stjohnswarts »

macintux wrote: post #515
ModernMech wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the touchpad on my Surface Book 2 to the one on my Macbook Pro (2019). The one on my Macbook is comically huge, and I also am not in love with the feel/click noise compared to the Surface Book. YMMV.

Ideally there’s be no feel/click noise on an Apple trackpad. “Tap to click” is a revelation.

You know when you say stuff like "revelation" it really doesn't help your argument that you're not just fanboying out for apple?

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

#617

Post by Blumfid »

itsokimbatman wrote: post #551
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 don’t think “impressive iteration” begins to describe it. I am very rarely impressed by new tech these days, and the M1 is the first piece of new hardware I’ve seen in years that seems downright magical. My previous laptop was a 2016 MBP with an i7, and the M1 destroys it. I can build large projects like LLVM or WebKit fast and it doesn’t even get hot. I’ve also been running Linux VMs with the new Parallels and the…

It's not a helpful comparison if you compare a chip from 2016 with a chip from 2020.

You would need to benchmark it against a current chip from someone else.

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

#618

Post by api »

onli wrote: post #505
api wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Top-end Ryzen chips may be as fast or faster. Are they also as low power?

The impressive thing about the M1 isn't just raw performance but performance / watt. There are obviously faster high-end many-core x86 chips, but the power use difference is wider than the speed difference. The M1 destroys mid-range Intel and AMD offerings at a fraction of the power consumption.

Check out this madness:

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

The MacBook Air trounces the top-end Mac Pro on single core performance. No this is not the top-end Intel you can get, nor is it as fast as AMD, but it's a MacBook Air and consumes a small fraction of the power.

Again... the power efficiency is the thing that really blows me away. 5nm accounts for only some of that.

On multi-core the same MacBook Air is just below recent Mac Pro models on total computational throughput. To beat the MacBook Air you have to go up to newer-generation Xeon chips with 8 full-speed cores. The Xeon is branded as a server chip and uses as much power as probably eight to ten M1s.

It's just insane. If Apple puts, say, 16 full-speed core in one of these chips it's absolutely over for all other vendors. Speculation is that the 16" Pro will end up getting 8 performance cores and 4 low-power cores. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up beating the top-end Intel Mac Pro.

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

#619

Post by oblio »

beagle3 wrote: post #600
oblio wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do visit 20-40 of those tabs regularly. They're SPAs so they use up a lot of memory.

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

#620

Post by sillysaurusx »

vesrah wrote: post #612
sillysaurusx wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the the 8GB model? I had the same issue with my workload and found that it was always under high memory pressure, upgrading to a 16GB model fixed it for me.

It’s the 16GB. The memory pressure is indeed the issue. I find it hilarious that Apple accidentally inverted their LRU into an MRU and constantly swaps for no reason, yet it’s still so fast that nobody even noticed during QA. Mine has already read/wrote 48TB in the first three weeks; at this rate the SSD will be dead in three years.

(If you haven’t looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check your smartmon to see whether you’re affected.)

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