Can't they just stick a few dozen M1s in a box and call it a Mac Pro to scale up that way?
The return of NUMA!
Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
661–670 of 942 posts
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
Web Developer here. Wouldn't accept anything less than 32GB for a work machine.
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.
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Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#663Earlier 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…
> "Apple didn’t do black magic. [...] Other ARM manufacturers could equal or exceed the M1 if they wanted."
I see lots of people saying "If only $company had an ARM device", and I don't understand it. My experience of ARM device is slow laggy janky products - from competing smartphones, tablets, router and network device management interfaces, year on year, the pairing is always (arm + fucking slow).
It's only Apple who have managed to get "desktop class" performance, and at this point I'm more willing to attribute that to Apple doing black magic than to ARM being inherently superior.
Microsoft have piles of money, thousands of developers, they make hardware, they've been working with ARM since the likes of the Compaq IPAQ PDA and Windows CE 21 years ago, and the Surface RT in 2012, their ARM devices are nothing to speak of. Google, industry gorilla of tech with the finances to match - see the famous Gruber/DaringFireball about iPhones far ahead in single core JavaScript performance year after year after year. Tech giants like Samsung, Qualcomm, Sony, who have been designing and building chips for decades, with their own drivers, firmware, and customized Android builds, and building their own flagship products.
Apple whomps in from "nowhere" with the fastest ARM device anyone has ever seen, and the critics response is "anyone could do that if they wanted to".
Then why don't they want to?
[Edit: Consider also that Apple spent $278M on acquiring PA Semi chip design company in 2008, and $600M on Dialog Semiconductor in 2018, and Microsoft spent $2.5BN on Minecraft. I say these companies "are tech giants with finances to match", but it's not like Apple had to lean hard into their hundreds of billions cash pile to do what they've done. Instead they had to do something that appears to be "black magic" (i.e. desire + leadership + execution + long term planning + ???)].
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have an M1 from work (which I now mainly use for private stuff...) and it does have 16gb memory. It did cost a bit less than $1700 (after taxes) I believe, although I am not sure. I know it has some upgraded gpu compared to the standard model in some form, but didn't know about the memory. As for the device: It is neat, but not revolutionary to any degree. I do paint and model and can run blender/krita just fine, i…
The M1 isn't what kills x86 (if it ever does completely). ARM kills x86. Microsoft is working on the ARM transition. ARM has good control of mobile hardware. And Apple will be only selling ARM hardware (in the form of Apple Silicon) in another 12-18 months. M1 and Apple Silicon are just part of the trend.
> Microsoft is working on the ARM transition.
And has been for years. Unlike Apple they don’t have the ability (or the courage) to tell their partners to get on the train or get out of their way.
It’s not obvious they’ll ever be able to leave x86 behind.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#665Earlier 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.
Apple Silicon is NOT just an ARM CPU. It's also a deep integration with macOS, and a unified memory architecture (less unnecessary copying on the bus). For example on the M1, certain very common operations for macOS apps, like freeing Objective C pointers, which happens millions of time per second, are optimized at the hardware level. The M1 is not a CPU. So no, the Ryzen 5000 with 5nm would NOT level the field.
> and a unified memory architecture (less unnecessary copying on the bus).
So does every other Intel & AMD laptop CPU from the last 5+ years. So does every Qualcomm SoC from the last 5+ years. This has been incredibly common for years and years now.
This does a lot less than you think it does, particularly since there's very few consumer workloads that switch between CPU & GPU.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#666Make 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.
Went from 64GB to 8GB. Didn't notice a difference - infact it is better. I kind of get your mindset but they have done some fuckery somewhere to get it to work so good.
My M1 Air with 16GB feels way more responsive and behaves better under load than my 64GB hex-core beast of a desktop I built late last year.
It's like the old days when I could put BeOS on a Pentium with two-digit MB of memory and it'd feel as good and responsive in actual use as a newer desktop clocked 6-8x higher and with 8x the memory, running Windows or Linux.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here’s the AMD benchmark and it’s using up to 3x the power of the M1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16446/amd-ryzen-9-5980hs-ceza...
That’s not the right part, the 5800U is the low power Ryzen competitor.
I don't see any reviews for laptops with that CPU. It's hard to compare against something no one can test.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking. I think people are a little too nostalgic when talking about Apple build quality. There's a 2011 MBP here that still works well. But recent releases... no better than the competition really.
Which competitor has a touchpad that’s equal to or better than apple?
I have a dell XPS and it's a dream. Probably the closest thing to a good trackpad. That being said, Apples keyboards, even on the MBP are below par. They don't feel like they're supposed to be put through their paces. At work they make us use Macs and iMacs and to be honest, I damn near threw the wireless keyboard in the trash but Apple will win the screen wars till Jesus comes back though.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use an M1 powered 16GB MacBook Air and I've never seen any freezing, even under heavy load. I don't use Google Chrome though. Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.
Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm, one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs open in Preview. I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers. The unfortunate part i…
If I do the same in my intel Mac book pro, it not only screams, burns but also slows down. honestly intel chips are overrated and overpriced.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably a Thinkpad. But depends on completely the type of work you wanna do. With anything you end up buying it's a long term investment. So whichever gets your job done and whichever has a good build quality (also something which you can easily upgrade yourself and repair easily) is the one you should buy.
Thinkpads feel well made but the screens are mostly terrible and the trackpad design is very dated. I’m not sure why Lenovo doesn’t use better IPS panels, they can’t be saving that much margin from them.
Not a huge sample size, but the screen on my X1 Nano looks excellent. Competitive with my 2018 11” iPad Pro’s screen visually, if a bit lower PPI.
That’s one of the highest end ThinkPads though, so I guess that’s to be expected. Have heard that getting a good panel on more mainstream models like the T-series can be tough.