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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

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

#671

Post by KozmoNau7 »

kevstev wrote: post #466
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 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 desktop is 2010 vintage 6-core Phenom II 1100T with 16GB RAM, the motherboard is officially maxed out, but I've been told it can take 32GB just fine. It has been upgraded with an SSD and more recently a Radeon RX560, and it really does everything I need. Newer games do need lower settings, but it'll motor through most games at 720p. I added a PCIe USB-C interface card, so I'm not even stuck at USB 2.0 anymore.

I have considered replacing it with something smaller, now that all of my files are on a NAS and I don't need room for 5-6 drives in this machine. But I just don't feel like I would be getting enough of an improvement over what I already have, even with hefty new parts.

My laptop is a 2011 vintage X220i, and that is starting to feel a little bit behind, mostly thanks to the i3 inside. But it connects to 5GHz WiFi and is fast enough for browsing and video playback, so for now it keeps on truckin'.

Actually the best upgrade would be a decently powerful 12-14" laptop paired with an eGPU dock. That setup would handily replace both machines, but eGPUs just aren't a mature configuration yet, especially combined with Linux. Maybe in a few years.

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

#672

Post by bredren »

thehnguy wrote: post #304
Tehnix wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went from a 32GB RAM Macbook Pro to an 8GB RAM M1 Macbook Air...the difference is insane, I don't know what the hell the MB Pro is doing with its RAM, but it just felt like RAM was never enough on Intel Macbooks. Here on the M1, I don't feel my system crawling to a halt like I did on the MB Pro, and I'm doing the same workloads.

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.

I'm interested in this because I have a maxed 2018 intel mac mini and loaded it to 64gb of RAM. I want to ditch my eGPU and go to Apple Silicon on the next release.

I wonder if the memory performance should be so surprising. Because haven't people been bemoaning the "low" amount of ram in iPhone / iPad?

iPhone had 4GB on XS, and 11. And only went to 6GB on the Pro models. Yet the performance and benchmarking on these devices has seemed to garner praise with each successive generation.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/14/how-much-ram-iphone-12-...

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

#673

Post by bayindirh »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #652
bayindirh wrote: post #622

Earlier 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…

This is heavy load for any machine unless it's configured as a bona fide workstation. Any machine, any OS (with M1 MacBook Air's HW configuration) would trash its SSD while swapping in that case, IMHO.

> I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.

When I'm in development mode with all cylinders firing, I have a single Eclipse window in CDT perspective, a couple of terminal tabs, Zeal (or Dash) for documentation and a couple of firefox tabs for documentation not available in Zeal.

Music is either supplied by a single YouTube tab or Spotify, and that's it.

The most unfortunate component is CPU in my case. I try to ooze every single bit of performance from it while running the application. Memory controller comes the second due to transfer operations but, I neither max out the RAM or cause system to do heavy swapping.

I'm always kind of conscious about the hardware resources of the system and minimize my resource usage habitually, without killing productivity.

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

#674

Post by markphip »

bayindirh wrote: post #622
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.

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.

Same here, zero freezing and amazing performance. I use Safari though and have not even installed Chrome.

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

#675

Post by eloff »

hutrdvnj wrote: post #378
klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

> 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.

The performance difference between i7s of 10 years ago versus today is more than 2x per core, and the number of cores have also more than doubled in that time period.

That's over a 4x performance difference in 10 years, it's not quite the good old days of Moore's law, but it's still an exponential improvement.

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

#676

Post by notJim »

pdimitar wrote: post #608
strictnein wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO go big or go home in this case. For a gaming machine I'd aim for some of the Ryzen 5000's (likely even the 5700 is an overkill) and an RTX 3090 so I can play 3440x1440 @ 144FPS (or maybe even 4K @ 120FPS). As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.

The problem with these cards is actually being able to get one. Even if you've got the $2k to spend for a 3090, good luck with finding stock.

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

#677

Post by 650REDHAIR »

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.

What about Safari?

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

#678

Post by paulpan »

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.

I wonder if Apple's strategy is to push macOS developers to optimize for certain SOC cadences, rather than having to traditionally target every system configuration possible. Therefore they opted to only have limited SKUs of the M1: only differentiated by RAM and GPU cores.

Analogy is gaming consoles - the hardware is fixed for X years so game developers know exactly what to target and make better looking & performing games over the cycle of that console. Compared to, say, Windows 10 that has to run on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations.

This is actually similar to their approach to iOS and iPhones - iOS versions span across multiple iPhone cycles, but they are limits. For example, iOS 13 was supported on iPhones 6S thru iPhone 11, or the A9 thru the A13 SOCs. There's probably some correlation between good performance and the tight SOC-to-OS coupling.

We'll likely see similar, limited configurations for future Apple M* SOCs.

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

#679

Post by onli »

api wrote: post #618
onli wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just keep in mind that scaling things will change power efficiency. Like the Vega gpu architecture showed so clearly - which could be quite power efficient, but the Vega graphics card released were ridiculously power hungry, it seems because they missed their performance target and thus got overclocked out of their power efficiency range.

I'm not sure that they can easily add more cores to the M1. If they can, that would also raise the TDP. And adding more cores does not increase performance linearly, even if the architecture is made for it.

Also keep in mind that comparing it to 14nm Intel processors with an architecture from a decade ago is a fair comparison when comparing M1 vs prior Apple products, but is not a fair comparison when comparing it against what x86 can do in general. You would need a modern x86 processor targeting the same watt usage to have a completely valid comparison. As discussed in the thread above.

So yeah, it's a great processor for its target. And it likely will also be a very strong processor when scaled up - it bodes well for the future of ARM. But don't extrapolate the performance too linearly, that is likely to be misleading.

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

#680

Post by pdimitar »

notJim wrote: post #676
pdimitar wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO go big or go home in this case. For a gaming machine I'd aim for some of the Ryzen 5000's (likely even the 5700 is an overkill) and an RTX 3090 so I can play 3440x1440 @ 144FPS (or maybe even 4K @ 120FPS). As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.

The problem with these cards is actually being able to get one. Even if you've got the $2k to spend for a 3090, good luck with finding stock.

True. Right now I could only buy an RTX 3090 for 3100 EUR (~3740 USD) and I am not willing to pay that much.

But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a very low prio.

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