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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

#691

Post by paulpan »

The article makes a good point on positioning, but I'm not sure if it's due to lack of data points.

Sure Apple seems to be using the M1 in across every price segment for their products, but M1 is also literally the first iteration of their shift to running macOS on ARM and not x86 architecture. This mass push mainly serves to speed up the transition.

No doubt there'll be a higher performing SOC for Apple's Pro lineup such as Mac Pro, Macbook Pro. History has confirmed this since Apple developed the A*X chips specifically for the Pro lineup of iPads. Main question is, how many concurrent SOCs will Apple maintain? Just 2 as they've done for the iPhone & iPad Pro divide or potentially more?

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

#692

Post by glsdfgkjsklfj »

yunohn wrote: post #651
chrisco255 wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m unsure if this is sarcasm. But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a majority of the time. There’s no value to this at all.

> But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a majority of the time.

Maybe they do not have an ad blocker? :D

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

#693

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

There is only one other popular task that a decade-old CPU can’t handle acceptably well: running a web browser. Outside of that, computers have been good enough ever since HiDPI/Retina screens became standard.

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

#694

Post by bitwize »

pdimitar wrote: post #566
kevstev wrote: post #466

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 have two thinkpads -- one from 2010 and one from 2012. Both of them have enough grunt to get through most any task, the heaviest of which is compiling large codebases. One of them was my daily driver for eight years; I only upgraded to a Ryzen because I wanted MOAR COARS and more RAM.

It's funny how today's computers could theoretically handle a user's workload for decades yet Apple builds them to fall apart after four years. There was a Hackernews story recently about a guy faffing around with old 68k Macs from the late 80s, he said that those old Macs were rated by Apple to last for fifteen years. And yet they come from an era of much more rapid utility decay for computer hardware, when a computer would be utterly obsolete after just a few years.

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

#695

Post by webmobdev »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #635
katbyte wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kill switch can you elaborate?

I mean technically there's the T chip which could switch off everything. Parent poster seems to be posting conspiracy theories that apple will maliciously kill machines in 3-5 years at their whim. I would guess that would not go over with the government or customers and be the end of Apple PC type products though, so it's not going to happen

> Parent poster seems to be posting conspiracy theories that apple will maliciously kill machines in 3-5 years at their whim.

I didn't insinuate anything like that. I was just pointing out that it exists.

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

#696

Post by grecy »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #101

> Apple’s gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation. This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini. Apple makes a lot of money by offering a range of processor options. At the moment we are early in the transition but…

> This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini

They're only doing that until they can replace the entire line with "Apple Silicon", which they said will take less than 2 years from when they announced the first M1 Macs. It's simply a stop-gap measure.

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

#697

Post by Someone »

fouric wrote: post #555
Someone wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand “16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram” is something to cry about. Programmers working on products with a billion users should realize that every kilobyte they save decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte.

> decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte While true, that's not going to motivate anybody. Memory is not a very scarce resource, we're making more all the time, we can continue to make more, and it's reusable. Moreover, memory that isn't being used is almost completely useless - the only thing it does is act as disk cache. Better to use memory than CPU, as the latter actually consumes power (leading to clima…

DRAM refresh takes power. I don’t have the numbers, but I’m not sure that, in the average smartphone or tablet of today that energy usage is negligible compared to that of the CPU.

Reason for that is that DRAM must be refreshed 24 hours a day, while the CPU is sleeping a lot of the time, even if the device is in use.

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

#698

Post by webmobdev »

kube-system wrote: post #478
webmobdev wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the x86-64 platform that still allows you to repair / upgrade RAM, memory, CPU's Have you opened many x86 devices of a similar form factor to the current M1 devices? I haven’t seen a socketed CPU in a laptop in over a decade, and the vast majority of ultrabooks and thin-and-lights have soldered RAM now too. The latest trend has been to start soldering SSDs as well.

True, other manufacturers have been trying to ape Apple and solder RAM and other parts on the x86-64 platform too. Thankfully it hasn't yet fully spread to the desktop platforms - I can still build my own PC. I pin my hope on government regulations and right to repair to stem this - EU has already emphasised that they are serious about their "right to repair" legislation. I also like the attempt being made by indie engineers to create more repairable phones and laptops.

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

#699

Post by grecy »

numpad0 wrote: post #180

I was thinking that there’ll be “M2” by now but a suspicion is growing inside me that they might use a NUMA cluster configuration with PCIe interconnect for upper tier models. Doesn’t it make sense?

I think it's very likely they will announce the "faster M1" at WWDC this year. It will go into the 16 inch MacBook Pro and the iMac Pro.

Hard to say if whatever they announce will go into the Mac Pro - or if maybe they'll have yet another "faster" chip for that. Time will tell.

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

#700

Post by exikyut »

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…

I am genuinely curious how you keep track of all that. Presumably this is all spread out over maybe a dozen workspaces?
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