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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

#731

Post by msie »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #620
vesrah wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whethe…

This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I

The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.

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

#732

Post by rsynnott »

afavour wrote: post #319
Grustaf wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a future hypothetical AMD processor could be as good as the M1, and that shows how M1 is just marketing hype?

I think the OP is saying that it could be a mistake to focus on the processor so much when it might turn out that worthy competition is just around the corner. Apple have ever focused on processor like this before, instead opting to focus on the whole product, fit and finish, etc. Which arguably still very few rival them on even today.

> Apple have ever focused on processor like this before

Eh, I'm not sure that's true. They did with the original PPC, and also the G3 and G5.

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

#733

Post by acdha »

Blumfid wrote: post #617
itsokimbatman wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're certainly correct for, say, highly-controlled benchmarks but don't discount subjective user experience. I've heard _far_ more M1 users talk about the subjective feel compared to even the previous generation MacBook hardware whereas it's been a long time since I've heard that about an Intel to Intel upgrade (basically since the Core -> Core Duo period) other than people with GPU-heavy needs and that seems like an interesting data-point to me.

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

#734

Post by rsynnott »

_xnmw wrote: post #262
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.

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.

> 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

I mean, this is _kind_ of true, but it's not unique to Objective C, the M1, or even particularly intentional. The _ARM_ memory model is more conducive to reference counting in general than the x86 one. Nothing special about Apple's chip in that respect, tho.

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

#735

Post by klelatti »

onli wrote: post #679
api wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Sigh. I'm typing this on an Apple "prior" product which has a two year old microarchitecture and is built on Intel 10nm (roughly the same as TSMC 7nm) - it's absolutely a modern x86 processor and a valid comparison - and it's left in the dust by the M1.

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

#736

Post by uncletaco »

GordonS wrote: post #315
arvinsim wrote: post #237

Earlier 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.

Anecdotal. I write client software for bioinformatics workflows. Usually web apps or clis. Right now with my mock db, Emacs, browser, and tooling I’m using ~5G of ram. At most I’ll use ~8GB by the end of the day.

I also shut down at the end of the day and make judicious use of browser history and bookmarks. If I were compiling binaries regularly I guess I could see the use in having more ram but as far as I’m concerned 8 is enough and so far people find what I put out perform at.

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

#737

Post by GordonS »

vlovich123 wrote: post #729
GordonS wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand how a demographic as technically intelligent as HN could make the flawed assumption that GBs of RAM in isolation of the entire system is all that matters. Consider the fact that iOS devices ship with half the RAM of Android devices and feel as responsive, have better battery life, and have better performance. The Apple stack is better optimized to take advantage of the hardware they have. Indeed, o…

> I don’t understand how a demographic as technically intelligent as HN could make the flawed assumption that GBs of RAM in isolation of the entire system is all that matters

I didn't claim it was all that matters, and I haven't seen anyone else do that either.

I do take the point of the rest of your comment though, and it may well be the case that Apple does some clever stuff. But realistically there is only so far that optimisations can take it - DDR4 is DDR4, and it's the workload that makes the most difference.

> I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple used telemetry to make an intelligent bet around the amount of RAM they’d need.

Your average Apple user is likely not a developer though (as others are very often pointing out on HN, whenever they make non-dev-friendly hardware choices). Furthermore, I would think such telemetry would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you have a pitiful 8GB of RAM, you're not going to punish yourself by trying to run workloads you know it wouldn't support.

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

#738

Post by glsdfgkjsklfj »

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…

How can you say Marketing is not being commented.

Outside of consumerist/fanboy forums (here is the later) it is the only thing being talked about.

M1 is apple doing a mattress-store on the CPU market. It is 90% marketing.

Would people be talking about apple if either of these were true:

- they announced the cpu architecture and metioned a integrated GPU with a few cuda cores

- they used numbers in the axis of their promo graphs :)

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

#739

Post by kergonath »

nemacol wrote: post #585
officeplant wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late-2012 ivy bridge i5 Mac Mini here. For a dual core machine it's really not all that bad of a daily driver experience. Makes me sad that I have to spend a crazy amount of money to get 16GB of ram and 1TB of SSD in a M1 Mini to match what I currently use. (although I understand the 1TB of SSD in the M1 is vastly superior)

Just for the fun of it, I tried to play WoW classic on my late-2012 mac mini and it ran like a toaster oven, but it worked just fine. Pretty fun. After putting the SSD in it, of course.

I used to play WoW on a G4 PowerBook! To be honest, it was decent, but the resolution was not great. I remember vividly having to look at the ground and zoom in all the way just to be able to go from the bank to the AH at IF. Hopefully whatever Intel GPU you have in your Mini is better than the Radeon 9700 in my old laptop.

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

#740

Post by rsynnott »

jodrellblank wrote: post #663
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…

> " 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 Appl…

Microsoft has to more or less take what Qualcomm will give them. Qualcomm's virtual monopoly on high end non-Apple phones has made it complacent.

> Apple whomps in from "nowhere" with the fastest ARM device anyone has ever seen

Not really from nowhere; they've already had the fastest (non-datacenter) ARM chips anyone has ever seen, fairly consistently, in their phones, for years.

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