Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model • Hacker News Board

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

#741

Post by amilios » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

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.

I actually have an orthogonal issue, but I wonder if it's related. When I have an external monitor connected via a Thunderbolt dock, the device takes forever to wake from hibernation (that is to say when I've left it on sleep for several hours). i.e. 10+ seconds, which is kind of ridiculous in 2021. This doesn't happen when the monitor is not connected. I also have a similar amount of things open as you described

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

#742

Post by ragnarok451 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #484

jsmith45 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But let's say that a 5nm Ryzen comes out ahead for mobile usage. (But not necessarily by very much.) Chips like the M1 (or ideally, something similar made available to other device manufacturers) is still really interesting. The ARM architecture can scale down better than x86/x64 can, allowing a device maker to hit low end performance targets with less cost than x86 chips can manage. For the low end, it also tends to…

> This makes M1 type chips really interesting for any manufacturer who want to make devices that span a huge scale of performance requirements, from slow kiosks performance range to the decent laptop range. This is purely theoretical. Apple will > sell its chips to other companies. So if you were expecting Apple Silicon on its own to start a revolution, that's never going to happen.

Honest question - why not?

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

#743

Post by pshc » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

slver wrote: post #520

CivBase wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need to, they're fast enough. You had me with everything except this. Any time someone claims the current state of computing hardware is "enough" I'm reminded of that fake 640K quote. There is no indication we are running out of applications for more compute power.

I'm not saying we're running out of applications for more compute power. We're specifically running out of reasons to want faster linear (per core) general-purpose performance (in fact I'd say this happened some time ago). Everything else we get from here on in terms of smaller process etc. is just a bonus. We don't fundamentally need it to keep evolving our hardware for our ever-growing computation needs. And that's…

Virtual reality, being so latency-sensitive, is always going to be hungry for faster raw serial execution. It seems like something that ought to parallelize alright (one GPU per eye!) but my understanding is that there are many non-linearities in lighting, physics, rendering passes, and so on that create bottlenecks.

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

#744

Post by rsynnott » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

eertami wrote: post #353

apatheticonion wrote: post #154

Can't wait for an iPhone Pro with an M1 processor that I can plug into a thunderbolt/usbc dock, run monitors, a keyboard, ethernet, and have it running MacOS when in desktop mode. EDIT: A little context; when I am in the office, I use vscode over ssh to connect to my desktop PC at home. My desktop takes care of my language server, syntax highlighting, compilation and vscode forwards my ports and spins up terminals. A…

They could've done this with the iPad already, but have not shown any indication that they will do so. I suspect Apple don't want you to use your phone as a laptop replacement, they want you to buy one of their laptops.

> have not shown any indication that they will do so.

I find it very suspicious that the new iPad has a 16GB RAM option. There's ~no use for that in iOS. Wouldn't be totally amazed if some sort of dual boot solution shows up at WWDC.

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

#745

Post by micv » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

sto_hristo wrote: post #482

_xnmw wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X cores + X gigs of RAM does not mean better performance for higher values of X. That is the fundamental innovation of Apple Silicon, which people still struggle to grasp. The M1 upended how we think about CPU performance. It's not even a CPU, it's a unified memory architecture with hardware-level optimizations for macOS. You can't even cleanly compare the performance benefits of having memory and CPU on the same chi…

But we still live in a physical universe where there are voluminous things some of us need to put into ram. Things like big projects, application servers, database servers, IDEs, and for some of those - multiple instances of them. On top of that, browsers with tabs open, productivity tools. Can't benchmark out of that.

Apple have done things to mitigate a lack of RAM (consistently using the fastest SSDs they can with a controller integrated into their custom chips and now into the M1 presumably, memory compression, using very fast RAM in the new M1, etc.) but yeah at some point you just need more room. 16GB has been enough for me for a while thankfully.

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

#746

Post by CountHackulus » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #733

Blumfid wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do wonder how much of that is just getting a nice new laptop? If the average user was handed the equivalent laptop with an Intel CPU but told it was an M1 would they notice? Would they also think it was nice and fast?

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

#747

Post by lowbloodsugar » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

fireattack wrote: post #289

I was always taught ARM (and M1), being a RISC architecture, isn't as "capable" as x86 in some way , whatever it means. I am no longer sure if that's still the case, since they seem to work just as good, if not better (energy efficiency). Of course, it's not exactly an apple to apple comparison since Apple upgraded so many other things, but I just didn't see any mention about the limitation of being RISC in these art…

You have been listening to propaganda. ARM has always been better. Consider the fact that it still exists, despite Intel's predatory nature. It exists because Intel could not make a processor for the low power market that was performant. They tried. But anything they built either took too much power, or used the right amount of power but was too slow. So ARM survived in this niche. But it couldn't grow out of this niche because Intel dominates ruthlessly.

But the low power market shows that, for a given power consumption, the ARM is faster. Does that not apply everywhere? Yes, it does. And so Apple, which controls its own destiny, developed an ARM chip for laptops and desktops. Its faster and cooler and cheaper than Intel chips, because ARM has always been faster and cooler and cheaper than Intel chips.

AWS, which also controls its own destiny has launched Graviton2. These are servers which are faster and cooler and cheaper than Intel servers, and the savings and performance are passed on to customers.

As long as Intel ruled by network effects - buy an Intel because everyone has one - build an Intel because it has the most software - their lack of value didn't matter.

There are now significant players who can ignore the network effects. The results are so stunning that many people simply refuse to believe the evidence.

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

#748

Post by rsynnott » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

zelon88 wrote: post #412

Here we go again. Comparing a 10w mobile RISC CPU to a 100w x86 CPU and somehow deducing that having a mobile CPU run desktop applications is a good idea. I wish all the Apple fanboys would just hurry up and buy one so they would realize they are comparing apples to oranges and sit back down. Nobody is buying an M1 to replace their gaming computer. And to insinuate that such a thing is possible or practical is dising…

> We are comparing embedded CPU's with proprietary north bridge architecture to industry standardized and socketed CPU's with an entire industry supporting it

Eh? x86es have had an integrated northbridge for about a decade.

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

#749

Post by oriolid » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

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…

The surprising part is that you have attention to spare for all those distractions.

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

#750

Post by kart23 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #214

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.

Really? I still use seven year old MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM. It’s perfectly fine for developing in at least Python, Go or Nim, with a Docker container or two and MariaDB in the background. Sure, when/if I upgrade I’d go for 16GB of memory, but one should be careful about projecting ones own needs onto other.

I have a 2015 MBP as well... it's HORRIBLE when I hook it up to a 4k monitor. Lag, freezing, etc. I can still get stuff done, but the experience is pretty bad.

Perfectly fine on its own screen though, the dual-core in mine just isn't up to the task of a 4k external monitor.