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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

#761

Post by leesalminen »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #429
twodave wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the requirements of your job—-just a single VS instance with chrome, postman and slack open takes around 5GB. Teams adds another GB or so. The rest probably another 2GB (SSMS and the like). On my particular team we also run a dockerfile that includes elastic search, sql server, rabbitmq and consul—-I had to upgrade my work laptop from 16GB to 24GB to make it livable.

Wouldn't you just have all the heavy stuff on a server? I don't understand the goal of running something like sql server and other server type apps on a desktop/laptop.

When I’m developing I don’t want any network dependency. I love coding with no WiFi on planes, or on a mountain, etc.

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

#762

Post by city41 »

simonh wrote: post #541
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…

I have to admit this is right. Even my old 2012 i7 Mac mini is still a perfectly serviceable machine to this day.

My 2012 MacBook Pro (the very first retina model) is 100% usable as daily driver. Only problem is it needs a new battery.

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

#763

Post by onli »

klelatti wrote: post #735
onli wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And you swapped the SSD and the swapping algorithm/memory usage model so that the IO performance is equal?

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

#764

Post by spurgu »

kstrauser wrote: post #710
650REDHAIR wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Safari?

That's a perfectly valid question. Lots of people use Chrome because they've used Chrome, and that's the whole reason. Some people need Chrome because it supports some site or tool that they require. I recommend that everyone else at least try Safari and see what they think of it.

Last time I tried it (couple of months ago) there were practically no extensions and Bitwarden didn't work in incognito. And Chrome's UI/UX is simply great. And dev tools as well.

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

#765

Post by zitterbewegung »

kergonath wrote: post #458
zitterbewegung wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the M1 in the latest iPad Pros I’m not even sure if Apple will keep the Ax line but instead to upgrade their low to high end with just Mx series processors .

Isn’t the M1 a bit big to put in a phone? Presumably, both Mx and Ax SoCs are already very similar so the distinction could be mostly marketing. But they’ll probably want to have different names for the lower-power, fewer-cores phone SoC and the things they put in their Macs. If only to avoid the perception that Macs run on “low-performance” phone parts.

What if Apple didn't care about the size and just put in an M SoC? iPhones have been getting thicker and it seems like their design language is going to have devices under certain thicknesses.

Option two would just be to make an A15 be only a die shrink and surprise ! It fits.

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

#766

Post by sillysaurusx »

msie wrote: post #730
bayindirh wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.

Thank you for finding this!

Unfortunately, and somewhat sadly, and melanchololy, I must report that I've been at OS version 11.2.3 (the latest) and run almost zero Rosetta apps: KeepassX, Beyond Compare, and Optimal Layout; of those, Optimal Layout has read 100GB, which is almost nothing.

In comparison, my kernel_task process is at 43TB bytes written, and WindowServer is at 8TB read.

So, as with cancer, there are multiple contributing factors, and hopefully Apple will ship an update to fix it... someday.

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

#767

Post by alpaca128 »

emteycz wrote: post #190
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…

There's a value in that too - people know immediately that i7 is powerful, and everyone [that cares] already knows that processors are renewed frequently. Though yeah, perhaps something like 7i1, 7i2 would've been better. Apple solved this nicely (given the naming is confirmed) with M1X.

But then you have different i7 variants with one having a different letter in the name which makes it just half as powerful because it's an extra energy-conserving mobile CPU.

I'm not into hardware but I have a rough overview, though whenever I'm supposed to help someone choose a laptop I only see a whole page with dozens of products and the only difference are a few numbers in the CPU serial number and some other weird product names and I simply have no idea what to say. I fully understand people who just go "I take this one because it has a nice color" - a layperson simply has no chance at understanding the difference, and good luck finding a store where the employees know more.

I never owned an Apple computer and I can still tell you on the spot which category of Macbook is better and more expensive, and why. Might have to do with the devices having normal names instead of alphanumeric strings that probably came from a password generator.

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

#768

Post by fulafel »

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…

Production quality multiplatform software is much much harder and less fun to make for GPUs due to inferior DX, rampant driver stack bugs unique for each (gpu vendor, os) combination, sorry state of GPU programming languages, poor os integration, endemic security problems (eg memory safety not even recognised as a problem yet in gpu languages), fragmentation of proprietary sw stacks and APIs, etc. Creation of performance oriented software is often bottlenecked by sw engineering complexity, effort and cost, and targeting GPUs multiplies these problems.

tldr; we are not running out of reasons for wanting faster CPUs. GPUs are a crap, faustian bargain substitute for them.

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

#769

Post by cercatrova »

ragnarok451 wrote: post #742
oblio wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Why would they? Apple likes vertical integration, it's not advantageous to them to sell off a differentiating part of their product, the hyped processor, so that others can use it, often competitors.

Back in the 90s, when Jobs was gone, Apple licensed its OS and almost went bankrupt as you could simply get a cheaper clone of Apple's computers with the OS on them. They won't repeat that mistake again.

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

#770

Post by smitty1110 »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #655
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…

Remember when Intel was 8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, then ... insanity.

The insanity started with the Pentium 4, specifically the HT versions. HT made the CPU slower, it was quite the anti-feature.
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