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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

#851

Post by pjmlp »

klelatti wrote: post #497
earthboundkid wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this point is so obvious, I feel like I've got to be missing something. I am a professional programmer. I am vaguely aware that Intel chips have X-Lake based codenames. I have no idea how to compare the chip in my current laptop to a new laptop based on Intel's marketing names. To convince myself to upgrade, I just go to Geekbench, because nothing else in the marketing tells me the new chip is better. Seems like…

I think Intel's marketing may have fallen down because: - At one point everyone upgraded their PC every few years anyway. - Just having Intel on the box was sufficiently impressive to make the sale. Now they really need to push their latest CPUs as the latest and greatest. I like the Lake names but I've never understood from a marketing perspective (what have chips got to do with lakes - were they designed near these…

Thing is, unless one is doing AAA games, surviving Android, Rust or C++ builds, or trying to see how much Docker instances it is capable to stuff into the machine, any 10 years old computer will do let alone a randomly chosen one at the computer store down the street.

Even ARM, if it wants to displace Intel, it will be selling cloud pizza boxes or phones to replace those that get stolen/broken.

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

#852

Post by pjmlp »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #521
echlipse wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a Thinkpad. But depends on completely the type of work you wanna do. With anything you end up buying it's a long term investment. So whichever gets your job done and whichever has a good build quality (also something which you can easily upgrade yourself and repair easily) is the one you should buy.

Thinkpads feel well made but the screens are mostly terrible and the trackpad design is very dated. I’m not sure why Lenovo doesn’t use better IPS panels, they can’t be saving that much margin from them.

I love the dated trackpad design, specially when combined with the rubber mouse.

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

#853

Post by nexuist »

airstrike wrote: post #716
sillysaurusx wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos > around 35 macvim windows You do you, but I'd wager you could probably trim some of that low hanging fat

I was going to say, there's no humanely possible way you can watch and absorb the content from 5+ videos at the same time right? Like what's even the point? (I presume tabs with videos on them that aren't playing still perform around the same as tabs without videos at all, since there's no need to re-paint frames.)

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

#854

Post by pjmlp »

slver wrote: post #448
astrange wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. M1 doesn't have specific Objective-C optimizations.

An interesting realization that it could, though. Overwhelming majority of MacOS/iOS software is written on Obj C and Swift, which have the same underlying semantics. That said ARC doesn't have such a great impact on performance as some people (esp. fans of Java's GC etc.) would convince you. Most ++/-- operations on the refcount are eliminated by the compiler.

Some fans do measure, and know the difference from marketing and reality in regards to tracing GC versus reference counting marketing material.

https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages

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

#855

Post by oblio »

nl wrote: post #843
oblio wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's ever going to use the full date in the marketing material? Apple never says iPad 2019 on their website, until you start digging really hard.

Exactly. This proves the point I'm making. No one - even Apple with the best supply chain management in the industry - wants the version scheme you suggest. Vendors want version numbers to push upgrades to consumers. They don't want to deal with demand forcasting for something with a limited time of life though.

Ummm... nice turning of my point on its head.

Nobody said that they have to make that versioning public and shout it from the rooftops.

Users do use the informal versioning that I mentioned, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to differentiate the products. I've heard "MacBook Pro 2015" a million times.

And a date > a version number. It also nicely auto-increments to prove to your customers that the latest thing is better than the old one.

Doodad Pro, 2021 edition. It's not that hard, as I was saying.

The alternative is the garbage that everyone is doing. WH-1000XM3, really?!?

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

#856

Post by dw-im-here »

dmos62 wrote: post #284
gambiting wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my sister does professional photography, and went from a 16GB MacBook Pro(2016) to an 8GB Air, and reports no decrease of productivity - quite the opposite, in her experience all Adobe programs run much faster, and the machine is quieter and lighter to boot. So yeah, I'm not sure - maybe the ram amount isn't as a big deal as people make it out to be. On the other hand I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128…

> I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128GB of ram and I wouldn't accept any less What on earth are you programming?

Same setup as him, I'm working on llvm. It's very nice to be able to test the compiler by running and simulating on a threadripper CX3990, means I don't have to run everything past the build server

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

#857

Post by andrewjl »

klohto wrote: post #88
andrewjl wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have, though the marketing is subtle. [1][2] [1] https://www.apple.com/icloud/ [2] https://developer.apple.com/icloud/cloudkit/

We are talking AWS competitors, not Google Drive alternative.

Besides a deliberate paucity of knobs to tweak, what exactly is the difference with AWS S3 as far as the target market (app developers) is concerned? This is a cloud hosting service in all but name.

https://developer.apple.com/icloud/icloud-drive/

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

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

#858

Post by hiq »

dijit wrote: post #682
hiq wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have the chance to try your setup on an M1? If it worked for your sister, although you seem to have way higher requirements, is there anything to say it wouldn't work for you? I'm asking because I read a lot of comments when it was released that it just doesn't need as much RAM because $REASONS. I wouldn't put my money on this, but I'm curious if this assumption holds water now that people have had time to tr…

I doubt it's possible to try a AAA dev setup on OSX at all, and, for whatever it's worth 64G workstations were "hand-me-downs" at my previous gig (AAA gamedev), I doubt there's much magic that can make "64 gig is not nearly enough" go to "16G is fine"

I also have doubts but that's what the marketing hype has been claiming for some time now, so I'm really curious about real-world experiences and where the hype breaks down. The debate is often "I need way more RAM!" vs "But this is a new paradigm and old constraints don't apply!".

AAA gamedev might be the wrong demographic though, since it's mostly done on Windows (I think?).

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

#859

Post by thu2111 »

spurgu wrote: post #826
spurgu wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I've never used Safari enough myself to have an opinion (since it's never been an option for me due to various things), it might be equal to Chrome or even better (I like Safari's clean UI). I'm mostly comparing it to Firefox which is quite clunky in my opinion (I've given it many chances). And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mod…

Whoa. Maybe an hour into testing Safari and I look at Activity Monitor and see that https://calendar.google.com is consuming 1 GB of RAM and https://docs.google.com 865 MB. :o Don't know if the numbers are comparable but in Chrome's Task Manager the numbers are 224 MB and 121 MB respectively. Edit: This might be an old (unfixed) issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6640430 ... This sucks because I have a specif…

It sounds like they are sharing memory and the shared memory is getting accounted to whatever tab was opened first until it closes.

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

#860

Post by thu2111 »

sib wrote: post #706
klelatti wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Intel's marketing may have fallen down because: - At one point everyone upgraded their PC every few years anyway. - Just having Intel on the box was sufficiently impressive to make the sale. Now they really need to push their latest CPUs as the latest and greatest. I like the Lake names but I've never understood from a marketing perspective (what have chips got to do with lakes - were they designed near these…

Many years ago Intel got sued for using code names that were things like "Hendrix" so they started using code names that were geographic features that could not be "owned" by others...

They are not real lakes, as far as I know. They might have been once but Skylake and Ice Lake are just made up.
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