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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

#861

Post by totalZero »

ctdonath wrote: post #165
Corrado wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? I think that's the point. Until now, buying a computer has always been focused on the CPU and RAM stats. If you wanted faster/bigger you had to spend more. With Apple's new strategy you almost don't even care about CPU/RAM stats. They are focusing on providing value in other ways; larger screen, lighter weight, different colors, more ports, etc. I think this is t…

Apple’s goal is to eliminate technical specifications from marketing: tech specs are an excuse - make it good enough that few care what those specs are.

I can't think of a technological product where that mentality applies. Can you?

In fact, it seems that the opposite is true; as a product gets better, people care more about the specs. Whether you're buying a Wusthof knife or a luxury car, you want to know what makes the product good enough to justify its price and position in the market.

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

#862

Post by pdimitar »

jagger27 wrote: post #648
bayindirh wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My primary desktop is a 3770K running Linux. That CPU's the unexpected beast. Just churning through what you throw at it with incredible speed even for today. I process RAW photos, encode some audio and develop high performance scientific software on it (testing it lowers my heating bills, somewhat). I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no reason to upgrade.

I’ve been doing big C++ builds (think gcc, LLVM-sized projects) on my Ryzen 9 5950X and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This thing saves me so much time every day. It’s so nice not to have to do remote builds to get a quick prototype. The best part is that it was a drop in replacement for my 2700X. I already had a great Noctua air cooler so I was all set.

Ah, Ryzen 5000 and Threadripper 3000 series are absolute beasts, no doubt about it.

I want to work with Rust more and when I get to that point I'll likely start gathering money for a TR Pro but until then, and me mostly working with dynamical languages, even old-ish i7 CPUs are more than adequate.

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

#863

Post by pdimitar »

bitwize wrote: post #694
pdimitar wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you might be going to the other extreme just by a tiiiiiiiny bit. :D

It's true that a lot of people are just fine with a a 10-year old i5 or an i7. Hell, a lot of store owners and front-end offices grumble at an i3 CPU because it's still too powerful for the daily activities of the staff.

But when it comes to routinely compiling C / C++ / Rust then you need all the power and hardware innovation you can get.

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

#864

Post by ngcc_hk »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #766
msie wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mul…

Surprise. I bought the rose... theory. Sigh.

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

#865

Post by 0-_-0 »

ghaff wrote: post #317
akmarinov wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time there’s a 5nm version of Ryzen, there’ll be a 4nm M2. AMD’s 5nm shift is scheduled for 2022 iPhone 13 (2021) rumors indicate a 4nm SoC

Node sizes are pretty meaningless at this point.

4 is not less than 5?

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

#866

Post by ngcc_hk »

amilios wrote: post #741
sillysaurusx wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not m1; but unplug and plug it back helps a lot

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

#867

Post by emteycz »

Joeri wrote: post #239
emteycz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is very confusing because typically the previous generation’s i7 performs the same as the current gen’s i5, within the same tdp tier, and i5’s from a higher tdp can vastly outperform i7’s from a lower tdp within the same generation. Typically at any one time there are two or three processor generations in actual laptops being sold, as well as three or more tdp classes, so there is basically no good way of knowing…

But selling previous models isn't interesting to Intel.

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

#868

Post by stevenwliao »

totalZero wrote: post #861
ctdonath wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s goal is to eliminate technical specifications from marketing: tech specs are an excuse - make it good enough that few care what those specs are.

I can't think of a technological product where that mentality applies. Can you? In fact, it seems that the opposite is true; as a product gets better, people care more about the specs. Whether you're buying a Wusthof knife or a luxury car, you want to know what makes the product good enough to justify its price and position in the market.

It's like how no one cares about which chip is in their smart TV, regardless of price range. They just want to watch Netflix without UI bugs.

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

#869

Post by my123 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #840
my123 wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cinebench is a rendering load that isn’t that much optimised. (Doesn’t even use the newer AVX levels when available, and isn’t properly optimised for Arm either). Cinema 4D, the program that Cinebench benchmarks, normally does the renders on NVIDIA GPUs, not CPUs. As such, it’s a very poor benchmark. And those 5800U results are at probably much higher than 15W. (Because that’s the base config, OEMs are free to ship w…

The examples I took were 15W. The M1 is also ran at much more than 15W in some models. Geekbench in general has very heavily biased for ARM as it does not run the same code on both. Cinebench doesn't have this issue. And while yes nowadays a lot of rendering is done on GPUs for C4D the class of programs is path-tracers and they are often ran on CPUs for many scenes.

Geekbench 5 runs the same tests on both platforms, and always did. What you say as heavily based for Arm comes with no evidence.

> The M1 is also ran at much more than 15W in some models.

Nope, it's the same M1 for both, same voltage/frequency curves and top clocks. It's the whole point of having a chip that's named the same. '

No modern laptop CPU has a headline power use number. They all try to use the headroom that they've been given.

Cinebench is very far from being the end-all of benchmarking that you say it is here. And there are far more optimised renderers around if you want to benchmark that. (RTX makes the matter moot nowadays anyway)

It does not use AVX-512, or older AVX levels much for that matter, for a workload that is SIMD-friendly. For Arm, they leave lots of perf on the table too. (Cinebench uses Intel's Embree renderer, with AVX-512 disabled)

Geekbench 5 is designed to be a composite index of multiple benchmarks to be more realistic to some extent than using just one. You can also access to the scores of the subtests too.

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

#870

Post by tobyhinloopen »

floatboth wrote: post #245
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death of moore’s law? Hmm. Meanwhile I just got a R9 5950X and it is drastically faster than my 5 year old i7. There must be some doubling of transistors in there, right? Also maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of a new generation of ARM CPUs wasn’t the wisest choice. Or maybe it is, idk.

Maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of DDR5 , PCIeGen5 and TSMC's 5nm wasn't the wisest choice. Ehhhh seems like all that new stuff would still take lots of time to actually get ready, and the 5950X is the best CPU now .

Ah well at least I can now run my test suite 3 times faster compared to my 16” i9 macbook pro so I’m happy.

From 60s to 20s every run is huge for me.

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