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Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

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Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#81

Post by Pulcinella »

jeroenhd wrote: post #53
cainxinth wrote: post #29

All very impressive, but here's my question: what are they going to do about graphics cards? Will they find a way to connect existing graphics cards to their CPU? Will they make their own ARM-based graphics cards? Will AMD or Nvidia?

Nvidia? Ha, never in a million years. Support for one of the recent Radeons was recently added to macOS, so it's a possibility. No reason the M1 can't do PCIe, as far as I know the only thing keeping eGPUs from working on the M1 right now is software support. It could also be that the driver was added because of the extensibility of the Pro, though. My expectation is that they'll keep the GPU on the same level, which…

Yeah I imagine the Radeon support was for the Pro and the existing Intel Macs (though I don’t know if those Radeon GPUs are really supported via eGPU. Are there enclosures where they fit?)

Still I can’t see Apple only developing one integrated GPU per year unless they somehow figure out how to magically make them somewhat approach Nvidia and AMDs modern chips. What would the ARM Mac Pro use?

It seems that Apple has put in a lot of development resources into getting Octane (and maybe Redshift and other GPU accelerated 3D renderers) to support Metal (to the point where it sounds like there may have been Apple Metal engineers basically working at Otoy to help develop Octane for Metal) and I can’t just imagine that happening just to support the the Apple Silicon GPUs. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see eGPU support announced for ARM Macs at WWDC (and maybe even the iPad Pros that support Thunderbolt. Yeah the idea of plugging your iPad into an eGPU enclosure is funny, but if it’s not to hard to implement, why not?)

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#82

Post by cainxinth »

akmarinov wrote: post #57
cainxinth wrote: post #29

All very impressive, but here's my question: what are they going to do about graphics cards? Will they find a way to connect existing graphics cards to their CPU? Will they make their own ARM-based graphics cards? Will AMD or Nvidia?

Option 1 - yes, they will Option 2 - no, but does it matter? It's not like the previous gen Macs had great GPUs and no one is gaming on a Mac anyway. Option 2.5 - bring back eGPU

You also need GPUs for rendering video, which people do use Macs for.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#83

Post by clajiness »

mortenjorck wrote: post #39

This would be quite an accelerated timeline if Apple ships its second-generation M-series chip only eight months after the first. Typically, they’ve followed a sort of six-month tick-tock pattern for the A-series, launching a new major revision in the fall with the new iPhone, and launching an “X” revision in the spring with new iPads. I think most observers have been expecting an “M1X” for Apple's first pro-oriented…

> "This would be quite an accelerated timeline if Apple ships its second-generation M-series chip only eight months after the first."

The M1 was available on Nov. 17th, 2020. The article states that the chip is entering mass production, and due for release sometime in 2H. This could easily be released a year after the M1, if not 13 months later.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#85

Post by volta83 »

tmccrary55 wrote: post #23
varispeed wrote: post #14

I hate to say that, but I am likely going to buy M2 Mac. I don't like Apple and their anti-competitive tactics, but I admit they won their spot for now. However, as soon as good PC competitor comes in, I'll drop Apple like a hot potato.

I'm really hoping Alder Lake or a similar AMD product gets PC closer to M1+ performance and battery consumption. The M1 chip is amazing but I'm a tiling window manager man.

This is Mac OS:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jupmda/aquayabai_...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/mvuplf/yabaimacos...

Its called Yabai (+ skhd): https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

That is, you can have a tilin WM today with all the advantages of running MacOS.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#86

Post by galangalalgol »

ripply wrote: post #64
hajile wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

I also am a tiling window manager man and tried that a few years back (as well as everything else on the market) when I had a mac from work, unfortunately, without real support from the OS, these are all just poor mans windows managers and can't compare to the real thing. I gave up trying to use any of them and ended up installing a virtual machine where I could actually use one.

I'm a gnome addict. If you ever asked yourself "who are they building this monstrosity for?". That would be me, it fits my exact preferences in a workflow out of the box. Unity irritates me to no end, and my wife's mac is almost unusable for me which she greatly appreciates.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#87

Post by meepmorp »

bhouston wrote: post #77
samgranieri wrote: post #55

I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.

I would prefer just one 6K or 8K monitor personally at a size of say 55" with a wide ratio. Simpler setup. No post in the middle. Something like this but bigger with higher resolution, and maybe a bit more height vertically (this one is a bit too wide for its height in my opinion): https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/gaming/super-ultra-wide-... I think that dual 4K is the old way, single 6K/8K ultra wides are the fut…

Do you have periodic weirdness on the thunderbolt monitor? Every so often, my m1 mini wakes or boots so that there’s a vertical misalignment by a pixel or two about halfway across. It’s like the desktop was cut in half and taped back together slightly crooked.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#88

Post by matsemann »

JoshTko wrote: post #80
matsemann wrote: post #13

Is anything known about the chip? The deal breaker of M1 (for me) as it currently stands is the amount of RAM it can handle (16 GB). Edit: Mistyped 16 as 1, sorry about the confusion

I've only read very rare workloads actually be constrained by 16GB on the M1, what use case do you have that you know will be hampered on a M1?

My current laptop has 64 GB. Could probably be fine with 32, but I'm seldom under 20 in usage. I run certain services locally in Docker, and then have 5+ instances of IntelliJ for various stuff open, some of them running a java server or node building the frontend, and others on my team may be running Android+iOS simulator at the same time as well.

I could alter my usage patterns and work with less. But people not used to having loads of ram don't know what they're missing out on.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#89

Post by solarkraft »

bhouston wrote: post #77
samgranieri wrote: post #55

I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.

I would prefer just one 6K or 8K monitor personally at a size of say 55" with a wide ratio. Simpler setup. No post in the middle. Something like this but bigger with higher resolution, and maybe a bit more height vertically (this one is a bit too wide for its height in my opinion): https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/gaming/super-ultra-wide-... I think that dual 4K is the old way, single 6K/8K ultra wides are the fut…

I use a 55" 4K Samsung TV as a monitor. It cold boots quickly and has no latency or subsampling issues in the right mode. I can recommend it as a more cost effective alternative to multiple monitors.

The amount of available screen space at 1:1 is refreshing (not as crazy as imagined though), but it makes me realize how grainy "normal" monitors are. In some years 8K TVs might be cheap enough for an upgrade, but on that time scale I can see VR being a serious contender as well (it's really good already).

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