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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

#201

Post by coldtea »

partiallypro wrote: post #176
kumarvvr wrote: post #156

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

If we're honest most customers aren't going to notice the performance differences, it will mostly be people with heavy work loads.

That includes anybody who uses Electron or Chrome... :-)

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

#202

Post by bhouston »

dfinninger wrote: post #140
meepmorp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have this happen on my Windows PC every now and again. It’s on the monitor that’s hooked up via DisplayPort.

I have run into poor quality DisplayPort cables in the past. I now only buy ones I know are brand name.

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

#203

Post by bredren »

Pulcinella wrote: post #81
jeroenhd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

>It seems that Apple has put in a lot of development resources into getting Octane to support Metal...and I can’t just imagine that happening just to support the the Apple Silicon GPUs.

At the start there will still be a lot more Mac Pros running AMD hardware that must be supported.

It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." [1]

This new Mac Pro design wasn't announced until June of 2019 and didn't hit the market until December 10th of 2019. That's just _six months_ prior to the Apple Silicon announcement.

So, unless Apple simultaneously was trying to honor pro users while also laying plans to abandon them, it is hard to imagine that Apple spent 2017-2019 designing a Mac Pro that they would not carry forward with Apple Silicon hardware. Keep in mind, the company had just gotten through a major failure with the Gen 2 cylindrical Mac Pro design.

The current, Gen 3 2019 Mac Pro design has the Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX). This is intended to be a plug-and-play system for graphics and storage upgrades. [2]

While the Apple Silicon SoC can run with some GPU tasks, it does seem it does not make sense for the type of work that big discrete cards have generally been deployed for.

There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019.

Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3]

It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon.

So, I think the question isn't if discrete Apple Silicon GPUs will be supported but how many types and in and what configurations.

I think the Mac Mini will remain its shape and size, and that alongside internal discrete GPUs for the Pro, Apple may release something akin to the Blackmagic eGPU products they collaborated on for the RX580 and Vega 56.

While possibly not big sellers, Apple Silicon eGPUs would serve generations of new AS notebooks and minis. This creates a whole additional use case. The biggest problem I see with this being a cohesive ecosystem is the lack of a mid-market Apple display. [4]

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

[2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E

[4] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-d...

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

#205

Post by tambourine_man »

samgranieri wrote: post #162
kumarvvr wrote: post #156

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ez-8qRYUUAIoukD?format=jpg

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

#206

Post by TheTrotters »

baggy_trough wrote: post #186
partiallypro wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're honest most customers aren't going to notice the performance differences, it will mostly be people with heavy work loads.

You can definitely notice the difference between a formerly top of the line Intel MacBook Pro and an M1 Air. The Air is way faster for opening apps, photo library, and other common daily activities.

And M1 Macs won't burn a hole through your desk.

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

#208

Post by hu3 »

rswail wrote: post #171
hu3 wrote: post #69

I might consider buying one when it is able to run proper Linux. And even then it's probably going to be limited to ARM Linux only.

"Limited to the CPU type that is installed"... how is that a "limit"?

For my workloads that is a limitation that must be considered when purchasing hardware. It's the same reason why I don't buy ARM Chromebooks.

It's going to take years to run proper Linux on M1 and even more for the ecosystem to catch up to x64_86.

For me it's reasonable to keep using AMD Ryzen 5000 which is faster than M1 on my multithreaded workloads anyway despite using 7nm. Plus it has better GPU, more memory, more storage, more ports and supports multiple monitors.

Sure it is more expensive, but that's just because my segment is geared to pros with higher requirements. Apple currently has no laptop offering on this tier.

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