Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

asia.nikkei.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 661 posts

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

#241

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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'm no silicon architect but isn't this why performance is so good? They can cut out all those extra pcie lanes and extraneous stuff and focus on performance. If you start adding back big I/O won't you just be back down to Earth with everyone else?

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

#242

Post by aldanor »

forgetfulness wrote: post #175
dman wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a laptop?

Maybe the commenter has a very interesting use for it, but why would you buy a 256 GB RAM machine (which isn't a lot of memory for this arena either) to develop the model, instead of using something smaller to work on it and leasing a big cluster for the minutes to hours of the day that you'll need to train it on the actual dataset?

Kicking learns off on a cluster is surely a thing as well. And in some fields, as you correctly mentioned, memory requirements may be measured in terabytes. It's more of a 'production use case' though - what I meant is the 'dev use case'. For instance, playing with mid/high frequency market data, plotting various things, just quickly looking at the data and various metrics, trying and testing things out often requires up too 100gb of memory at disposal at any time. It's definitely not only about model training. And 'something smaller to work on' principle doesn't always work in these cases. If the whole thing fits in my local ram, I would of course prefer to work on it locally until I actually need cluster resources.

(But seriously though... what is 16gb these days? Looking at process monitor, I think my firefox takes over 5gb now since I have over a thousand tabs in treestyletab, clion + pycharm take another 5gb, parallels vm for some work stuff is another 10gb; if doing any local data science work that's usually at least a dozen gb or a few dozen or more)

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

#243

Post by Toutouxc »

canuckintime wrote: post #237

I’m reading somewhat incompatible reactions in the top level comments e.g. [1] > 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. Another [2]: > I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors ove…

How are the reactions incompatible? People like me, who don't need more than 16 GB of RAM and one monitor, are happy with the M1. Other people are waiting on the M1X/M2 chip to bring what they need.

> meanwhile the Intel Surface Book was fanless in 2017

The MacBook was fanless in 2015 and, like many other fanless designs using Intel chips, it was slow.

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

#244

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #241
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'm no silicon architect but isn't this why performance is so good? They can cut out all those extra pcie lanes and extraneous stuff and focus on performance. If you start adding back big I/O won't you just be back down to Earth with everyone else?

Not really. The main reason the M1 doesn't have good IO is that it's a beefed up ipad CPU. This was the first generation where they were putting the chips in systems that can use IO, so they probably are just behind on the design for those parts of the chip.

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

#245

Post by alkonaut »

Why a new SoC? Isn't the M1 basically maxiing out what can be done on a SoC, but what's missing is the version with external memory and GPU?

They can refresh the core in the M1 of course, and I expect they will do that yearly like the AXX cores, but it would be weird to go even 2 generations of the SoC without addressing the pro cpu.

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

#246

Post by alkonaut »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #240
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?

Why would Apple build fancy graphics cards? They have no meaningful gaming market and haven't cared about it for years. For machine learning?

They don't need to build them, but they need their machines to be able to use them (for the same reasons their current pro machines use them).

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

#247

Post by intergalplan »

mobilio wrote: post #73
varispeed wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have an iPad 2. I use it in the kitchen to browse recipes.

I still have another one near bed for reading eBooks

I have a first-gen iPad Mini that still sees light use. Approximately the same internals as the iPad 2, AFAIK.

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

#248

Post by macintux »

dylan604 wrote: post #227
bhouston wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree. But what I am trying to say is that we should be pushing for 6K and 8K ultra wide monitors rather than the old hack of 2 monitors to one computer.

There are times I actually prefer 2 separate monitors. Allowing one monitor to quickly go full screen while continuing to use the other monitor is quite useful in my workflows.

Virtual desktops are also more useful with two separate displays, or at least lend themselves to different use cases.

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

#249

Post by gonehome »

holman wrote: post #187
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.

I run a decent chunk of heavy work loads, and tbh the main things I notice on the new Air are all of the other niceties: instantly awake, ludicrous battery life, no fans. I think those aspects are going to be much more noticeable than many expect.

Agreed - most people use their computers as web browsers to access social media and shopping.

The performance boost there is extremely noticeable on new M1 chips.

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

#250

Post by anaerobicover »

DCKing wrote: post #195
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.

The current RAM restrictions in the M1 are dumb restrictions resulting from the fact that you can't get LPDDR4X chips larger than 8GB in size (the M1 has two on SoC LPDDR4X chips). This year we should see a lot of CPU manufacturers change to (LP)DDR5 for memory - high end Samsung and Qualcomm SoCs are already using LPDDR5. It's a safe bet Apple is also switching to LPDDR5 which would put the upper limit on 64GB for t…

Just to side note, the 27" iMac RAM is the rare component that is upgradable by the user. You should be able to get 128GB for under $700 if you do not buy the RAM from Apple.
Post reply on HN