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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

#341

Post by jacobolus »

staticfloat wrote: post #238
clashmoore wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 laptops can only support one external display at 6k and 60Hz. The other video goes to the laptop's own display. Even if you use the laptop closed in clamshell mode you can't connect or daisy chain to more than one external display. The mini can support two external displays. One via thunderbolt at that same 6k and 60Hz and the other a 4k at 60Hz through the HDMI port.

Note that the restriction on external monitors can be worked around by using a DisplayLink compatible dongle/dock, since it uses a custom driver (I assume it does something in software that would otherwise be limited in hardware). I use the Dell D6000 and I run three (1080p) external monitors in addition to the built in monitor.

Three 1080p displays add up to 3/4 the bandwidth of one 4k display, at the same framerate.

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

#342

Post by nicoburns »

flohofwoe wrote: post #298
ogre_codes wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for some low hangers, but compiling code will still be faster, XCode and VSCode will be a bit snappier, Safari and Messages will be a bit better. These base things need to work on a broad range of products. The fact that Apple writes much of their software for iOS and MacOS at the same time means much of it is designed to run on fairly light hardware. I know we’re all stuck with bloated stuff like Slack and som…

> but compiling code will still be faster I don't know about that, LLVM is getting slower with each new release too [1]. Same for Xcode: startup is very noticeably slower than a few years ago on the same machine. Starting into a debugging session for the first time is much slower (it used to be instant, now it's multiple seconds). The new build system in Xcode is most definitely slower than the old one, at least for…

The work off the back of that article has mostly halted that I think.

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

#343

Post by masklinn »

Foxhuls wrote: post #231
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.

Out of curiosity, when did you last use a single monitor instead of your current dual monitor setup? I’ve been using an ultrawide since 2015 but have almost always had a second side monitor with it. The period where I didn’t have a second monitor was short as having a separate monitor has always come in handy. All of the extra space on an ultrawide is great but when you’re doing something that takes the whole screen,…

Not the GP, and I really don't agree with their position, but I did switch from two monitors to a single UW last year.

TBF my old setup was a decade old so it was merely a 24" (1920x1200) and a 19" (1280x1024 in portrait).

Though my new display has a much larger logical size, the inability to put something fullscreen on one of the monitors (whether the small one or the large one, depending on the content) is definitely one of the drawbacks I had a hard time getting used to, not only can it be inconvenient, it actually wastes space as I can't get rid of window decorations, which putting e.g. a video player or browser window in fullscreen allowed.

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

#344

Post by monocasa »

jolux wrote: post #333
monocasa wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised how quickly a regular user can eat that these days with electron apps and a browser. My MIL would pretty routinely get out of memory errors at 16GB and she's hardly a power user. Somehow her Facebook tab would clock in at over a GB alone.

I pretty regularly have Slack running while compiling Erlang in the background, running a Docker container, several dozen Firefox tabs, and a Microsoft Teams call going, and I do not have problems with 16GB on x86. Perhaps ARM Macs use more memory or something. My next MacBook will definitely have more than 16GB if it’s available, but that’s more for future need rather than present.

She has problems with 16GB on x86. A single docker container and compiling erlang really don't use that much. It's many tabs of office 365, google docs, and social media, and how every app is an electron app now that eats memory.

I think we as programmers have lost sight of how a single gif in memory is about the same size as a whole docker container.

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

#345

Post by vladvasiliu »

mrweasel wrote: post #303
Klonoar wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t run Electron apps, even an older Mac will fly. My 2015 is still astoundingly fast, it just doesn’t have Chrome bogging it down.

You can even go back to 2013 and not notice that you’re using a 7-8 year old machine. A MacBook Pro from late 2013 runs Big Sur and performs fine for most everyday use use case and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE. You just can’t run Chrome all the well, which should tell you more about Chrome than Macs.

> and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE

Probably depends on the IDE and the language. My impression is that newer computers (especially in the "consumer" / "general public" market) have especially improved efficiency. They're not much faster, but they last longer on smaller batteries.

My late 2013 15" (2.3 GHz / 16 GB RAM) works great with Pycharm for moderately sized projects. It's even usable for personal Rust projects (with the intellij-rust plugin).

For Rust it's somewhat slower than my i5-8500 desktop but not by much. For incremental compiles, I don't feel like I'm waiting around more. The i5 mainly wins when it can use all six cores.

It's however quite a bit faster than my work HP ProBook with an i5-8250U which is a much newer machine (2018 I'd say).

Aside from battery life, which is somewhat lesser, all in all the mac is a much, much better machine than the HP, especially for "creature comforts": gorgeous screen, no misaligned panels rubbing against my wrists, great trackpad, no random coil whine, inaudible fans unless it starts compiling for a while, no background noise on the headphone out, integrated optical output when I want to use my home stereo.

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

#346

Post by msoad »

dcchambers wrote: post #258

I haven't yet used an M1 mac but based on what I've read about it I have fully bought into the hype train. Hoping my next laptop will be a M2-powered MBP, assuming they can increase the maximum RAM to at least 32GB.

I replaced my Core i9 fully spec'ed out MacBook Pro 64GB RAM with an M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and I can tell you my computing experience is better! Specially the fact that my computer works on battery!

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

#347

Post by Hamuko »

Klonoar wrote: post #275
flohofwoe wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

If you don’t run Electron apps, even an older Mac will fly. My 2015 is still astoundingly fast, it just doesn’t have Chrome bogging it down.

My early 2011 MacBook Pro definitely isn't fast but it's usable for checking out a couple tabs worth of stuff on the sofa.

My work 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro actually doesn't feel that fast considering how fucking expensive it is.

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

#348

Post by Hamuko »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #326
sneak wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are. What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them . Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS. I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.

AMD will probably "arm" up quickly, NVidia is acquiring ARM proper, Qualcomm won't sit still. Intel? Well, maybe 12 months after they catch up to AMD in x86. AMD's chips I've seen are decently competitive with M1. If ARM is a not-too-bad microcode adaptation and ditching a whole lot of x86 silicon real estate, AMD might be able to come to market quickly. Intel isn't just getting pantsed in x86 by AMD and process by T…

Isn't the ARM acquisition kinda stuck at the moment?

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

#349

Post by dillondoyle »

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…

My current almost 2 year old 16" has 64gm ram already. Is this new version faster despite lower amounts of storage?

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

#350

Post by sneak »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #323
sneak wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are. What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them . Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS. I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.

Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.

My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines.

There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks?

After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.

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