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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

#511

Post by enos_feedler »

dmix wrote: post #488
enos_feedler wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The opportunity for competition exists" is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, inves…

There's already multiple billion dollar companies trying to compete and get to where Apple's at. Apple has the lead now but they wont forever. They never do. I don't see what the big deal is here. Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.

In the consumer space there are only 2 paths for a viable competitor to emerge. 1) a coordinated ecosystem attack or 2) an individual company doubles down.

There are things that lead me to believe 1) can't happen. Google ultimately acquiring Fitbit instead of ecosystem compatibility and integration. It seems like the giants are needing to acquire the pieces to build their own Apple, rather than partner with them. Also Google and Microsoft have complementary businesses but they barely coordinate on this. The closest thing I have seen is Android helping Microsoft with Dual screen Android devices. In most other areas they are setup to compete (chromeos vs. windows, azure vs. gcp, stadia vs. xbox cloud, gsuite vs office, bing vs google search etc).

2) Samsung is the most equipped to lead this.

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

#512

Post by wmf »

mikece wrote: post #3

While this news is about "a rumor according to sources familiar with the matter" it's obvious that Apple will be doing this at some point. Whether it's the M2 or if there will be a new letter designator (X-series silicon for eXtreme performance? Apple X1?) I am very interested to see what the performance numbers will be for an ARM-powered workstation rocking 16 to 32 high power cores. Aside from the Ampere eMAG, is a…

Here's an ARM workstation: https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-workstati... "Unfortunately" the minimum CPU is 64-core.

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

#513

Post by sim_card_map »

dmix wrote: post #488
enos_feedler wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The opportunity for competition exists" is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, inves…

There's already multiple billion dollar companies trying to compete and get to where Apple's at. Apple has the lead now but they wont forever. They never do. I don't see what the big deal is here. Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.

> they wont forever. They never do.

retina imacs and macbook pros beg to differ

8,9 years later still no good alternative

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

#514

Post by wulfklaue »

niels_bom wrote: post #74
jonplackett wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple's second version of everything is always the one to get. The first version is always exciting, but usually comes at some large expense. - iPhone 2 had 3G and was so much better than 1 - iPad 2 was about 3 X slimmer/lighter than 1 Lots of other examples if I though about it.

What, in your opinion, is the drawback of the M1 product series? I haven’t read many negative reviews.

* Limited IO * Max 16GB Memory ( at unjustified cost ) * Limited Multi monitor support * No eGPU support ( as of now )

* Only about 50 a 55% of all the software is M1 ready ( looking at some tracking sites ). Technically this is not a M1 flaw but you need something to push the market/iron out the bugs. While when the M2 gets introduced, you may be at 60 or 70%. As in less likely to run into issues as the M1 users are the real beta testers. Even Parallels only recently got good M1 support ( with massive speed increases ).

As of this moment, buying a M1 laptop is a less beta tester feature then it was several months ago. If you ended up buying in Nov/Dec, you spend a lot of time under Rosetta 2 or dealing with issues.

> I haven’t read many negative reviews.

The above was kind of always overglanced by a lot of the reviews, as the youtubers mostly looked at their own us for video editing etc and there most software was on point very early in the release cycle.

You see a lot of reviews in Jan/Feb from people going back to Windows laptops after a month, not because of the CPU being bad but because they ran into software issues.

In the mean time the software situation has evolved a lot more but the progresses with software being made M1 ready has also slowed down a lot.

As a PC user i want a M1 like laptop, that has long battery life, is silent and still powerful ( unlike a lot of Windows laptops where its always the old saying: Pick 2, you can never have all 3 ).

But i prefer one with 8 performance cores, double the iGPU cores ( with preferably DDR5 ) for light gaming and standard 16GB. So some macBook 16 Pro or whatever, if the price is not insane. We shall see what Apple introduces...

So far the new offerings from AMD and Intel are fast but still power hungry and heat generating ( aka fan noise! ). AMD is only going little.big in 3nm.

Intel's alder lake may be a M1 competitor ( for battery life under light loads ) but its again first generation product so expect to be a beta tester until Windows gets fine tuned for a long time to properly use the little cores! For heavy loads, ... well, 10nm is 10nm, no matter how many +++ you add.

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

#515

Post by monocasa »

astrange wrote: post #496
monocasa wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Activity monitor showed that RAM was full. She did not use Safari, but instead Firefox.

Well that’s fine, RAM is supposed to be full. You’re wasting it if it’s not full. If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps. (which tends to come up way too late, but whatever)

> If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps.

Yes, she was getting both. To the point that I asked her to keep activity monitor running in the background so we could see who the problem applications were.

I'm not sure why this is in question.

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

#516

Post by wmf »

rvz wrote: post #259
bloqs wrote: post #164

soldered ram and SSD coupled with SSD Wear issues leading to a less than 3 year lifespan of a laptop makes all of this a hard pass for me, and should be for any sensible person too.

Not sure why you are downvoted, but this is true is it not? It's even worse with Apple Silicon machines since if the SSD dies, well the whole thing is bricked. Unlike the Intel Macs. It seems the Mac aficionados (Especially the M1 fanatics) are in denial of the degree of lock-in with the Mac as it gradually descends into become nearly as locked in as an iPhone. I'd give it 0.1 out of 10 for repairability. At least wi…

You can wear out any SSD. There's no evidence that Apple SSDs are any worse than others. You need to have backups. You need to understand that Apple products are sealed and disposable and only buy them if your use case can accommodate that.

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

#517

Post by 542458 »

foldr wrote: post #362
hajile wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a deal with the devil (especially on the pro machines) where you trade 50% faster CPU for 50% less RAM. Everyone raves about how 8GB machines feel, but the massive SSD usage and pitiful lifespan shows that there’s not a free lunch here. 16GB (or a 24GB option) goes a long way toward preventing early death. I actually suspect they’ll be launching a free SSD replacement program in the next couple years. I’ve also…

> I actually suspect they’ll be launching a free SSD replacement program in the next couple years. Not even the most alarmist estimates suggest that the SSDs on the 8GB machines will start dying after two years! At the moment the SSD lifetime concerns are little more than FUD. Everything we know is perfectly consistent with these machines having SSD lifetimes of a decade, even with heavy usage.

I was going to say! People seem to get all paranoid whenever swap is brought up on SSD machines, but modern SSD lifespans are pretty awesome.

https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

700TB was the minimum that any drive in the above link managed. If you used 100gigs of swap per day it would take you two decades to hit that level.

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

#518

Post by mike_d »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #409
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.

This idea that Electron apps are inherently somehow slow is starting to bug me out. While writing Electron version of our graphics heavy web application, I noticed that the memory usage or CPU consumption is not a lot higher than some other native applications. We have taken careful care in order to write fast and memory friendly javascript if possible, avoiding using slow features of the language (the list is long,…

It isn't just Electron, Node is also plagued by its own low barrier to entry.

One of my former employers had the great idea of hiring hundreds of "senior" JS devs and redoing the entire frontend of the website. When it launched to production the whole system scaled at approximately 1 enterprise-grade server to 1 concurrent user.

While I applaud your efforts to teach people how to write code faster, the majority of JS devs I have found just want to hit feature-complete and go home.

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

#519

Post by breakfastduck »

foobiekr wrote: post #494
edrxty wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM is destroying x86 across the board, not just at Apple. They've long won the mobile space and are now making significant inroads into the server market, long thought to be the last bastion of Intel/x86.

What's the revenue of ARM server CPUs?

It doesn't matter. The revenue for x86 server CPUs goes down every time Amazon install a CPU they made themselves instead of buying an intel chip.

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

#520

Post by wmf »

alkonaut wrote: post #245

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.

Apple could easily fit 2x-4x the performance on an SoC so that's what people expect the M1X and M1Z to be. Note that it's still an SoC if it has "external" memory (Apple's "unified memory" isn't what people think).
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