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People say that Ryzen is faster - but if it has a fan, then this is a deal breaker. I have become so annoyed by fans I often just stop work when they start whirling, go make a coffee etc. It seems like M1 is now the only laptop that can let you work in silence and be productive.
M1 will soon have a fan due to the overheating issue. Although I imagine given how slow the response was on the butterfly keyboard issue it might be a few years out.
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Memory is unified its just not on die. CPU and GPU and AI share unified memory which means zero copy transfers between them.
I laughed when they called it “unified memory.” Amazing what some marketing can do. In previous years, that was called “shared graphics memory” and it was only for low end systems.
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Cold start of Electron, MS office, Affinity (all ARM versions) takes me north of 15". 8GB M1 Mini, so maybe that makes the situation worse.
Affinity Photo starts in 15 seconds on my M1, which IMO is not okay. It's just as slow as on my Haswell Intel Mac. Everything else launches in a second or so. Spotify (Electron) draws a window in three seconds, but takes another four to display all content.
I'm curious if there is some architectural limit that prevents Apple from doing something similar on Intel Macs, at least ones with 8+ cores. The scheduler could arbitrarily nominate 4 cores as "efficiency" cores and keep them for background tasks, leaving the rest free for "performance".
But you then get a huge tradeoff: If you reserve over 50% of the computational power for "asap" stuff, then all the "whenever" stuff will take twice as long as usual (assuming the tasks to be limited by compute power). On a 8C Intel that means that, for a lot of stuff, you're now essentially running on a 4C Intel. Given the price of these chips that MIGHT be a difficult sell, even for Apple. On the M1 they don't seem to care.
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What overheating issue? There isn't one in M1.
There isn't any thermal slowdowns on the M1 devices with a fan, no. The only M1 device without a fan shows thermal limitations, though. Not an overheating issue, no, but the M1 still benefits from a fan, and obviously whatever Apple does in a Mac Pro class machine will also have a fan. They aren't going to keep at ~25W in a full size desktop, that'd be nonsense.
I'm still assuming it's faster due to unified memory architecture, latest generation lithography and less on tailored behavior for their OS. An AMD/Intel using same soldered RAM next to CPU and same process node would give Apple a run for its money. Still, the optimizations on OS side are interesting here.
AMD, Intel, ARM, & Qualcomm have all been shipping unified memory for 5+ years. I'd assume all the A* SoCs have been unified memory for that matter too unless Apple made the weirdest of cost cuts.
Moreover literally none of the benchmarks out there include anything at all that involves copying/moving data between the CPU, GPU, and AI units. They are almost always strictly-CPU benchmarks (which the M1 does great in), or strictly-GPU benchmarks (where the M1 is good for integrated but that's about it)
> An AMD/Intel using same soldered RAM next to CPU and same process node would give Apple a run for its money.
AMD's memory latency is already better than the M1's. Apple's soldered RAM isn't a performance choice:
"In terms of memory latency, we’re seeing a (rather expected) reduction compared to the A14, measuring 96ns at 128MB full random test depth, compared to 102ns on the A14." source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
"In the DRAM region, we’re measuring 78.8ns on the 5950X versus 86.0ns on the 3950X." https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
That is all well and good. Great actually. And it makes sense. The high efficiency reduced instruction set computer has highly optimized architecture to improve efficiency. But we all knew that deep down. It's like the Ford Tempo. A mere 80 horsepower mated to a well designed and highly optimized transmission gave levels of performance that were higher than other cars in the same market. What I can't stand are all th…
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I laughed when they called it “unified memory.” Amazing what some marketing can do. In previous years, that was called “shared graphics memory” and it was only for low end systems.
Shared graphics-memory is not the same as unified memory. In a shared graphics-memory system, a part of the system RAM is reserved for the GPU. The amount of RAM reported to the OS is the total RAM minus the chunk reserved the GPU uses. The OS only can use it's own part, and cannot access the GPU memory (and vice versa). If you want to make something available to the GPU, it still has to be copied to the reserved GPU…
Or allocate on the GPU side and get direct access to it from the CPU, achieving zero-copy:
https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/article...
This certainly makes a lot of sense, and it's a brilliant strategy to improve overall performance. But it doesn't account for the full picture either. My M1 Macbook Pro feels about as responsive as my desktop system with an AMD Ryzen 3900X, which is impressive to say the least. It doesn't quite have the raw computing power of the 3900X, but given that it's a portable device that's something else.