Could an informed reader briefly explain whether the current M1 chips are overly hard on their hard drives? I'm debating between 8GB and 16GB for an M1 Mac Mini. Between the two sizes my main concern is more about whether the swapping on the 8GB will kill the hard drive, rather than whether 8GB will be enough
Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
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Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#82"Company developing Mac Pro desktop with 40 cores, new Mac mini" It will be interesting to see how close the rumors are to fact when real hardware announcements happen. Given how fast the M1 in the MacBook Air is performing for tasks like video editing I wonder if they will really need to push to such extremes as putting 40 cores in a Mac Pro -- unless they plan to edit four 8K streams at once?
40 cores isn't extreme. "Titan S375 - Dual AMD EPYC Rome 7002 Series - Scientific Research Server PC up to 128 cores" https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-S375-Dual-AMD-EPYC-Rome...
If you're going the scientific computing / HPC server route, then the sky's the limit for core count, you can buy dozens of these and connect them up with Infiniband to run your MPI job or whatever. The point is, the people buying Mac Pros are usually content creators (photography, video editing, music composition, animation etc...) rather than researchers for numerical computation, and for them Mac Pros are probably going to be sufficient enough (unless you are doing 3D animation and need render farms). Most number-crunching scientific code is written only for Linux, you'll never buy a Mac anyway.
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#83The Mac Pro Mx CPUs illustrate the promise of ARM and Apple Silicon. When the Firestorm core is one of the fastest available but uses less than 5 watts, Apple can use a ton of them at once without massive heat and power usage.
The top end Mac Pro with 32 Firestorm on one chip is probably will have a GeekBench Multicore score approaching 60,000, triple the fastest Xeon based Mac Pro.
And it probably uses half the 300 watts of the existing Mac Pro, with correspondingly less heat. Hopefully Apple doesn’t use this as sn opportunity to go back to the whacky packaging of the Trash Can Mac Pro.
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#84It says the split for performance versus efficiency cores will be: - 20 total, 16 high performance, 4 efficiency - 40 total, 32 high performance, 8 efficiency Which is kind of interesting given that the 8 core M1 is split half/half at 4 high performance, 4 efficiency. Sounds like perhaps MacOS doesn't typically have more than 4 cores worth of low-priority work, regardless of the system size/workload?
This is what I would have expected - I suggested when the M1 was first mentioned that it might make more sense for the Mac Pro to just have a side wall of separate independent SOC stacks with independent on-thread memory that GCD could manage behind the scenes. This seems like a much more straight-forward way to throw more performance into the higher-end machines without making long-tail disruptions to the architecture.
The efficiency cores are essentially for when the system is idling or for the 95% case (browsing the web, watching YouTube and checking e-mails). If a task is performance-bottlenecked then it makes sense to go straight to maximum performance rather than any in-between combination as you're essentially either waiting for the computer or not (i.e. it probably doesn't make much sense to try to strike an efficiency balance for tasks that are stressing a minimal set of low-power cores when they need to be completed either way - and in a machine where there's no battery life to worry about).
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#85Could an informed reader briefly explain whether the current M1 chips are overly hard on their hard drives? I'm debating between 8GB and 16GB for an M1 Mac Mini. Between the two sizes my main concern is more about whether the swapping on the 8GB will kill the hard drive, rather than whether 8GB will be enough
Most analysis I’ve seen says it shouldn’t be a problem. The concern came out of people misinterpreting read/write stats.
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :) I still deal with 1080p and get annoyed at my hardware's limitations. If I could justify a Mac Pro and Apple's accelerator card, I'd get them in a heartbeat. For certain applications, no matter how good the hardware you have is, there's always a desire for more, faster hardware.
"There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :)" Is that really a common scenario? I can see editors at the big studios using monsters like this (because the studios can afford it) but are we talking about a market of hundreds or thousands? Is this something a free-lance video person would use?
Not yet, but that future is nigh. And if you’re discussing workhorse computers, I’d at least want that capability for when the time comes.
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#87As someone who just invested in a Mac Pro late last year, I'm a bit frustrated. I wanted years for a modular design that I could keep and upgrade over a longer time only to find out I'll be forcefully phased out within 2 years.
Truly a first world problem for you.
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren’t forcing you to phase out your machine. They will continue to support it.
Only for ~2 more years. I had a Motorola machine and when they switched to x86, it was useless pretty quickly, far before its time.
The Intel MacBook was introduced in 2006 and SnowLeopard discontinued PowerPC in 2009. So 3 years seems to be about what you can expect before there's no OS, and another 2-3 years after that the patches stop.
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be a cooper pipe between the CPU and cooler like this one[1]. Seriously, WTF? Where is it? 1: https://i0.wp.com/lemmymorgan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...
In a way it's possibly more efficient without the heat pipe - the cooler is directly over the CPU in this design, and can be quite large due to the way it's packaged (though it has to be thin). The downside is it's harder to get decent airflow over the fins. The casing is probably designed to direct the airflow, but I'd have to see all parts together to figure out how this works. EDIT: the lower case appears to have…
That's a very questionable system. It needs to be completely sealed except for intake to work properly.
Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adding a bunch of tiny cores to an SOC is easy. What’s much harder is writing the software to make use of them.
Nah, that's pretty easy if you do anything involving video. AV1 will eat all the cores.
It depends on the type of video processing and whether you can handle adding latency.