Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#171

Post by periheli0n » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #157

Is this going to be inside an affordable box ie do I have to spend close to 5 figures for it? This is about as exciting as new cellular data speed announcements in a world where most data plans are extremely limited and quickly throttled one way or another. I still use Macs, but my resentment is building up from Apple's past choices e.g. thinness overrides every other feature, every component being solder on, ...

I would be very surprised if those Macs were offered at a much lower price point than the current top of the range.

They are selling the M1 MacBooks and Mini at a similar price as previous models with comparable number of ports, amount of ram, ssd. Only the CPU performance gain was for free ;)

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#172

Post by cronix » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

kingsuper20 wrote: post #98

cogman10 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True enough. Memory is also often a major constraint.

Absolutely. I think that people grossly underestimate the amount of processing that can be done on video. Reasonably sized filters, something like deinterlacing, high quality transforms. Swamping a modern CPU in terms of memory access or processing isn't too hard.

Sure, it's likely why AMD 64 core Threadrippers are overtaking the pro video industry at about 1/3 the cost of Apple's current top of the line Mac Pro. 8k/12k uncompressed RAW video is very demanding. It will be interesting to see how this 40 core apple cpu competes with the 64 core. Maybe they'll get a bit of market share back, but it better outperform by more than a few percentage points especially if they will cost more, which is likely.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#173

Post by jmrm » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

vinay_ys wrote: post #147

My current Late 2019 MacBook Pro heats up like crazy and goes into thermal throttling whenever I'm doing wfh meeting with lots of video participants for a couple of hours. I really hope they dedicate some hardware for this type of use-case with plenty of sustained thermal headroom.

The latests Intel-based Macbooks aren't well designed around thermals, and if the software you are using to have this meetings is Microsoft Teams, which at least in Windows eats a lot of memory and CPU resources (and I expect the same on macOS), it's even worse.

I haven't tried yet, but AFAIK M1 Macbooks have a lot lower thermal issues, so that isn't a problem right now.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#174

Post by formerly_proven » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

mikece wrote: post #19

pjmlp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The key part there being "scientific research server." The Amazon Graviton2 ARM chips have something like 64 cores but that makes sense for machines that are powering AWS. Unless the point of these Mac pros is to be at supercomputer speeds or to pack massive specs like VM packs a Bughatti Veyron (because we can) I don't see much of a point beyond the highest of high end video editing and scientific research.

Well that literally was their marketing 1999, no?

https://data.mactechnews.de/493404.jpg

https://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/150514094302-appl...

https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/94353573/ori...

https://b2c-images.idg.zone/3292182_800x400_r.jpg

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#175

Post by rdsnsca » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

dep_b wrote: post #70

Tolerable build times for large Swift projects!

The M1 is already better at that than most Intel Macs.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#176

Post by matja » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #61

xadhominemx wrote: post #49

Earlier 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.

Not quite that simple: Using AOM AV1, a 12-core Ryzen 5900X beats a 128-core dual EPYC 7763 (same Zen3 architecture) in every encoding benchmark, according to https://openbenchmarking.org/

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#177

Post by Closi » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

xadhominemx wrote: post #79

cogman10 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, that's pretty easy if you do anything involving video. AV1 will eat all the cores.

It’s definitely not easy. In general it is very hard. Some applications have been optimized and for a few applications the fit is very natural (ie, where it is easy to avoid single threaded bottlenecks, or where you don’t need to pass data from core to core via the cache). But for general purpose workloads, it will take a lot of optimization.

For general purpose workloads maybe, but the target-audience for the Mac Pro is really for people who are using applications that are highly multi-threaded. Just look at the use cases Apple describes the existing Mac Pro for:

> From production rendering to playing hundreds of virtual instruments to simulating an iOS app on multiple devices at once, it’s exceedingly capable.

> Increased speed for Logic Pro X, MATLAB, Adobe Photoshop 2020, Autodesk Maya, Wolfram Mathematica Build Time, Final Cut Pro X

> Tasks like animating 3D film assets, compositing 8K scenes and building lifelike gaming environments.

This is the target market - and pretty much everything listed here tends to be multi-threaded. Making multi threaded applications aren't easy, but for high performance tasks all these use-cases have to be multi-threaded where possible or they are just too slow.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#178

Post by newsclues » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #88

redm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m still using an iMac from 2007 with a core 2 duo. No software updates but it still hums along and functions as a YouTube machine.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#179

Post by neonate » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

https://archive.is/MAafg

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#180

Post by dang » Tue, May 18, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

killingtime74 wrote: post #87

redm wrote: post #45

As 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.

Please don't be an asshole in HN comments, no matter how annoying another comment feels. It just makes this place worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html