271–280 of 351 posts
Really would like to know more about the GPU and Ram. At 128 gpu cores vs the 8 in the M1 you talking 16 times the potential GPU power which could put it up there near the top of discrete GPU's.
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As has been mentioned elsewhere, devoting some cores to background tasks and reserving the others for higher-priority stuff also makes the system feel more responsive. See, for example, this article from yesterday: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-... Long story short, segregating background work from foreground work means that Spotlight indexing won't cause the UI to become sluggish. I'm g…
But separating the background work doesn't actually require efficiency cores. With 40 performance cores, you could still dedicate 4 or 8 of them to "background" processes only. As that article you linked shows, the background processes would simply complete more quickly without affecting interactive work on the machine.
At the end of the day you will still need HE Core, they just aren't as important comparing to a Battery devices.
Not to mention Marketing, Die Size cost consideration.
> Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes. They’ll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like. Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Tou…
I've had MacBooks since 2005, and I'm an amateur photographer. I really don't miss the ports or MagSafe at all. I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap. I've found that the cord being on other side is nearly as good as magsafe anyway, as it will be better positioned to pull out if it gets yanked. Ye…
From these reports, the next revision to the Air is going to get a bit of a redesign, colors, faster CPU, etc., but "Air" is still almost certainly going to mean the line that prioritizes being thin and light. You will still have a Mac laptop that gives you what you want. But people who do want more ports will, for the first time since Mac laptops went USB-C, also get what they want. (Or at least get closer to it.)
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I've had MacBooks since 2005, and I'm an amateur photographer. I really don't miss the ports or MagSafe at all. I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap. I've found that the cord being on other side is nearly as good as magsafe anyway, as it will be better positioned to pull out if it gets yanked. Ye…
As a musician with tons of peripherals, some of which are annoyingly sensitive and can't be used through hubs or anything but straight-through adapters (my turntable mixer's digital interface, for example), I welcome the return of the ports. Its not uncommon to have an audio interface, one or more midi controllers, the aforementioned mixer all connected for instance. And basically all of those things still use USB-B…
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I bought a 10-core iMac Pro, and it's a screamer - super-fast and super-reliable even after 16+ hours of use a day. So I don't regret that choice, even if it was the most expensive computer I've ever bought. A 32+8 core M1 for a less insane price sounds like an easy upgrade choice. The lingering question is memory. 16GB won't be enough.
> super-fast and super-reliable even after 16+ hours of use a day. What does the time have to do with it? It's not like a car with moving parts.
It 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?
Consider the use cases. The Mac Pro is a desktop, always plugged in and used for the power. The M1 is on a laptop running on a battery where efficiency is more important to improve the battery life.
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Apple’s goal is to have every portable computer work like an iPhone: you charge it overnight, then unplug it and use it unwired for a full day. This is why the charging port on the mouse is on the bottom, for instance. They never quite got their Intel laptops there, though. (Especially running MS Teams, Slack, and Chrome!) It’s kind of funny that, now that they can make a laptop that really does last all day on one c…
Unfortunately that doesn't work for those of us that need to run compute intensive tasks, like browsing the web, or compiling stuff, or running docker. There's this stupid dream that the computer needs to be light and fanless and thin and sexy. It doesn't need to do that. I'm happy if it doesn't melt while trying to run some software I need to do my job.
Will TSMC 3nm be the second die shrink in a row where Apple does the unconventional thing and takes a reduction in power/heat instead of a performance increase? >Compared to it’s N5 node, N3 promises to improve performance by 10-15% at the same power levels, or reduce power by 25-30% at the same transistor speeds. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16024/tsmc-details-3nm-proces... It would certainly help pack that many c…
The 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…
Why focus on the Geekbench test? I thought the industry standard for CPU testing was Cinebench and AIDA64.
You can see the full description here (https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf) but there’s compression, encryption, compiling, and several other tests.
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> it can probably keep scaling to 16 and 32 Bad assumption. It's pretty difficult to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 32 cores. You have to carefully avoid all sources of process-wide contention. The only cases where it is easy to just keep adding cores are where the units of independent work are overwhelmingly large compared to everything else, like video compression.
No, it's certainly hard to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 32 cores. But it's also hard to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 8 cores. I'm saying that if we exclude the multithreaded programs that don't scale to 8 cores, most of them can be made to scale to 32 cores with reasonable effort.