Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

apple.com

71–80 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#71
post #59

M1 Pro Max is only $200 more. I'm tempted, but do we think it will be more power hungry under the same workload than the Pro?

The full-blown Max they talked about is an $800 upgrade. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch It's combined with double RAM (32GB), double GPU (32-core).

The $200 upgrade is called 'Max', but is still 16GB RAM, and 'only' 24 core GPU.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#73
post #3
post #2

Did they really just claim 30-series tier performance on the max GPU? If that's true that would be insane!

Equivalent to "the notebook with the fastest GPU we could find at half the power" is how I remember it... I'm just not entirely certain what GPU performance does for me...? I don't work with video, there aren't any games, and I'm not playing them, anyway. Does iTerm2 scrolling get better? I used to be quite happy with the GeForce 7xx(?) and tensorflow, and this seems like it would have quite a bit of power for ML. Un…

Something like this?

https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#74

As is typical for apple, the phrasing is somewhat intentionally misleading (like my favorite apple announcement - "introducing the best iphone yet" - as if other companies are going backwards?). The wording is of course carefully chosen to be technically true, but to the average consumer, this might imply that these are more powerful than any CPU apple has ever offered (which of course is not true).

>this might imply that these are more powerful than any CPU apple has ever offered (which of course is not true).

Excuse my ignorance, what is?

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#75

The benchmark to power consumption comparisons were very interesting. It seemed very un-Apple to be making such direct comparisons to competitors, especially when the Razer Blade Advanced had slightly better performance with far higher power consumption. I feel like typically Apple just says "Fastest we've ever made, it's so thin, so many nits, you'll love it" and leaves it at that. I'll be very curious to see those…

I'm not going to wait for the comparisons this time. Maxing this baby out right now.

Honest question, what do you do where a $6,099 laptop is justifiable?

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#76

Great update, I think Apple did the right thing by ignoring developers this time. 70% of their customers are either creatives who rely on proprietary apps, or people who just want a bigger iPhone. Those people will be really happy with this upgrade, but I have to wonder what the other 30% is thinking. It'll be interesting to see how Apple continues to slowly shut out portions of their prosumer market in the interest…

I agree this is very targeted towards the creative market (i.e. SD card port, etc), but I'm curious as a developer what you would have liked to see included that isn't in this release.

I guess personally having better ML training support would be nice, since I suspect these M1 Max chips could be absolute monsters for some model training/fine-tuning workloads. But I can't think of anything design-wise really.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#77
Lots of junk comments, but I guess that happens with Apple announcements. Laptops seem impressive to me, I want to see the real world use metrics. Pushing hard on the performance per watt type metric and no doubt they have a lot of power and use less power. Seems like they listened to the outcry of people regarding the Touch Bar and more ports. Seems like this should sell well.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#78

Are these M1 Pro/Max based on the A14 or A15? Does “M1” == “A14” or does it mean “M1” == “5nm TSMC node”?

m1 is already very different to A14/15. Why do you think they are "based" on the mobile SoCs?

Because CPU tears downs show that “Apple's M1 system-on-chip is an evolution of the A14 Bionic” [0]

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/apple-m1-vs-apple-m14-...

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#79

Since these won't ship in non-Apple products, I don't see really the point. They're only slightly ahead of AMD products when it comes to performance/watt, slightly behind performance/dollar (in an Apples to apples comparison on similarly configured laptops), and that's only because Apple is head of AMD at TSMC for new nodes, not because Apple has any inherent advantage. I have huge respect for the PA Semi team, but t…

Our local office only uses macOS and Windows for desktop computers, GNU/Linux nowadays only for servers in some Amazon and Azure cloud instances.

Apple will have plenty of customers.

Post reply on HN