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Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

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

#92

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…

Yeah this is the first time they actually compared to something with the possibly bigger performance.

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

#95
post #65

Any indication on the gaming performance of these vs. a typical nvidia or AMD card? My husband is thinking of purchasing a mac but I've cautioned him that he won't be able to use his e-gpu like usual until someone hacks support to work for it again, and even then he'd be stuck with pretty old gen AMD cards at best.

Wow, I had no idea M1 doesn't support eGPUs. I was planning on buying an external enclosure for Apple Silicon when I upgraded; thanks for pointing that out.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A few thousand dollars per year (presumably it will last more than one year) is really not much for the most important piece of equipment a knowledge worker will be using.

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

#97

For me, think about that memory bandwidth. No other CPU comes even close. A Ryzen 5950X can only transfer about 43GB/s. This thing promises 400GB/s on the highest-end model.

No consumer CPU comes close. Just saw an article about the next-gen Xeon's with HBM though that blows even this away (1.8TB/s theoretically), but what else would one expect from enterprise systems. Getting pretty damn excited about all the CPU manufacturers finally getting their asses into gear innovation-wise after what feels like a ridiculously long period of piss-warm "innovation".

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

#98
post #82

This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do for their desktops. Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the effi…

I think the higher memory is also a huge win, with support for up to 64gb.

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

#99

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

They share the core design, icestorm for efficiency cores and firestorm for performance cores, but these are recombined into entirely different systems on chip. To say the m1 max is the same as a14 is like saying a xeon is the same as an i3 because they both have skylake-derived cores.

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

#100

Isn't almost every new Apple chip the most powerful chip Apple has ever built?

They could have been optimizing for lower power consumption rather than more compute power. For example, the next iPhone chip will likely not be the most powerful when it comes to compute, even if it beats the other iPhone chips.

And that's exactly why I put the word "almost" in the sentence!
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