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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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 still uses DDR memory at the end of the day, it's just physically closer to the core. This is in contrast to L3 which is actual SRAM on the core. The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow the memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas the M1 uses 4266. The real advantage is the M1 Max uses 8 channels, which is impressive considering t…

> The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow the memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas the M1 uses 4266. My understanding is that bringing the RAM closer increases the bandwidth (better latency and larger buses), not necessarily the speed of the RAM dies. Also, if I am not mistaken, the RAM in the new M1s is LP-DDR5 (I read that, but it…

The overall bandwidth isn't affected much by the distance alone. Latency, yes, in the sense that the signal literally has to travel further, but that difference is miniscule (like 1/10th of a nanosecond) compared to overall DDR access latencies.

Better signal integrity could allow for larger busses, but I don't think this is actually a single 512 bit bus. I think it's multiple channels of smaller busses (32 or 64 bit). There's a big difference from an electrical design perspective (byte lane skew requirements are harder to meet when you have 64 of them). That said, I think multiple channels is better anyway.

The original M1 used LPDDR4 but I think the new ones use some form of DDR5.

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

#212
post #168
post #105

"Apple’s Commitment to the Environment" > Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and by 2030, plans to have net-zero climate impact across the entire business, which includes manufacturing supply chains and all product life cycles. This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral. But what they won't do is put the chip in an expan…

>But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. Mac computers last way longer than their PC counterparts.

Is apple's halo effect affecting your perception of the mac vs PC market? iPhones last longer because they have much longer software updates, and are more powerful to start with. None of these factors apply to macs vs PCs.

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

#213

> This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral. How is that even possible?

I guess it must be net, right? So maybe carbon offsets or providing more green energy than they consume, to the grid?

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

#214
post #103

Based on the numbers it looks like the M1 Max is in the RTX 3070-3080 performance territory. Sounds like mobile AAA gaming has potential to reach new heights :D

Not to disagree, but what gave you that impression?

The slides with performance numbers list the comparison machines

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

#215
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…

Actually no "extra" chip area in comparison to x86 based solution. They just throw away so much of cruft from the die like PCIE PHYs, and x86 legacy I/O with large area analog circuitry. Redundant complex DMA, and memory controller IPs are also thrown away. Clock, and power rails on the SoC are also probably taking less space because of more shared circuitry. Same with self-test, debug, fusing blocks, and other small…

This is very interesting and first time I’ve heard / thought about this. Wonder how much power efficiency comes from exactly these things?

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

#216
post #54

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 time, they showed which laptop was used to compare the performance on the bottom left corner during presentation

Yeah, that is good ofcourse.

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

#217
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple almost single-handedly made computing devices non-repairable or upgradable; across their own product line and the industry in general due to their outsized influence.

Single handedly? >According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.” The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-s...

And they get away with it because Apple normalized it.

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

#218
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The big ticket items: Hardware-accelerated VSCode cursor animation. Dedicated button for exiting vim. Additional twelve function keys, bringing the total to 24; further, vectorised function key operations, so you can execute up to 12 "nmap :set background=dark" statements in parallel. Dedicated encode and decode engines that support YAML, TOML and JWT JSON. A neural engine that can approximate polynomial time registe…

You could just say "I want Linux" and get the same point across.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only makes sense if you presume people throw away their laptops when they replace them after "a few years". Given the incredibly high second hand value of macbooks, I think most people sell them or hand them down.

My F500 company has a 5 year tech refresh policy, and old laptops are trashed, not donated or resold.

I cannot imagine that represents the majority of the market.

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

#220
post #103

Based on the numbers it looks like the M1 Max is in the RTX 3070-3080 performance territory. Sounds like mobile AAA gaming has potential to reach new heights :D

Not to disagree, but what gave you that impression?

based on the relative differences between the m1 and the m1 pro/max, and also the comparisons shown by apple to other laptops from the MSI and Razerblade both featuring the RTX 3080.
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