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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

#361
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it'll be the same M1 Max. Just wait a few months like with the 24" iMac.

You're probably right. Maybe they have inventory to work through!

They might also have supply constraints on these new chips. I suspect they are going to sell a lot of these new MacBook Pros

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

#362
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.

In terms of Hardware M1 Max is great. On paper you wont find anything match its performance under load. As even Gaming / Content Creation Laptop throttle after a short while.

The problem is gaming isn't exactly a Mac thing. From Game selection to general support on the platform. So really performance should be the least of your concern if you are buying a Mac for games.

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about selling working devices but parent was also talking about repairing them. Seems like a huge waste to throw away a $2000+ machine when it's out of warranty because some $5 part on it dies and Apple not only doesn't provide a spare but actively fights anyone trying to repare them, while the options they realistically will give you out of warranty being having your motherboard replaced for some insa…

> Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000 lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the sticky mess inside. Thanks to the Right To Repair, you can take the laptop to pretty much any repair shop and they can replace anything you damaged with OEM or third-party parts. They even have schematics, so they can just desolder and resolder failed…

Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half.

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

#365
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.

As a developer and a power user, I'd love for them to stop iOS'ifying Mac OS. There's such a huge disconnect between what they do with hardware and what they do to MacOS.

Honestly a MacOS "Pro Mode" would be great. Let me run the apps I want, not use my mouse, and be able to break things, but keep the non-power user experience smooth and easy.

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

#366

Server Chips: if you removed the GPU, and added ECC - these would be dang nice server chips.

I was having a vision last night of a server rack filled with iPad Pros /w Ethernet through the USB-C. I still wonder what the performance per mm^3 would be in comparison to a traditional server.

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

#367
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

400GB/s available to the CPU cores in a unified memory, that is going to really help certain workloads that are very memory dominant on modern architectures. Both Intel and AMD are solving this with ever increasing L3 cache sizes but just using attached memory in a SOC has vastly higher memory bandwidth potential and probably better latency too especially on work that doesn't fit in ~32MB of L3 cache.

I'm thinking with that much bandwidth, maybe they will roll out SVE2 with vlen=512/1024 for future M series.

AVX512 suffers from bandwidth on desktop. But now the bandwidth is just huge and SVE2 is naturally scalable. Sounds like free lunch?

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

#369
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple, the company that requires the entire panel to be replaced by design when a 6 dollar display cable malfunctions, is proud to announce its latest marketing slogan for a better environment.

Just because you're not getting that panel back doesn't mean it's destroyed and wasted. I figure that these policies simplify their front-line technician jobs, getting faster turnaround times and higher success rates. Then they have a different department that sorts through all the removed/broken parts, repairing and using parts from them. No idea if this is what they actually do, but it would be the smart way to han…

It seems like they will rather shredded perfectly good parts than to let thirt party repair shops use them to help people at sane prices:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon...

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

#370
post #118
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought the memory was one of the more interesting bits here. My 2-year-old Intel MBP has 64 GB, and 8 GB of additional memory on the GPU. True, on the M1 Max you don't have to copy back and forth between CPU and GPU thanks to integrated memory, but the new MBP still has less total memory than my 2-year-old Intel MBP. And it seems they just barely managed to get to 64 GiB. The whole processor chip is surrounded by…

Just some genuine honest curiosity here; how many workloads actually require 64gb of ram? For instance, I'm an amateur in the music production scene, and I know that sampling heavy work flows benefit from being able to load more audio clips fully into RAM rather than streaming them from disk. But 64g seems a tad overkill even for that.

I guess for me I would prefer an emphasis on speed/bandwidth rather than size, but I'm also aware there are workloads that I'm completely ignorant of.

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