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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

#401

Post by smoldesu »

rpmisms wrote: post #365
dmitriid wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seconding this. If both iOS and MacOS had a "Pro Mode" that didn't treat me like a toddler, I'd be jumping into the Apple ecosystem head-first.

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

#402

Post by avisser »

azeirah wrote: post #301
mattfrommars wrote: post #272

I am in the market for a new laptop and bit skeptic for M1 Chips. Could anyone please tell me how is this not a "premium high performance Chromebook" ? Why should I buy this and not Dell XPS machine if I will be using it for web development/Android Development/C#/DevOps. Might soon mess with machine learning

For web dev it works very well, android development no clue, c# is primarily a windows-oriented development environment so probably not so great. For devops, well.. Mac is a linux-esque environment, it'll be fine? I have the m1 air and the big advantages are the absurd battery life and the extremely consistent very high performance. It's always cold, it's always charged, it's always fast. I believe you can get both f…

> c# is primarily a windows-oriented development environment so probably not so great.

I'm not confident that is still true today. .net core is multi-platform all-the-way and is the future.

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

#403

Post by methyl »

mannymanman wrote: post #388

So if I want a new Macbook purely for software development and building mobile apps, what should I pick between the $2499 14" and the $3499 16"? Doesn't look like there's any difference in Xcode build times from their website

It’s only a matter of your preference, whether you like more real estate on the screen or better portability.

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

#404

Post by seviu »

mannymanman wrote: post #388

So if I want a new Macbook purely for software development and building mobile apps, what should I pick between the $2499 14" and the $3499 16"? Doesn't look like there's any difference in Xcode build times from their website

14" + M1 Max (24 GPU cores) with 32 Gb Ram is the sweet spot imho. It costs a bit more but you get twice the memory bandwidth and double the ram, which will always prove handy.

I develop iOS apps and I think this is the sweet spot. I am not sure what impact the extra bandwidth of the M1 Max will have though. We will have to wait to see. For video editing is clear. For Xcode not so sure.

14 or 16 inches is up to personal preference. I just value more the smaller package and the reduced weight. Performance is about the same.

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

#405

Post by dragontamer »

culpable_pickle wrote: post #398
the_arun wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we use M1 chips on non-apple boards? If yes, I wish Apple releases these for non mac os consumption. Eg. Running linux servers in the cloud.

Why? There are plenty of server oriented ARM platforms available for use (See AWS Graviton). What benefit do you feel Apple’s platform gives over existing ones?

The Apple cores are full custom, Apple-only designs.

The AWS Graviton are Neoverse cores, which are pretty good, but clearly these Apple-only M1 cores are above-and-beyond.

---------

That being said: these M1 cores (and Neoverse cores) are missing SMT / Hyperthreading, and a few other features I'd expect in a server product. Servers are fine with the bandwidth/latency tradeoff: more (better) bandwidth but at worse (highter) latencies.

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

#406

Post by ac29 »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #124

Disingenuous for Apple to compare these against 2017 Intel chips and call them 2x and 3.7x faster. I would love to see how they fare against 2021 Intel and amd chips.

Intel's 2021 laptop chips (Alder Lake) are rumoured to be released later this month (usually actual availability is a few months after "release"). I expect them to be pretty compelling compared to the previous generation Intel parts, and maybe even vs AMD's latest. But the new "Intel 7" node (formerly 10++ or something) is almost certainly going to be behind TSMC N5 in power and performance, so Apple will most likely still have the upper hand.

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

#407

Post by pb7 »

paavohtl wrote: post #385
pb7 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If repairability was important to consumers, it would be a selling point for competitors. But it's not.

If Apple actually cared about sustainability, they would make their devices repairable.

They are repairable, but not by consumers in most cases.

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

#408

Post by mlindner »

lisper wrote: 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…

This isn't relevant to the chips. Take this to the other thread.

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

#409

Post by klelatti »

julienb_sea wrote: post #345
klelatti wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context the absence of the 27 inch iMac was interesting. If these SoC were not deemed to be 'right' for the bigger iMac then possibly a more CPU focused / developer focused SoC may be in the works for the iMac?

I doubt they are going to make different chips for prosumer devices. They are going to spread out the M1 pro/max upgrade to the rest of the lineup at some point during the next year, so they can claim "full transition" through their quoted 2 years. The wildcard is the actual mac pro. I suspect we aren't going to hear about mac pro until next Sept/Oct events, and super unclear what direction they are going to go. Mayb…

On reflection I think they've decided that their pro users want 'more GPU not more CPU' - they could easily have added a couple more CPU cores but it obviously wasn't a priority.

Agreed that it's hard to see how designing a CPU just for the Mac Pro would make any kind of economic sense but equally struggling to see what else they can do!

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

#410

Post by wmf »

sounds wrote: post #187
Unklejoe wrote: post #126

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…

Just to underscore this, memory physically closer to the cores has improved tRAS times measured in nanoseconds. This has the secondary effect of boosting the performance of the last-level cache since it can fill lines on a cache miss much faster. The step up from DDR4 to DDR5 will help fill cache misses that are predictable, but everybody uses a prefetcher already, the net effect of DDR5 is mostly just better efficie…

improved tRAS times

Has this been documented anywhere? What timings are Apple using?

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