421–430 of 1001 posts
I always thought it was strange that "integrated graphics" was, for years, was synonymous with "cheap, underperforming" compared to the power of a discrete GPU. I never could see any fundamental reason why "integrated" should mean "underpowered." Apple is turning things around, and is touting the benefits of high-performance integrated graphics.
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This exact question was asked a year ago when the M1 was announced. In the year since, their laptop market share increased about 2% from 14 to 16%[0]. The reasons for this are: 1. When deciding on a computer, you often have to decide based on use case, software/games used, and what operating system will work best for those use cases. For Windows users, it doesn't matter if you can get similar performance from a Macbo…
All good points but: 1) In the pro market (audio, video, 3d, etc) performance is very relevant. 2) Battery time is important to all types of laptop users. 3) Apple is certainly working on more desktop alternatives. 4) You don't need move all your devices into the closed ecosystem just because you use a Mac. Also, some people just don't want to use macOS on principle, but I'm guessing this is a minority. > AMD's produ…
I think the big thing to remember is that "performance crown" at any moment in time does not have a massive instantaneous effect on the purchasing habits across the market.
I have no doubt that Apple will continue to grow their market share here. But the people that continue to buy PC will not expect ARM-based chips unless someone (whether Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or someone else) builds those chips and they are competitive with x86. And x86 chips are not suddenly "so bad" (read: obsolete) that no one will consider buying them.
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
Whatever AAA games that might have gotten some love on the Mac (and there are some), it's going to be even harder to get game companies to commit to proper support to the M1 models. Bethesda has said they won't even compile ESO for M1. So I will continue to run it on a 12-year-old computer running an ATHLON 64 and a nVidia 9xx-series video card. (This works surprising well, making the fact that my Mac effectively can't play it all the more galling.)
I'm never going to try tricking out a Mac for gaming again. I should have learned my lesson with eGPU's, but no. I thought, if I want a proper GPU, it's going to be built in. Well, that doesn't work either. I've wasted a lot of money in this arena.
It makes me sad that no one will never be able to build anything with those chips. I imagine there could me many, many innovative products built with these chips if Apple sold them and supported Linux (or even Windows).
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Really curious if the memory bandwidth is entirely available to the CPU if the GPU is idle. An nvidia RTX3090 has nearly 1TB/s bandwidth, so the GPU is clearly going to use as much of the 400GB/s as possible. Other unified architectures have multiple channels or synchronization to memory, such that no one part of the system can access the full bandwidth. But if the CPU can access all 400GB/s, that is an absolute game…
I suspect the GPU is never really idle. Even simple screen refresh blending say 5 layers and outputting it to a 4k screen is 190Gbits at 144 Hz.
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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 have 32GB, so unless I’m careless everything usually fits in memory without swapping. If you got over things get slow and you notice.
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Not sure if it will be available, but 400GB/s is way too much for 8 cores to take up. You would need some sort of avx512 to hog up that much bandwidth. Moreover, it's not clear how much of a bandwidth/width does M1 max CPU interconnect/bus provide. -------- Edit: Add common sense about HPC workloads. There is a fundamental idea called memory-access-to-computation ratio. We can't assume a 1:0 ratio since it was doing…
Don't know the clock speed but 8 cores at 3Ghz working on 128bit SIMD is 8 3 16 = 384GB/s so we are in the right ball park. Not that I personally have a use for that =) Oh, wait, bloody Java GC might be a use for that. (LOL, FML or both).
The question is: what kind of problems are people needing that want 400GB/s bandwidth on a CPU? Well, probably none frankly. The bandwidth is for the iGPU really.
The CPU just "might as well" have it, since its a system-on-a-chip. CPUs usually don't care too much about main-memory bandwidth, because its like 50ns+ away latency (or ~200 clock ticks). So to get a CPU going in any typical capacity, you'll basically want to operate out of L1 / L2 cache.
> Oh, wait, bloody Java GC might be a use for that. (LOL, FML or both).
For example, I know you meant the GC as a joke. But if you think of it, a GC is mostly following pointer->next kind of operations, which means its mostly latency bound, not bandwidth bound. It doesn't matter that you can read 400GB/s, your CPU is going to read an 8-byte pointer, wait 50-nanoseconds for the RAM to respond, get the new value, and then read a new 8-byte pointer.
Unless you can fix memory latency (and hint, no one seems to be able to do so), you'll be only able to hit 160MB/s or so, no matter how high your theoretical bandwidth is, you get latency locked at a much lower value.
Can these drive more than one external monitor?
Also specific statements:
- M1 Pro SoC supports two XDR Pro Display
- M1 Max SoC was highlighted (Connectivity: Display Support -> 33:50):
- Supports three XDR Pro Displays and a 4k television simultaneously
- "75 Million pixels of real estate."
- Highlighted still having free ports with this setup.I always thought it was strange that "integrated graphics" was, for years, was synonymous with "cheap, underperforming" compared to the power of a discrete GPU. I never could see any fundamental reason why "integrated" should mean "underpowered." Apple is turning things around, and is touting the benefits of high-performance integrated graphics.
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…
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.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/07/linux-is-now-usable-as-a-basi...