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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

#551

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You could use the new AMD cards at least though right? I don't think Nvidia support will ever happen again though (I got burned by that, bought a 1060 right before they dropped Nvidia). I'm on a RX 5700XT with my Hackintosh, and it works well. Edit: Thinking about this more.. I bet third party GPUs are a dead end for users and Apple is planning to phase them out.

I think I'd wait to see what the Mac Pro supports before coming to that conclusion. Could be something they're still working on for that product, and then when it's working on the Apple Silicon build of macOS will be made available on laptops as well.

I guarantee you this is them finally ripping the Band-Aid of having to support _any_ outside hardware

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

#552
post #544

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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…

L3 is almost never SRAM, it's usually eDRAM and clocked significantly lower than L1 or L2. (SRAM is prohibitively expensive to do at scale due to die area required). Edit: Nope, I'm wrong. It's pretty much only Power that has this.

L3 is SRAM on all AMD Ryzen chips that I'm aware of.

I think it's the same with Intel too except for that one 5th gen chip.

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

#553

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.

I thought they compared it with an i9-9980HK which is the top-end 2019 chip in the outgoing 16" MBP?

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

#554

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Huh, I guess that was as bad an idea as the 640K one.

How much per 8K x 10 bit color, video frame? Roughly 190GB per minute without sound. Trying to do special effects on more than a few seconds of 8K video would overwhelm a 64GB system, I suspect.

You were (unintentionally) trolled. My first post up there was alluding to the legend that Bill Gates once said, speaking of the original IBM PC, "640K of memory should be enough for anybody." (N.B. He didn't[0])

[0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-e...

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

#555
post #331

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In A15, Anandtech claims the Efficiency cores are 1/3 the performance, but 1/10 the power. They should be looking at (effectively) doubling the power consumption over M1 with just the CPUs and assuming they don't increase clockspeeds. Going from 8 to 16 or 32 GPU cores is another massive power increase.

I wonder if Apple will give us a 'long-haul' mode where the system is locked to only the energy efficient cores and settings. I us developer types would love a computer that survives 24 hours on battery.

macOS Monterey coming out on the 25th has a new Low Power Mode feature that may do just that. That said, these Macs are incredibly efficient for light use, you may already get 24 hrs of battery life with your workload. Not counting screen off time.

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

#556
post #505

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That's still a bad naming convention. It won't be the maximum forever.

But it will the the max M1 forever. When M2 comes around, that's a different class.

It appears that M1 Max itself comes in 24-core and 32-core GPU variants. So I guess some M1 Max chips are more maximum than other M1 Max chips.

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

#557
post #290

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> "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1 Total cores, but going from 4 "high performance" and 4 "efficiency" to 8 "high performance" and 2 "efficiency. So should be more dramatic increase in performance than "20% more cores" would provide.

Is there a tradeoff in terms of power consumption?

Huge, apparently. I just spent a bit over $7,000 for a top-spec model and was surprised to read that it comes with a 140 watt power adapter.

Prior to my current M1 MBP, my daily driver was a maxed-out 16" MBP. It's a solid computer, but it functions just as well as a space heater.

And its power adapter is only 100 watts.

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

#558
Kind of surprising to me they’re not making more effort towards game support - maybe someone can explain what the barriers are towards mac support - is it lack of shared libraries, x64 only, sheer number of compute cores?

When I see the spec sheet and “16x graphics improvement” I go okay what could it handle in terms of game rendering? Is it really only for video production and GPU compute tasks?

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

#559
post #543
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…

Edit: I was wrong! Thanks for pointing it out Not exactly. M1 CPU, GPU, and RAM were all capped in the same package. New ones appear to be more a single board soldered onto mainboard, with a discrete CPU, GPU, and RAM package each capped individually if their "internals" promo video is to be believed (and it usually is an exact representation of the shipping product) https://twitter.com/cullend/status/145020377914878…

CPU and GPU is one die, you're looking at RAM chips on each side of the package. The M1 also had the RAM separate but on package.

M1: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn

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

#560

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...or just released the full documentation for them. Apple being Apple and wanting full control over its users, I don't see that happening. I really don't care how fast or efficient these are, if they're not publicly documented all I think is "oh no, more proprietary crap". Apple might even make more $$$ if it wanted to open up, but it doesn't.

What do you mean? All the APIs (Xcode SDK, Metal, ML, etc) required to build on their devices are very well documented.

I'm not talking about apps on their devices, I'm talking about new types of devices based on their processors.

If these were available for others to buy, I think we would be very surprised by the innovative new devices people would invent.

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