Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by stirlo » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

zelon88 wrote: post #356

rdw wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple does nothing to improve front line technician procedures. They aren't even an engineering factor. If you happen to be able to replace something on an Apple product, it's only because the cost-benefit ratio wasn't in favor of making that part hostile to work with. Apple puts 56 screws in the Unibody MBP keyboards. They were practically the pioneer of gluing components in permanently. They don't care about techni…

> Apple does nothing to improve front line technician procedures.

I’m not a fan of planned obselence and waste but this is clearly wrong. They’ve spent loads of engineering effort designing a machine for their store that can replace and reseal and test iPhone screen replacements out back.

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

#572

Post by alex504 » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

gradys wrote: post #59

M1 Pro Max is only $200 more. I'm tempted, but do we think it will be more power hungry under the same workload than the Pro?

On Apple's website, see the notes below the battery consumption claims.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/#footnote-23

They are using the m1 pro to get their battery claim numbers.

I ordered an M1 Pro based on the slightly lower price and my assumption that it will be less power hungry. If it is only 200 dollars cheaper why else would they even offer the M1 Pro? The extra performance of he max seems like overkill for my needs so if it has worse power consumption I don't want it. I could probably get away with an M1 but I need the 16" screen.

We will find out in a few weeks when there are benchmarks posted by 3rd party reviewers, but by that time who knows how long it will take to order one.

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

#573

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #498

modulusshift wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Apple is selling M1 Macs like hotcakes, so it won't be too long until it'll be stupid not to support them. Also, texture thrashing isn't really an issue when you've got a shared CPU/GPU memory with 64 GB of space. Just cache like half the game in it lol

Apple had a shot at making Mac gaming a reality around 2019. They decided to axe 32-bit library support though, which instantly disqualifies the lion's share of PC games. You could still theoretically update these titles to run on MacOS, but I have little hope that any of these developers would care enough to completely rewrite their codebase to be compatible with 15% of the desktop market share.

Yeah, I was living with gaming on a Mac when that happened, and watched 2/3rds of my Steam library get greyed out.

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

#574

Post by threeseed » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #249

eli wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few thousand dollars per year (presumably it will last more than one year) is really not much for the most important piece of equipment a knowledge worker will be using.

It's still a waste if you don't need it though. This money could be spent on much more useful things.

If it improves compilation speeds by 1% then it's not a waste.

My time is worth so much more to me than money.

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

#575

Post by thoughtsimple » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

thecleaner wrote: post #562

Naive question - is this chip purely home-made at Apple or does it use Arm licensed IP ?

Apple uses the Arm Aarch64 instruction set with Apple silicon which is Arm IP. I don't believe that any Apple silicon uses any other Arm IP but who really knows since it is likely Apple would have written any contracts to prevent disclosure.

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

#576

Post by ellisv » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #370

bla3 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> how many workloads actually require 64gb of ram?

Don't worry, Chrome will eat that up in no time!

More seriously, I look forward to more RAM for some of the datasets I work with. At least so I don't have to close everything else while running those workloads.

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

#577

Post by miohtama » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

00deadbeef wrote: post #538

jackjeff wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t answer for music, but as a developer a sure way to waste a lot of RAM is to run a bunch of virtual machines, containers or device simulators. 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.

Same, I tend to get everything in 32GB but more and more often I'm going over that and having things slow down. I've also nuked an SSD in a 16GB MBP due to incredibly high swap activity. It would make no sense for me to buy another 32GB machine if I want it to last five years.

Don’t run Chrome and Slack at the same time :)

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

#578

Post by Andys » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #376

yumraj wrote: post #70

$400 to upgrade RAM from 16GB to 32GB -- Ouch!!

Also $400 to go from 32GB to 64GB if you start with the 16 inch MPB with the M1Max. So $400 in that case buys 32G extra instead of just 16GB extra. Interesting.

Except you already paid more to get the M1 Max, too, the upgrade to 64 is not available on any other models.

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

#579

Post by cududa » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #507

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…

>so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years Except you and I surely must know that's not true, that their machines have industry leading service lifetimes, and correspondingly high resale values as a result. Yes some pro users replace their machines regularly but those machines generally go on to have long productive lifetimes. Many of these models are also designed to be highly recyclable when…

Right. Im not speaking to iPhones or iPads here, but the non-serviceability creates a robustness pretty unmatched by Windows laptops in terms of durability.

Was resting my 2010 MBP on the railing of a second story balcony during a film shoot and it dropped onto the marble floor below. Got pretty dented, but all that didn't work was the ethernet port. Got the 2015 one and it was my favorite machine ever - until it got stolen.

2017 one (typing on now) is the worst thing I've ever owned and I'm looking forward to getting one of the new ones. 2017 one: -Fries any low voltage USB device I plug in (according to some internal Facebook forms they returned 2-5k of this batch for that reason) -When it fried an external drive plugged in on the right, also blew out the right speaker. -Every time I try and charge it I get to guess which USB-C port is going to work for charging. If I pick wrong I have to power cycle to power brick (this is super fun when the laptops dead and there's no power indicator, as there is on the revived magsafe) -Half-dime shaped bit of glass popped out of the bottom of the screen when it was under load - this has happened to others in the same spot but user error..

Pissed Apple wouldn't replace it given how many other users have had the same issues, but this thing has taken a beating as have my past laptops. I'll still give them money if the new one proves to be as good as it seems.

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

#580

Post by thcleaner999 » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #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?

Price you can’t win the gaming market with 2000+$ product