611–620 of 1001 posts
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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.
Wasn't there a rumor that AMD was creating ARM chips? It will be great if we have ARM versions of EPYC chips.
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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, and they also deprecated OpenGL, which would have wiped out most of those games even if the 32-bit support didn't. I'm not expecting to see much backwards compatibility, I'm expecting forwards compatibility, and we're starting to see new titles come out with native Apple Silicon support, slowly, but surely.
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
It's not a function of capability. I spent $4,000 on a 2019 MBP, including $750 for a Vega 20. It plays Elder Scrolls Online WORSE than a friend's 2020 with INTEGRATED graphics. (I guess Bethesda gave some love to the integrated chipset, and didn't optimize for the Vega. It hitches badly every couple of seconds like it's texture thrashing.) Whatever AAA games that might have gotten some love on the Mac (and there are…
Naive question - is this chip purely home-made at Apple or does it use Arm licensed IP ?
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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.
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> I never could see any fundamental reason why "integrated" should mean "underpowered." There was always one reason: limited memory bandwidth. You simply couldn't cram enough pins and traces for all the processor io plus a memory bus wide enough to feed a powerful GPU. (at least not in a reasonable price)
We solved that almost a decade ago now with HBM. Sure, the latencies aren't amazing, but the power consumption numbers are and large caches can hide the higher access latencies pretty well in almost all cases.
How do they get 200/400GB per second RAM bandwidth? Isn't that like 4/8 channel DDR5. 4/8 times as fast as current Intel/AMD CPUs/APUs? (E.g. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/201837/... with 45.8GB/s) Laptop/desktop have 2 channels. High-end desktop can have 4 channels. Servers have 8 channels. How does Apple do that? I was always assuming that having that many channels is prohibitive in terms of…
They are using LPDDR5. Not the usual DDR5 used in Desktop / Laptop.
DDR4 is the common desktop/laptop chip. LPDDR5 is cell-phone chip, so its kinda funny to see a low-power RAM being used in a very wide fashion like this.
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Yeah, and they also deprecated OpenGL, which would have wiped out most of those games even if the 32-bit support didn't. I'm not expecting to see much backwards compatibility, I'm expecting forwards compatibility, and we're starting to see new titles come out with native Apple Silicon support, slowly, but surely.
I wouldn't hold your breath. Metal is still a second-class citizen in the GPU world, and there's not much Apple can do to change that. Having powerful hardware alone isn't enough to justify porting software, otherwise I'd be playing Star Citizen on a decommissioned POWER9 mainframe right now.
My older Intel Macs I'm sure are more or less SOL but they were never intended to be gaming machines.
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.
Video game consoles have been using integrated graphics for at least 15 years now, since Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.