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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

#711

Post by floatboth »

dragontamer wrote: post #606
duskwuff wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more comparable to the sort of memory bus you'd typically see on a GPU... which is exactly what you'd hope for on a system with high-end integrated graphics. :)

You'd expect HBM or GDDR6 to be used. But this is seemingly LPDDR5 that's being used. So its still quite unusual. Its like Apple decided to take commodity phone-RAM and just make many parallel channels of it... rather than using high-speed RAM to begin with. HBM is specifically designed to be soldered near a CPU/GPU as well. For them to be soldering commodity LPDDR6 is kinda weird to me. --------- We know it isn't HB…

HBM isn't just "soldered near", it's connected through a silicon interposer rather than a PCB.

Also we know it's not HBM because the word "LPDDR5" was literally on the slides :)

> just make many parallel channels of it

isn't that just how LPDDR is in general? It has much narrower channels than DDR so you need much more of them?

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

#712

Post by jml7c5 »

labby5 wrote: post #639
satya71 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very simple: thermal budget. Chip performance is limited by thermal budget. You just can't spend more than roughly 100W in a single package, without going into very expensive and esoteric cooling mechanisms.

this is mostly wrong. The real issue has always been memory bandwidth. the highest end consumer x86 CPU has about the same memory bandwidth as a dGPU from 10 years ago. The M1 is extremely competitive with modern dGPUs, only a bit behind a 6900 XT.

>The M1 is extremely competitive with modern dGPUs, only a bit behind a 6900 XT.

Do you have a source for this?

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

#713

Post by cmeacham98 »

nojito wrote: post #570
m4rtink wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they will rather shredded perfectly good parts than to let thirt party repair shops use them to help people at sane prices: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g... https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon...

So because a company stole devices to sell them makes Apple the bad guy?

It's possible for both companies to be in the wrong.

The recycling center shouldn't have resold the devices (which is, as you point out, effectively theft). However, Apple should not be shredding hundreds of thousands of otherwise usable devices.

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

#714

Post by dougmwne »

ngngngng wrote: post #37

The benchmark to power consumption comparisons were very interesting. It seemed very un-Apple to be making such direct comparisons to competitors, especially when the Razer Blade Advanced had slightly better performance with far higher power consumption. I feel like typically Apple just says "Fastest we've ever made, it's so thin, so many nits, you'll love it" and leaves it at that. I'll be very curious to see those…

For the first time ever, they have something to brag about in their laptop specs. They are no longer just pulling parts off the shelf.

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

#715

Post by floatboth »

londons_explore wrote: post #151
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When nothing is changing, you do not have to touch the GPU. Yes, without Panel Self Refresh there would be this many bits going to the panel at that rate, but the display engine would keep resubmitting the same buffer. No need to rerender when there's no damage. (And when there is, you don't have to rerender the whole screen, only the combined damage of the previous and current frames.)

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

#716

Post by dzhiurgis »

hrrsn wrote: post #695
tantony wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They support fast-charging the battery to 50% in 30 minutes. That's probably the reason for the beefy charger.

I'm surprised the fast charger isn't a separate purchase, a la iPhone.

Yeah I'd prefer that. Converted everything to quality 6ft braided usb-c cables, bought a separate multiport charger. Will have to sell original one...

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

#717

Post by floatboth »

dragontamer wrote: post #636
socialdemocrat wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t think that is entirely true. Lots of features which exist on both RISC and CISC CPUs have different natural fit. Using micro-ops e.g. on a CISC is more important than in RISC CPU even if both benefit. Likewise pipelining has a more natural fit on RISC than CISC, while micro-op cache is more important on CISC than RISC.

I don't even know what RISC or CISC means anymore. They're bad, non-descriptive terms. 30 years ago, RISC or CISC meant something, but not anymore. Today's CPUs are pipelined, out-of-order, speculative, superscalar, (sometimes) SMT, SIMD, multi-core with MESI-based snooping for cohesive caches. These words actually have meaning (and in particular, describe a particular attribute of performance for modern cores). RISC…

Today RISC just means an ISA is fixed-length load-store. No uarch implications.

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

#718

Post by kranke155 »

Thaxll wrote: post #591
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #61

For me, think about that memory bandwidth. No other CPU comes even close. A Ryzen 5950X can only transfer about 43GB/s. This thing promises 400GB/s on the highest-end model.

And only 10 cores so a 5950x completely wreck an M1.

What application makes full use of 5950x all cores?

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

#719

Post by smoldesu »

wolrah wrote: post #619
smoldesu wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The major factor Apple has working in their favor with regards to the future of gaming on Macs is iOS. Any game or game engine that wants to support iPhone or iPad devices is going to be most of the way to supporting ARM Macs for "free". My older Intel Macs I'm sure are more or less SOL but they were never intended to be gaming machines.

That won't get the top 10 Steam games running on MacOS. There's just too great of a disparity in the tooling, a 'convergence' like you're describing would take the better half of a decade, conservatively speaking. And even if they did converge, that's only guaranteeing you a portion of the mobile market, and just the new games at that. Triple-A titles will still be targeting x86 first for at least the next 5 years, and everything after that is still a toss-up. There's just too much uncertainty in the Mac ecosystem for most games developers to care, which is why it's a shame that Proton doesn't run on Macs anymore. Apple's greatest shot at a gaming Mac was when MacOS had 32-bit support.

Your older Intel Macs are probably just fine for gaming, too. I play lots of games on my 2016 Thinkpad's integrated graphics, Minecraft, Noita, Bloons Tower Defense 6, all of these titles work perfectly fine, even running in translation with Proton. If you've got a machine with decent Linux support, it's worth a try.

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

#720

Post by josephg »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #716
hrrsn wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised the fast charger isn't a separate purchase, a la iPhone.

Yeah I'd prefer that. Converted everything to quality 6ft braided usb-c cables, bought a separate multiport charger. Will have to sell original one...

Just in case people missed it - the magsafe cable connects to the power supply via usb-c. So (in theory) there's nothing special about the charger that you couldn't do with a 3rd party charger, or a multiport charger or something like that.
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