Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 1001 posts

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

#851

Post by londons_explore »

modulusshift wrote: post #425
londons_explore wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple put ProMotion in the built in display, so while it can ramp up to 120Hz, it'll idle at more like 24 Hz when showing static content. (the iPad Pro goes all the way down to 10Hz, but some early sources seem to say 24Hz for these MacBook Pros.) There may also be panel self refresh involved, in which case a static image won't even need that much. I bet the display coprocessors will expose the adaptive refresh funct…

It only takes a tiny animation (eg. a spinner, pulsing glowing background, animated clock, advert somewhere, etc), and suddenly the whole screen is back to 120 Hz refresh.

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

#852

Post by simonh »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #721
jerrysievert wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the power supply is for charging the battery faster. the new magsafe 3 system can charge with more wattage than usb-c, as per the announcement. usb-c max wattage is 100 watts, which was the previous limiting factor for battery charge.

The other end of the new MagSafe is usb-c, which gets plugged into the power adapter.

Sure, but it's an Apple cable plugging into an Apple socket. They don't have to be constrained by the USB-C specs and could implement a custom high power charging mode. In fact I believe some other laptop manufacturers already do this.

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

#853

Post by schmorptron »

the_jeremy wrote: post #208
Grustaf wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only makes sense if you presume people throw away their laptops when they replace them after "a few years". Given the incredibly high second hand value of macbooks, I think most people sell them or hand them down.

My F500 company has a 5 year tech refresh policy, and old laptops are trashed, not donated or resold.

Damn, they could at least just trash the hard drives and just give them to local schools or something...

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

#854

Post by schmorptron »

ac29 wrote: post #406
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #124

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.

Intel's 2021 laptop chips (Alder Lake) are rumoured to be released later this month (usually actual availability is a few months after "release"). I expect them to be pretty compelling compared to the previous generation Intel parts, and maybe even vs AMD's latest. But the new "Intel 7" node (formerly 10++ or something) is almost certainly going to be behind TSMC N5 in power and performance, so Apple will most likely…

Are those the ones with big.LITTLE designs already?

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

#855

Post by kaba0 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #795
Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can exhaust my 64GB just opening browser tabs for documentation.

In case your statement is only a slight sarcasm:

Isn’t that just the OS saying “unused memory is wasted memory”? Most of it is likely cache that can easily be evicted with higher memory pressure.

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

#856

Post by simonh »

astrange wrote: post #731
sulam wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, M1 has been out for a while now, with HN doom and gloom about not being able to put enough memory into them. Real world usage has demonstrated far less memory usage than people expected (I don't know why, maybe someone paid attention and can say). The result is that 32G is a LOT of memory for an M1-based laptop, and 64G is only needed for very specific workloads I would expect.

Measuring memory usage is a complicated topic and just adding numbers up overestimates it pretty badly. The different priorities of memory are something like 1. wired (must be in RAM) 2. dirty (can be swapped) 3. purgeable (can be deleted and recomputed) 4. file backed dirty (can be written to disk) 4. file backed clean (can be read back in). Also note M1's unified memory model is actually worse for memory use not be…

Unified memory is a performance/utilisation tradeoff. I think the thing is it's more of an issue with lower memory specs. The fact you don't have 4GB (or even 2 GB) dedicated memory on a graphics card in a machine with 8GB of main memory is a much bigger deal than not having 8GB on the graphics card on a machine with 64 GB of main RAM.

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

#857

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

cbarrick wrote: post #745
fastball wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu already has an ARM build. Is there a reason you wouldn't be able to run linux?

Last I heard, there were graphics driver issues left to iron out. Linux 5.13 was the first with M1 support. Dunno if that's enough for M1 Pro/Max.

> Last I heard, there were graphics driver issues left to iron out.

Who cares in a server ?

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

#858

Post by kaba0 »

monocasa wrote: post #605
lillecarl wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know how the implementation of a tracing GC works but I was thinking they could do some smart memory ordering to land in the same cache-line as often as possible. Thanks for the clarifications :)

Interestingly earlyish smalltalk VMs used to keep the object headers in a separate contiguous table. Part of the problem though, is that the object graph walk pretty quickly is non contiguous, regardless of how it's laid out in memory.

But that’s just the marking phase, isn’t it? And most of it can be done fully in parallel, so while not all CPU cores can be maxed out with that, more often than not the original problem itself can be hard to parallelize to that level, so “wasting” a single core may very well be worth it.

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

#859

Post by marcan_42 »

spicybright wrote: post #186
bla3 wrote: 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…

I'm going to sound dumb for this, but how difficult do any of you think it would be to make a computer with 2 M1 chips? Or even 4?

Apple are already planning multi-die systems, judging by their drivers. So yes. Rumors are they have a SKU with two M1 Max dies.

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

#860

Post by marcan_42 »

lemoncucumber wrote: post #201
spicybright wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to sound dumb for this, but how difficult do any of you think it would be to make a computer with 2 M1 chips? Or even 4?

The M1 is a system-on-a-chip so AIUI there's a bunch of stuff on there that you wouldn't want two of.

That's not a problem, you just turn off what's redundant. AMD did the same thing with their original Threadripper/EPYC models.
Post reply on HN