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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

#871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Might be a power limitation. I have an XPS 17 which only runs at full performance and charges the battery with the supplied 130W charger. USB C is only specced to 100W. I can still do most things on the spare USB C charger I have.

With the latest USB-PD standard that was announced in May, up to 240W is supported

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

#872
post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is the OS saying “unused memory is wasted memory”, and then every other application thinking they're OS and doing the same.

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

#873

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…

After committing to Metal and then killing 32-bit support and then switching to ARM, Apple has made it clear that video games are dead on MacOS. I don't know what people are going to do with these new GPUs but it's not going to be gaming.

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

#874
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 still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end. You'd have to be extremely old to remember that era. Lots of stuff important to making computers work got split off into separate chips away from the CPU pretty early into mass computing, such as sound, graphics, and networking. We've also been sending a lot of compute from the CPU into the GPU as lat…

All this talk of "media engines" and GPUs reminds me of the old SID chip in the Commodore 64 and the Amiga with Agnes and Fat Agnes.

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

#875

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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…

On a desktop Hackintosh, I started with 32GB that would die with out of memory errors when I was processing 16bit RAW images at full resolution. Because it was Hackintosh, I was able to upgrade to 64GB so the processing could complete. That was the only thing running.

What image dimensions? What app? I find this extremely suspect, but it’s plausible if you’ve way undersold what you’re doing. 24Mpixel 16bit RAW image would have no problem generally on an 4gb machine if it’s truly the only app running and the app isn’t shit. ;)

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

#876
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they run windows. If you look at android phones, you're looking at a few years only. Because of software

Parent is talking about laptops, I am talking about laptops, why are you talking about smartphones? Though I also had my Samsung S2plus from 2013 to 2019 in use, and that was fairly cheap. I do not know any IPhone users that had theirs for longer.

My iphone 2G from 2007 still works well into 2013-2014.

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

#877
post #831
post #793

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Yes, apple's marketing materials claim 400 GB/s, while the 6900 XT is 512 GB/s. This is very easily Googled. While memory bandwidth isn't everything, it is the major bottleneck in most graphics pipelines. An x86 cpu with 3200 MHz memory has about 40 GB/s of bandwidth, which more or less makes high end integrated graphics impossible.

Ah, I misunderstood your comment. When you said it was competitive with the 6900 XT I thought you were talking about GPU performance in general, not just in terms of memory bandwidth.

According to the numbers Apple is touting, the M1 Max is competitive with modern GPUs in general, being on par with—roughly—a 3070 (laptop version) or a 2080 (desktop version). They've still got a ways to go but this is shockingly close, particularly given their power envelope.

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

#878
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…

Working with video will use up an extraordinary amount of memory.

Some of the genetics stuff I work on requires absolute gobs of RAM. I have a single process that requires around 400GB of RAM that I need to run quite regularly.

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

#879

Can these drive more than one external monitor?

2x6K on the Pro, 3x6K + 1x4K on the Max. The 4K seems to be because that's the limit of the HDMI port. No mention of MST though.

MST is not supported and won't be supported, that's been Apple policy for some time now. Only Thunderbolt tunneling is supported for multiple screens on one output (which logically provides separate DP outputs, no MST)

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

#880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsession with emissions has really made people start to miss the forest from the trees.

Emissions affect everyone on the planet, no matter where they happen. But polluting the ground or water only happens in China, so a lot of Americans that care about emissions don't care about the other types of pollution, because it doesn't affect them.

> But polluting the ground or water only happens in China

I see you've never been to Houston.

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