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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#161

Post by runeks »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #78
runeks wrote: post #72

What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage. My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up. This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definitio…

> This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU I'm not too sure about that. The current 20-core CPU from Apple is inside the Mac Studio, and it has quite a monster of an air cooler. It's obviously going to be much harder to put that (or something more powerful) inside a laptop, even with all the chip improvements...

Interesting.

Something’s not adding up here, though. 8 cores = “tiny fans basically always off” vs 20 cores = “two huge fans”. Either those two huge fans are running at a very low RPM, or the fans in the laptop are almost as efficient as the huge ones. I highly doubt the latter, so I assume the former is the case.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#162

Post by rsynnott »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #78
runeks wrote: post #72

What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage. My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up. This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definitio…

> This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU I'm not too sure about that. The current 20-core CPU from Apple is inside the Mac Studio, and it has quite a monster of an air cooler. It's obviously going to be much harder to put that (or something more powerful) inside a laptop, even with all the chip improvements...

The M1 Ultra in the Studio apparently peaks at about 60W, so a laptop based on it would have lower peak power usage than an old 15" MBP (45W CPU, 35W GPU, usually).

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#163

Post by zozbot234 »

lelanthran wrote: post #157
JKCalhoun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia, Blackberrys ... it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew. My surprise is that Android is the "other one" and not Windows Phone.

Why are you surprised, you said it yourself: > it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew. Microsoft never fully committed to a phone OS because workable tablets might have demolished the desktop market.

Microsoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition. Then they wasted time and effort trying to push a crappy tablet UX (Windows 8) to desktop users.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#164

Post by runeks »

retskrad wrote: post #152

Apple literally had the Avengers of the chip industry working for them until the M1, which was a groundbreaking chip and still is for its unmatched performance per watt. Just like sports, a team can’t stay at the top forever. Now that Apple has lost many of their Avenger members in their chip division, they need to be humble and go back to the drawing board. AMD and Qualcomm are getting closer to their performance pe…

> The M2 showed that the M1 architecture is done.

How so?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#165

Post by coldtea »

zozbot234 wrote: post #163
lelanthran wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you surprised, you said it yourself: > it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew. Microsoft never fully committed to a phone OS because workable tablets might have demolished the desktop market.

Microsoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition. Then they wasted time and effort trying to push a crappy tablet UX (Windows 8) to desktop users.

>Microsoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition.

The problem was that the "Windows XP Tablet Edition" was utter crap. A desktop OS and its mentality shoved into tablet form with modifications that fell way short of what was actually needed for that form. The iPad was the first tablet that got it right - and feel like a tablet meant for tablety things, as opposed to a PC without a keyboard and crippled in all sorts of ways.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#166

Post by lostapathy »

jltsiren wrote: post #143
michaelt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production. Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops. That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64…

The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office. I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac wi…

> While offices had fast and reliable internet connections,

most offices I’ve been around have internet that tops out no more than a little faster than a decent home connection, but have dozens of people sharing them.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#167

Post by kayodelycaon »

yakubin wrote: post #115

I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in gen…

I’ve never had Sublime Text crash on any platform. I‘ve used it for years. Sounds like a hardware problem. Or if you’ve never done a clean install, bad configuration/apps buried in old data.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#168

Post by jes »

akelly wrote: post #96
devwastaken wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be really difficult to do considering apple needs macs to develop iPhone. Apple dogfoods it's own hardware, that's why it's the best.

Apple doesn't want you to know this but they do their mechanical and electrical design on Windows PCs (using Siemens NX and OrCAD respectively)

I have seen some posts on the Intel FPGA community forum about using Quartus Prime Pro (FPGA design software) on Apple Silicon. Apparently, it works, even though not officially supported.

I haven't had the time or the desire to take it for a spin yet, but I'd love to be able to compile FPGA designs on a nicely configured and quiet M2 system.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#169

Post by [deleted] »

runeks wrote: post #164
retskrad wrote: post #152

Apple literally had the Avengers of the chip industry working for them until the M1, which was a groundbreaking chip and still is for its unmatched performance per watt. Just like sports, a team can’t stay at the top forever. Now that Apple has lost many of their Avenger members in their chip division, they need to be humble and go back to the drawing board. AMD and Qualcomm are getting closer to their performance pe…

> The M2 showed that the M1 architecture is done. How so?

[deleted]

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#170

Post by vetinari »

zozbot234 wrote: post #163
lelanthran wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you surprised, you said it yourself: > it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew. Microsoft never fully committed to a phone OS because workable tablets might have demolished the desktop market.

Microsoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition. Then they wasted time and effort trying to push a crappy tablet UX (Windows 8) to desktop users.

I would put an emphasis on "workable". XP Tablet Edition was not that.
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