It’s ridiculous that the base and Pro only support 1 and 2 external displays, respectively.
Want 3 monitors? Have to pay for the Max.
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/02/m3-chip-still-supports-...
M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
121–130 of 419 posts
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Want a high refresh rate screen present in cheap android phones? What is this for? Games? I avoided this to save money the last time I bought a phone. I honestly can't think of use case where a phone display needs to update higher than 60 Hz
High refresh rates aren't just for games, they make the entire interface smoother. Things like frame rate or latency are quality of life things that you don't need , but once you upgrade, the difference becomes clear. Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. Hopefully someone else has a better analogy.
sounds like something I'd rather never want to get used to then. More expensive, uses more power so kills battery life faster and worse for the environment. Where's the win?
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#123I don't see apple silicon in macs having been the right decision a decade from now because competing toe to toe with the entire semis industry on architecture has never worked before except in iphone where they had a huge first mover advantage.
I think the argument that this might not be great in the long run is worth considering, but in the short run I think that their results over the last few years are nothing short of astonishing. Specifically their laptops, especially when not plugged into a power source, have both stunning performance and battery life at the same time.
Yes there are competitor chips from AMD and the like that are faster when plugged in, but at a power budget that mean they are severely throttled when unplugged. This is what Apple cares about, and at this point they are unmatched. Apple likes to have fast desktop machines (and they do), but they don't care about that nearly as much as they care about laptops-in-laptop-mode. We are a couple of years into this, and Intel is making noises about trying to match this, but has not yet, and Apple seems to be pulling further ahead in specifically this area.
And they have a huge overlap in this focus in the development of the related processors for their iPhones/iPads/AppleTV products, and the upcoming headset. A lot of the development work gets largely reused in that other space, making Apples ROI even better.
So long as their is a big enough market that cares about that (and from the look of sales, there is), Apple's strategy seems to be a winning one.
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#124This seems to be a lot of effort to rationalize the surprisingly small performance increase from M2 to M3. Initially the assumption was that M2 to M3 would be a bigger step than M1 to M2, not a smaller one. Perhaps TSMC 3nm is showing the limits of scaling?
It's a mixture of several problems: * TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive) * Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last few years * Tim Cook trying to push the average selling price up to keep revenue growth going in the face of sales declines (e.g. hobbling memory bandwidth, reducing the number of performance cores for M3 Pro) I don't expect there to be a M1 style generational l…
> expect 2010s Intel style yearly performance gains from here on out
Intel saw very little gain this year at all in return for a 400 watt power draw under load.
The plain old M3 saw a 20% performance gain along side efficiency gains.
Having a 22 hour battery life is insane and you certainly aren't going to manage that with a 400 watt power draw.
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the lowest tier models probably beat any PC laptop when it comes to usability and comfort though.
Strong disagree. UI is very buggy and inconsistent. CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. Uses it's own set of shortcuts, different from what's standard on windows/linux and most other operating systems. Not sure what people mean when they say completely vague…
> Unix tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying.
I'm pretty sure this is simply you expecting GNU and actually getting FreeBSD-based tooling. It's not wrong, it's just different than what you expected.
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#126It’s ridiculous that the base and Pro only support 1 and 2 external displays, respectively. Want 3 monitors? Have to pay for the Max. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/02/m3-chip-still-supports-...
From what I know, this isn't some artificial limitation that Apple imposes. Adding support has a cost that most customers don't need to pay.
Regardless, most people aren't going to be plugging in three monitors into their laptops, so most people aren't going to care about this.
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#127I want a better system load metric now that we've got heterogenous cores in CPUs. The Pixel 8 Pro has 3 types, efficiency, performance, and one single ultra performance core. If your efficiency cores are always close to max usage, but your performance cores are idle, is your system being heavily or barely used? I understand that system load isn't really a useful metric between systems, but it's useful to compare on a…
Isn't this just a subset of the existing capacity monitoring problem where I want to know how loaded a multi-core system is under the following scenario: Some critical path, single-threaded task is at 100% of capacity of a core; the system has 10 cores -- is my system at 10% utilization or 100% utilization?
Easy, measure the TDP usage instead of CPU usage, which is impossible to correctly measure at a given time anyway.
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet it's a dick move from Apple to artificially limit number of external screens supported.
They are not artificially limiting the number of external screens. To support more screens, they would have to reserve die area for an additional controller. That could mean a gpu less or something. This is about engineering tradeoffs.
Engineering tradeoffs to support something intel/amd PCs have supported for 15+ years? Maybe apple is just shit at engineering?
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
While some engineering compromises I can understand, most appear to simply be anti-consumer/cash-grabs. Need more than 8gb ram? Hope you've got sufficient money. Want a high refresh rate screen present in cheap android phones? Sorry not for our base models.
> Want a high refresh rate screen present in cheap android phones? What is this for? Games? I avoided this to save money the last time I bought a phone. I honestly can't think of use case where a phone display needs to update higher than 60 Hz
I've recently splurged on a new phone (old one was >4 years old and started to run a little slow) and a high refresh screen just adds to the general "snappiness" of everything. I'm also using a high refresh-rate monitor for work and it's always a little weird to go back to a 60hz screen.
This is obviously not a critical feature, mind you, but it does add to the experience of using a device, even if it's just productivity-related tasks.
Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
High refresh rates aren't just for games, they make the entire interface smoother. Things like frame rate or latency are quality of life things that you don't need , but once you upgrade, the difference becomes clear. Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. Hopefully someone else has a better analogy.
sounds like something I'd rather never want to get used to then. More expensive, uses more power so kills battery life faster and worse for the environment. Where's the win?
> uses more power so kills battery life faster and worse for the environment. Where's the win?
Depends on the device, but often the difference is a very minimal few point percent, perhaps 3-5%. I would think it can easily be compensated for by undervolting/powerlimiting on laptops.
The win is lesser eye strain/headaches for a lot of people. No harm in turning it off if you don't need it, but many do benefit.