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Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

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Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#151

So, all of these new Macs have the same SOC across the board? Or will there be slight differences like the Macbook pro will have a higher-binned soc or maybe the Mac mini and Macbook air will have fewer graphics core?

The Mac Mini and MacBook Pro have fans where the MacBook Air is fanless, so I assume there are some differences in at least boost clock and probably core clock too. I wouldn't be surprised if we see higher core count M1X chips next for the larger MacBook Pros and iMacs, and maybe even the Mac Pro.

Maybe not the on-paper clock-speed, but likely the effective clock due to throttling

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#153

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

The 13" MacBook Pro has an option to upgrade to 32.

I just checked the store configurator and there is no option to upgrade the Pro with M1 to 32, which is consistent with the presentation.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#155

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

The 13" MacBook Pro has an option to upgrade to 32.

I don't see that.

You might have looked at the 16" one, which did not get updated today.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#157

So, all of these new Macs have the same SOC across the board? Or will there be slight differences like the Macbook pro will have a higher-binned soc or maybe the Mac mini and Macbook air will have fewer graphics core?

If you look on the order page they're all described the same but the Air has different option on the GPU side of the chip, 7 vs 8 cores. It sounds like that is possibly the only binning they did, where one GPU core is disabled? Perhaps the 13" ones can run faster & more efficiently or something but they're not saying that.

That is interesting. Both Mac Mini versions have a 8 core GPU. I wonder why they made the distinction for Macbook air.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#158
post #49

All the Macs looked quite impressive! It was well worth waiting for these (at least for me). But I was disappointed that the maximum RAM is 16GB. I would’ve preferred a 32GB option for better future proofing (especially with web applications needing more and more memory). Edit: Considering the fact that the RAM won’t be upgradeable (it’s part of the SoC), this limitation is a big bummer. What may be worse is that all…

Was that for just mb air or all of them? I missed that part.

All of them, including Mini.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#160
post #8

When they say "[faster than the] latest PC laptop chip", what exactly do they mean? Intel? AMD? EDIT: added [faster than the]

Probably Tiger Lake-U. I definitely believe M1 is faster.

Apple has a history of pretending things like Nvidia or Ryzen don't exist when it suits them so I'm sure there will be gotcha benchmarks down the line.

Apple also compared against "best-selling PCs" several times, but the best-selling PCs are the cheapest junk so obviously Macs will be faster than those.

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