151–160 of 467 posts
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True, but I believe graviton is still not like M1. Do they support i386 / backward compatible?
M1 is not i386 compatible. macOS uses a translation layer through Rosetta 2 for x86 compatibility.
Can't wait to see the Mac Pro. The argument is over for best laptop processor. I want to see if Apple is as eager to beat the competition in the Workstation/HPC space as they were in the mobile/laptop. I think they are, Srouji looks like he's got a knife in his teeth and can't wait to claim fastest personal computer ever period. But we'll have to see, it's a tiny, tiny market to justify the effort.
How much effort is it really? Make a version of this with more cores and cache and maybe all high-performance cores instead of heterogenous. It's just a remix of the same already designed components. The only really tough thing would be supporting things desktop users want like external video cards, but people may be willing to forego that if the CPU smokes everything else and if the built-in GPU is at least fast eno…
Just a side note. It's unlikely that Apple will eliminate their "slow" cores from their desktops. Mac Pros spend big chunks of their time doing mundane things which their efficiency cores do just fine. By using their efficiency cores, they can bring down total power requirements and their desktops can essentially run continually as opposed to entering a dedicated sleep more.
I suspect the Mac Pro will sip power and run cool as a cucumber most of the time when it's not getting hammered for high end tasks.
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Well, Apple has managed to move all the way down to a 5nm process while Intel still hasn't made it past 14nm. AFAIK that's the largest limiting factor for Intel. I can't speak to why they have been stuck there for so long.
Leaving aside the fact that process size is a marketing term these days, I’m currently typing this on a previous-gen Macbook Air with a 10nm Intel CPU. They’re definitely not stuck on 14nm.
There's a reason the only laptops getting 10nm are low-quantity premium laptops.
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I think people should pay more attention to the LPDDR4X RAM that's tightly coupled to the CPU and likely has significantly less latency and more bandwidth than anything on the Ryzen or i9. This is critical to keeping their wide design fed, and if you swapped this out with standard DDR3200 you'd see some lackluster numbers. Both Intel and AMD try to overcome the memory wall with larger caches and clever prefetching, w…
How would one benchmark memory performance (DRAM latency & bandwidth) on the various chips?
I'm curious if anybody tried AppleM1 with Unity3D? This guy reported dreadful compilation performance (11.6s on AppleM1 vs 2.3s on some old dual-core 2016 Intel model) https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-compilation-speed-is-s...
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Yeah seeing a MacBook Air beat an i9 is hilarious. I think this should put arguments over X86 efficiency disadvantages to bed. The X86 is obviously a huge boat anchor. There is no other explanation for this monstrous of a performance efficiency gap... unless Apple has invented something fundamentally new that has never been done in the entire history of CPU design. I doubt that.
I think people should pay more attention to the LPDDR4X RAM that's tightly coupled to the CPU and likely has significantly less latency and more bandwidth than anything on the Ryzen or i9. This is critical to keeping their wide design fed, and if you swapped this out with standard DDR3200 you'd see some lackluster numbers. Both Intel and AMD try to overcome the memory wall with larger caches and clever prefetching, w…
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
The cache on the M1 is also massive. If Intel/AMD have clever prefetchers to make up for this, it looks like the M1 might be doing something more.
I know the Apple M1 is fast but against a 3900X?
Is it mostly storage and memory affecting the results? (doesn't say what storage Ryzen uses).
I mean - I still have a hard time believing that a M1 can outperform a Ryzen 3900X if they benchmark something that uses the CPU 100% for a while - like raytracing.
Or do x86 just suck and we found out now when something else came out?
1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice.
2. There will be N somewhat compatible ARM chips, that is to say they are somewhat incompatible. Remember the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s but also the diversity in server architectures and OSes.
3. At least Microsoft is likely to sell their chips to third parties (they used to sell their software). Probably Amazon and Google have reasons to sell their chips too (Google -> Chromebooks)
4. Some of those chips will end up in development laptops and desktops.
5. If you want to develop for AWS you'll be safer to have a laptop with an Amazon chip, if you want to develop for Google Cloud a Google Chip, for Azure a Microsoft chip. This is not unheard of because if you want to develop for iOS you must have Apple hardware since 10+ years ago.
6. The chip manufacturer that wins the war for the developers' machines wins the war for the cloud, because it won't be possible for (let's say) Google to compete with (let's say) Amazon if Google has to buy chips from Amazon because 90% of the developers have a laptop with an Amazon chip.
Or we'll end up with 5 different laptops (unlikely) or one that connects to a remote desktop running in the appropriate cloud with the correct chip. That laptop could be a Mac or anything else, something powerful or a thin client.
So: fragmentation and then remote desktops? Back to mainframe / time sharing?
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Just a quick note, the MacBook Air is by no means "ultralight" even by Apple standards, 2017 MacBook for example was more than twice lighter. Thinkpad laptops are also measurably lighter than any current generation MacBook.
Yes, Apple's current lineup is a little confusing. The 13" Pro and 13" Air are so similar, and almost the same weight. I still use a 12" MacBook, and it's just amazingly small and light. If Apple makes a 12" MacBook with a M1, it would be awesome. A dream machine for me.