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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

#161
I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...

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

#162
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely, or very slowly, because Windows x86 would need CPU emulation.

there's arm64 builds for windows.

Microsoft even released a Surface device with an ARM processor.

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

#163

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.

The 2 lower machines on the selection page are intel ones, and are the only ones with 32Gb option

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

#164

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.

The M1 MacBook Pro starts with 8GB and has an option for 16GB. I was talking about the Mac mini which in the Intel version has an option for 64GB (at +$1000 it's not exactly cheap).

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

#165
No 32GB options on any of the models announced today is a shame. Or not I guess as it means I won't be buying anything today

M1 looks impressive, hopefully it scales as well to higher TDPs.

Pretty much what I expected today with all the low power models getting updated.

With no fan I expect the Air will throttle the CPU quickly when using the high performance cores. Calling it an "8-core CPU" is a little cheeky IMHO but I guess everyone does it.

Looking at the config options it seems the CPU/SoC is literally the "M1" and that's it. No different speeds like before so apparently the same CPU/SoC in the Pro and the Air? I guess the fans in the Pro will allow the high performance more headroom but still kinda odd. I wonder if that will carry over to the 16" MBP next year?

I am disappointed to see the design is identical to what we currently have. I was hoping we would see a little refinement with thinner screen bezels, perhaps a slightly thicker lid to fit in a better web cam (rather than just better "image processing") and FaceID.

Overall I am disappointed due to 16GB max RAM and the same old design. I guess we will see the bigger machines get updates sometimes between March and July 2021.

Also are we calling it the M1 CPU or the M1 SoC?

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 8-core, but they're 4 performance and 4 low-power cores, so it's not your normal 8-core chip. It's more like a big.LITTLE chip.

Anyone know how you interact with these cores as a developer/user? Say if I'm running some C code with OpenMP parallelism, can I bind it to three of the fast cores?

Binding to specific cores is not exposed to userspace, but you can influence which kinds of cores it's likely to be run on by setting thread priorities and QoS classes.

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

#167
post #117

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

And it costs an extra €224 to go from 8 to 16gb. This is ridiculously expensive.

It's not quite as insulting as their $800 2TB SSD.

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

#168

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

Really, 16GB max? I find it very strange how Apple went from targeting professionals, seeing the strategy work from the ground up for many years, but now somehow want to pivot to hobbyists/others instead of professionals. Could someone try to help me figure out the reasoning behind Apple changing the target customer?

This is their 13" model. Their 15" model is targeted for professionals.

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

13" Pro is also 16GB.

Yes:

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

“Memory 8GB unified memory Configurable to: 16GB”

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