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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#161

Post by msla »

alwillis wrote: post #135
nix23 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.

but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1 The M1 has 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores. It also runs at 10 watts and maxes out at 24 watts. A Threadripper starts at over 100 watts…

So are we going to have "Core Wars" to replace the "MHz Wars" of previous decades?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#162

Post by pathartl »

simonh wrote: post #130
nix23 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.

He's talking about the vast majority of PC chips sold today, who's power consumption / performance / thermal ratios just got marmalised. You're quite right, your machine and in fact everyone else's are still just as good as they were a few weeks ago. I got an Intel 5K iMac in the summer and I'm still very happy with it. I need to be able to run windows and Linux in VMs so M1 isn't for me right now. It's no for you ei…

It's all going to come down to user experience and versatility. Apple is doing some crazy stuff with the M1, but I personally would chock (most of it) it up more to being clever than true innovation. I think only Intel needs to be concerned right now because they're being outpaced by both AMD and Apple. Additionally if the acquisition of Arm by Nvidia results in what people expect, Intel will basically be losing out in every market.

Going back to versatility, there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure, so there's still a massive market for AMD or other Arm manufacturers to target. For the consumer side unless Apple releases a chip that results in them making a sub-$800 laptop, they're just simply not going to capture a large market. With the rise of devices like Chromebooks in education and home there's still something to be said for Apple devices just being too expensive.

In general, Apple devices also leave a LOT to be desired for any sort of large scale enterprise organization. Unless they go back to their 90's and early 00's mindset, I just can't see this changing.

It's certainly exciting to see the CPU market being upended by Apple and AMD, as well as the potential future for a large architecture shift, but I don't think there's any real threat to market shares as a whole.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#163

Post by mrtksn »

tootie wrote: post #78
croes wrote: post #31

Fast and hot and slow and cool is still valid. The M1 is as fast or faster as other CPU but could surely run faster. But then it's getting hot.

IDK how it actually went down at Apple HQ but I can imagine. They are so, so keen on sleek, quiet machines that it tops all other concerns. When the hardware engineers said "more performance is going to require a fan or two" the leadership said "nah, let's design and fab our own CPUs".

I applause all the fellow misophoniacs in cupertino! No constant or repeating sound is too silent to be ignored.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#164

Post by hajile »

trinix912 wrote: post #123
nix23 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.

This is not a completely fair comparison, your threadrippers surely use more energy and produce more heat than the M1 chip.

Add 50 more PCIe lanes, double the bus width, 270mb of cache, 60 cores and a communication protocol then get back to me.

Anandtech ran the numbers a couple years ago and an EPYC processor spent around 60% of its budget on Infinity Fabric (up to 90% of used power with only a couple cores being used).

An M2 based chip might get more done, but it won't use much less power. In truth, I'd guess there's a good chance it bottlenecks on the IO and performance doesn't increase as expected (without widening IO further with all the extra power costs).

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#165

Post by wrsh07 »

ladyanita22 wrote: post #149
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly I don't care that much about entry level macbook's absolute performance. But the utility of 20 hours 4k video play(3rd party tests even exceeded this number) can't be understated.

You sure watch a ton of movies.

While it's not super relevant (for countries with high covid cases) now, not needing to worry about charging in the car, at the airport, on a plane -- those are real wins. Traveling for the weekend and forgetting your charger and... being fine.

Have you ever had your laptop on a train or bus and then found out the outlets aren't powered? It's stressful!

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#166

Post by cpgxiii »

Jonnax wrote: post #155
feelix wrote: post #99

It turns out that the benchmarks for M1 vs latest generation Intel & AMD CPU's are indeed overblown, and it is an incremental improvement more than a great leap forward. The source of the confusion has been the benchmarking software. To saturate one core on an Intel processor you need to run two threads, because that's the way they are designed. So the single thread benchmarks that have been used so far have been usi…

That article makes no sense whatsoever. And whoever wrote it doesn't not understand what they're talking about. SMT is designed to boost performance in multitreaded workloads. It can be thought as multitasking for a CPU core. Using two threads for one benchmark and use one thread for another, it is not comparing single core performance. Because why wouldn't that CPU schedule the load on other cores?

Of course, the scheduler can easily be told to run both benchmark threads on the two hyperthreads of a given core.

The argument to be made is that because of the resources dedicated to SMT, single thread on AMD/Intel versus single thread on Apple is not measuring the true potential performance of the whole core. In principle, some multithreaded workload over all available threads could be a better metric for whole-processor performance.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#167

Post by simias »

piokoch wrote: post #154
simias wrote: post #100

I've never owned a Mac and don't intend to own one but I'm very happy with this M1 move, mainly for the reasons highlighted in the introduction to the article: >M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs — all Intel-based Macs, including automobile-priced Mac Pros, and every single machine running Windows or Linux. Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. I think it's…

I am not sure if the derogatory tone is fair. This is just example how progress works. Not that long time ago Apple had to be saved by some pennies thrown by Microsoft. Not that long time ago Apple was moving from Motorola processors to Intel ones. There is nothing bad that someone stayed behind. Someone has to stay behind if we want progress. No reason to insult predecessors. Planc and Dirac weren't making fun of Ne…

I agree with you but I basically filtered that as "typical Mac fanboy noise" and try to search for insightful content which I think this piece has, in spite of its "I have a shrine dedicated to Steve Jobs in my living room" tone.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#168

Post by wrsh07 »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #113
kelchm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact this makes me wonder: if Apple chips are so far ahead, why are iphones not the fastest, best smartphones by a wide margin? Apple has pretty consistently had the fastest SoCs for phones and tablets for a few years now, particularly in single core performance. Here are some benchmark results of the iPhone 12 versus some of it’s Android competitors [1]. Notice that last year’s iPhone 11 Pro Max still outperfor…

Yeah that's what puzzles me, why has chip superiority not translated into an objectively better phone? For laptops the M1 laptops are best in class in everything, battery and performance.

I honestly don't know why you're being downvoted.

I think for some people (eg my oldest brother), the iPhone is "the best." He's not a tech person - and that might be perspective that you're missing.

I tend to agree that there are great androids that seem competitive with iPhones (disclosure: I haven't really owned a flagship phone for a while; this is one of android's issues! The flagships aren't that much better than the $300-400 phones)

But I know a lot of people who think the iPhone is the premium phone experience, and if they're going to spend over a thousand dollars on a phone, it'll be an iPhone.

My point here is that for many people, the iPhone is objectively better.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#169

Post by HJain13 »

s3cur3 wrote: post #133
simias wrote: post #100

I've never owned a Mac and don't intend to own one but I'm very happy with this M1 move, mainly for the reasons highlighted in the introduction to the article: >M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs — all Intel-based Macs, including automobile-priced Mac Pros, and every single machine running Windows or Linux. Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. I think it's…

It's not just "ARM is fast," though—Apple's ARM chips in particular beat the pants off their ARM competitors. (See benchmarks of any iPhone compared to flagship Android devices.) I don't think you should expect similar levels of performance from a run-of-the-mill ARM chip on the desktop (though I'm happy to be shown benchmarks to the contrary).

It depends on what you're comparing: A14 on phones have a Multi Core score which would be quite comparable to Snapdragon 888 (extrapolating a 20% boost over SD865) that was just announced all while A14 being clocked higher (3.0ghz 4 core vs 2.84 x 1, 3 x 2.4) comparing performance cores. Single thread OTOH Apple wins comfortably but I would suspect X1 to reduce the lead a bit. As for AI performance Apple claimed 11 TOPs, while Qualcomm claims 25 TOPs

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#170

Post by mikestew »

faitswulff wrote: post #14
ghaff wrote: post #12

I'm not sure I see most of the disagreement here. As Gruber says, Moorhead is mostly complaining about software incompatibilities. But that's part of the total package--especially with Apple which is about selling the total experience. Personally I'll probably switch sooner rather than later especially given that I don't run a lot of native apps on my laptop. But it seems pretty reasonable to critique a new architect…

I had a suspicion upon reading Moorhead's review that he was trying to use familiar enterprise Windows software on the M1 instead of trying to use native apps: > So far, I have experienced application crashes in Microsoft Edge, Outlook, WinZip and Logitech Camera Control. I got installation errors with Adobe Reader XI, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, a Samsung SSD backup application, and Xbox 360 Controller for Mac. What Ma…

What Mac user tries to use Edge...?

This Mac user, having just discovered that there's a macOS version of Edge. TIL...

EDIT: well, you're off to a good start, Microsoft:

https://imgur.com/a/IWZMlMl

Instead of a browser, I guess I installed demons. I wish they'd get this shit right. MS Teams always has this notification window hiding in the background so that whenever one alt-tabs to Teams the window doesn't actually have focus and your typing goes to /dev/null. And now their browser does this "fit-and-finish" crap that few muggles will parse.

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