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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#181

Post by macintux »

ghaff wrote: post #158
macintux wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more accurately: Apple won't wait for partners to get along for the ride. Backwards compatibility has long been a Microsoft obsession (out of necessity for the enterprise market) and an Apple allergy.

I'm not sure there's another company of Apple's size and influence which has consistently been so ready to dump legacy at least a beat before its customers were prepared for it. Headphone jack, 5 1/4" floppy, I'm sure a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. "I'm going to dump Apple over this!" "See ya. Don't let the door hit you on the way out!."

Pretty much every I/O port Apple has ever used they dropped before the rest of the industry. PS/2, parallel, serial, USB-A...

Of course optical drives; that was a big step.

Apple is ruthless at pruning old tech.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#182

Post by danaris »

ghaff wrote: post #152
aequitas wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, this is why Apple is able to take this leap and the PC platform hasn't so far. They don't have to wait for as many partners to get along for the ride.

And partners also means customers. A ton of those Windows systems (and I should have said systems--rather than laptops--as I don't know how things split out on laptops specifically) are going to non-technical users in big companies who absolutely do not want any changes that alter a menu or move an icon or introduce some incompatibility they have to deal with. They absolutely do not care whether there's some signific…

Frankly, I think that the willingness on the part of some, like Microsoft, to cater to that degree of hidebound thinking is actively harmful to us as a society, especially in terms of technology.

The more we enable people who are unwilling to even try to learn that this particular option has moved from the Edit menu to the Format menu, or has removed the default toolbar icon (but you can add one), or has simply moved an inch to the left, the more we send the message that it's normal and expected that people shouldn't have to ever adapt and change and learn new things.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#183

Post by Yetanfou »

wrsh07 wrote: post #168
perryizgr8 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

He is being downvoted by people who consider the choice of a specific vendor a religious issue and will vote down anyone who in their eyes disparages their vendor of choice. It is a sad fact that the existence of this phenomenon only leads to the reinforcement of the religious behaviour since their insistence on the infallibility of their vendor is questioned by those not part of their cult, whereupon they double down on the magnificence and superiority of their vendor's products over everything else, which leads to more reactions and the cycle continues.

The power/performance ratio of the M1 SoC does not seem to need religious adoration to be seen as a significant step in the establishment of ARM as a real competitor to the AMD64 hegemony. The wait is now for other vendors - Samsung, Qualcomm, etc - to launch similar "desktop-oriented" SoC's which can be used by both traditional "dekstop" vendors (HP, Dell, Lenovo and to a limited extent Samsung etc) as well as traditional mobile-oriented vendors like Xiaomi. Some of those vendors will eventually produce ARM-based platforms which support user-upgradeable memory, GPUs and storage - and possibly also user-upgradeable CPUs - like they do for AMD64-based systems. Once these systems become available ARM has a real chance to take over the market.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#184

Post by pcr910303 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #20
faitswulff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, I'm getting absolutely enormous memory leaks in stock Safari on my new M1 MBP after a few hours of use. It doesn't seem to be reclaiming memory when tabs are closed. https://imgur.com/a/HqxAspK There are growing pains, and they're not all in third-party apps. (It is hilarious to me, though, that WinZip a) exists for Mac and b) is used by anyone on a Mac.)

If you're using 1Blocker, you might want to turn off the (memory-leaking) 1Blocker Button until an update shows off...

Worked like a charm at least to me :-)

https://twitter.com/kb091412/status/1330470681813934086

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#185

Post by pwinnski »

tracker1 wrote: post #22
faitswulff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That does sound a little sketchy... though I can see wanting to use the 360 controller, would like to see a review on how well most of the Steam supported games run for example. I'd been considering doing an ITX build for the living room, mostly for emulation/games... the new mac mini is definitely in the consideration, and seems to sit right between a lot of the nuc/sff options and mini-itx options and punch above i…

I think no additional software is needed to use the 360 controller on an M1 Mac.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#186

Post by rsynnott »

msla wrote: post #161
alwillis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, but we've had performance per watt wars for years now. It's why prior to Zen you only saw AMD chips on the cheapest of laptops, and also now why Intel is panicking.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#188

Post by cpgxiii »

Jonnax wrote: post #174
cpgxiii wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pr…

Fair enough. But if you're comparing single threaded performance, there isn't a reason to split the workload into two threads for AMD/Intel and have it as a single thread for Apple. If I had a single threaded application or a single threaded critical path of a multithreaded application. I don't see a scenario where SMT will help AnandTech have done a comparison here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16261/investigating…

Benchmarking multicore Performance+Efficiency (Apple) versus SMT (AMD) versus SMT+Wide vectors (Intel) is never going to provide perfect apples-to-apples comparisons. There's an entirely reasonable argument that single-thread performance is oversold as a metric, and that the focus on it advantages some platforms over others.

At the end of the day, benchmarks are inherently only an approximate measure of how real-world code will perform. SMT, basically by definition, is rarely going to benchmark well, but is inherently going to show more of a benefit when running real-world mixed workloads.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#189

Post by perryizgr8 »

dhosek wrote: post #85
perryizgr8 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can you do on iphone that can't be done better on an android phone?

Two that leap to mind immediately: Install the latest OS on a device older than a year old. Get money for your old phone when you upgrade.

But those have nothing to do with the supposedly "incredible" chip performance Apple has that Qualcomm doesn't.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#190

Post by danaris »

spamizbad wrote: post #136
dhagz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I get his coming down on criticisms this time. It doesn't make sense to criticize the hardware for software issues. I'm not going copy a binary compiled for x86 over to a RPi and complain about ARM chips being inadequate. If there are software issues, address them as such.

But when you purchase an Apple product you're not buying one or the other: You're buying the complete package. They are one.

Software can—and will—be updated. If the problem is with the M1, it's going to be a problem for the life of the laptop.
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