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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#211

Post by Klonoar »

ficklepickle wrote: post #175
the_af wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to believe. If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :)

This is it. I'm excited because Apple just showed what is possible. Other companies are going to have to try to match it. I have wanted a powerful "enough" fanless laptop for many years. I got excited about 4 years ago with Intel's short-lived M line and I bought an Asus ux305. It served me well for front end web dev (had to use a cooler stand under sustained high load though). Great Linux support and battery life (a…

>Other companies are going to have to try to match it.

This actually worries me.

Lately, anytime I look outside the Apple ecosystem, I wonder to myself what all these companies are doing... sure, I could see AMD closing the gap, but Apple's made additional choices for integration beyond what AMD would do alone.

I guess my summary would be: other companies trying to "match" Apple hasn't really gone well in the past decade, short of a few select standouts.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#212

Post by ekianjo »

the_af wrote: post #120
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 want to believe. If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :)

But that won't happen unless there's a Windows ARM build that does everything that Windows does in x86: the market for Linux-only laptops is pretty small.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#213

Post by sib »

nix23 wrote: post #119
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…

>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.

Well, if you're not going to consider about power consumption, Fugaku (and its 28MW consumption) would like a word with you.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/311995-japans-new-arm-ba...

I think his point about moving the bounds of the power (and heat) / performance tradeoff is valid.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#214

Post by kllrnohj »

valuearb wrote: post #193
nix23 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper. It will not, my TR has 64 cores 128 Thread and you know whats the best thing? 128GB Ram...and imagine that..they aren't even soldered...and i even can exchange my GPU..or slap in 2 others. And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.

Your TR is what, 280 watts TDP? nearly 20 times more than a M1. And is 30% slower in single core. Firestorm Cores use less than 4 watts each. A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR, with a less than 70 watt TDP. And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power. Top end ThreadRippers cost $2,000 to $3,000 each. You can bet an Apple Mx ThreadRi…

> Firestorm Cores use less than 4 watts each.

This is just not true. A mini going from idle to a full single-core load is a power increase of 6W. A heavy multicore load hits over 25W.

> A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR

With what fantasy math? 30% faster single core performance would be 16 * 1.3 = ~21 equivalent TR cores. It'd be less than half the performance of a 64 core ThreadRipper.

> And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119365.png

M1's single-core performance is very strong. But not enough to overcome a ~2x or greater core deficit, either, not at all.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#215

Post by [deleted] »

unsigner wrote: post #207
ChrisLTD wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers show that the other chips are slower, but they don't show that they are "unusable".

Put it this way: if the new Macs had the performance of the fastest Qualcomm ARM cores available today, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

[deleted]

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#216

Post by fulafel »

aequitas wrote: post #70
hpaavola wrote: post #46

I don't care about any Apple products, but I really do hope that M1 will force all other manufacturers ship good ARM laptops. Or force Intel and AMD to pull a rabit out of their hat to match the performance/watt of ARM chips. I want long battery life, no fans and a lot of memory. Running Linux. If M1 is the catalyst to make it happen, then so be it.

Don't get your hopes up. My prediction is, that yes, there will be a slew of new ARM laptop's. And even though the technically run ARM chips, it will only be a marketing selling point for new. They might even cram Snapdragon's or other mobile device CPU's in there, just to be able to put a ARM sticker on a plastic frame with an folding LCD panel and keyboard. They will sell it as beter than Intel, because that is wha…

Nitpick: The M1 is also essentially a mobile chip, very close to the iPad version.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#217

Post by qppo »

ekianjo wrote: post #212
the_af wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to believe. If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :)

But that won't happen unless there's a Windows ARM build that does everything that Windows does in x86: the market for Linux-only laptops is pretty small.

> the market for Linux-only laptops is pretty small.

but growing more today than it was a few years ago because of the prevalence of Chromebooks in education. Many of which run ARM CPUs!

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#218

Post by jdminhbg »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #189
dhosek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Resale value absolutely has a lot to do with the better chip performance. You can't sell a dog-slow phone.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#219

Post by kllrnohj »

kelchm wrote: post #33
perryizgr8 wrote: post #2

I don't understand the comparison to the iphone and android situation. As far as I can see, android phones are highly competitive with iphone on everything. The longest battery isn't on an iphone, the best camera isn't on an iphone, the latest screen tech isn't on an iphone, etc. etc. Coming to the M1 laptops, they beat comparable Windows laptops in every single metric. It's literally just a matter of looking at the…

> 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…

> It’s also worth noting that while the performance / efficiency gap between x86 and ARM seems to be pretty sizable at this point

It's really not, though. You have to compare performance at a given power target to judge performance/efficiency, which you can't do for most ARM CPUs. But you can get 8 core x86 CPUs that are 15W, or 1.8w per core (example: the 4800U). Similarly 64 core Epycs are around or less than 3W per core. These are all well within similar per-core power numbers as your typical big-core ARM chip.

The perceived gap is larger than it really is, because there just isn't really an x86 tablet-focused market. The M1's jump into laptop-space puts it up and we can really see it shine, but the other ARM jumps into laptop-space were a joke. So comparing equivalent power targets becomes challenging.

But take your articles benchmarks for example. The Snapdragon manages something like 60% of the performance of the A12's. So take the existing M1 mac, cut the performance drastically, and suddenly it'd be not interesting at all. The performance/efficiency wouldn't be impressive at all if it was getting 60% of the performance it is now.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#220

Post by machello13 »

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 have to imagine this is a joke or do you actually think the only advantage of the M1 is that you need 1 less fan in your machine?
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