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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#221

Post by nix23 »

zepto wrote: post #176
piokoch wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point about being able to upgrade ram or upgrade to whatever you want doesn’t make sense. A ram upgrade will never compensate for a less efficient memory architecture. There is no CPU architecture other than Apple’s that will make your laptop faster because AMD and Intel are thermally limited, so there is nothing to upgrade to. The only situation in which you are right, is if you are talking about a high end desk…

>The point about being able to upgrade ram or upgrade to whatever you want doesn’t make sense.

If my program needs 64GB of ram, your 8GB highly efficient "memory architecture" can do nothing about it...you have to know that even my gpu has 16GB alone. But i have to say that 8GB are probably enough for your Chrome Browser.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#222

Post by saagarjha »

pathartl wrote: post #162
simonh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don’t just go and make ever part of your chip architecture wider by being clever. Well, there was probably some cleverness involved, but it’s not like this has been a one-off trick.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#223

Post by machello13 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #173
username3 wrote: post #105

There are no honest 8GB reviews. Gruber is selling 8GB Macs based on 16GB review units. This is the iPad 1 with 256MB all over again.

The justification that 16GB is "enough" from the Apple blogger clique like Gruber is ridiculous. Even if it is "enough" it's still what my MacBook Pro I bought 6 years ago shipped with for several hundred dollars less than this one. Why are we giving Apple a pass on RAM being stuck at 8GB and SSD being stuck at 128GB (only very recently bumping to 256) for almost a decade. Not to mention some of us get stuck on 8GB 1…

If you need more than 16GB just... buy one of the other MacBook Pros? I really don't see what the problem is.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#224

Post by wtallis »

bfgoodrich wrote: post #151
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…

To be fair, 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). An 8 performance core M1 would be a monster. Not sure if it maxes out at 24 watts. Someone measured wall power of a Mac Mini hitting 21 watts at full load, but that's including power supply inefficiency, all of the supporting circ…

> 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things).

I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#225

Post by simias »

zepto wrote: post #177
simias wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's ARM SoCs are definitely ahead, but it's not like the competition is hugely far behind. Top of the line Android phones and tablets perform well enough for most desktop tasks IMO. It's mostly the software and I/O that makes them unusable as such.

The numbers say otherwise.

To be clear I'm not talking benchmarks, I have no idea what the raw numbers are. I'm talking about my personal experience using ARM SoCs. Specifically I've worked with Tegra chip and they're powerhouses for instance, I could definitely see myself do my day-to-day development on such a chip.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#226

Post by arminiusreturns »

wayneftw wrote: post #187

> M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs... Sure, if you can bear living in a prison complex that has shitty window management and a petty tyrant of a warden.

I am willing to bet if mods did some data munging they would find sockpuppetry of a hail corporate type at work, because if hn is really this brainwashed about macs it makes me sad.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#227

Post by PartiallyTyped »

higerordermap wrote: post #196
uniqueid wrote: post #195

I don't doubt Apple's CPUs are great, but they coincide with the Mac's transition into a product I, otherwise, no longer wish to use. I want access to my boot volume. I don't want cloud anything . So Apple's technical prowess now makes me sad. I can either use an OS that doesn't head further every year in a direction I hate, or I can have a fast computer.

Are M1 macs faster by significant factor for dev purposes though? I remember reading compiles are slow on MacOs, but don't remember what was the reason.

Many reviews show the M1 chips offering double the compilation speed of intel based macs.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#228

Post by gcblkjaidfj »

dustinmoris wrote: post #82
alwillis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge on macOS is a very good browser. Unlike Chrome, it has real privacy features for blocking tracking scripts right out of the box. The Collections feature is also well done.

> Edge on macOS is a very good browser. .. if you want your manager to spy on you.

chrome has enterprise managed mode just the same, with even more capabilities (i.e. spying features to keep your post wording) than the microsoft ones.

MS enterprise mode can only control settings and extensions, google goes several steps further.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#229

Post by Toutouxc »

the_af wrote: post #142
alwillis wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :) Apple showed Debian running in a VM on an M1 prototype Mac nearly 6 months ago. I get that it won't be acceptable for some Linux diehards but the superfast, supercool ARM laptop running Linux will soon be an M1 MacBook Pro.

If I can get it to run Linux not on a VM, but natively and without coexisting with macOS at all, then it'll be good enough for me!... ...except I cannot afford a macbook. The one I'm using now was paid for by my employer. More generally, I'd love to see fast ARM platforms not built by Apple.

I don't think you really pay that much extra for an Apple machine, especially for the M1 ones. I'm afraid that when/if fast ARM alternatives arrive, they will probably cost 80-100 % of what the MacBooks cost. So basically, if you can't afford a MacBook today, you won't be able to afford a comparable high-end ARM offering from, say, Dell.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#230

Post by saagarjha »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #173
username3 wrote: post #105

There are no honest 8GB reviews. Gruber is selling 8GB Macs based on 16GB review units. This is the iPad 1 with 256MB all over again.

The justification that 16GB is "enough" from the Apple blogger clique like Gruber is ridiculous. Even if it is "enough" it's still what my MacBook Pro I bought 6 years ago shipped with for several hundred dollars less than this one. Why are we giving Apple a pass on RAM being stuck at 8GB and SSD being stuck at 128GB (only very recently bumping to 256) for almost a decade. Not to mention some of us get stuck on 8GB 1…

It’s enough for many of the people who actually buy Macs.
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