M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness • Hacker News Board

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#231

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

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.

They’re faster than other Macs.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#232

Post by foobarian » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #214

valuearb wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On-die memory is pretty much their one ace in the hole that nobody else will have the guts to match. Intel can't because their fabs are behind, and AMD probably doesn't have the resources to fork their architectures and/or piss off the server integrators.

I can't live without 64GB in my desktop and would love to have more, so the new Macs are not for me.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#233

Post by ravi-delia » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

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.

I'm also pretty bummed that I can't use the magic ARM machine yet, but this is just the beginning. Apple currently has an advantage, but I suspect its more of a market advantage than a technical advantage. Snapdragons are getting really fast too, and a lot of the difference in power comes down to a lack of demand. Now that ARM has been shown to be this good, more and similarly powered chips will be made.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#234

Post by oezi » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #180

I want a "hot" M1, one that runs at 5Ghz and burns 120W (or whatever) at load because it will be even faster. That is how this works, the reason your seeing "fast and cool" is because the target is 15W. If that becomes 25W then there is budget for more cores, or faster clocks (or whatever) and the the result is a faster machine. Which is why a lot of people are holding out for the M2 (again or whatever) the next vers…

I guess that is what is coming: M2 will be 40% faster, still be 10W but come in 1x for Air and 2x configuration for MBP 16 and desktop Macs. I think this is just the beginning of a growing wave lapping the x86 space.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#235

Post by ravi-delia » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

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.

I think a lot of his frustration seems to come from people using Apple software to write off ARM hardware overall. In the M1 specifically the software may hold it back, but using that to justify claims of x86 systems being fundamentally superior.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#236

Post by MaxBarraclough » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

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…

> there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure

AWS already have a series of AArch64 instance-types which they will most likely continue to improve.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#237

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

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.

> Or force Intel and AMD to pull a rabit out of their hat to match the performance/watt of ARM chips.

AMD has been great (and improving) on performance/watt. It appears that the M1 has the upper hand, but then again Apple bought all the 5nm capacity for the year. I'm really curious how well 5nm Zen chips would compete non performance/watt - I suspect Zen 4 (5nm) will compete very favorably.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#238

Post by brundolf » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

> I actually discovered that I’ve had an instinct of measuring my MacBook’s CPU usage by feeling the heat on the strip of aluminum right above the Touch Bar, and I can’t even do that anymore now.

Market opportunity here for a peripheral that's just an adhesive strip you put above your touch bar, and it outputs heat corresponding to CPU usage ;)

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#239

Post by ArchOversight » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #72

bstar77 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s not saying permanently disable Adblock, but rather disable it to see if it’s responsible for the memory leak in question.

As far as I can tell, the issue is present without any extensions. I'm not willing to browse unprotected for several hours to 100% confirm, but it still grows with every tab.

Yes, it grows, but slightly. Ever since 1Blocker updated their app to use the older logo rather than the new monochrome logo I am not seeing the disastrous memory growth I was seeing before. After ~5 days of use without restarting Safari it is still hovering at around 800 Mb used, instead of the 10 Gb+ it was using before.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#240

Post by daenney » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #208

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…

> But I think the overarching point is true: now desktop and laptop makers can't just pretend that having a hot and/or slow, clunky, noisy x86-based architecture is just a fact of life. I hope and expect that it'll help create a new generation of ARM-based laptops and maybe even desktops that will run cool and smooth. Be careful what you wish for. X86 is the most open architecture right now. ARM, on the other hand, h…

> Be careful what you wish for. X86 is the most open architecture right now

You might want to take a look at PowerPC/OpenPOWER.

ARM not being very open is mostly because there's been limited development interest in it, aside from specialised devices, and those companies have no real need or interest to have open things. Doesn't mean ARM itself can't evolve past it.