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Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

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241–250 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#241
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is their 13" model. Their 15" model is targeted for professionals.

I mean, "Pro" is in the name, I expect Pro-level specs, haha :P

It was a long time ago MacBook Pro meant "MacBook for Professionals", as other makers have now equalized and sometimes even passed Apple when it comes to producing quality hardware for reasonable cost.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#242

No 32GB options on any of the models announced today is a shame. Or not I guess as it means I won't be buying anything today M1 looks impressive, hopefully it scales as well to higher TDPs. Pretty much what I expected today with all the low power models getting updated. With no fan I expect the Air will throttle the CPU quickly when using the high performance cores. Calling it an "8-core CPU" is a little cheeky IMHO…

Especially since it’s unified memory between the CPU and GPU - no wonder they were showing off mobile games on a desktop device

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#244

Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming: There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch https://w…

I doubt the logic board is the same. It’s just that the M1 integrates so much.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#245
post #161

I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...

Read the fine print at the bottom, the claims they are making seem very..... not backed up by their testing. They chip they say they beat that makes them the best in the world is the last gen mackbook with an i7

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#246

Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming: There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch https://w…

If you compare the M1 Air and Pro, the only difference seems to be the addition of the Touchbar, 10% better battery life, and a "studio" speaker/mic on the Pro.

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/

I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#247
post #140

I don't know if this will be a big success, but if it is, I think ARM will take over a large amount of server/cloud market.

> but if it is, I think ARM will take over a large amount of server/cloud market. Seeing as how Apple has zero presence in the server/cloud market, how do you figure? Are you hoping they bring back xserve? Otherwise I don't see how Apple having a custom power-efficient chip in a laptop is going to do anything at all in the server/cloud market?

The argument has been that lack of credible Arm desktop / laptops has held back Arm in the cloud. If you can't compile on your desktop then it's much harder to develop / test etc. Now you can buy a Mac and use that to develop for AWS Arm etc.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#248

Apple mentions TensorFlow explicitly in the ongoing presentation due to the new 16-core "Neural Engine" embedded in the M1 chip. Now that's an angle I did not expect on this release. Sounds exciting! Edit: just to clarify, the Neural Engine itself is not really "new": > The A11 also includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Neural Engine". This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billio…

Yeah, I was confused at that implication. I don't think these are designed for training!

(If they are or can be, I'm interested)

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSD performance with their integrated IO controller might close the gap here, the same way that pretty fast storage on their iPhones makes the lack of RAM there not so debilitating. But yeah, agreed that not having a 32GB option is somewhat disappointing. (sent from my MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM)

mmmmm yeah, I will let you all be the guinea pigs here and check back next month. I am very curious about the performance. If the macbook air is editing 6k videos and scrubbing smoothly, I am optimistic.

While a valid workload for a segment, I would be a bit skeptical of generalizing the extraordinary video editing capability to general purpose computing, as those things are facilitated heavily by hardware decoders.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#250
post #49

All the Macs looked quite impressive! It was well worth waiting for these (at least for me). But I was disappointed that the maximum RAM is 16GB. I would’ve preferred a 32GB option for better future proofing (especially with web applications needing more and more memory). Edit: Considering the fact that the RAM won’t be upgradeable (it’s part of the SoC), this limitation is a big bummer. What may be worse is that all…

> Considering the fact that the RAM won’t be upgradeable (it’s part of the SoC)

While I agree that RAM won't be upgradeable (as it hasn't been in all new models the past few years), are you sure that the RAM is part of the SoC? I believe what they labelled with "DRAM" in the M1 schmatics is very likely the L3 cache instead.

Adding RAM to the SoC would make little sense from a cost and yield perspective. I also believe that 16GB of DDR4 memory are much larger than the "DRAM" part of the SoC.

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