Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 882 posts

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#271

Post by criddell »

romanoderoma wrote: post #242
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…

But honestly, does it matter? People buying a threadripper today don't care about it. What matters to them it's the performance, my gf is a 3d artist, she doesn't care if some cpu consumes more or less power than another (when I say she doesn't care I mean she doesn't even know that CPU have very different power requirements), she needs the fastest gear she can buy on her budget. Apple M1s are not it. There are many…

> she needs the fastest gear she can buy on her budget.

> Apple M1s are not it.

If a person had a $1000 budget, they could by an M1 equipped laptop from Apple. Is there something significantly faster at that price?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#272

Post by spijdar »

adkadskhj wrote: post #253
zepto wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers say otherwise.

Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing, tiny, and more close to the ARM chip than anything out there for x86, right? I'll be interested to see if Apple can keep this up with 128GiB of RAM and a beefy GPU. So far to me M1 is great, ARM is great, but comparing a tiny amount of RAM soldered onto the C…

Architectural analysis of the chip [0] suggests it is a massive improvement as a general purpose CPU, not just because of Apple's vertical integration and streamlining.

The magnitude of extra ROB entries, having an 8x wide instruction decoder, that massive L1I cache, and such fat cores with lots of ALU and other op units while simultaneously keeping over a 3GHz clock is a phenomenal architectural improvement overall.

Apple may not need to add more RAM locally. Other silicon designers like IBM with POWER10 are moving to serial memory with massive "L4" caches, seen previously with their Centaur memory controllers. I can see Apple using OMI or a similar serial memory bus to add extra memory, using 16/32/etc GB of PoP RAM for caching reads and writes to slower off-chip memory. I expect Intel and AMD will eventually move to a similar memory model, at least in server grade hardware.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#273

Post by gorbypark »

aequitas wrote: post #137
ghaff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, it's all about Windows. I know it's hard for many of us who basically hardly see anything other than Mac or Linux laptops to really grok, but something like 90% of the laptops out there run Windows (if you exclude Chromebooks which AFAIK are mostly used in education).

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.

It's also because Microsoft half-assed their Windows-on-arm attempt. They made something akin to Rosetta 2 (x86 to arm translation) but only supported x86, not amd64. Apparently they are working on 64bit support, but releasing something half done doesn't inspire confidence. Even the 32bit support was reportedly not very good/fast, compared to Rosetta 2, anyways. If Microsoft steps up their game then I can see Windows on arm starting to take off, even if Qualcomms chips trail Apple's M1 in performance.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#274

Post by om2 »

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.)

Wow, that’s a lot of memory use. Would you be willing to file a Feedback Assistant report with a sysdiagnose? Would like to see what’s up here. How many tabs is this?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#275

Post by snazz »

romanoderoma wrote: post #242
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…

But honestly, does it matter? People buying a threadripper today don't care about it. What matters to them it's the performance, my gf is a 3d artist, she doesn't care if some cpu consumes more or less power than another (when I say she doesn't care I mean she doesn't even know that CPU have very different power requirements), she needs the fastest gear she can buy on her budget. Apple M1s are not it. There are many…

People using powerful laptops care about battery life, though. For someone moving from a "workstation"-class laptop, the M1's value is significant.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#276

Post by ogre_codes »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #264
ogre_codes wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> X86 is the most open architecture right now. x86 is not "Open" in any fashion. You can't license x86 even for a fee, let alone free. While ARM isn't open either, it is by comparison far more available to license at reasonable cost. > ARM, on the other hand, has locked bootloaders It also has open/ unlocked boot loaders. One of the advantages of licensable technology like this is you can have a lot of different arch…

> x86 is not "Open" in any fashion. You can't license x86 even for a fee, let alone free. OP is not talking about being able to manufacture x86 CPUs kind of open, that's useless for most folks. They're talking about being able to install any OS, drivers being fairly universal, no device specific out of tree kernel patches for the vast majority of PCs, no device trees etc.

It's a lousy use of the word "Open" in a discipline where Open has a fairly specific meaning.

I mentioned that as well though. Using your goofy definition of Open, x86 is no more "Open" than ARM. Pinebook and Raspberry Pi both use no bullshit ARM setups. With ARM, how accessible the architecture is is 100% dependent on the implementation which vary greatly by manufacturer.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#277

Post by bfgoodrich »

wtallis wrote: post #224
bfgoodrich wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% slow…

Pulling other cores into this discussion does nothing but muddy the waters.

The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 4.5X faster at SPECfp than the Icestorm cores. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 3.1X faster at SPECint than the Icestorm cores.

In my world, the 3.1 - 4.5X faster sibling makes them very low performance, relatively. In a fully working together scenario, the "8" core M1 is equal in performance to a conceptual 4.5 core Firestorm part (see the Geekbench scaling, for instance). This, again, has positively nothing to do with any other core or part.

Bizarre that anyone thinks this is somehow negative or dismissive of the M1. It is an extraordinary chip. But they intentionally, purposefully put 4 very low performance -- compared to Firestorm -- cores because it matches the computing model of users average workload.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#278

Post by hinkley »

barkingcat wrote: post #61

I think the missing part of the discussion is that the M1 can run fast and hot... It hasn't transcended physics - it's just not being pushed hard enough. Give it a 800% overclock and dunk it in liquid nitrogen and then we'll talk.

No device this is going in has a large TDP budget. A unit tuned for a desktop heat sink will put in some interesting numbers. I'm curious to see when they put out a Mac Pro with an M-series chip. Or if server is ever coming back.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#280

Post by mattkevan »

macintux wrote: post #129
kzrdude wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple had versions of iOS running ARM on phones and pads since how many years? They used their head start already to launch themselves into their ARM computers.

And it's not particularly relevant, but the Newton was an ARM device, so Apple's head start is even longer than that.

ARM was a joint project between Apple, Acorn and VLSI, so you could say that they had a head-start on pretty much everyone except Acorn, who invented it in the first place.
Post reply on HN