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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#281

Post by Joeri »

kllrnohj wrote: post #150
forrestthewoods wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the M1 is Zen3 5600X performance in an ultra-portable form factor. It’s astonishing. I just hope they someday put in a good GPU. Something comparable to an Nvidia 3060 would be great. I’d love to see Apple go HAM with their ARM chips in an iMac Pro or some such. Give me 12 firestorm cores and bump the GPU cores from 8 to 64.

> I just hope they someday put in a good GPU. Something comparable to an Nvidia 3060 would be great. The GPU in the M1 is perfectly good for the power targets it's trying to hit. Either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Apple is unlikely to be able to do with the GPU what they did with the CPU. That is, there's no legacy in either Nvidia nor AMD's GPUs that Apple can cut out to get wins. An…

What gpu offers the same power efficiency as the one in the m1? Apple is matching the 75w 1050ti with less than 5w of power.

The 3060ti is a 200w gpu, which is 40x the power draw of the gpu in the m1, but it is only 5x the performance. Gpu’s might not scale linearly, but it may very well be the case that apple will blow us away when they ship their high end gpu’s.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#282

Post by EricE »

jimnotgym wrote: post #240

It is funny to read the comments full of excitement. To me the M1 thing fills me with dread. To me I just see problems for the IT team. I already know our corporate VPN doesn't run on Big Sur. I have no hope for the monitoring app, or the Antivirus. Apple is such a pain for corporate IT

Corporate IT is often an even bigger pain for it's users since things like VPNs are often bought to meet the need of Corporate IT and not the users :p

Re: M1 Macs Review

#283

Post by CraigJPerry »

sg47 wrote: post #247
CraigJPerry wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It arrived with 69% charge, by this morning 11am i had reached 21%. I left the screen brightness on the default setting and usage was a mix of installing software (mostly I/O i suppose), a lot of safari, around 4 hours of Citrix remote desktop, around 90 minutes of zoom, some light gaming last night to see if it works. If you do anything that's heavy on I/O (packaging jar files in my case), this laptop is faster than…

Do they still ship these Airs with 720p webcams from the 2000s? I have a 2020 Macbook Air that has a terrible webcam.

Yeah and the low light performance isn’t great either

Re: M1 Macs Review

#284

Post by rado »

mikechen233 wrote: post #258
rado wrote: post #196

This is the revolution we needed in a technology landscape that promotes waste (x86, Electron), however belittled by the haters. It's real and changes everything.

Why is x86 waste? It was beating everything on the market during the 90s and 2000s no? Its just intel hasn't pushed things forward in 10 years right?

Power consumption and inefficiency

Re: M1 Macs Review

#286

Post by jdsully »

mistersquid wrote: post #182
mojzu wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is impressive, makes me wonder whether there's a potential future where Apple puts chips like these into servers to run existing software faster/on lower power

> a potential future where Apple puts chips like these into servers Not to put too fine a point on it, but that potential future is already here. Mac mini is a server and off-the-shelf rack mounts are easy to find. [0] [0] For example: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html

Without 10gig ethernet its really limited in that role.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#287

Post by alwillis »

ActorNightly wrote: post #214
yhersk0vitz wrote: post #16

I feel like this may the first time that Macbooks might actually be worth their premium from a purely hardware perspective. Before people jump on this, I mean that for example the previous Intel MB Pro with i5 would cost like $1,500, which is far more than almost any windows laptop running the same specs.

Has there been any sort of long term load tests? I feel like the chassis limitations are going to result in thermal throttling compared to similar performance laptops with actual cooling design. Even if it doesn't thermal throttle, one of my main complaints with Macbooks is that you can't actually use them in your lap cause they get uncomfortably hot. As for being worth it, wait till the next gen mobile chips in 2021…

I feel like we will see similar performance fairly soon in cheaper laptops without being locked into the Apple ecosystem.

That's probably not going to happen any time soon.

If the $999 M1-based MacBook Air is already outperforming almost every Intel laptop that's been shipping (including Apple's), there's little chance Intel or AMD are going to surpass that.

Even if they get close to performance, they're not going to have the same battery life. From Matthew Panzarino's review on Techcrunch on the M1 MacBook Pro [1]:

"In fullscreen 4k/60 video playback, the M1 fares even better, clocking an easy 20 hours with fixed 50% brightness. On an earlier test, I left the auto-adjust on and it crossed the 24 hour mark easily. Yeah, a full day. That’s an iOS-like milestone."

It's important to remember: this is Apple's low-end chip for entry-level/consumer level hardware, yet it's more than competitive with a $5000 iMac Pro.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

Re: M1 Macs Review

#288

Post by tambourine_man »

syspec wrote: post #249
Tagbert wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Apple has tuned the M and A series chips to perform well with Objective-c and Swift as used by iOS and Mac OS. One example is that they made some object operations 5x faster than on Intel chips. This speeds up loops and garbage collection significantly. Those are very common operations. Other vendors are using generic chips that were not tuned for the OS.

MacOS / iOS apps are not garbage collected

Reference counting is a form of garbage collection, although not usually refered to that way.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#289

Post by alwillis »

mojzu wrote: post #6

Although I’m definitely not convinced enough to make the jump yet, those emulation benchmarks are impressive (and seem to also apply somewhat to general use based on another review I read). Running x86 code faster than native equivalents, using an ARM chip, that will probably be consuming significantly less power doing it is something I did not expect to see in gen 1 of this switch.

Although I’m definitely not convinced enough to make the jump yet, those emulation benchmarks…

Remember, it's not emulation; Rosetta translates the x86 binary into ARM code and runs it. That's why there's a small pause when launching x86 apps—it translates the app on the fly.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#290

Post by kllrnohj »

Joeri wrote: post #281
kllrnohj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just hope they someday put in a good GPU. Something comparable to an Nvidia 3060 would be great. The GPU in the M1 is perfectly good for the power targets it's trying to hit. Either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Apple is unlikely to be able to do with the GPU what they did with the CPU. That is, there's no legacy in either Nvidia nor AMD's GPUs that Apple can cut out to get wins. An…

What gpu offers the same power efficiency as the one in the m1? Apple is matching the 75w 1050ti with less than 5w of power. The 3060ti is a 200w gpu, which is 40x the power draw of the gpu in the m1, but it is only 5x the performance. Gpu’s might not scale linearly, but it may very well be the case that apple will blow us away when they ship their high end gpu’s.

> Apple is matching the 75w 1050ti with less than 5w of power.

Who gives a shit about the desktop 1050 Ti here? The M1 comes close but can't match a 1650 Mobile, and the 1650 mobile is both faster than a 1050 Ti and uses less power. Almost like the 1050 Ti was never the pinnacle of anything but being cheap? Then again, the 1050 Ti doesn't use 75w, either ( https://www.techpowerup.com/review/palit-geforce-gtx-1050-ti... ), just like the M1's isn't "less than 5W" ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... - more like ~10-15w for just the GPU)

The M1's good enough it doesn't need nonsensical comparisons with fake numbers to exaggerate things further. Let it be what it is, which is a good integrated GPU not that dissimilar to other recent integrated GPUs

EDIT: Although if you do care about power efficiency, sites like techpowerup have you covered: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6800-xt/36.... performance / watt graphs.

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