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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#301

Post by foobarian »

kllrnohj wrote: post #249
foobarian wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

M1 isn't using on-die memory[1]. It's on-package, and likely little more than just off-the-shelf Micron or Samsung dram modules that are just soldered instead of socketed. 1: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn (from https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet... )

Thanks for the correction, that's a big difference. Still a severe limit but seems more hopeful for larger options in the future.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#302

Post by cestith »

ogre_codes wrote: post #260
the_af wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to believe. If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :)

Someone needs to spend the time/ money to design this M1 killer CPU. There is very little money in delivering powerful Linux laptops. ARM based Linux server CPUs? Very likely. Low end/ Chromebook style laptop ARM CPUs, Already exist. Performant ARM CPUs designed for laptops? I expect you just gotta hope Windows on ARM takes off or start porting Linux to M1 Macs.

Work has already begun to port Linux to M1 Macs. Linux for ARM and Windows for ARM are already running as PoC on the M1 Macs with QEMU (running ARM-on-ARM).

https://www.techradar.com/news/you-can-now-run-linux-and-win...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#303

Post by erk__ »

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…

I am pretty sure the most open at the moment are OpenPOWER and RISC-V, while there is is MIPS I am sure how open it is.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#304

Post by erk__ »

mlyle wrote: post #210
colinmhayes wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because there's basically no competition in the ARM space, especially in non-mobile. I'd like to see what amd and intel can do with ARM before saying apple will continue to be king.

Qualcomm, Samsung, Cavium/Marvell, and nVidia don't count? Not to mention ARM's own cores...

And Fujutsu as well, I think they are making the fastests chips at the moment, or at least the fastest systems with ARM.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#305

Post by romanoderoma »

cellar_door wrote: post #292
romanoderoma wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buying Apple for its M1 low power consumption are a niche inside a niche. Got it, watching Netflix in Chrome without the laptop getting hot is "a niche inside a niche" while GPU intensive 3d graphics workflows are mainstream.

If not getting hot while watching Netflix is the benchmark, I can show you a 400 euros laptop that can do 9 hours of Netflix on battery (or 7 hours of 1080p 60fps streaming)

Don't need no M1

AMD and Nvidia have sold more GPUs than Apple laptops by a large margin

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#306

Post by joncp »

liminal wrote: post #279

Can someone please ELI5 why the M1 is so much faster than every other ARM chip?

1. They took all the different chips and crammed more of them onto one chip. Now the different parts of the computer can talk to each other faster without any more work.

2. The new chip does lots of little things waaaay faster than the old chip does a handful of big things.

3. Apple figured out how to do a lot more things before they need to. Like if you did all of the math problems in your textbook ahead of time and then when the teacher eventually gives you the assignment you hand in the ones they asked for.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#307

Post by spijdar »

adkadskhj wrote: post #284
spijdar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Yea and to be clear i'm not saying it's not awesome. I'm just saying that a lot of things - like real world benchmarks of programs/etc - massively benefit from the proximity and speed of the RAM. Proximity seems to be a very difficult beast to scale. Works great in small scale, horrible in large scale. Sidenote, even if Apple rolled out 128GiB tomorrow i probably couldn't afford it. As the OP says: > including automo…

Hypothetically, with these new memory architectures, you could get the best of both worlds. Best case, you get a huge speed up if everything fits in the high-speed RAM, worst case, you fall back to the "old" RAM.

Side note, while Apple charges ridiculous prices for their upgrades, Mac Pros are actually some of the more ""reasonably priced"" computers comparatively. I've looked at HP and Lenovo's equiv. workstations, and you pretty much get screwed by everyone at that scale.

My desktop can take up to dual 128 GB sticks but one stick costs over $1,000, so I'm stuck with my 32 GB stick :(

... OTOH, it's pretty insane you can get 128GB of RAM for $1,000 nowadays. I remember when 8GB was a lot and cost several hundred. Time and miniaturization go on I guess...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#308

Post by romanoderoma »

criddell wrote: post #271
romanoderoma wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Or a desktop with 64 GB of RAM and two previous generation GPUs

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#309

Post by ianhowson »

cpgxiii wrote: post #146
marricks wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It very well may be over hyped but with the breakdown of Dennard scaling[1] the gains we've seen in CPUs has been pretty minor generation to generation. I think that could also be the reason it is getting so hyped, it is a tangible improvement over other CPUs. 50% more battery life, better performance in some case, what's the last CPU generation we saw such gains? Probably pretty far back to when Dennard sclaing was…

We have seen massive improvements in power envelope in CPUs in fairly recent generations, to say nothing of the power improvements seen in some generation->generation GPU improvements. For example, with an improvement to the 14nm process and not a die shrink, Kaby Lake->Whiskey Lake saw low power processors double in core counts (2C/4T->4C/8T) in essentially the same power/thermal envelope. Basically every thin lapto…

Well... yeah... but they also dropped clock rate from 2.5GHz-ish to 1.7GHz-ish. That could equally well explain the increase in core count at the same TDP. You're gaining about 15% IPC improvement from Kaby->Whiskey [1].

It's an overall improvement, but not as dramatic as "2x cores for 2x perf at the same power"

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14514/examining-intels-ice-la...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#310

Post by pathartl »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #236
pathartl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say that they wouldn't go Arm, I said they wouldn't buy chips from Apple. Apple would never sell it like that.
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