321–330 of 767 posts
I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.
They have already stated they won’t: “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...
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ELI5 please, how this change things for M1
ELI5: Some things that ARM can do in one instruction, can be done with multiple instructions on x86
One person thought that benchmarks were saying that the M1 had strong SIMD performance, but the reality is that cinebench (and in fact most renderers) doesn't use SIMD very effectively when looking at the whole process, and the assumption that it demonstrates SIMD performance is not correct.
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These gains are just through improvements in processors. Now, combine that with parallel leaps for battery tech... It's also good that battery tech hasn't jumped too far ahead already - the constraint has helped in the development in these mobile chips. The display panel is still the biggest energy draw on my laptop. There's a lot of chance for improvement there too. A 2 day battery in 5 years isn't that crazy.
Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.
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> The Zen3 processor that they are comparing it to is the 5950x - the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W. The entire system power of the M1 mini under load was 28W. This is a very misleading statement. They primarily only used the 5950X in single-core tests, and in those tests it doesn't come remotely close to 105W. In fact per Anandtech's own results[1] the 5950X CPU core in a single-core load draws around…
> This is a very misleading statement. They primarily only used the 5950X in single-core tests, and in those tests it doesn't come remotely close to 105W. In fact per Anandtech's own results[1] the 5950X CPU core in a single-core load draws around 20w. It would seem that the switching of AMD chips in the various graphs have caused some confusion. I was referring to the "Geekbench 5 Multi-Thread" graph on page 2. This…
But... Other than ST performance, the multi-core CPU isn't linear at scaling. At 16cores - core-to-core communications take a hit, that is not as bad as for 4 cores.
Use the M1 Air to remote into a real non virtualized computer running linux.
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I feel the same way. Very interested, but not going to go in for first gen.
This is the 12th generation Apple Silicon processor design. A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12, A13, A14, M1
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Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.
I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they know what you want and need better than you.
In reviews of the new M1 Macs as a whole, I'd like to see a comparison with Qualcomm's best: meaning the fastest current Windows ARM laptops. Up to now, their performance has at best only kept up with comparably priced x86 models, despite pressure on Qualcomm by Microsoft and the device makers. Maybe some new competition will shake Qualcomm out of its complacency...
In reviews of the new M1 Macs as a whole, I'd like to see a comparison with Qualcomm's best: meaning the fastest current Windows ARM laptops. You may recall that Apple already embarrassed Qualcomm years ago when they shipped 64-bit ARM-based chips at least a year before Qualcomm could do it. When the new iPhone ships, the next fastest phone is the iPhone being replaced by the new flagship phone. The Android phones ba…
This puts me in mind of one time that I was ranting to a Microsoft colleague over lunch about how MS shouldn't be exclusive with Qualcomm for ARM chips given the very low rewards over the years. They said to me that when Windows Phone 7 first was under development in 2008-2010, choosing Qualcomm exclusivity seemed best because Qualcomm was the only one willing to make decent BSPs for us at Microsoft.
Upon reflection, I realized that this was still the case as of our conversation years later. The Mediateks, Samsungs, and Nvidias of the world either did not work with Microsoft at all, or got spurned by Microsoft themselves, or gave up after 1 or 2 high-profile failures (such as Surface RT). Texas Instruments was a notable exception as they gave up on ARM SoCs altogether, thus killing what would have become a TI-based Windows RT tablet platform.
Now neither me nor my coworker was in a position to actually know what was going on here, but I think this anecdote illustrates the value of a trustworthy business partner even when their products look mediocre.
From the article's conclusion... "The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets." This is the first in-depth review validating all the hype. Assuming the user experie…
> At this point I'm mostly interested in the Air's performance with its missing fan. I think the clear store here is that the Air will definitely be slower than the rest over time. This isn't a 10W SoC, clearly, so it definitely can't run at its best while being passively cooled. How it behaves when throttled will be interesting for sure though.
In a lot of day-to-day work that is much more peaks and valleys, you may never see the throttling.
Interesting that it is not able to outperform the Zen3 CPUs. I had expected it to do somewhat better, especially it being a 5nm processor, and with all the hype around ARM processors. I don't know how well it will hold up to its x86 competitors like this, especially once they launch their 5nm CPUs next year.
Have you seen benchmarks post 1st page? M1 at 7-8W power drain beats or just trails behind a desktop class $799 Ryzen 9 5950x at +49W consumption in single threaded performance. What did you expect?
But you cannot extrapolate these numbers (to multi-core performance or to more cores or to a possible M2 with a larger TDP envelope), nor can you even directly compare them. The Ryzen 9 5950x makes an entirely different trade-off with regard to number of cores per CPU, supported memory, etc., which allows for more cores, more memory, more everything...and that comes at a cost in terms of die space as well as power consumption. If AMD had designed this CPU to be much more constrained in those dimensions and thus much more similar to what the M1 offers, they would surely have been able to considerably drive down power consumption - in fact, their smaller units 4800U and 4900HS which were also benchmarked and which offer really good multithreading performance for their power envelope, even better than the M1, clearly demonstrate this fact.
What I read out of these benchmark numbers is: the ISA does matter far less than most people seem to assume. ARM is no magic sauce in terms of performance at all - instead, it's "magic legal sauce", because it allows anyone (here: Apple; over there: Amazon) to construct their own high-end CPUs with industry-leading performance, which the x86 instruction set cannot do due to its licensing constraints.
Both ISAs, x86_64 and ARM, apparently allow well-funded companies with the necessary top talent to build CPUs that max out whatever performance you can get out of the currently available lithography processes and out of the current state of the art in CPU design.