M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness • Hacker News Board

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#321

Post by criddell » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

romanoderoma wrote: post #308

criddell wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

64 GB? From where?

I just looked at Dell and an XPS desktop with 16 GB of RAM starts at $650. You aren't going to be able to add two GPUs and a monitor for $350.

At HP you can get to 32 GB for $650 but again you still need to buy GPUs and a monitor.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#322

Post by jcheng » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

HJain13 wrote: post #169

s3cur3 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just "ARM is fast," though—Apple's ARM chips in particular beat the pants off their ARM competitors. (See benchmarks of any iPhone compared to flagship Android devices.) I don't think you should expect similar levels of performance from a run-of-the-mill ARM chip on the desktop (though I'm happy to be shown benchmarks to the contrary).

It depends on what you're comparing: A14 on phones have a Multi Core score which would be quite comparable to Snapdragon 888 (extrapolating a 20% boost over SD865) that was just announced all while A14 being clocked higher (3.0ghz 4 core vs 2.84 x 1, 3 x 2.4) comparing performance cores. Single thread OTOH Apple wins comfortably but I would suspect X1 to reduce the lead a bit. As for AI performance Apple claimed 11 T…

A14 has two performance cores.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#323

Post by vetinari » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

jcheng wrote: post #312

vetinari wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung stopped Exynos development a year ago. Cavium is basically dead (yes, bought out by Marvell). Qualcomm is interested only in mobile SoCs at mobile SoCs volumes where they can also sell radios, and Nvidia was traditionally not capable of delivering anything at promised power consumption.

Are you sure about Exynos? They announced the 1080 just a couple of weeks ago and the 2100 is expected next year.

This is from wikipedia (under "Exynos"), so apply the appropriate amount of salt:

On October 1, 2019, rumors emerged that Samsung had laid off their custom CPU teams at SARC.[21][22][23] On November 1, 2019, Samsung filed a WARN letter with the Texas Workforce Commission, notifying of upcoming layoffs of their SARC CPU team and termination of their custom CPU development.[24] SARC and ACL will still continue development of custom SoC, AI, and GPU.[25]

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#324

Post by Scarbutt » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

6d65 wrote: post #297

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. With Zen3 on mobile, giving a…

Regarding hardware, will Dell be able to compete with a MBA at the $1000 price point? I doubt it.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#325

Post by wmf » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #289

wmf wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't count in the PC space. For desktop PCs there's just the Mac mini and various hacker boards. For laptops there's the new MacBooks and the mediocre Qualcomm 8cx/SQ2 and nothing else.

There's Exynos.

No, there aren't any PCs running Exynos.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#326

Post by Thaxll » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

M1 is fast but also very much completely closed, impossible to extend / change anything, on my PC I can buy more ram, I can buy a new graphic card every 2-3 years, it's a very different constrains than AMD / Intel supporting a million of different configuration + legacy.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#327

Post by buran77 » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #247

zepto wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers say otherwise.

When iPhone came out in 2007, Android was still an OS for BlackBerry like devices. It didn't take long for Android to discover touch screens once Apple made it clear that they were dramatically better. Similarly, it's not like other ARM chip manufacturers are going to have to go through all of the same R&D expense to figure out how to make chips that are comparably fast--they just need to copy what Apple did without…

> it's not like other ARM chip manufacturers are going to have to go through all of the same R&D expense to figure out how to make chips that are comparably fast--they just need to copy what Apple did without infringing on any particular patents

Very handwaivy but the devil is in the details of that "all they have to do". Copying success is not that straight forward or else AMD would have had a response to Conroe in 2007, Intel for Zen in 2018, and Qualcomm for A-chips around 2014.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#328

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

alwillis wrote: post #140

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 :)

If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :) Apple showed Debian running in a VM on an M1 prototype Mac nearly 6 months ago. I get that it won't be acceptable for some Linux diehards but the superfast, supercool ARM laptop running Linux will soon be an M1 MacBook Pro.

Apple laptops have always been among the best in terms of quality. If you can run free software on it, even better.

Is it actually possible to replace macOS with Linux though?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#329

Post by ravi-delia » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

_abox wrote: post #315

6d65 wrote: post #297

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. With Zen3 on mobile, giving a…

Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. His article reads like an Apple keynote transcript, everything is magical and amazing, a marvel and mindbogglingly great. No wonder they throw him so many exclusives ;) Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system (no booting Linux or Windows at this time) and even under macOS you're having even less access to the system's internals than before. Also, A…

The M1 as a computer is too locked down for me, and it seems like for you. But the M1 as a demonstration of the power of modern ARM chips is absolutely unmatched. I have seen a lot of people use the lockdown argument to justify a disregard of ARM overall without realizing that no, the open version of this technology will be incredible.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#330

Post by rgbrenner » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

matwood wrote: post #269

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…

Laptops have outsold desktops every year for the last decade+. The M1, being a mobile friendly chip, is addressing the larger market. People may not care about power usage from the wall, but they do care about battery life. Also, the fact that the M1 is even being mentioned along with a desktop powerhouse like the threadripper says it all. The M1 is the lowest end mobile Apple Silicon. We know higher end mobile chips…

It's only being mentioned alongside threadripper because the article went overboard and claimed the M1 "embarrass all other PCs — ... including ... every single machine running Windows or Linux"

This is a joke. The M1s performance is no where near the threadripper. Even on per-thread performance, new AMD cpus perform better than the M1... and they have many more cores. The M1 can only win these comparisons when we start adding all kinds of conditions, like power draw, heat, price point, etc. They need to add those conditions to redirect the conversation, because on raw performance threadripper destroys the M1.

The article made the mistake of leaving out those conditions to make it seem even more impressive than it is... but hyperbole and fantasy will always sound better than reality. Reality requires those conditions. That doesn't detract from the m1's impressiveness.. but it's foolish to forget that and go off and start making ridiculous claims like the article has done.