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Apple introduces M4 chip

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Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#341

Post by gruez »

paulpan wrote: post #183
EduardoBautista wrote: post #13

The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage. https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/

I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation purposes. On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.

How does that justify locking the 16GB option to 1TB/2TB options?

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#342

Post by Aurornis »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #186
EduardoBautista wrote: post #13

The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage. https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/

If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram. Such a waste of nice components.

I have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM for lightweight travel.

Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.

And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#343

Post by huhuhu111 »

marinhero wrote: post #318

I get frustrated seeing this go into the iPad and knowing that we can't get a shell, and run our own binaries there. Not even as a VM like [UserLAnd]( https://userland.tech ). I could effectively travel with one device less in my backpack but instead I have to carry two M chips, two displays, batteries, and so on... It's great to see this tech moving forward but it's frustrating to not see it translate into a more si…

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Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#344

Post by mh8h »

philistine wrote: post #141
izacus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?

Quickly looking at the press release, it seems to have the same comparisons as in the video. None of Apple's comparisons today are between the M3 and M4. They are ALL comparing the M2 and M4. Why? It's frustrating, but today Apple replaced a product with an M2 with a product with an M4. Apple always compares product to product, never component to component when it comes to processors. So those specs are far more impr…

That's because the previous iPad Pros came with M2, not M3. They are comparing the performance with the previous generation of the same product.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#345

Post by mort96 »

Shank wrote: post #311
mort96 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I wish my iPad's chip was slower! I can't do anything other than watch videos and use drawing programs on an iPad, why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do? If I could actually do something with an iPad there would be a different discussion, but the operating system is so incredibly gimped that the most demanding task it's really su…

> Why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do? Well, it's not. Every process shrink improves power efficiency. For watching videos, you're sipping power on the M4. For drawing...well if you want low latency while drawing, which generally speaking, people do, you...want the processor and display to ramp up to compensate and carry strokes as fast as p…

From what I can tell, the 2020 iPad has perfectly fine latency while drawing, and Apple hasn't been advertising lower latencies for each generation; I think they pretty much got the latency thing nailed down. Surely you could make something with the peak performance of an A12Z use less power on average than an M4?

As for the environmental impact, whether I buy or don't buy this iPad (I won't, don't worry, my 2020 one still works), millions of people will. I don't mind people buying powerful machines when the software can make use of the performance, but for iPad OS..?

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#346

Post by eterevsky »

They are talking about iPad Pro as the primary example of M4 devices. But iPads don't really seem to be limited by performance. Nobody I know compiles Chrome or does 3D renders on an iPad.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#347

Post by gruez »

michaelt wrote: post #239
Laaas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic reasoning behind this doesn't make sense to me. What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?

Because before you know it you're Dell and you're stocking 18 different variants of "Laptop, 15 inch screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD" and users are scratching their heads trying to figure out WTF the difference is between a "Latitude 3540" a "Latitude 5540" and a "New Latitude 3550"

I can't tell whether this is serious or not. Surely adding independently configurable memory/storage combinations won't confuse the user, any more than having configurable storage options don't make the user confused about what iphone to get?

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#348

Post by janalsncm »

lemcoe9 wrote: post #254
ttul wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An NVIDIA RTX 4090 generates 73 TFLOPS. This iPad gives you nearly half that. The memory bandwidth of 120 GBps is roughly 1/10th of the NVIDIA hardware, but who’s counting!

The 4090 costs ~$1800 and doesn't have dual OLED screens, doesn't have a battery, doesn't weigh less than a pound, and doesn't actually do anything unless it is plugged into a larger motherboard, either.

And yet it’s worth it for deep learning. I’d like to see a benchmark training Resnet on an iPad.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#349

Post by phren0logy »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #264

> M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today. I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less tha…

I have a MacBook M2 and a PC with a 4090 ("just" one of them) - the VRAM barrier is usually what gets me with the 4090 when I try to run local LLMs (not train them). For a lot of things, my MacBook is fast enough, and with more RAM, I can run bigger models easily. And, it's portable and sips battery.

The marketing hype is overblown, but for many (most? almost all?) people, the MacBook is a much more useful choice.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#350

Post by SkyPuncher »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #264

> M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today. I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less tha…

All of the tech specs comparisons were extremely odd. Many things got compared to the M1, despite the most recent iPad having the M2. Heck, one of the comparisons was to the A11 chip that was introduced nearly 7 years ago.

I generally like Apple products, but I cannot stand the way they present them. They always hide how it compares against the directly previous product.

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