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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#411

Post by ogre_codes »

bfgoodrich wrote: post #384
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…

Intel's 10nm is approximately equal to TSMC's 7nm (even having advantages in some areas). The A-chips at 7nm (the A13) were already significantly ahead of Intel's offerings in efficiency and instructions per cycle. Intel went all in on a design that relegates performance to power gobbling turbo boost and here we are. Just generally too much is made about node size. It isn't a magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on…

> Last year it was just that Apple had some easily replicated

It feels like if you listen to the peanut gallery, Apple CPU advantage is always easy to replicate. They said the same thing when Apple bumped the A series to 64 bits and at pretty much every step between.

If Apple's formula was easy to copy or as obvious as everyone seems to claim, then we wouldn't be in the position where Apple has the best mobile CPU, the best wearable CPU, the best tablet CPU, and the best ultrabook CPU.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#412

Post by r00fus »

mlyle wrote: post #378
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.

No one said "in the PC space" here. There's lots of credible ARM work in both the mobile and the server space. Generally, a lot of it would work OK in the PC space, but for the lack of software support. Apple has the ability to leapfrog that particular problem. Still, Apple seems to have done pretty well compared to both the other mobile and server ARM vendors with their PC offering.

This whole article and thread are about the desktop (not server) space.

I do agree that Apple's push to ARM for laptops will have a dramatic impact on the server space in a year or two. Intel is in for a world of hurt unless they can pull a rabbit out of their hat.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#413

Post by altcognito »

egsmi wrote: post #393
altcognito wrote: post #372

This Gruber character is something else. No, the rules of physics and heat generation have not been repealed. You would think the fact you can’t crank out 100% performance on a Mac book air for too long before it throttles would be evidence enough that heat dissipation was still the prevailing reality, but not so for Gruber!

Can you be a bit more specific about what section of the article you're referring to? The claim I read is that it runs fast and cool, as perceived by touching the outside case. I didn't find any claim that no heat was generated at all and didn't read anything about throttling in this article.

Can you be a bit more specific? I didn't find any claim "no heat was generated" wasn't stated anywhere. The first paragraph talks about "fast computers should run hot." In an article titled "truth and truthiness", it should be commended for "truth in labeling" because vague usage of "hot and fast" is one way to make the truth difficult to pin down.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#414

Post by mbreese »

6d65 wrote: post #344
Scarbutt wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If it will cut into their sales they might have to adapt. Also, from what I heard, while intel was on top, it was charging outrageous margins on its CPUs. AMD mobile were said to be hundreds of dollars less per cpu. The manufacturers might choose to pass on these savings. Of course, if AMD becomes the only game in town, they might jack up their prices as well. We'll see.

I didn't really think about it at the time, but Nvidia buying ARM makes even more sense now that Apple has shown what can be done with ARM CPUs. Not necessarily because Nvidia wanted a CPU, but because otherwise, they'd be stuck providing GPUs for Intel CPU systems. AMD can bundle Radeon GPUs and Apple has the M1 CPU/GPU. That means that for a system vendor (Dell), the only cost effective place to use an Nvidia GPU would be in an Intel system. And if those are already more expensive, then that market will be shrinking.

However, with Apple showing the viability of ARM for desktop / laptop use, this opens a whole new market up for Nvidia/ARM. Apple has already shown it is a viable approach hardware wise, so half of the work is done.

So, an ARM powered Dell laptop might not be too far off.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#415

Post by sushisource »

jakeva wrote: post #343
btilly wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have demonstrated exactly why I don't care how fast the M1 runs, I'm not buying Apple hardware. Not until I start hearing that they have done something about their long quality slide. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25238688 for the last time that I expressed this opinion on HN.

Comments like these always make me wonder if I'm the only person in the world still delighted by Apple products. I mean I alone can not be responsible for their sales volume. And then I start to wonder if I should be more critical of Apple, so I fire up my Windows machine and think silently "No, this is still a worse experience". So I fire up my Ubuntu and have the same reaction. I just don't understand the vitriol s…

At least for me the reaction is largely emotional. I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that way. Now, I'm not really the target market, so whatever, but there are a few things that upset me about it:

1. I could really, really love macOS if they had a "don't treat me like a child" checkbox I could hit somewhere that would turn off some of the more obnoxious default behaviors. It took me a solid 5 minutes to figure out how to navigate to the root of the filesystem on a new MBP I recently was given at a new job. The most intuitive thing I could think to do was double click the name of the folder I was in ("Recents", by default when you first open it), which seems to do nothing except make a little icon appear and grow/shrink the window in Big Sur. Neat. The left pane, by default, literally has no means of navigating to the filesystem root. OSX has seemingly always wanted to pretend the filesystem doesn't exist. I like the filesystem. Stop trying to hide things from me.

2. This point is actually more a credit to apple than anything - the rendering, touch input, display management, etc on macOS is stellar, and it makes me angry I can't have the same level of polish on my linux install. I really, really want something that is as smooth as the macOS experience but with the customize-ability of linux. Apple pisses me off because they are incredibly close to that goal but they find it philosophically objectionable (for business reasons that I understand, but it still pisses me off)

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#416

Post by bayindirh »

6d65 wrote: post #401
bayindirh wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live a double life: Apple for laptops and Linux for desktops (and I'm mostly a Desktop user who manages a lot of Linux servers). Both platforms have their pluses and minuses. I like to carry ideas between them for my development and environments. Found this extremely fruitful for me over the years. We ordered a bunch of M1 airs for portability and power efficiency. Will see how it goes. I personally love both Linux…

Yep. Mac's look like a comfortable unixy environment. Preinstalled zsh, a fast terminal emulator (item), gnu utils. I'm sure I could make it work as a dev machine. I have to admit that m1 macbook air battery life is compelling. A long time ago I was thinking about a perfect laptop that would be very light and have a 20+ hours of battery life. This comes close. Even though I have never used a laptop more than 5 hours…

Thank you. I’m really excited about it. Using a different CPU architecture is always exciting. :)

Using Mac is like driving an Audi S8. Comfortable, smooth, powerful. However, it's not your hand tuned Impreza which can read your mind while going above 200Km/h.

Even an Intel MacBook pro can go a long time on battery (I have a personal Mid2014, configured all-out). I've developed some system-abusing scientific code on it and, it really delivers.

The trick for me is, I can make a Mac dev machine without modifying it with homebrew, et. al. I install a Linux VM to VMWare, give it a static IP, install all required tools, servers and services on it. On the macOS side, I use Eclipse for IDE and use clang/llvm for compiling (since I also aim to code which behaves same on both gcc and llvm).

I develop on macOS and interface it with Linux VM via network if it's absolutely necessary. Linux VM also hosts some heavy tooling like LaTeX which cannot be installed/updated on macOS very cleanly (I know macTeX. It doesn't play nice with newer macOS, due to Apple's locks on the OS).

Then everything becomes transparent for me. Pull -> Develop -> Push in either direction. Eclipse already syncs itself via oomph and cloud. Code is portable, environment is same. It also ensures code compatibility, allows me to see compiler effects and run tests on many platforms.

As aforementioned, it also inspires me to write better software. My code carries Apple's sensible defaults and it-works mentality with Linux's flexibility options. This approach allowed me to create a series of utilities for a project in limbo. These small no-setup utilities saved a lot of labor and ultimately saved the project. So yes, apple is a walled garden and it's not optimal but, they do a lot of right things. We can selectively carry them to more open platforms to make them better. Similarly, open platforms' flexibility can be carried to some macOS applications so, the environment better accommodates power users out of the box.

Homebrew and other tools are nice but, I don't like to shoehorn stuff which doesn't fit natively into an ecosystem.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#417

Post by rimliu »

jakeva wrote: post #343
btilly wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have demonstrated exactly why I don't care how fast the M1 runs, I'm not buying Apple hardware. Not until I start hearing that they have done something about their long quality slide. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25238688 for the last time that I expressed this opinion on HN.

Comments like these always make me wonder if I'm the only person in the world still delighted by Apple products. I mean I alone can not be responsible for their sales volume. And then I start to wonder if I should be more critical of Apple, so I fire up my Windows machine and think silently "No, this is still a worse experience". So I fire up my Ubuntu and have the same reaction. I just don't understand the vitriol s…

No. Just some people are trying to use macOS as any OS they have used before that. Instead of using macOS.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#418

Post by ianhowson »

egsmi wrote: post #379
romanoderoma wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

64GB of ram cost A lot of studios sell their old GPU (as in a generation ago) for cheap If you stay out of vertical integrated supply chains you can buy the best your budget allows If you are saying that you cannot assemble a laptop of the same quality of an Apple one, I agree If you are saying that Apple laptops are what people want because they consume 20 watt full load, I disagree The market of the good enough pro…

> 64GB of ram cost Not all RAM is equivalent. If one wants 64GB of the kind of RAM M1 uses, which is very high performance, it will cost more than 300 euros.

M1 is using standard LPDDRx. It's not "very high performance". It uses a different interconnect -- that's it.

I guarantee that 64GB does not cost anything near EUR300.

You might be thinking of HBM[2] which has a wider I/O path and costs more.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#419

Post by oldmanhorton »

outworlder wrote: post #381
_abox wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system It doesn't matter. Sure, that might mean that an Apple system is not for you. But the crux of the matter is: Apple did something truly revolutionary. How is the rest of the market going to respond? Specifically, how are Intel, AMD and Microsoft going to respond? Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta. Intel and AMD have nothing remotely…

Microsoft does have their own Rosetta, which has been able to run x86 apps for a long time and will be able to run x64 apps within the next few months in preview builds

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#420

Post by twic »

macintux wrote: post #181
ghaff wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure there's another company of Apple's size and influence which has consistently been so ready to dump legacy at least a beat before its customers were prepared for it. Headphone jack, 5 1/4" floppy, I'm sure a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. "I'm going to dump Apple over this!" "See ya. Don't let the door hit you on the way out!."

Pretty much every I/O port Apple has ever used they dropped before the rest of the industry. PS/2, parallel, serial, USB-A... Of course optical drives; that was a big step. Apple is ruthless at pruning old tech.

When did Apple use PS/2 ports? It went D-sub -> ADB -> USB, as far as i remember.
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