Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

9to5mac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#491

Post by JohnBooty »

vmception wrote: post #230
modeless wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's actually a pretty big limitation. I guess it's tough to do 64 GB with their on-package unified memory. I wonder if they're working on a version with discrete memory and GPU for the high end? They'll need it if they ever want to get Intel out of the Mac Pro.

Let's think about that a little bit. If the RAM is fast and the SSD is fast and the virtualization options are limited, then this is good enough? Or, inspire me. Which processes really require occupying and allocating bigger blocks of RAM? I personally don't want to purchase another machine with 16gb RAM but that's mainly because I want the option of having a powerful Windows guest or two running at the same time. Bu…

    Which processes really require occupying and 
    allocating bigger blocks of RAM?
It's not uncommon to work with e.g. 50GB+ databases these days.

They don't always need to be in RAM, particularly with modern SSD performance, but if you're using a laptop for your day job and you work with largeish data...

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#492

Post by cmoscoe »

think814 wrote: post #63

Did I understand correctly that MacBook Pro and Air will share the same M1 CPU? Previous models had a massive delta in CPU performance based on using low power (Air, no fan) or medium power (Pro, with dual fans) Intel chips

Yes, but they only replaced the lowest-end 13 inch pro at this point, and are still selling the higher-end Intels. The performance versions will follow next year.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#493

Post by ericls »

kllrnohj wrote: post #363
klelatti wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument has been that lack of credible Arm desktop / laptops has held back Arm in the cloud. If you can't compile on your desktop then it's much harder to develop / test etc. Now you can buy a Mac and use that to develop for AWS Arm etc.

I don't see your cloud infrastructure throwing everything away and wholesale switching platforms just because you bought a new macbook air, though. This is all assuming you're doing anything at all that depends on the ISA and pushing prebuilts of it somewhere. Otherwise it's not like deploying Java, Python, JavaScript, etc... changes at all here.

Not throwing things away. X86 will continue to exist for sure. It’s just if ARM is popular to developers, the barrier that sometimes your code don’t run on ARM will eventually be removed. After the barrier is removed, some advantages of ARM will shine, such as more energy efficient, more cores(so when you buy a cloud server you are more likely to have dedicated cores, instead of vcores).

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#494

Post by lfuller »

wmf wrote: post #373
mortenjorck wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting line of inquiry. In the gaming console world, a similar principle has been explicitly espoused by Sony in the decision to only go with 16GB of RAM (a smaller factor increase than any previous generation) for the Playstation 5, as the speed of its custom SSD architecture should in theory make that 16GB go a lot further than it would have with a more traditional design.

And then PS5 load times are worse than Series X. Whoops.

That's when playing backwards-compatible games (PS4 games on PS5, and Xbox / 360 / One games on Xbox Series X) as Microsoft spent more time optimizing their console to play old games. PS5 loads next-gen titles significantly faster than the Xbox Series X due to the 2.5x faster SSD.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#495

Post by 0x64 »

rewtraw wrote: post #246
kevindong wrote: post #186

Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming: There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch https://w…

If you compare the M1 Air and Pro, the only difference seems to be the addition of the Touchbar, 10% better battery life, and a "studio" speaker/mic on the Pro. https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/ I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.

Pro has one extra GPU core as well.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#496

Post by ogre_codes »

kayson wrote: post #161

I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...

> (especially without active cooling)

It seems likely the higher end of the performance curves are only attainable on the systems with active cooling. Or at least only sustainable with active cooling. So the MacBook Air would still realize the efficiency gains, but never the peak performance on that chart.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#497

Post by geerlingguy »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #339
293984j29384 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB and 16GB configurations seem more than enough..

I went to Apple's website right after I finished watching the keynote with the intention of buying a new Mac mini ... the lack of memory options above 16GB stopped that idea dead in its tracks though.

Also no 10G networking option. The combination of those feature exclusions makes it a dud for me; I don't want to have a $150 TB3 adapter hanging off the back, not when previous gen had it built in.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#498

Post by acchow »

bla3 wrote: post #451
kayson wrote: post #161

I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...

If they could outperform AMD/Intel today, they would've offered 16" MBPs / iMacs / Mac Pros. Today, they have power-efficient chips, so they converted their low-end machines, and Mini so that companies porting their software can start migrating their build farms.

They probably beat AMD/Intel on perf/power efficiency, which is why it makes sense for MBA and 13" MBP.

The smaller machines are also likely held back by cooling solutions, so if you have Intel beat on power efficiency in a tiny form factor, you can boost your clock speed too.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#499

Post by villgax »

ojosilva wrote: post #28

Apple mentions TensorFlow explicitly in the ongoing presentation due to the new 16-core "Neural Engine" embedded in the M1 chip. Now that's an angle I did not expect on this release. Sounds exciting! Edit: just to clarify, the Neural Engine itself is not really "new": > The A11 also includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Neural Engine". This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billio…

They do not have any hardware combination which can actually support even modest GPU intensive training sadly, so much touting running models instead of training.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#500

Post by sercand »

0x53 wrote: post #263
Jtsummers wrote: post #218

Out of curiosity, how many people are actually constrained by 16GB of RAM? What applications are you using it for that 16GB vs 32GB is actually a deal breaker for you? Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processin…

I often use more than 16 GB of RAM. Generally, I have 3-4 Windows 10 VMs running which each take at least 4GB to be stable. So if I have 4 running that is all the RAM already.

Running 3-4 Windows 10 VMs is not a standart Macbook (at least not for 13" macbook) workload.
Post reply on HN