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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#511

Post by egsmi »

notreallytrue wrote: post #497
egsmi wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25050625 showed https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1-1804 which determined the M1's memory is LPDDR4X-4266 or LPDDR5-5500. If those memories are not high performance, what is?

You can't do what you do on a desktop on a laptop, not even a good one Who cares if an M1 consumes less energy than a candle if I can buy 64GB of DDR4 3600 for 250 bucks and render the VFX for a 2 hours movie in 4k? Another 300 bucks buy me a second GPU When I deliver the job I put aside another 300 bucks and buy a third GPU Or a better CPU vertical products are an absolute waste of money when you chase the last bit…

> You can't do what you do on a desktop on a laptop, not even a good one

Ummm... ok. But my comment was not all RAM is equivalent.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#512

Post by erik »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #463
usefulcat wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Intel similarly threaten Apple? If not, why not? Even if they didn't know for sure exactly what Apple was up to with the M1, they surely could have speculated, as so many others did.

The threat was regarding emulation. Rosetta 2 isn't emulation, it's translation.

Rosetta 2 includes both ahead-of-time translation and run-time emulation. It can run x64 jit software for example.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#513

Post by GekkePrutser »

matwood wrote: post #446
_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…

> John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. I think it's important to read Gruber and understand he's an Apple person. Not a shill, as much as his world is all Apple. Sure, he checks out an Android phone every couple of years, but for the most part he doesn't care what's going on outside the Apple ecosystem. And, that's fine. As a reader of Gruber, I read for his takes about Apple.

That's fair enough, I have occasionally read his blog over the years (mainly linked from other sites such as MacRumors). That's also how I saw how many scoops he's been given by them (because if they were actual leaks I'm sure he would have been cut off by now, knowing Apple's secrecy). But I don't remember him being this lyrical about Apple as he is here.

However I used to be an Apple fan and Mac used to be my daily driver (even though I've always been an "every OS at the same time" guy). But my enthusiasm has reduced a lot lately due to the higher lock-in, and 'iPadification' of the Mac. Especially due to stronger ties with Apple services: As an "every OS" guy this doesn't work for me obviously. Basically it is getting decidedly harder to use Apple stuff well if you don't want to do things exactly "the Apple way". The Mac didn't use to be like that. It was more like a general unixy OS that wasn't so opinionated.

So, as my opinion has changed it is possible his admiration for Apple is irking me more than before :) Sorry if I offended by calling him a shill. But he adopts Apple's flowery language filled with superlatives as if their products are some kind of magic inconceivable to their competitors. That rubs me the wrong way as I do consider the world outside Apple which is not bad at all.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#514

Post by azangru »

6d65 wrote: post #453
mbreese wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

You're right, it could be that Nvidia will push for more beefed up cortex CPUs, with the same tricks employed in m1, like larger L1/l2 caches, increasing the die size, and add more complex pipelines, put the ram on the soc, and an Nvidia gpu. The potential problems are. - This might take some time, if it's not already in progress. And pc manufactures might not afford lower sales for a few years while this happens. -…

> And pc manufactures might not afford lower sales for a few years while this happens.

What do you mean? What other options do they have?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#515

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #404
klelatti wrote: post #385

The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true, but: - Apple has a material (and apparently perceptible) performance advantage against the majority of the laptop market - which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand. - The M1 has killed the idea (which I've heard a lot) that you can't get performance out…

> The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true Even if it is, I doubt there will be a Zen 3 laptop out that has the screen, keyboard, trackpad, and case quality of the MBAir. Even if it were slower , literally no one is building machines of that physical quality. Some are attempting to compete, like the Dell XP…

[deleted]

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#516

Post by p1necone »

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…

> Apple did something truly revolutionary

This is hyperbole. Apple has released a CPU that has very good perf/watt compared to it's current competition. That's it. This isn't revolutionary, it's just another incremental step in CPU improvements.

Can we please give Apple praise for competing well in the hardware market without fully drinking the kool aid and parroting their marketing.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#517

Post by heavyset_go »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #466
heavyset_go wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> x86 is no more "Open" than ARM. Pinebook and Raspberry Pi both use no bullshit ARM setups. They're ARM SoCs, meaning that you can't just download the Ubuntu ARM ISO[1] and run it on either device like you could with an x86 ISO and an x86 machine. To run Ubuntu or any Linux distribution, you need to use images that were specially crafted for either SoC. This is because ARM SoCs use custom bootloaders and don't have…

While Apple likely has no motivation currently to make a UEFI-based ARM computer, there's nothing that prevent anyone else from doing so. UEFI is not x86-specific. (I also think it's a bit too early to say definitively that no ARM-based Apple computer will ever be able to boot into Linux. I don't think Apple has any motivation to make that easy, but that may not be the same as making it impossible.)

It's cheaper to just design a ARM SoC with a custom bootloader.

> I also think it's a bit too early to say definitively that no ARM-based Apple computer will ever be able to boot into Linux.

There's a big difference between a SoC running a Linux fork and actually running Linux distributions in the same sense that we can on x86 computers or ARM servers.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#518

Post by [deleted] »

kmano8 wrote: post #387
barkingcat wrote: post #61

I think the missing part of the discussion is that the M1 can run fast and hot... It hasn't transcended physics - it's just not being pushed hard enough. Give it a 800% overclock and dunk it in liquid nitrogen and then we'll talk.

The distinction here is between "fast" and "fast_er_". It isn't that it can't run faster and hot (because of course it could) .. but that it's able to achieve fast performance relative to the competition without having to get "hot".

[deleted]

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#519

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #463
usefulcat wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Intel similarly threaten Apple? If not, why not? Even if they didn't know for sure exactly what Apple was up to with the M1, they surely could have speculated, as so many others did.

The threat was regarding emulation. Rosetta 2 isn't emulation, it's translation.

So why does Microsoft go the translation route instead of emulation?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#520

Post by GekkePrutser »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #444
_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…

> Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years I remember reading sentiments to that effect since 2004. I doubt he's getting paid directly, so he could only be a shill in a very loose sense of the word. He does get paid in review units and access, though. I think he's maybe overly enthusiastic about the good stuff, and skews toward the positive when matters are questionable but he has called out…

Personally I do think that very access to inside information makes him at least partially an Apple-controlled outlet. He's released some serious scoops about upcoming products, and his verification of a rumour is basically taken as a confirmation in the Mac rumours scene.

It's of course possible he has some kind of access that Apple don't control (like an employee leaking information), but given their extreme focus on secrecy, I'm sure that this would have long been shut down if it wasn't fully authorised.

That kind of access does not come without ties, IMO. Though I agree I was coming on too strong when I said shill.

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