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

M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 882 posts

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#551

Post by sgerenser »

oldmanhorton wrote: post #419
outworlder wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Microsoft’s solution is emulation, not binary translation. This is a much slower approach than Rosetta. Hopefully this gives MS the kick in the pants it needs to step up their game though.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#552

Post by Siilwyn »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #318
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 :)

Yeah, that would be really amazing. Is it even possible to install Linux on this new Mac though? Probably not. Will Apple offer these chips to other manufacturers? Would be cool if we could build small form factor PCs with these M1 chips! I also wonder about the driver situation. Intel hardware has excellent support on Linux, everything works out of the box. Apple probably has zero interest in contributing drivers to…

Not at the moment but probably some time next year: https://www.patreon.com/marcan

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#553

Post by klelatti »

Rapzid wrote: post #406
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #65

I feel like the M1 hype is getting out of hand. Apple bought up TSMC’s entire 5nm manufacturing capacity so of course it’s going to pack more transistors and use less power than AMD’s 7nm TSMC process or Intel’s 10nm process (which is effectively similar to 7nm TSMC). The M1 is a great and well-refined design but when compared to AMD’s similarly priced 4750U in multi core benchmarks, the performance per watt is bette…

AMDs current gen 4800h/u is still competitive with the air cooled M1(mac mini) in both perf and performance. M1 has better single core perf, but the AMD 4800 edges it out in multi-core perf on Geekbench(apparently) and smokes it in multi-core Cinebench. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1-1804 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_7_4800u-1142

Not a huge surprise that 8 perf cores > 4 perf + 4 efficiency cores.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#554

Post by jeromegv »

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…

FYI, they have to ship back the review units. Of course there is a financial aspect to the fact he gets the unit first and can publish the review and get the eyeballs, but it's just something to know about Apple, they don't give anything.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#555

Post by saagarjha »

coldtea wrote: post #534
erik wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The jit is run-time translation still - not run-time emulation.

That is literally how performant emulators work.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#556

Post by temac »

gorbypark wrote: post #273
aequitas wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, this is why Apple is able to take this leap and the PC platform hasn't so far. They don't have to wait for as many partners to get along for the ride.

It's also because Microsoft half-assed their Windows-on-arm attempt. They made something akin to Rosetta 2 (x86 to arm translation) but only supported x86, not amd64. Apparently they are working on 64bit support, but releasing something half done doesn't inspire confidence. Even the 32bit support was reportedly not very good/fast, compared to Rosetta 2, anyways. If Microsoft steps up their game then I can see Windows…

MS x86 emulation will likely be far slower if they don't have access to the memory model trick.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#557

Post by czhiddy »

neogodless wrote: post #510
ricardobeat wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple rounds of 20% improvement will still not give you the performance jump brought by M1. It takes tasks that were simply unthinkable on a light laptop and not only makes them possible but manages to beat something like a 10-core i9 [1], in a machine without a fan. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-mini-and-apple-s...

How quickly we forget... the 10-core i9 was being embarrassed by AMD's Zen 2 mobile processors this spring. https://www.notebookcheck.net/10-core-Intel-Core-i9-10900F-d... Looks like single core Zen 3 scores about 2100 on Geekbench 5. M1 scores about 1700. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q... I'm confused why we feel like AMD Zen 3 has to "cat…

Those 2000+ scores are from hobbyist enthusiasts overclocking the Zen 3 CPUs, with elaborate liquid nitrogen cooling setups at the highest scores.

Stock Zen3 single core scores average around 1650: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#559

Post by saagarjha »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #520
pilsetnieks wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

I'm sure leakers go to him to give him stuff, just like they'd go to any other press source.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#560

Post by wrsh07 »

Yetanfou wrote: post #183
wrsh07 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know why you're being downvoted. I think for some people (eg my oldest brother), the iPhone is "the best." He's not a tech person - and that might be perspective that you're missing. I tend to agree that there are great androids that seem competitive with iPhones (disclosure: I haven't really owned a flagship phone for a while; this is one of android's issues! The flagships aren't that much better th…

He is being downvoted by people who consider the choice of a specific vendor a religious issue and will vote down anyone who in their eyes disparages their vendor of choice. It is a sad fact that the existence of this phenomenon only leads to the reinforcement of the religious behaviour since their insistence on the infallibility of their vendor is questioned by those not part of their cult, whereupon they double dow…

Great points. I remember back in (good lord) 2011 when the MRI research was shown [1]

I'm very excited about the new m1. While I'm tempted to buy it, I also can't wait to see what they do with it in their pro models. Or what the second generation looks like.

The competition is great for everyone, and Apple going all in on arm as they run from Intel's manufacturing failures is very well-timed.

I think this was somewhat inevitable, to be sure. Microsoft had Qualcomm and AMD processors in their surface [2], and I think as TSMC continues to dominate in manufacturing, we will see really exciting gains.

Also, I'm thrilled that CPUs are coming with tensor cores now. I think fast matrix operations might be separated from gpus (at the least, you no longer need a >$400 gpu for it), and that's a win for everyone, too.

In two years, we could be able to reimplement early neural network research on a macbook air! (I mean, you already can, but instead of taking minutes/hours/days, even more recent things become accessible)

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2011-05-17-bbc-loving-apple-looks-l...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20888999/microsoft-surfac...

Post reply on HN