Live data from Hacker News

M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

daringfireball.net

561–570 of 882 posts

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#561
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

Yeah… no, those days are over. The reviews clearly show the M1 Macs, including the MacBook Pro outperform most "desktops" at graphics-intensive tasks.

>So no, M1 is not comparable to a Threadripper, it's not even close, even if it consumes a lot more energy

Um… nobody is comparing an M1 Mac to a processor that often costs more than either the M1 Mac mini or MacBook Pro. However, the general consensus is the M1 outperforms PCs with mid to high-end GPUs and CPUs from Intel and AMD. Threadripper is a high-end, purpose build chip that can cost more than complete systems from most other companies, including Apple. However, it's at a cost of power consumption, special cooling in some cases, etc.

>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

The MacBook Pro has faster LPDDR4X-4266 RAM on a 128-bit wide memory bus. The memory bandwidth maxes out at over 60 GB/s. And because the RAM, CPU and GPU (and all of the other units in the SoC) are all in the same die, memory is extremely fast.

From AnandTech; emphasis mine [1]: "A single Firestorm achieves memory reads up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at 33-36GB/s. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before."

It can easily render a 2-hour 4k video unplugged in the background while you're doing other stuff. And when you're done, you’ll still have enough battery to last you until the next day if necessary. According to the AnandTech review [1], it blows away all other integrated GPUs and is even faster than several dedicated GPUs. That's not nothing; and these machines do it for less money.

>vertical products are an absolute waste of money when you chase the last bit of performance to save time (for you and your clients) and don't have the budget of Elon Musk

>The M1 changes nothing in that space

This is not correct… seeing should be believing.

Here's a video of 4k, 6k and 8k RED RAW files being rendered on an M1 Mac with 8 Gb of RAM, using DaVinci Resolve 17 [2]. Spoiler: while the 8k RAW file stuttered a little, once the preview resolution was reduced to only 4k, the playback was smooooth.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxH3RabNWfE

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There also appears to be an awful lot of them running MacOS which doesn’t really make sense (overclockers with bleeding edge Ryzen systems don’t have a lot of overlap with the Hackintosh crowd). Seems like it might be at least partially a data error.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is revolutionary about it? We still haven't seen Zen in the same node as the M1. Zen still scores higher in absolute terms (albeit at higher power). It's evolutionary. The power efficiency is great, and the core design is great (wouldn't expect less from those who were Intel's and Qualcomms most talented staff), but calling it revolutionary is an overstatement.

Using an M1 Air, coming from a 16" Pro, here's the diff: - Cost: $1400 vs $4000 (nearly 1/3) - Speed: Air feels significantly faster, and more apps move to native, will be even moreso - Battery: At least double, if not 3x - Size: Less than 1/2 the weight The revolutionary thing is doing all of those at once . Nearly tripling battery life while making a huge leap in performance, at 1/3 the cost and half the weight is…

Comparing it to previous gen Apple devices doesn't really tell the whole story. You can get a machine from a different manufacturer with similar hardware for much much less than $4000, and it wont have totally broken cooling[0].

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-Core-i9-s...

Bear in mind that I'm not arguing that the m1 macbooks aren't a really compelling option. I'm just saying this is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

(Making other laptop/desktop manufacturers and OS devs wake up to non x86 architectures could be revolutionary for competition and pricing though, we'll see.)

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#564
post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you provide a definition that specifies the difference? The end result is identical: being able to run software compiled for foreign ISA.

It doesn't emulate a whole CPU and has the simulated CPU run the code.

It translates instructions directly to the different ISA.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#565
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…

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...

Multiple rounds of 20% improvement like what we've been getting with iPhones each year?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#566
post #315
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…

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

Only a grain of truth to that. He has always been known, as far as I am aware, merely as an Apple fan who blogs about it. There may be some "shilling", to the extent that he probably has Apple stock, but it is also done out of conviction.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RAM soldered onto the CPU It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything. There are laptops that already have a shorter physical path to RAM than the M1 MacBooks, stacking the RAM right next to the CPU is common. So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round.

> It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything. Yea, i was just simplifying. Though in SoC i think that's a perfectly fine simplification lol. > So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round. Think there will be > 32GiB?

Almost certainly, although maybe not immediately.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#568
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.

For other ARM manufacturers, I wonder how much of this is a software problem. I mean, what would the market be for a super-fast ARM laptop/desktop machine? It would run Windows RT, I guess? How much better than Intel/AMD would the ARM machine need to be to justify buying it and running that? It seems like the M1's "magic" is not just the chip, but very much also the Rosetta thing.

Windows RT doesn't exist anymore. Now its Windows ARM, which is basically 100% fully featured Windows with the exception that x86 apps have to be run in emulation and x86-64 apps don't run at all (yet).

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#569
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to judge a book by it's cover, but mind-bogglingly his "preferred browser" for OSX is Edge. https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/13296105698261319...

Edge on macOS is a very good browser. Unlike Chrome, it has real privacy features for blocking tracking scripts right out of the box. The Collections feature is also well done.

So like Brave but not as good?
Post reply on HN