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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#571

Post by coldtea »

andrewprock wrote: post #548
coldtea wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. That's because there are plenty of measurements published, which agree with the author, and disagree with the "another author".

The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above. The insanely good thermals and 5mm process make M1 a great laptop, but middling performance and a lack of expansion only makes it decent mini-desktop for family use. If the rumors of the M1x prove true, that might be the first real pro-level ARM CPU. For pro-level performance, it's roughly matching AMD's three-year-ol…

>The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above.

Which makes sense, since those are the lower-speced Mac machines (Mini, Air, 13" Pro). At the level at which they compete (similarly speced Intel Mac sold until recently, Surface machines, PC laptops of the same price) they obliterate them.

"meh at the prosumer level" for a consumer level machine is kinda like saying that an AMD Threadripper / 64 cores is meh as the mainframe level.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#572

Post by Apocryphon »

coldtea wrote: post #533
fgonzag wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, shill isn't the right word to use. Fan, cultist, or zealot would be more in line (depending on the desired impact and tone of the expression)

I think "cultist" or "zealot" applies more to the FOSS/Stallman crowd.

There are multiple cults.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#573

Post by Apocryphon »

coldtea wrote: post #539
wpietri wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like the people downvoting you to explain why they think it's truly revolutionary. I just went back to reread the Tom's Hardware article on the chip, thinking I must have missed something, and I'm not seeing it. Full credit to Apple for incrementally improving their A-series processors over the last decade until they're good enough for laptops. But I'm not seeing that this makes anything fundamentally differe…

> I would like the people downvoting you to explain why they think it's truly revolutionary. For one, it's the first PC chip with these kind of thermals and power combo. Second, it brings many new design decisions, from unified memory, to the SoC design, various coprocessors, etc, that have not been available in the form of laptop/desktop PCs. The last of this kind in the mass market would be something like the Amiga…

Like the iPhone and iPod, it's a revolutionary entrant from the consumer point of view in terms of user experience. And like the iPhone and iPod, from a technical point of view, it's merely a very competent iteration down a natural evolutionary pathway, in a preexisting product type.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#574

Post by saagarjha »

coldtea wrote: post #570
saagarjha wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literally how performant emulators work.

At that level though, emulation/translation/simulation is blurred.

Somewhat, they're really not exclusive. You could say Rosetta is an x86 emulator that uses AOT binary translation and JIT compilation.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#575

Post by alwillis »

the_af wrote: post #142
alwillis wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :) Apple showed Debian running in a VM on an M1 prototype Mac nearly 6 months ago. I get that it won't be acceptable for some Linux diehards but the superfast, supercool ARM laptop running Linux will soon be an M1 MacBook Pro.

If I can get it to run Linux not on a VM, but natively and without coexisting with macOS at all, then it'll be good enough for me!... ...except I cannot afford a macbook. The one I'm using now was paid for by my employer. More generally, I'd love to see fast ARM platforms not built by Apple.

...except I cannot afford a MacBook

You know, the M1 Mac mini is $699…

And since you can attach up to 6 displays to it (or the MacBook Pro), you'd never have to look at macOS if really didn't want to. ;-)

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/24/m1-macs-able-to-run-six...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#576

Post by jaimex2 »

Apple propaganda and not worth your time reading.

We got an M1 on pre-order and so far it seems pretty half baked. Some apps work reliably, others outright don't. I'd wait another year at least for the kinks to be worked out.

Some notable apps that either dont work or break on use:

Anything from Adobe, Google sync, MS Office.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#577

Post by ithkuil »

saagarjha wrote: post #352
pathartl wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By clever I mostly mean, from what I've seen from reports, handling stuff like transition from x86 to arm by baking in instruction translation into the die. Their approach with some things is a bit different from what others are doing, but it's not like they wholly invented a new 2nm process that breaks what we thought the laws of physics were, they're using the same fab as everybody else. Thus their design at the mo…

There’s no hardware instruction translation.

there is little hardware assist though: TSO can be enabled and disabled and thus simplifying x86 instruction translation by implementing the x86 memory model in hardware and thus avoiding unnecessary memory barriers

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#578

Post by andrewprock »

coldtea wrote: post #571
andrewprock wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above. The insanely good thermals and 5mm process make M1 a great laptop, but middling performance and a lack of expansion only makes it decent mini-desktop for family use. If the rumors of the M1x prove true, that might be the first real pro-level ARM CPU. For pro-level performance, it's roughly matching AMD's three-year-ol…

> The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above. Which makes sense, since those are the lower-speced Mac machines (Mini, Air, 13" Pro). At the level at which they compete (similarly speced Intel Mac sold until recently, Surface machines, PC laptops of the same price) they obliterate them. "meh at the prosumer level" for a consumer level machine is kinda like sayin…

If the 13" Macbook Pro is not for Professional work, then I guess that makes sense.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#579

Post by fomine3 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #504
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta " I thought that Microsoft's emulation efforts were hampered by Intel making threats, e.g. " Intel recently made an unprecedented public challenge to Microsoft and Qualcomm that basically told the latter two companies: if you ship an x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) emulator, we’re coming after you. ", from https://www.forbes.com/s…

Who knows what kind of weird deals Microsoft and Intel have. Also, Microsoft historically is awful at transitions. Look at the 64 but print driver transition - complete shitshow.

I don't think it was awful. It's not failure to 64bit transition but they simultaneously force drivers to be signed.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#580

Post by macNchz »

p1necone wrote: post #550
cellar_door wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People buying Apple for its M1 low power consumption are a niche inside a niche. Got it, watching Netflix in Chrome without the laptop getting hot is "a niche inside a niche" while GPU intensive 3d graphics workflows are mainstream.

This is doable on practically anything. Talking about being powerful with low heat/power consumption implies heavier workloads than Netflix because otherwise the "powerful" part is irrelevant. Of course I'm sure you can find laptops with terrible cooling design that would get uncomfortably hot watching Netflix, but there's plenty of thin and light laptops available for < $1000 that would do just fine too.

Even my 5 year old passive-cooling Core m3 12" Macbook streams Netflix for hours on battery without getting hot.
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