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

581–590 of 1001 posts

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

#581

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

therealmarv wrote: post #525
belval wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal opinion, no insider info I think it's a good CPU, but I don't think it'll be a great CPU. Judging by how heavily they leaned on the efficiency, I am pretty sure that it will be just good enough to not be noticeable to most Mac users. Can't wait to see actual benchmarks, these are interesting times.

You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. But I agree... let's wait for the benchmarks (btw. iPads already overturns nearly all laptop CPUs)

Did they say what they meant when they said faster?

I saw some graphs that looked unrealistically smooth with two unlabeled axis

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

#582

Post by saagarjha »

mortenjorck wrote: post #392
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.

This would seem to point toward a tiered RAM configuration that acts somewhat like Apple's old Fusion Drives: On-package RAM would be reserved for rapid and frequent read/write, while the OS would page to discrete RAM for lower priority. Discrete RAM would act as a sort of middle ground between on-package RAM and paging to the SSD. Then again, maybe their in-house SSD controller is so blazing fast that the performanc…

Apple doesn't like writing to their SSDs much, to prevent wear-out.

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

#583

Post by dionisio »

cma wrote: post #481
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…

I think this is for inference not learning, even though they use the term machine learning. They seem to just mean running models based on machine learning approaches. Tensorflow includes stuff for inference.

My thinking was along the same line as yours, but the way apple framed it seems to suggest that the M1 accelerates model training and not just inference. Here's the actual quote "It also makes Mac Mini a great machine for developers, scientist and engineers. Utilizing deep learning technologies like tensorflow ... which are now accelerated by M1". It should be pretty straightforward to test this though: installing tensorflow-gpu on a mac mini and seeing the result. I suspect, TF's latest branch should also indicate which GPUs are supported. Curious to hear more thoughts on this.

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

#584

Post by merrin1010101 »

ljm wrote: post #448
varispeed wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't be surprised if the cooling solution was serialised and it had a detection whether the cooling is originally programmed for the particular unit like they do now with cameras and other peripherals (check iPhone 12 teardown videos). I bet that the logic would check the expected temperature for given binning and then shut down the system if it is too cool or too hot. Apple knows better than the users what hardw…

So, essentially their new Macbook line is a glorified iPhone/iPad but with a foldable display (on a hinge)? Not too far-fetched when you see the direction MacOS is headed, UI-wise. And it sounds nice, but if it means that repairability suffers then we'll just end up with a whole wave of disposable laptops.

To be fair to apple, people keep their macbooks for years and years, keeping them out of landfill longer. They are well made and the design doesn't really age. Written on my 2015 Macbook pro.

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

#585

Post by mmastrac »

sercand wrote: post #522
mmastrac wrote: post #8

When they say "[faster than the] latest PC laptop chip", what exactly do they mean? Intel? AMD? EDIT: added [faster than the]

At the bottom of the macbook-{air,pro} page: > with up to 2.8x faster processing performance than the previous generation [2] > Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Open source project built with prerelease Xcode 12.…

That's.. kind of weak. How many other perf tests did they throw away before taking this one because it showed so well? I guess we'll see the real-world benchmarks when people get their hands on them.

Geekbench is not a _great_ benchmark, but it's common enough that we could use it to roughly compare.

EDIT: Apparently there are Geekbench results that are unofficial that suggest it's faster than current MBPs, but we'll have to see.

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

#586

Post by JAlexoid »

dschuler wrote: post #254
bnt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it costs an extra €224 to go from 8 to 16gb. This is ridiculously expensive.

Any option in Euros is about 30% more expensive than buying the same in the US or Hong Kong (which is pretty crummy, but possibly related to taxes and the cost of doing business in the EU). EDIT: I don't mean VAT/sales tax, I've considered sales taxes in the comparison, but also exchange rates of $1.18/1€. The difference is almost exactly 30%. It looks like the cost of doing business in the EU is much higher, and/or…

Maxed out Mac Mini is $1699 pre tax in US and €1917 in Ireland. That's €1558 pre VAT price, or $1838 including mandatory 2 year warranty.

$139 is NOT 30% difference.

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

#587

Post by Tepix »

saagarjha wrote: post #435
heavyset_go wrote: post #258

What happens when Apple deprecates support in macOS for these machines in 7 somewhat years? Is there an upgrade path to install Linux on them like you currently can with Intel-based Macs? Or are these SoCs like every other ARM SoC that requires a custom kernel and bootloader to get Linux running on them?

You can turn off boot security.

Source?

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

#589

Post by [deleted] »

marta_morena_28 wrote: post #564
nrp wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Apple's volume and level of system integration, it doesn't make sense to do assembly sharing at that level between different models. Presumably the SoC package is the same between the different products, but binned differently for the Air, Pro, and Mini. The actual logic boards would be custom to the form factor.

Not just that. At 5nm there will also be yield problems. I.e they will put the best yield into high end and the worst yield into low end.

[deleted]

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

#590

Post by sroussey »

francoisLabonte wrote: post #464
greenpresident wrote: post #89

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

My guess is that they are using up to 2 HBM2 memory stacks (from the picture). Each is limited to 8GB . If they were to go to HBM2e in M2 they could get up to 2x24GB. The biggest advantage of HBM is lower power per bit as the signals are all on the package running at a lower frequency. The memory market is getting fragmented with Nvidia having seemed to moved from HBM2 to GDDR6X (Micron being only supplier). LPDDR su…

Are they using HBM2 memory? I keep waiting for AMD to do that in a cpu package.
Post reply on HN