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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#591

Post by ralfd »

6d65 wrote: 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…

Sometimes Gruber calls people out for their bad commentary and it comes across as being superior. This time, though, this article was very much needed.

Moorhead’s article got a lot of traction, and ‘felt’ serious enough that a lot of folks would be dissuaded from the M1 Macs.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#592

Post by Mandatum »

singhrac wrote: post #585

I hear a lot of "all PC laptops are now comparatively a bad deal", which is a real bummer since it's always good for Apple to have competition. If Apple is reserving all of TSMC's 5nm (and probably 3nm) node output, is Samsung a viable competitor? Does the world of ultra-cheap (i.e. I'm kind of with Gruber that this is a game changer, but what does it mean for the ecosystem?

Competition. And I'm excited.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#593

Post by p1necone »

alwillis wrote: post #561
notreallytrue wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The M1 beats low end desktop GPUs from a couple of generations ago (~25% faster than the 1050ti and RX560 according to this benchmark [0]). Current high end GPUs are much faster than that (e.g the 3080 is ~5 times as powerful as a 1050ti).

Don't get me wrong - this is still very impressive with a ~20w combined! power draw under full load, but it definitely doesn't beat mid - high desktop GPUs.

(This is largely irrelevant for video encoding/decoding though as you can see - as that's mostly done either on the CPU or dedicated silicon living in either the CPU or the GPU that's separate from the main graphics processing cores.)

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/16/m1-beats-geforce-gtx-10...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#594

Post by mixmastamyk »

wk_end wrote: post #205
ChrisLTD wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers show that the other chips are slower, but they don't show that they are "unusable".

x86 chips aren’t “unusable” either, and if these other ARM chips wanted to compete in the desktop space they’d be just as - or more - “hot and/or slow, clunky, noisy”. ISA just doesn’t matter half as much as microarchitecture.

5nm process would help a lot.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#595

Post by ricardobeat »

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…

What I'm trying to say is you'll not see a laptop that resembles a Macbook - silent, slim, light, with day-long battery life and top performance, with Zen CPUs anytime soon. It's simply outside the performance envelope. 35W vs 10W is a huge difference, even before you account for the slow cores / fast cores architecture vs frequency boosting.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#596

Post by sudosysgen »

grecy wrote: post #398
6d65 wrote: 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…

> With Zen3 on mobile, giving a similar 20% boost as it did on desktop, plus a jump from 7nm to to 5m, giving another 20%, next year might be a very good year for Ryzen laptops. You're making the classic mistake of comparing what might be coming at some undetermined time in the future to what you can walk into the store and buy right now .

You can walk into a store, buy a Zen 3 processor right now (if you're lucky, they're in high demand), fiddle with the clocks and voltages to simulate (poorly) a laptop chip, and notice that, right now, at the same power, a Zen3 core at 7nm HPP is comporable in single core performance to a single M1 big core on 5nm LPP.

So right now we know that Zen 3 is more or less equivalent or even ahead in architectural power efficiency. You do have to wait for 5nm LPP to see it pull ahead or use it in a laptop, yes. But the statement that M1 is well ahead of the competition is clearly false. It's competitive.

As for multicore performance, it's already matched by Zen 2 parts.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#597

Post by et2o »

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.

Agree. He is an Apple guy. He delights when Apple does cool stuff. Sometimes he takes Apple’s side on debatable subjects. But he has no issue calling Apple out when he thinks they are doing wrong. It’s unfair to call him a shill.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#598

Post by nordsieck »

ghettoimp wrote: post #299
wmf wrote: 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.

> For other ARM manufacturers, I wonder how much of this is a software problem.

IMO, one of the key innovations Apple made in the M1 is a modification to the memory model so that it is much more efficient to translate x86 code into ARM code.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#599

Post by mixmastamyk »

adkadskhj wrote: post #253
zepto wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers say otherwise.

Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing, tiny, and more close to the ARM chip than anything out there for x86, right? I'll be interested to see if Apple can keep this up with 128GiB of RAM and a beefy GPU. So far to me M1 is great, ARM is great, but comparing a tiny amount of RAM soldered onto the C…

Let the Pro devices come out next year.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#600

Post by coldtea »

Apocryphon wrote: post #573
coldtea wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And like the iPhone and iPod it has very real innovations (in engineering) that people always underplay because "No wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame!", or "we had smartphones before, I had some Ericsson/Nokia/MS gizmo, so what's evolutionary about the iPhone?".
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