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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#631

Post by nemosaltat »

innagadadavida wrote: post #604
jitl wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What lockdown is grating to you? I grew up on BSD multi-user systems and Apple things still look the same to me: crusty BSD with ancient coreutils in the terminal, nice rounded corners in the GUI. What is the iPad-ification? Just the code signing stuff? I guess you can't write to /System anymore these days? And there's something about app notarization, but it doesn't really affect any of my uses.

Almost all GNU user land tools and libraries work on BSD and you can install them fairly easily with brew. Unless you are doing Linux kernel development, there is little you’ll miss out on.

Mostly agree, and upvoted, however I think it’s important to acknowledge (in thread about M1 Macs) that full brew support will be a large undertaking for M1.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#632

Post by [deleted] »

blunte wrote: post #626
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #615

Patrick Moorhead is a stock analyst for the chip industry. In Wall Street terms, he is aligned with Intel others who are shaking in their boots right now. He's not going to say that the M1 is great until Intel/NVidia/etc. allow him to. These pundits know which side of his bread is buttered. He knows that his clients were caught off-guard by the M1 announcement. He needs to give his clients enough time to sell their I…

Is Intel really so blind that they didn't see this coming or even have detailed inside info about it? I would wager that they knew, but execs chose to protect their personal short term interests overt those of the company and its long term shareholders. This is typical modern US publicly traded company behavior.

[deleted]

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#633

Post by armadsen »

p1necone wrote: post #614
xvector wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Apple themselves advertised it as the "worlds fastest CPU core" when they announced it, which is blatantly untrue. Is it? In Geekbench the M1 was outperforming the 5950X in single-core. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/jspnhp/apple_new_m1_ch... EDIT: Looks like that post is comparing 2 different Geekbench versions. Newer Geekbench versions have optimizations for Zen 3, putting it back at the top.

Highest Geekbench 5 single core score is apparently 2239 on a 5800x ( https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore?page=1 ) Highest m1 single core score is 1716 ( https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1 ) (Of course they're likely overclocked past factory settings, but if we ignore those results that's not the fastest CPU core in the world, is it?) Geekbench has also not traditionally been a benchma…

> Geekbench has also not traditionally been a benchmark used for x86 desktop chips, it's more commonly used to compare android and apple phones.

This isn’t really true. Geekbench started out as a desktop (Mac) app. Originally it was calibrated so that Power Mac G5 would get a score of 1000. They’ve recalibrated since then and added mobile versions, but it has its roots in desktop benchmarking.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#634

Post by grecy »

sudosysgen wrote: post #596
grecy wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eff…

So why can't we walk in and buy a Zen 3 in a laptop right now?

.... because the thermals and engineering have not been designed/completed yet. Sometime in the future they will be, which is great. But that's the future. I'm still talking about right now. I like to buy things that actually exist and work today, not things that hypothetically work well in the future.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#635

Post by fastball »

ceejayoz wrote: post #42
arn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are using an ad block or other extensions, that is likely the cause. I can't find specific reference, but try turning those off. edit: https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1329132372034347009

A browser isn't viable to me without ad blocking and 1Password. Firefox has issues currently on M1, as well - uBlock Origin won't load, for example. Thankfully, that particular issue is fixable by disabling javascript.options.wasm and javascript.options.wasm_trustedprincipals in about:config as a temporary solution. I fully expect these to be fixed, but it's clear it's gonna be a few weeks/months before everything ru…

HN seems to really dislike Brave, but it is hands down the best browser for people that care about ad-blocking.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#636

Post by sjwright »

Zancarius wrote: post #443
GekkePrutser wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I'm not against ARM at all. In fact I have many systems running it :) Raspberries but also a Pinebook. I'm also getting an M1 mini from work. I just don't like the almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple. They're doing a great job. They're not perfect. For example: Moorhead makes a good point IMO. Yes he's talking about software issues. But in the case of Apple, you can't separate those two. The OS doesn't…

> I just don't like the almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple. They're doing a great job. They're not perfect. I'm in the same boat as you and the other OP up-thread. I'm amazed by what M1 has accomplished, but less so because of what it represents for itself (and for Apple) and more that it shows ARM is capable of . As an architecture, ARM is impressing the Hell out of me as of late. Sure, it's not touchin…

In your quest to avoid almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple, I'd contend that you're presenting the inverse: almost-religious anti-hyping of everything Apple. We can criticise them for their seemingly blinkered focus on casual consumers and end-users at the expense of developers and technologists without finding ways to rationalise away anything good Apple does.

Attributing the positive aspects of M1 to the ARM micro-architecture is contemporary revisionism. If micro-architecture was the key differentiator, Microsoft Surface RT would have been a runaway success and Qualcomm would have taken over the notebook CPU market by now. Little of what makes the M1 so impressive has anything to do with the ARM instruction set. The impressive parts are things like the entirely in-house GPU and the mild hardware acceleration of Rosetta 2.

It's also worth noting that Apple has been deeply involved in ARM since the late 1980s. They were a co-founder of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. along with Acorn and VLSI. Apple were deeply involved in development of the ARM6 architecture and the Apple Newton was one of the first major commercial applications. So even if you limit your amazement to the ARM architecture, a portion of that credit goes to Apple anyway.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#637

Post by sgerenser »

p1necone wrote: post #614
xvector wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Apple themselves advertised it as the "worlds fastest CPU core" when they announced it, which is blatantly untrue. Is it? In Geekbench the M1 was outperforming the 5950X in single-core. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/jspnhp/apple_new_m1_ch... EDIT: Looks like that post is comparing 2 different Geekbench versions. Newer Geekbench versions have optimizations for Zen 3, putting it back at the top.

Highest Geekbench 5 single core score is apparently 2239 on a 5800x ( https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore?page=1 ) Highest m1 single core score is 1716 ( https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1 ) (Of course they're likely overclocked past factory settings, but if we ignore those results that's not the fastest CPU core in the world, is it?) Geekbench has also not traditionally been a benchma…

2239 for a Ryzen 5800x single core isn’t just overclocked, that’s like 6GHz LN2 overclocked. Looks dubious to me.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#638

Post by tomxor »

Since this annoying article is really all about intel... I wonder if anyone could answer me this:

How practical would it be for Intel to pivot away from the deficiencies of their ISA, e.g to be able to make improvements in OoO comparable to the M1?

It's well understood such a move would completely remove the advantage of high backward compatibility for intel - but assuming the market is open to such a change - how technically feasible would it be, e.g is the micro-architecture and ISA more tightly coupled than one might expect? does such an endeavor mean scrapping most of it, or is a significant portion of the technology under that ISA layer flexible enough to be adapted without ending up with the same limitations in current intel chips?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#639

Post by wpietri »

_jal wrote: post #549
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 people arguing the opposite to define "revolutionary". The combination of the performance increase with the power and thermal efficiency in the first release for a laptop is the sort of improvement we haven't seen in a very long time. > I'm not seeing that this makes anything fundamentally different I guess we'll see. $1000 dollars buys a lot more laptop utility than it did a month ago, and the abrupt av…

Sure. To me evolutionary generally means quantitative improvements in expected dimensions. Revolutionary requires overturning some existing order. E.g., the American Revolution replaced the existing government.

I'd call the original Mac revolutionary, in that it totally changed how people interacted with computers. Laptops were revolutionary. Smartphones were revolutionary.

A new generation of laptop that runs somewhat longer without plugging in is not revolutionary. People will be doing the same things.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#640

Post by nwienert »

p1necone wrote: post #563
nwienert wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evolution…

For years we've been evolving. I've owned ~6 laptops over the last 10 years, all Intel Macs. Each year you get about ~20% ~performance increase for the same "costs" (weight, battery, price).

This year you get about 100% performance increase and the costs are all halved. Ok, so... we'll call it a "huge" evolution. All I know is I've been waiting since the air came out for this laptop to exist: fast enough to handle all my work, with decent battery life. It's been almost a decade of waiting, and not only did it finally come, but it somehow is much faster than even the biggest of last generation and super cheap.

If you made a graph showing (price * perf * battery-life * weight) you'd see a nice evolutionary curve over the last decade, and then this generation you'd see a huge jump - way more than double. You're ignoring the fact this is a 10W CPU doing more than 28W, fanless! And the diff in subjective performance isn't small, it feels bigger than any previous generation jump by quite a lot...

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