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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

anandtech.com

641–650 of 767 posts

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has something like this called containers. The best example is one for facebook, where any call to any facebook servers only works in the facebook container. It has similar setups as well, Work, Home, Commerce, etc.

I switched from Chrome to FF as my daily driver, and miss being able to have multiple simultaneous instances with different proxy configs (via a --proxy-server="socks4://localhost:####" command line flag). FF as far as I know does not have a way to do this as easily, you have to spin up different profiles and click through each one to configure it. I still have chromium around for primarily this reason.

Foxyproxy extension will help you there. You can also configure automatic proxy switching based on many conditions.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He owns a license for Photoshop 6, payed for it and has no need to uograde, especially to the new subscription based licensing Sounds like the friend has a need to upgrade, and that upgrade is going to require new software. I don’t think this situation is Adobe or Apple’s fault, old stuff stops working at some point.

> I don’t think this situation is Adobe or Apple’s fault, old stuff stops working at some point. Old stuff stops working due to deliberate design choices made on both Apple and Adobe's parts. Apple deliberately stripped Rosetta and 32-bit support from macOS, and Adobe is deliberately making it nearly impossible to use older versions of the CS suite on their end. Meanwhile, I can run Photoshop 6 on Windows or WINE, an…

You can probably run Photoshop 6 under SheepShaver. I can (and have) run DOS programs from the 1990s in DOSBox on my Mac.

I appreciate backwards compatibility, but I'm not convinced drawing lines in the sand every once so often is a terrible idea. Revisiting old software is fun for nostalgic reasons and, sure, there are sometimes edge cases where you have to use something that hasn't been updated in years, but in general I'd rather be using software that exhibits at least minimal signs of being an ongoing concern.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conclusion is quite misleading, in my opinion. They write "outperforms the core performance" and the keyword here is "core". What they mean is that if one had a single-core Zen3 and a single-core M1, then the M1 would win some and lose some. But in the real world, most Zen3 CPUs will have 2x or more cores, thus they'll be 2x to 4x faster. So what they mean to say is that they praise Apple for having amazing per-…

Passively cooled first generation macbook air chip isn't quite as fast as an absolute monster grade PC Ryzen chip on its 3rd generation. Color me shocked. I think you're just trying your hardest to convince yourself that these chips aren't competitive.

The M1 is only "first generation" because they called it M1 instead of A15. :)

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like it only begins to throttle after 8.5 minutes of sustained high loads — like exporting 4K video. In a lot of day-to-day work that is much more peaks and valleys, you may never see the throttling.

Seeing reddit reports of gaming throttling more quickly than that, which would make sense since the GPU is going to sit at or near 100% pretty easily with a game and you'll still be seeing a decent CPU load.

link?

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#645
post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being obtuse. The only test you're using is Geekbench, which just isn't useful for these kinds of comparisons. In other multicore benchmarks, the M1 gets beaten by parts with lower TDPs by AMD, and the 5950X has something like 3 to 4+ times more performance.

Calling me obtuse doesn't add anything of value to the discussion. I was pointing out the multithreaded benchmark in response to the claim that there were none. Read kllrnohj's response that is the sibling to your comment to see how to make a point effectively.

That's not the obtuse part. The obtuse part is ignoring all the other multicore tests in the same uArch and then saying that the 5950X is comparing unfavorably and ignoring the fact that single core perf on Geekbench for the 5950X doesn't scale like any of the other tests and is much lower relatively to the other tests, then taking this one test were a 105W TDP is actually used as significant to all the other comparisons, then saying that their are comparing it to a chip with a 105W TDP, when in all multicore tests except two it gets compared to the 4800S (which beats it with half the power consumption).

It's not getting compared, at the scale of the article, to the 5950X in anything but single core performance except for one expection, and the claim that it's being compared generally to a 105W TDP part is also false because in multicore comparisons, where the total TDP makes sense, it's getting compared to parts with half or 150% the TDP and losing.

In reality, it's getting compared to a 6-7w core, and to 15-45w chips.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#646
post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 4900HS has way more I/O and is on 7nm, as well as has more powerful graphics.

I guess we're talking at cross purposes. I was just making the point that the 4900HS isn't really a competitor to the M1 because it's in a different TDP class. It looks like Apple wanted to stick with one chip for their first generation products, but they could presumably at least throw in a few extra cores if they had another 10-15W to play with.

Well no, but then again there is the 4800S at half the TDP that gets close in single core performance and wins in multicore performance, so there pretty much no way they could've beaten it at another power budget.

Indeed, it they were to add a few more cores to their M1, then AMD could have also thrown a few more cores in their 4800, and it would have been a wash.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't. AMD has essentially the same perf/watt coming in a few months. ISA doesn't change anything nowadays because it all gets decoded into a per-CPU specific actual instruction set anyways.

This is not correct actually. Simpler ISA often requires bigger instruction caches, but consumes less energy because of simpler decoding logic. VLIW theoretically can be super efficient, because it discards decoding stage altogether.

In theory, yes. This is the case when you have small cores, which is why a lot of GPUs used VLIW.

But in practice the whole decoder stage is basically a rounding error because cores got so big.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#648
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.

I'm not sure I or really anyone actually wants a 2 day battery life. Like, we can do that on smartphones right now but users have signaled that the 1 day device is fine for them, notably because of the human gap. You know the gap. If you charge your phone every night it becomes a habit tied to your daily routine. If you were to charge your phone every other night, you might lose track of what day you are on, not char…

My Garmin lasts about a week if I don't use GPS and it's by far the best feature.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#649
post #11

Impressive results from Apple, and another well-deserved kick in the teeth for Intel after years of stagnation. The coming decade is going to finally see some interesting developments in the CPU market again.

Right, I think in the end, this is going to show just how bad monopolies (or near-monopolies) can be for innovation. These are super impressive results, just hoping that the rest of Apple (software, developer relations) can turn away from the draconian future they are currently heading.

There's a fair risk of this turning into new monopolies, but at least it should take a while and hopefully other companies will figure out how to meaningfully compete

I guess the fact that Apple will probably never sell this stuff for non-Apple computers will allow AMD to keep competing on the PC side.

Clearly when Apple come out with a desktop class chip though, it's going to be hard for anyone else to come close.

Somehow that doesn't seem to be a problem for Android though!

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#650

From the article's conclusion... "The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets." This is the first in-depth review validating all the hype. Assuming the user experie…

It’s not super technical, but Engadget did some benchmarking of the Air. Similarly impressive

https://www.engadget.com/apple-macbook-air-m1-review-1400313...

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