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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#641

Post by fomine3 »

simonh wrote: post #130
nix23 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.

He's talking about the vast majority of PC chips sold today, who's power consumption / performance / thermal ratios just got marmalised. You're quite right, your machine and in fact everyone else's are still just as good as they were a few weeks ago. I got an Intel 5K iMac in the summer and I'm still very happy with it. I need to be able to run windows and Linux in VMs so M1 isn't for me right now. It's no for you ei…

I wonder does Apple really make real "Pro" line Apple Silicon for Mac Pro that competitive to 32-64 core Threadripper. Is it profitable?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#642

Post by arvinsim »

bayindirh wrote: post #370
6d65 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with regards the closed platform. I switched to Linux for my development machine for a few years now. And, using something else than i3(or any other tilling window managers) seems like a step down. I like instant switching between workspaces, splits, no animations. And I'll be looking for a good laptop next year, when everything returns back to normal, and I might have to travel. And will put Linux o…

I live a double life: Apple for laptops and Linux for desktops (and I'm mostly a Desktop user who manages a lot of Linux servers). Both platforms have their pluses and minuses. I like to carry ideas between them for my development and environments. Found this extremely fruitful for me over the years. We ordered a bunch of M1 airs for portability and power efficiency. Will see how it goes. I personally love both Linux…

I have a Macbook and used to have a Hackintosh for my desktop. But this ARM move made me move away from that solution on the desktop.

I tried using Windows with WSL2 first but there was just too many workarounds I had to do for my workflow.

I then looked into the most popular Linux distributions and chose Pop!_OS. Suffice to say, I am really satisfied with it. It's probably the Linux distribution that I feel is the closest to MacOS that I have used.

I am interested in the M1 Macs but my 16" MBP is still fine. I will look into the ARM Macs next year to see what they offer.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#643

Post by wpietri »

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…

These all strike me as evolutionary changes. People will be doing about the same things as before. They will do them a bit faster, and not have to plug in as often.

I expect revolutionary changes to overturn an existing order. E.g., the Mac was revolutionary. Smartphones were revolutionary. This is a solid and impressive evolutionary change. Kudos to them, of course. But when actual revolutions happen, I would like to have a word handy to acknowledge that.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#644

Post by sokoloff »

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…

Was it really that shocking for Apple to announce they were shipping their own silicon? That stuck me as a pretty open (non-)secret and I’m not even in that industry.

I doubt Intel was actually caught unaware.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#645

Post by prvc »

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…

What are the prospects for a hypothetical future fanless Ryzen laptop?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#646

Post by wpietri »

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.

I disagree. The iPhone was revolutionary in that it made smartphones and phone apps accessible to the mass market, unleashing a wave of change in how people live, work, and play.

M1 Macs will be used basically like the previous Macs, but somewhat faster and somewhat longer without plugging in. So I don't think this qualifies as a revolutionary change.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#647

Post by rsfinn »

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…

I know I'm probably older than most people here, but the notion that 16 GiB is "a tiny amount of RAM" is tremendously amusing to someone who paid $740 in 1986 (with a developer's discount) for 2 "MB" of RAM (we didn't have MiB back then)...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#648

Post by Geminidog »

p1necone wrote: post #516
outworlder wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system It doesn't matter. Sure, that might mean that an Apple system is not for you. But the crux of the matter is: Apple did something truly revolutionary. How is the rest of the market going to respond? Specifically, how are Intel, AMD and Microsoft going to respond? Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta. Intel and AMD have nothing remotely…

> Apple did something truly revolutionary This is hyperbole. Apple has released a CPU that has very good perf/watt compared to it's current competition. That's it. This isn't revolutionary, it's just another incremental step in CPU improvements. Can we please give Apple praise for competing well in the hardware market without fully drinking the kool aid and parroting their marketing.

It's revolutionary in the sense that apple is the one who did this rather then intel or amd?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#649

Post by sjwright »

coldtea wrote: post #603
sudosysgen wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead. For very light loads, it does have a slightly better power performance than existing low power PC processors, but not by that much. A Ryzen LPP core is somewhere between the big and the s…

> Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead. Being a process node ahead is already "much better", and IS a feat. Where are the process node ahead chips from the competitors? On top of that, it's Apple's own SoC design, it has its…

In terms of GPU cores it seems evident that Nvidia is clearly number one—disregarding any thermal limits—and AMD is clearly number two. It seems Apple is a solid contender for third place now. I don't think Intel or the smaller embedded players (Mali, PowerVR etc) have anything quite so good.

Am I missing something?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#650

Post by arvinsim »

mbreese wrote: post #414
6d65 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it will cut into their sales they might have to adapt. Also, from what I heard, while intel was on top, it was charging outrageous margins on its CPUs. AMD mobile were said to be hundreds of dollars less per cpu. The manufacturers might choose to pass on these savings. Of course, if AMD becomes the only game in town, they might jack up their prices as well. We'll see.

I didn't really think about it at the time, but Nvidia buying ARM makes even more sense now that Apple has shown what can be done with ARM CPUs. Not necessarily because Nvidia wanted a CPU, but because otherwise, they'd be stuck providing GPUs for Intel CPU systems. AMD can bundle Radeon GPUs and Apple has the M1 CPU/GPU. That means that for a system vendor (Dell), the only cost effective place to use an Nvidia GPU w…

So in short, CPU and GPU manufacturers will have to do vertical integration themselves to compete.
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