Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#651

Post by yunohn » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #589

KMnO4 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s because 99% of regular computer tasks don’t need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second. The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind. My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only…

Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core per Chrome tab.

I’m unsure if this is sarcasm.

But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a majority of the time. There’s no value to this at all.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#652

Post by sillysaurusx » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #622

sillysaurusx wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My new M1 constantly freezes, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of chrome. Or the secret SSD thrashing design flaw that Apple is hoping nobody talks about till they quietly fix it. Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.

I use an M1 powered 16GB MacBook Air and I've never seen any freezing, even under heavy load. I don't use Google Chrome though. Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.

Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm, one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs open in Preview. I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.

The unfortunate part is, when it freezes, it does the beachball for a full minute before I successfully execute a “switch to activity monitor / s click topmost process / force quit / confirm” sequence. Each step takes around 45 seconds to complete. I assume Apple QA never tested the extreme edges of workloads.

One poor guy on Twitter is already up to 18% of his SSD lifetime, in the first three months of having an M1. We had a heart to heart about how silly it was that the drive will die within a year, that Apple better replace it under warranty, and so on. But it’s a coin toss whether he’ll just have to eat the cost and buy a new one: https://twitter.com/_wli/status/1364934834229977090?s=21

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#653

Post by baybal2 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #606

baybal2 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field. Not look too bad best to say. Even if we add a one node advantage, we still have a ~15 watt chip making 20W-30W chips sweat. If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get M1 beating it by double digit margin. M1 is simply a way more efficient chip than any X86 chip can be because…

Trust me, it does not have 40 years of architectural advantage, just an advantage. It's not going to take Intel "40 years to catch up" give me break. I have an M1 mini anad it's a great little desktop machine for browsing and light development but it's not 40 years ahead of intel.

This is not the point.

40 years of architectural advantage is X86 electing to forego results of 40 years of advances, and improvements that every other sane ISA had, and instead trying to add them by increasingly complex "workarounds."

Giant transistors counts go to allow X86 cores to not to break ISA compatibility with a 40 years old chip, while trying make new ISA features to live along with it.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#654

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#655

Post by SavantIdiot » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

Remember when Intel was 8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, then ... insanity.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#656

Post by baybal2 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

jeswin wrote: post #647

baybal2 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field. Not look too bad best to say. Even if we add a one node advantage, we still have a ~15 watt chip making 20W-30W chips sweat. If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get M1 beating it by double digit margin. M1 is simply a way more efficient chip than any X86 chip can be because…

> ...you will still get M1 having almost 3 to 4 times advantage at performance per square mm. 400%? Do you have any sources to back up this somewhat extraordinary claim?

I used die shots from https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-vs-apple-m14-floo...

And 119 mm² total die area claim

For Zen 3 I used https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AMD-Ryze...

0.5mm² per core on M1 vs 2.2mm² on Zen 3 sans caches

If you add caches, it gets much worse

17.5mm² vs 65mm²

And I may have had inadvertently included non-core parts into M1 calculation because of no official die floor map

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#657

Post by enragedcacti » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

fireattack wrote: post #574

enragedcacti wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC has only a handful of instructions, that all take 1 clock cycle (with pipelining). This isn't really the case with modern ARM. Fundamentally modern ARM and x86 CPUs are designed very similarly once you get past the instruction decoder. Both 'compile' instructions down to micro-ops that are then executed rather than executing the instruction set directly so the distinctions between the instruction sets themselv…

So ARM nowadays is just straightly better than x86?

For the most part I think so. The main advantages x86 has are based on code size. Many common instructions are 1 or 2 bytes so the executable size on x86 can often be smaller (and more instructions can fit in the instruction cache). I'm sure there are tons of other small differences that weigh in but I'm not well versed enough to know of them.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#658

Post by kyberias » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #216

sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

On the other hand “16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram” is something to cry about. Programmers working on products with a billion users should realize that every kilobyte they save decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte.

Right! And imagine the number of ELECTRONS whey would save from moving! That's also a big number.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#659

Post by SavantIdiot » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

slver wrote: post #602

yalogin wrote: post #575

The difference is the advantage Apple has with their HW+SW vertical integration. Its as simple as that. Intel sells CPUs, so it creates the ranges of CPUs to make money. They advertise clock speed and put the higher ones on a pedestal, that is how they can charge more money. The OEMs just used that playbook and developed their own marketing stories on top of Intel's marketing. Either no one tried to differentiate or…

> Intel sells CPUs, so it creates the ranges of CPUs to make money. They advertise clock speed and put the higher ones on a pedestal, that is how they can charge more money. How is any of this specific to Intel? Apple uses M1 at different clockrates in different devices. And that's not only due to battery and heat concerns, but also because those M1 are rated to run without errors at different clockrates. Similarly t…

> How is any of this specific to Intel?

As of right now, there are 6 different Intel processor brands and close to 100 different SKUs.

Source: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...

Currently, there is one M1.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#660

Post by intergalplan » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #584

sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

The 8 gigabyte machine is fine for 90% of people. I've recommended just getting that platform to a number of people, and none of them have had issues. I've got an 8 Gigabyte MBAir, and it never stutters. Meanwhile, on my 16 GByte Dell XPS (Ubuntu 20.04) - I routinely live in fear of exceeding my chrome tab quota because I know it will bring the system to a crashing halt. Somewhere around 45 is the point it all comes…

Safari vs. Chrome (or Firefox) is one part of why I can get so much more mileage out of a Mac's memory than I can under Linux or Windows. It's wildly more respectful of system resources, across the board—memory, processor cycles, and battery.

The rest of their software's mostly like that, too, with the possible exception of Xcode. I often forget Preview with a half-dozen PDFs is open, and Pages with a document, and Numbers. I wouldn't forget a single tab of Google Docs under Chrome, left open for weeks, because it would make itself known in system responsiveness and battery use. Ditto MS Office. Mac Terminal's got notably lower input latency than most other terminal emulators, especially featureful ones.

Apple, seemingly almost uniquely among major software vendors, gives a shit about performance, and it shows. I really, really wish they had competitors, but in so many ways they're the only ones doing what they do, to the point that they can make periodic serious blunders and I'm left going, "yeah, but what else am I gonna buy, that won't have a 'normal' that's overall-worse than Apple's 'broken'?"