2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test • Hacker News Board

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

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Post by chipotle_coyote » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 1:45 AM UTC

bitL wrote: post #424

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He owns a license for Photoshop 6 Uh, I'm guessing you mean CS6 rather than Photoshop 6, the program that came out in 2000. In any case, Adobe's help page[1] currently reads, "As Creative Suite 6 is no longer sold or supported, platform or language exchanges are not available for it." Since they're certainly not selling or supporting versions older than CS6, it's unlikely your friend is going be able to keep Photos…

CS6 runs just fine on Windows 10. Of course it's not supported by Adobe as they were pretty aggressive in canceling CS6 licenses if one mistakenly accepted CC with the same account before in order to put everybody onto their extortion scheme, but I use CS6 as before just fine on PC, not on Mac.

Right -- what I was commenting on was that if you have the Mac version of CS6, you can no longer "cross-grade" to the PC version (or vice-versa).

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

#662

Post by pabs3 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

ytch wrote: post #622

paulpan wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsung hero here is TSMC and their industry-leading 5nm fabrication node. Apple deserves praise for its SOC architecture on the M1 and putting it together, but the manufacturing advantage is worth noting. Apple is essentially combining the tick (die/node shrink) and tock (microarchitecture) cadences together each year, at least the past 2-3 years. The question, perhaps a moot one, is how much the performance gains ca…

Apple has built many second-source partners for cost-reduction for a long time. But most of their CPUs are made by TSMC right now. I'm wondering will Apple find another semiconductor factory partner (they tried to build A9 by both Samsung and TSMC, but Samsung one seems like has heat issues)or stick with TSMC?

Are there any fabs that can compete with TSMC? Or EUV equipment manufacturers that can compete with ASML?

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

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Post by phire » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

hajile wrote: post #508

phire wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more than one way to scale. Over the last decade, Intel had been pushing wider SIMD. Instead of making your cpu able to execute more instructions per cycle, why don't you make each instruction do more work. SSE packs four floats/ints or two doubles/longs into a single 128bit register and then you can do the same ALU operation to each lane. It works great on certain workloads. With AVX, Intel increased the si…

I'd note that both arguments have merit. A SIMD is basically controller + ALUs. A wider SIMD gives a better calculation to controller ratio. Fewer instructions decreases pressure on the entire front-end (decoder, caches, reordering complexity, etc). This is more efficient overall if fully utilized . The downsides are that wide units can affect core clockspeeds (slowing down non-SIMD code too), programmers must optimi…

I agree, both approaches have merit.

But at this point I really have to question what code gets decent speedups with AVX512 that wouldn't preform even better on a GPGPU.

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

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Post by pabs3 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #433

StreamBright wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. We need more competition because the #1 reason we got to this situation is mono culture and a single platform (x86). We need Apple to succeed of creating an alternative ARM based desktop/laptop platform and for more competition we could add in Mips64 from China to the mix. I am really hoping that by 2025 we are going to have 3 major platforms available for end customers, so that there is real competit…

Isn't having a whole bunch of different processor architectures at the same time kind of bad for end-users?

The experience in Linux distros is that extra arches surface bugs that other arches paper over, leading to higher quality software. For example unaligned memory access is slower on some arches but causes crashes on other ones.

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

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Post by nomel » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #605

copperx wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, exactly? As long as Apple keeps their chips to themselves, Intel or AMD will have nothing to worry about.

Because Apple (theoretically at least) should start increasing their market share. Don't assume that they only downside for Intel is losing Apple as a customer... That could end up being the least of their worries.

> Because Apple (theoretically at least) should start increasing their market share.

Should that be a serious goal for Apple though? Is there that much more money for them if they jump into the race-to-the-bottom budget market, where I assume much of the remaining share is? It seems there is some added value in being a luxury product.

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

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Post by pdpi » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

iamcreasy wrote: post #654

pdpi wrote: post #5

Someone posted these results on Reddit earlier: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jvrck7/m1_macboo... As far as I know, DotA 2 is running on Rosetta.

I wonder if a full DotA match can be played which can last somewhere between 25 - 45 minutes. From Dave2d, M1 Air starts throttling after 8-9 minutes.

That link has some charts with FPS dropping over time as throttling kicks in. It drops from 110fps to 90fps.

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

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Post by jonfromsf » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #579

murukesh_s wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would want a 2, 3, even 7 day battery. Why not? I don't want to bother about charging every day. But my worry is that with more and more efficiency in computing and battery tech, if Apple instead decides to reduce the battery capacity? Especially with no competition in sight, or competitors trying to follow Apple, we may end up with smaller batteries instead of more battery life. They seems to be doing that with iP…

The problem with multi day battery life is you never get in to a routine and you get caught out every time. I had a pebble watch which had a 10 day battery life and almost every 10th day it would go flat on me mid day or I'd get a warning about low battery while I'm outside and then forget about it when I get home. Now I have an Apple Watch that lasts almost but not quite 2 days, I charge it every night and it has ne…

Kindles suffer this problem. The battery lasts forever so you never get in the habit of charging them. Then you get caught out and it's at 0% and you can't read your book. Too much battery capacity is surprisingly harmful.

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

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Post by ashtonkem » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #54

CapriciousCptl wrote: post #4

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…

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-…

Most real world usages don’t max out all cores all the time.

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

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Post by ashtonkem » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:30 AM UTC

d3nj4l wrote: post #81

msie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 has multiple cores. 2x-4x multiple cores does not necessarily mean 2x-4x faster.

The M1 has a big.LITTLE design with only half of the cores being performance-oriented, so if there is a gap, it would almost always be in Ryzen's favour.

Assuming complete core saturation, yes.

That’s not how CPUs actually operate though, outside of some very narrow tasks. If you actually regularly max out your CPU, you already know that and wouldn’t touch a Mac mini no matter what chip is in it.

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

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Post by SulfurHexaFluri » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 2:32 AM UTC

jonfromsf wrote: post #667

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with multi day battery life is you never get in to a routine and you get caught out every time. I had a pebble watch which had a 10 day battery life and almost every 10th day it would go flat on me mid day or I'd get a warning about low battery while I'm outside and then forget about it when I get home. Now I have an Apple Watch that lasts almost but not quite 2 days, I charge it every night and it has ne…

Kindles suffer this problem. The battery lasts forever so you never get in the habit of charging them. Then you get caught out and it's at 0% and you can't read your book. Too much battery capacity is surprisingly harmful.

The only device that I don't have this issue with is my logitech mouse which gets 70 days on a single charge. It shows a red light on the side when its at about 2 days charge left and I usually remember to plug it in when I leave for lunch.