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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#671

Post by eins1234 »

mantap wrote: post #665
kag0 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general, but is this really true? > the legacy chip makers have a business model that doesn't work It seems like this implicitly assumes that everyone switching to Apple silicon is a possibility. But it doesn't seem likely that all the android users are going to switch to iphones or that all the windows/linux users are going to switch to macs. This is hugely embarrassing for Intel and Qualcomm in particula…

Not sure. There are clearly some problems with the x86-64 ISA. If the world switches to ARM in the coming decade, that leaves Intel in a perilous position: no advantage in IP and no advantage in fabrication.

Right, the problem for Intel & AMD is not that everybody will switch over to Apple chips (they can't, because Apple likely won't sell it to them), but rather that Apple has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that ARM chips _can_ be this good when scaled up to laptop-level power envelopes.

That will probably prompt other ARM vendors and certain PC manufacturers (Microsoft who already has the ARM based SQ chips, for instance) to further invest in similar products that chip away at Intel/AMD's lead and likely eventually overtake them.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#672

Post by judge2020 »

pathartl wrote: post #310
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure AWS already have a series of AArch64 instance-types which they will most likely continue to improve.

I didn't say that they wouldn't go Arm, I said they wouldn't buy chips from Apple. Apple would never sell it like that.

Current Macs on AWS run via real Apple hardware, so I don't see how M1 will be different. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-bu...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#673

Post by thayne »

freeAgent wrote: post #668
kag0 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general, but is this really true? > the legacy chip makers have a business model that doesn't work It seems like this implicitly assumes that everyone switching to Apple silicon is a possibility. But it doesn't seem likely that all the android users are going to switch to iphones or that all the windows/linux users are going to switch to macs. This is hugely embarrassing for Intel and Qualcomm in particula…

No, it’s not true. Most people buy their computers because of the price, style, and easily observable features (not necessarily performance, certainly not the type of difference that only shows up in benchmarks). Hacker News commenters are far from your average PC buyer. I’m sure the M1 and future desktop Apple silicon will have an impact, but it’s far from a killing stroke. If people only cared about maximum perform…

And not all HN readers are won over either. I for one am not willing to switch to Apple's closed ecosystem for a chip that is a little faster. Or even a lot faster.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#674

Post by ogre_codes »

sokoloff wrote: post #644
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.

This is more about trying to soften the blow on Wall Street. I'm sure Intel had a good idea Apple's chip was going to blow the doors off their offerings.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#675

Post by x0x0 »

wpietri wrote: post #531
p1necone wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

all day on-battery real-world heavy usage without significant compromises. In fact, not just without significant compromises, but about as fast as a laptop can go.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#676

Post by harikb »

> emulating or translating apps compiled for a different architecture is necessarily going to be irritatingly slow and somewhat incompatible at best

While it wasn't as popular, Palm OS did this beautifully when going from Motorola 68k based device to ARM. Granted the executables are tiny (usually 10 to 64k in size or smaller), but the execution was flawless. In this comparison, I am not nitpicking on emulation vs translation vs JIT. Whatever it is, the 68k binary ran on ARM without a recompilation.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#677

Post by sagarm »

nwienert wrote: post #640
p1necone wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

AMD laptops are also crushing this generation of Intel laptops. AnandTech's comparison shows that M1 vs AMD is mostly a power/performance trade-off at the moment.

Not that the M1 isn't exciting especially in the ultrabook segment.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#678

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

freeAgent wrote: post #668
kag0 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general, but is this really true? > the legacy chip makers have a business model that doesn't work It seems like this implicitly assumes that everyone switching to Apple silicon is a possibility. But it doesn't seem likely that all the android users are going to switch to iphones or that all the windows/linux users are going to switch to macs. This is hugely embarrassing for Intel and Qualcomm in particula…

No, it’s not true. Most people buy their computers because of the price, style, and easily observable features (not necessarily performance, certainly not the type of difference that only shows up in benchmarks). Hacker News commenters are far from your average PC buyer. I’m sure the M1 and future desktop Apple silicon will have an impact, but it’s far from a killing stroke. If people only cared about maximum perform…

The biggest game changer is the battery life, it's so good that feature alone will put it ahead of most of the competition.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#679

Post by [deleted] »

_abox wrote: post #315
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…

Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. His article reads like an Apple keynote transcript, everything is magical and amazing, a marvel and mindbogglingly great. No wonder they throw him so many exclusives ;) Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system (no booting Linux or Windows at this time) and even under macOS you're having even less access to the system's internals than before. Also, A…

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