701–710 of 882 posts
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> I want to believe. If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :)
Not going to happen anytime soon.
I can dream of an even better one, though!
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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…
> Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years I remember reading sentiments to that effect since 2004. I doubt he's getting paid directly, so he could only be a shill in a very loose sense of the word. He does get paid in review units and access, though. I think he's maybe overly enthusiastic about the good stuff, and skews toward the positive when matters are questionable but he has called out…
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Not to judge a book by it's cover, but mind-bogglingly his "preferred browser" for OSX is Edge. https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/13296105698261319...
This guy is a tech reporter? But he doesn't know how to take a screenshot. Says a lot.
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You can walk into a store, buy a Zen 3 processor right now (if you're lucky, they're in high demand), fiddle with the clocks and voltages to simulate (poorly) a laptop chip, and notice that, right now, at the same power, a Zen3 core at 7nm HPP is comporable in single core performance to a single M1 big core on 5nm LPP. So right now we know that Zen 3 is more or less equivalent or even ahead in architectural power eff…
So why can't we walk in and buy a Zen 3 in a laptop right now? .... because the thermals and engineering have not been designed/completed yet. Sometime in the future they will be, which is great. But that's the future. I'm still talking about right now. I like to buy things that actually exist and work today, not things that hypothetically work well in the future.
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…
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…
Both have followed Apple's direction and neither is going to want to let the PC market get away from them.
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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.* Ok. Where can I buy a laptop with similar performance, battery life and cooling then? Same arguments came out with the first iPhone. “It’s just a big screen! Other phones have a big sc…
Similar battery life? A good part of it is down to the software, sadly.
For the trade-off of 8 instead of 12 hours of battery life, you'll have a repairable and open computer. Seems competitive. You also get upgradeable RAM, a GPU that is actually useful because it has drivers for a useful API, and much more I/O.
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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…
> It seems like this implicitly assumes that everyone switching to Apple silicon is a possibility. Apple has flipped the tables. They went from being way behind the pack in terms of price/ performance pile in the 90s and 00s to the point where Apple's base MacBook Air is now competitive in terms of performance with laptops that cost twice as much. I suspect they will absolutely pick up share. I also expect AMD will g…
My partner is now able to run dozens of Korean apps which never have had a Mac equivalent.
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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…
Not if you still don't beat them cleanly. The end result is what matters. Also, being able to pay more than other people isn't a technical feat.
>On top of that, it's Apple's own SoC design, it has its own GPU design and co-processors, tons of work into making speed optimizations all around (from the buses to memory handling), and came with a new OS release, a port to the new architecture, a bridge layer for iOS apps, and a perfectly capable x86 translation layer.
Half of that is software, which I didn't mention, and the rest is par for the course. The buses and interconnects in a Zen chip are far superior, which you notice as better I/O.
>Which mainstream PC chip in actual laptops/desktops people use has unified memory and doesn't use sockets/DIMMS?
You didn't mention Sockets/DIMMS, but literally any AMD APU has unified memory, and use memory DIMMs. Seems like the best of both worlds to me. Just as good memory performance, and it's upgradeable.
>That's a moot point, since they still carry all the x86 baggage in microcode, since tons of bad decisions leading to things like Spectra. ARM doesn't.
AMD is not affected by Spectre. ARM also uses speculative execution.
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> I just don't like the almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple. They're doing a great job. They're not perfect. I'm in the same boat as you and the other OP up-thread. I'm amazed by what M1 has accomplished, but less so because of what it represents for itself (and for Apple) and more that it shows ARM is capable of . As an architecture, ARM is impressing the Hell out of me as of late. Sure, it's not touchin…
In your quest to avoid almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple, I'd contend that you're presenting the inverse: almost-religious anti-hyping of everything Apple. We can criticise them for their seemingly blinkered focus on casual consumers and end-users at the expense of developers and technologists without finding ways to rationalise away anything good Apple does. Attributing the positive aspects of M1 to th…
> In your quest to avoid almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple, I'd contend that you're presenting the inverse
I must point out that I believe you misinterpreted my intent. I'm largely indifferent to Apple. I'm not entirely sure if you'd find that more offensive or less since I'm interpreting this response as one of annoyance (I'd appreciate a clarification to this end).
I don't use Apple products. And you're absolutely right, the M1 is an impressive feat.
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> 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…
> " Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta " I thought that Microsoft's emulation efforts were hampered by Intel making threats, e.g. " Intel recently made an unprecedented public challenge to Microsoft and Qualcomm that basically told the latter two companies: if you ship an x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) emulator, we’re coming after you. ", from https://www.forbes.com/s…
Microsoft has a performance disadvantage in that the memory consistency model of ARM is much weaker than x86 sequential ordering or x86_64s total store ordering. Apple’s chips (at least back to the A12Z) support enabling TSO per thread on the performance cores, so the translated code does not need as much fencing.