711–720 of 767 posts
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This is really the 12th generation of Apple's own chips, though - and the third of this particular design, if I recall correctly.
Are you claiming that A1 is in the same category as M1? If so... then Intel's latest chip generations should be traced back to 8088 in 1979.
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Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.
I think that's the right call, honestly. I need to recharge my own wetware at least once a day. So there is a nearly guaranteed several hour idle period where I'm not using any technology and where laptops and phones can be recharging too. I don't see much end user value in not taking advantage of that. It's like if you parked your car literally at a gas station every night anyway. Would you really care about a fuel…
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Question is whether they were compiling for the same architecture on both x86 and arm.
That's a good question but I don't think it would make a huge difference. Those details should have been included. Safari is already a universal binary on my Intel Mac running Big Sur; that means WebKit runs natively on Intel and M1 processors.
This is a slight aside, but could someone more familiar with the field than me explain what the Neural Engine is for? Does any software currently use it, or is it something that Apple are trying to push? Is it designed to build ML models, or to apply them to data? And perhaps more basically, what for? How much machine learning is done on user machines, as opposed to renting some cloud time? What are they anticipating…
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I have a theory on why ST perf is always the most important metric for me, and some other folks. When you're waiting for something synchronously, like rendering a webpage, stuff to open, etc. you're usually running a ST load. For stuff that can benefit from multithreading it's usually planned task. So does it make a difference if it takes 4 minutes compared to 3? You will still context switch.
Right now I have ~20 tabs open and a few apps, a workload which is probably similar to the average user. My machine currently has 510 processes running with 2379 threads, though most of them are background. I'd wager core count is more important than ST performance nowadays, especially considering the fact that applications seem to be multicore optimized.
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Depends on what you're doing. For example, compiling is multi-core, but linking is normally single-core. Many workloads are still heavily single-core-dependent, so great single-core performance is still a big asset.
> linking is normally single-core. GNU gold was doing threaded linking 15 years ago, and nowadays threaded linking is the default for new linkers like LLVM's lld. Unless you use very specific GNU linker hacks, there aren't any reason to not use lld, it works fine for linking large software like LLVM/Clang, Qt, ffmpeg...
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But you can disable Secure Boot and boot whatever OS you want, so unless there's some other hardware gotcha it's not like someone couldn't get Linux running if they wanted to put the time in (which is a big if, considering there's no UEFI-ish helper like on the Windows ARM devices). https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma...
There are quite literally millions of ARM devices out there that will never have Linux support, and millions more are being produced each year. When it comes to ARM SoCs, Linux requires vendor support to get it running. If you want mainline kernel support, that requires even more work that many vendors just aren't providing. A locked bootloader is just one issue to overcome for Linux support. A lot of the real issues…
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Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries… 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life. 2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most…
> 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not going to get 20 hours of battery life in real world usage on the M1 either. The early tests show about 10-12h, which is the same as my (and many other) laptops under regular usage. > 2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most CPU and GPU-intensive app…
Yeah, laptops that look like bricks.
> Can you tell me what "unified memory" even is exactly?
GPU shares memory with the AP
> Is it LPDDR4 on a pop package
On SoC, no PoP
> I'm limited 16GB of memory
Wait for new hardware
> which I regularly go over - I am using 19GB of RAM right now just with browser tabs open
This isn’t how memory works :/
I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.
They have already stated they won’t: “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...