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Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

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Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#741

Post by highfrequency »

dawnerd wrote: post #670
ksec wrote: post #195

The M1 is basically what would Apple would call A14X / A14Z if it was on iPad Pro. So they decided to reuse the A14X / M1 across all three products. And the only differentiation are their TDP cooling. The MacBook Air is 10W TDP, and both Mac Mini and MacBook Pro are likely ~35W range. The did mention MacBook Air's SSD performances is now twice as fast, so this isn't exactly an iPad Pro with Keyboard. That is great ex…

> But for MacBook Pro, You are essentially paying $300 more for a Fan and Touch Bar. More than that. Better screen. Bigger battery. Better speakers. Better mics (although I don't know how much I would buy this one as 'studio quality' is silly). A "USB Power Port". The fan will make the MBP perform without throttling a lot longer than the air. The price difference is minor for all that IMO.

Is the screen better on the MBP? I see "2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch" for both:

https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#742

Post by 00deadbeef »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #437
greenpresident wrote: post #89

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

16GB is fine for mobile and low end. I'm a developer and struggle to fill that amount of memory, even with VMs running. I guess they made a cost trade-off for these machines, which will not be carried forward to the high-end. Perhaps a new "M2" chipset, with discreet RAM and graphics. Next year? It would be amazing if they could bring ECC for a decent price as well, time will tell.

Doing mobile dev on my 16GB MBP causes it to constantly swap, and on my 32GB desktop I often get very close to using all 32GB. I wouldn't buy a new dev machine with less than 64GB.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#743

Post by 00deadbeef »

jonplackett wrote: post #173
greenpresident wrote: post #89

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

And it's unified memory too, shared with the graphics.

The Intel GPUs shared RAM too

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#744

Post by tinus_hn »

ksec wrote: post #212
kevindong wrote: post #186

Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming: There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch https://w…

Actually that was what I notice in the video as well. Mac mini has huge amount of empty space. And the only difference was the cooling unit fitted on top.

There used to be a DVD player and a hard drive in there, there has to be spare room.

When comparing the mini to other SFF computers be sure to note that the mini has the power supply built in though where most of the others have it external.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#745

Post by 00deadbeef »

ogre_codes wrote: post #431
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? "Oh we can't give you a 64GB MBP because Intel can't use low power dram yet". Launches Apple Silicon with 16Gb.

Did you expect they would launch every single configuration on day 1? Apple said the transition is going to take 2 years. This is day 1. You can still buy Intel based Macs with 64GB RAM. When Apple phases those out and you still can't buy 64GB Macs, then you can complain. What are the chances that happens?

It just seems silly though. If you want a Mac Mini with 64GB of RAM you're forced to take the slower CPU and GPU. If you want a 13" MBP with 32GB RAM it will cost you $500 more and also get you a slower CPU and GPU.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#746

Post by ineedasername »

hajile wrote: post #669
marta_morena_28 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that. At 5nm there will also be yield problems. I.e they will put the best yield into high end and the worst yield into low end.

This is undoubtedly why they launched the Mac Mini today. They can ramp up a lot more power in that machine without a battery and with a larger, active cooler. I'm much more interested in actual benchmarks. AMD has mostly capped their APU performance because DDR4 just can't keep the GPU fed (why the last 2 generations of consoles went with very wide GDDR5/6). Their solution is obviously Infinity Cache where they add…

Okay, probably a stupid question, but solid state memory can be pretty dense: why don't we have huge caches, like a 1GB cache? As I understand it, cache memory doesn't put off heat like the computational part of the chip does, so heat dissipation probably wouldn't increase much with a larger chip package.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#747

Post by cheeze »

Aperocky wrote: post #605
myrandomcomment wrote: post #573

So there is an interesting trend here in the comments because HN is very developer focused. Everyone seems to say "well this does not work for my XXX because of RAM, etc." I would say yes, no surprises there! With this line up Apple is fine with that, because the Air and 13" are not targeted at you. This is the laptop for my wife or kids that use it for school, web, some music and video, nothing at a professional lev…

I'm a dev and I have the air as my personal, side-project computer, and I have already ordered the new one. I use vim to develop primarily in python/js. So my need for performance is super low.

Hah, this reminds me of college. I remember some of my first CS courses, everyone either had a brand new mbp or an ALIENWARE super beefy laptop.

I had a 300 dollar 7" netbook. Turns out that unless you're doing deep learning, etc. (which you might as well just run remote IMO), a bottom of the line intel atom processor can handle the workloads that a CS program throws at it no problem. I mean, in reality you're doing things like solving sudoku puzzles or making some syscalls 95% of the time.

Admittedly, I ended up buying a desktop because I wanted the screen real estate when things got more complex, but I thought it was funny how many people had this conception that they would need to run their ray tracer from CS101 on their i7 with 32gb RAM

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#748

Post by hajile »

StillBored wrote: post #726
therealmarv wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. But I agree... let's wait for the benchmarks (btw. iPads already overturns nearly all laptop CPUs)

A number of times when they said that I though, "but, that is a GPU heavy workload". Its not clear if they were comparing to existing mac's or more recent ryzen/intel xe machines. Both of which have very significant GPU uplifts with their integrated GPUs. AKA, I suspect a big part of those perf uplifts evaporate when compared with the laptops that are appearing in stores now. And the ipad benchmarks also remain a wai…

They are comparing to the MacBook processors which they kept as ancient 8th gen Intel quad cores.

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#749

Post by adammenges »

ojosilva wrote: post #28

Apple mentions TensorFlow explicitly in the ongoing presentation due to the new 16-core "Neural Engine" embedded in the M1 chip. Now that's an angle I did not expect on this release. Sounds exciting! Edit: just to clarify, the Neural Engine itself is not really "new": > The A11 also includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Neural Engine". This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billio…

Would love to get GPU accelerated learning in Lobe (http://www.lobe.ai).

Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers

#750

Post by mitjak »

jonplackett wrote: post #235
mitjak wrote: post #152

The word "fast" appears 16 times on the page.

One for each CPU. Maybe it's a code...?

i think it's code for, we're definitely, positively, conclusively faster than the Latest PC Laptop Chip, for sure.
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