Too bad their OS is unusable...
M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
751–760 of 882 posts
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
The M1 beats low end desktop GPUs from a couple of generations ago (~25% faster than the 1050ti and RX560 according to this benchmark [0]). Current high end GPUs are much faster than that (e.g the 3080 is ~5 times as powerful as a 1050ti). Don't get me wrong - this is still very impressive with a ~20w combined! power draw under full load, but it definitely doesn't beat mid - high desktop GPUs. (This is largely irrele…
How much does a 3080 cost? Could you build a complete computer around one for $1000?
- a 3080 costs > $750 . Good luck buying one, I would if it wasn't out of stock. On the other hand the gtx 1050 mobile that is on the M1 can be easily found on eBay for - yes, you totally can. The best thing is that with a 1k.entry level you can start working on real-life projects that have deadlines and start earning money that will let you upgrade your gear to the level you actually need, without having to buy an entire new machine. The old components can serve as spare parts or to build a second node. You don't waste a single penny on things you don't need.
Even though, it's true, you can't brag with friends that it absorbs only 20 watts full load and the heat of the aluminium body is actually pleasant
It's a big sacrifice, I understand it.
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#753Earlier 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…
It proves the viability of ARM for desktops, laptops, and probably eventually servers too. Intel having been humiliated by this will loosen their grip on OEMs who will now be under pressure in the inevitable rush to produce appealing, performance-oriented ARM laptops, as the current market has basically been Chromebooks and some half-hearted Windows ARM tablets, all based on chips adapted from phones. And of course t…
ARM started on the desktop.
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#754Earlier 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…
> 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…
If one is living on US or comparable countries, maybe.
Over here Apple has to do much more to win market share over PC sales.
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same here, I do use Macs at work, but at home is all Windows and a surviving Linux laptop.
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) M1 is significantly faster than 4800U at single-core. 2) M1 is up to 20 hours of battery life. 3) Not the software since the existing Intel based Macs share the same OS.
M1 is somewhat slower in multicore, and has a fifth of the I/O performance. They are comparable. Importantly, you're comparing the M1 in a Mac Mini, to the 4800U in a laptop. Comparing the M1 in the Air, for example, the 4800U is quite a bit faster in multicore and the single core performance advantage shrinks. As for 2 and 3, you're comparing to AMD, not to Intel. AMD CPUs have significantly better power efficiency…
>As for 2 and 3, you're comparing to AMD, not to Intel. AMD CPUs have significantly better power efficiency than Intel.
Still nowhere near as the same battery life has been seen in any AMD laptop. Not even in ones with less perf.
Seems that you're grasping at straws at this moment :-)
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would like the people downvoting you to explain why they think it's truly revolutionary. For one, it's the first PC chip with these kind of thermals and power combo. Second, it brings many new design decisions, from unified memory, to the SoC design, various coprocessors, etc, that have not been available in the form of laptop/desktop PCs. The last of this kind in the mass market would be something like the Amiga…
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…
Read the anandtech article again. 15-25w is the power consumption of the whole Mac mini measured at the wall plug. I.e it includes power supply, ssd, gpu comparable to RX560, external buses etc etc. If you want an x86 chip that beats its performance by a significant margin you have to pay more for just the chip than for the whole Mac mini.
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
M1 is still just a tablet SoC in a laptop form factor. That wouldn't be good enough for production hardware. The developer units had a previous iPad’s A12 SoC in an enclosure for developers to test things on. For example, the A series doesn't support virtualization because that's not required on a phone or tablet. But the M1 supports this and other laptop/desktop features. Even the A14 only has 4 cores compared to th…
Another example - M1s can't do SMT, no one is denying that they are good chips but there's a lot of catching up for them to do. > And all of the M1 Macs have blazingly fast memory access. Remember, it's an SoC—the memory is on the same die as the CPUs, GPUs and they all have equal access to it. No bus to go across. What does this even mean? Memory works at a certain voltage, clock speed, and has a capped rate at whic…
Just read "Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?" [1] to answer most of these questions.
I’ll just hit the obviously erroneous issues here.
A M1 chip has 16 billion transistors for 8 cores. AMD's EPYC Rome has 39.54 billion transistors for 64 cores.
It doesn't make sense to compare the M1 with the EPYC Rome. They couldn't more different and were developed for dramatically different use cases.
(I also don't think it's not a good look when folks feel compelled to state Apple's M1 isn't as fast as AMD's $4000 64-core processor, as if this means anything. Of course the EPYC Rome is faster--duh. Anyways…)
16 billion transistors on the M1 SoC (emphasis on system) gets you an 8-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Processor, a Digital Signal Processor, a Secure Enclave, image processing unit, video encoder/decoder and of course 8 CPU cores and 8 or 16 Gb of memory.
Instruction decoders deal with the out of order execution of the instructions; more decoders enables you to have more instructions "in flight" as they say for the execution cores to run in parallel.
Again, you should read the article for the details, but due to the legacy architecture and technical debt of a 40 year-old instruction set, not to mention with instructions ranging in size from 1 to 15 bytes, it's not easy for the decoders to juggle all of the instructions to do out of order execution of instructions. Yes, even the EPYC Rome only has 4 instruction decoders.
Meanwhile, the instructions for Apple's Firestorm cores are all the same size, making decoding the instructions much easier and faster; so much so that the M1 has 8 decoders, which is unheard of in a mainstream processor.
Here's the bottom line quote from the article: "In fact, adding more causes so many other problems that four decoders according to AMD itself is basically an upper limit for how far they can go. This is what allows the M1 Firestorm cores to essentially process twice as many instructions as AMD and Intel CPUs at the same clock frequency."
Apple and AMD solved the "get as many instructions in the pipeline as possible and process them as quickly as possible" problem two different ways.
AMD does it with threading and many cores; Apple does it by increasing the number of instruction decoders and by having 60+ Gb/s bandwidth with a 128-bit bus. Apple didn't implement SMT because they don't need it; they have no issues with keeping their instruction pipeline full.
Bottom line: Apple's approach has more headroom than AMD's approach. They can't add more instruction decoders, so they crank up the clock speed and the threads to execute more instructions per clock cycle. But the M1 is so efficient, it processes twice as many instructions at the same clock frequency.
The M1 runs at 3.2 GHz; it's got a higher ceiling because Apple can add more cores and increase the clock speed a lot before it gets anywhere near the power consumption and other physical limits that AMD is starting to run up against.
[1]: https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#759Patrick 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…
Is Intel really so blind that they didn't see this coming or even have detailed inside info about it? I would wager that they knew, but execs chose to protect their personal short term interests overt those of the company and its long term shareholders. This is typical modern US publicly traded company behavior.
> I would wager that they knew
Same. It's pretty clear that they knew and those that were blindsided, earned to get a pink slip.
Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Right, but they're going to remain a tiny niche. They're priced so highly that there's no risk of them cannibalizing Amazon's own AArch64 instance-types.