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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

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Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#771

Post by SubiculumCode »

Blumfid wrote: post #617
itsokimbatman wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think “impressive iteration” begins to describe it. I am very rarely impressed by new tech these days, and the M1 is the first piece of new hardware I’ve seen in years that seems downright magical. My previous laptop was a 2016 MBP with an i7, and the M1 destroys it. I can build large projects like LLVM or WebKit fast and it doesn’t even get hot. I’ve also been running Linux VMs with the new Parallels and the…

It's not a helpful comparison if you compare a chip from 2016 with a chip from 2020. You would need to benchmark it against a current chip from someone else.

yeah, especially given the leaps AMD has made.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#772

Post by TheCoelacanth »

tazjin wrote: post #375
maigret wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I know why all the websites I use are so slow :D

You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies gave their developers of client-facing software slower computers the resulting software would end up being faster.

I don't think it's the developers who are the problem. In my experience, they're usually the ones advocating to spend time improving performance.

PMs and executives are the ones you should give slow machines to if you want more focus on performance.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#773

Post by userbinator »

adwn wrote: post #499
userbinator wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

latest x86 chips have patently gigantic decoders metastasising into backend. It's still a tiny percentage of the area. The caches are the biggest.

Area isn't what affects power usage, switching activity is. [1] Besides, the cache size doesn't negatively influence or constraint the design of the core logic, but highly complex instruction decoding absolutely does. [1] Well, mostly. There is such a thing as static power draw, but I suspect that the transistors in the L3 cache are optimized to have lower static leakage than the transistors in the core logic, which…

Leakage is actually a significant part of idle power consumption, especially at smaller process sizes, so much that some CPUs have the ability to turn off parts of caches when idle.

I repeat my stance that x86 instruction decoding is a tiny part of a processor, and things like vector units (which are also often powered down when idle) and reordering logic take far more power.

There's a paper about this that compares the efficiency of different ISAs, and basically concludes that ARM and x86 are no different in that respect. Only MIPS is an awful outlier.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-sho...

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#774

Post by edvinbesic »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #758
brewdad wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other main improvement in the past 10 years is the power draw. You can get more than 10 hours of battery life in a machine that weighs less than 3 lbs. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago. CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.

10 hour battery life was achievable 15 years ago on Pentium M provided you under-volted, under-clocked, and had a high capacity battery.

How far does this goalpost go?

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#775

Post by TheCoelacanth »

hkstm wrote: post #361
GordonS wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, if you're running big IDEs (e.g. Rider/IntelliJ, Visual Studio), containers and VMs, 32GB is really a must. There always seem to be people in these threads claiming that 16GB or even 8GB is enough - I just don't understand how that could possibly be for most of the HN demographic.

Do you think most of the HN demographic is actually running big IDEs, containers and VMs at the same time? I'm personally a CS student and never had to run more than a few lightweight docker containers + maybe one running some kind of database + VS Code and that has been working fine on a laptop with 8GB and pop_os. Could imagine that a lot of other people on HN are also just generally interested in tech but not nece…

I could believe that for students because students are usually working on projects that are tiny by industry standards.

10 klocs is huge for a student project but tiny for a real-world project.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#776

Post by sudosysgen »

my123 wrote: post #718
sudosysgen wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which benchmarks are we talking about? The 5800u is a 15w part, you might be confusing the normal part with some overclocked implementation. But the 5800u at 15w is still faster than the M1 in multicore. Yes, Zen has to downclock, but it has more cores.

It's far from being as definitive as you say. Trying to find with one of the best 5800U scores: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/7449909?baselin... It's for 5800H which is at 45W where Ryzen can get a tiny edge.

Ok, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the 5800U@15W.

On Cinebench, the 5800U gets much more than the M1 in multicore and slightly more in single core. It even edges out the M1 on Geekbench, though Gb is a poor benchmark.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#778

Post by acdha »

CountHackulus wrote: post #746
acdha wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're certainly correct for, say, highly-controlled benchmarks but don't discount subjective user experience. I've heard _far_ more M1 users talk about the subjective feel compared to even the previous generation MacBook hardware whereas it's been a long time since I've heard that about an Intel to Intel upgrade (basically since the Core -> Core Duo period) other than people with GPU-heavy needs and that seems like…

I do wonder how much of that is just getting a nice new laptop? If the average user was handed the equivalent laptop with an Intel CPU but told it was an M1 would they notice? Would they also think it was nice and fast?

Possibly but it feels like that should have but has not happened to anything like this degree when people were getting shiny new Intel CPUs after the early 2010s.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#779

Post by thehnguy »

KMnO4 wrote: post #533
kevstev wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I w…

I think that’s because 99% of regular computer tasks don’t need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second. The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind. My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only…

This is perhaps the real genius of the M1. It's a great chip and all. But when you make it the only choice, people are finding the only choice is more than sufficient. And now Apple only has to produce one piece of silicon for their iMacs, iPad Pro, and Laptops. What a boon for logistics.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#780

Post by thehnguy »

bredren wrote: post #359
jbverschoor wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No reflection? The iPad Pro running the Axxx soc was already insanely powerful. x86 is a monster with this huge legacy. Sounds to me more like the usual anti-apple speak.. The whole article is about not having to choose between performance and powerusage. With "5000", which 5000 do you mean? A 100W cpu of about the full cost of a macmini? This is the whole point of the article. Apple made a monster move. Next up: App…

I had wondered what their first Apple Silicon powered data center would be. I thought the company would wait and deploy a later gen chip. Though with the standardization of M1 across such a wide array of products makes me think it is going to be the M1.

I was bit surprised to see M1 in the iMacs. I thought the M1 was going to be a very capable proof of concept. But now we've got it in iMacs, iPads, and Macbooks. So I wouldn't be shocked if they spread it far and wide.
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