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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#791

Post by sgerenser »

vr46 wrote: post #771
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #615

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…

You know, I would have sworn that Dvorak used to write a Mac column for an American Macuser or Macworld when I was a student in the 1990s, waxing lyrical about the Mac.

He did write for a while in one of those publications, but he hardly waxed lyrical. It was mostly vaguely negative “insights” about Apples business strategy and how awesome they could be if they just listened to him.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#792

Post by ekianjo »

ogre_codes wrote: post #657
ekianjo wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Raspberry Pi both use no bullshit ARM setups. Seriously? You need a blob from Broadcom to even boot the thing, and you call that a no bullshit ARM setup? I am astounded.

Compared to the amount of bullshit we had to to deal with in the 90s and 00s getting Linux running on a laptop, it's a walk in the park. Often it was a choice between mediocre FLOSS drivers or binary blobs from 2-3 private parties... when things even had drivers at all. It's been a while, but how many laptops lack wifi support or require proprietary drivers to work now? Are the FLOSS drivers for Nvidia's cards great…

> It's been a while, but how many laptops lack wifi support or require proprietary drivers to work now?

Very few actually.

> Are the FLOSS drivers for Nvidia's cards great now?

Don't shift goalposts, we are talking about CPU support, not GPUs... GPU support on ARM is anyway not that great to begin with.

> What people are describing as "Open" is actually an enormous amount of work on the part of developers and the grudging support of hardware vendors after decades of struggle.

Intel has Linux dedicated teams at least, pushing FOSS code every single day. Most ARM licensees could not care one bit about FOSS.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#793

Post by ekianjo »

josephcsible wrote: post #724
ekianjo wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you buy a desktop with those right now?

POWER: Yes, https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html RISC-V: Not really. The closest thing is probably https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched

> POWER

at prohibitive costs. So not really an option...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#794

Post by vr46 »

sgerenser wrote: post #791
vr46 wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I would have sworn that Dvorak used to write a Mac column for an American Macuser or Macworld when I was a student in the 1990s, waxing lyrical about the Mac.

He did write for a while in one of those publications, but he hardly waxed lyrical. It was mostly vaguely negative “insights” about Apples business strategy and how awesome they could be if they just listened to him.

Fair enough, it was a long long time ago. I guess he hasn't changed. Pundits never need to be right.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#795

Post by shawnz »

wpietri wrote: post #643
coldtea wrote: post #539

Earlier 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…

These all strike me as evolutionary changes. People will be doing about the same things as before. They will do them a bit faster, and not have to plug in as often. I expect revolutionary changes to overturn an existing order. E.g., the Mac was revolutionary. Smartphones were revolutionary. This is a solid and impressive evolutionary change. Kudos to them, of course. But when actual revolutions happen, I would like t…

Smartphones can be just as easily trivialized into being something which lets us "do the same things as before, but faster and with less plugs".

I think it is wrong to say there is a clear difference between these kind of changes. We won't really know how "revolutionary" M1 was until we see the landscape of the market in the future, but I think the simple fact of dropping x86 alone is enough to enable some major new ways of looking at desktop computing.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#796

Post by josephcsible »

ekianjo wrote: post #793
josephcsible wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POWER: Yes, https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html RISC-V: Not really. The closest thing is probably https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched

> POWER at prohibitive costs. So not really an option...

They don't seem that expensive. They're high-end machines themselves, and their pricing seems on-par with high-end x86 workstations, like the Dell Precision series.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#797

Post by mikepurvis »

pjmlp wrote: post #753
mikepurvis wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But for the last twenty years, surely pretty much every linux-capable ARM part produced in excess of Q>1M has fallen into one of two buckets— either a) a device that runs on batteries, or b) an embedded, specialized processor such as for a router, vehicle infotainment, or home appliance.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#798

Post by ascagnel_ »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #226
wayneftw wrote: post #187

> M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs... Sure, if you can bear living in a prison complex that has shitty window management and a petty tyrant of a warden.

I am willing to bet if mods did some data munging they would find sockpuppetry of a hail corporate type at work, because if hn is really this brainwashed about macs it makes me sad.

Apple has always operated with a more closed-off ecosystem that sacrifices openness for tighter control on the user experience, and that's always been at odds with the "I want access to everything so I can tinker" mindset on HN. I expect any HN discussion about Apple to be a mess, because the average HN commenter/reader wants something very different than what Apple sells.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#799

Post by jtbayly »

freeAgent wrote: post #668
kag0 wrote: post #630

Earlier 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…

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…

Not getting hot or loud while lasting forever on battery are easily observeable selling points I’d say.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#800

Post by sod »

sod wrote: post #776
p1necone wrote: post #612

A lot of the arguments here seem to come from people thinking laptops are the only game in town. When someone makes unqualified claims about the m1 beating "all the other PC cpus" of course people are going to compare it to desktop chips. Even Apple themselves advertised it as the "worlds fastest CPU core" when they announced it, which is blatantly untrue. People aren't saying that this isn't a very compelling CPU, t…

So on my macbook pro 8gb m1, everything node.js related (thats what I work with, node.js compiled to arm via `npm install v15`) is more then 2x as fast as on ryzen 3900x PC, and even faster as on my i7 16" 32gb 2018 macbook pro. Example: My angular project compiles in 65 seconds on the intel macbook - while fans screaming in terror. And in 30 seconds in the m1 macbook - not even getting warm. So if Intel came with a…

`nvm install v15`, not npm :D
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