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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

#891

Post by ctdonath »

totalZero wrote: post #880
stevenwliao wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like how no one cares about which chip is in their smart TV, regardless of price range. They just want to watch Netflix without UI bugs.

TVs are sold on refresh rate, color accuracy, contrast, backlight localization, and panel resolution. This stuff is written on the box and promoted in marketing material. They are unavoidably differentiated on technical specs, even in the eyes of a layperson. Some of those specs depend on the panel (itself a semiconductor product) and others depend on processors/ICs. I'm not suggesting that no parts can ever be a com…

Most TV customers can’t articulate the difference. Many may state a preference but only because such numbers are prevalent and associated. Were the numbers not advertised, most wouldn’t ask.

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

#892

Post by hajile »

enragedcacti wrote: post #657
fireattack wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ARM nowadays is just straightly better than x86?

For the most part I think so. The main advantages x86 has are based on code size. Many common instructions are 1 or 2 bytes so the executable size on x86 can often be smaller (and more instructions can fit in the instruction cache). I'm sure there are tons of other small differences that weigh in but I'm not well versed enough to know of them.

A paper I read a few months ago compared instruction density between a few different ISAs. Thumb was 15% denser and aarch64 was around 15% less dense compared to x86. Unfortunately, mode switching in thumb impacts performance which is why they dropped it.

RISCV compressed instructions are interesting in that they offer the same compact code as thumb, but without the switching penalty (internally, they are expanded in place to normal 32-bit instructions before execution).

If they added some dedicated instructions in place of some fused ones, that density could probably increase even more (I say probably because two 16-bit instructions can equal one 32-bit dedicated instruction in a lot of those cases).

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they start designing high performance chips in the near future.

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

#893

Post by hajile »

domano wrote: post #715

People underestimate AMD and mix it in together with the current Intel chips when talking about the M1. Ryzen is not far behind M1 in single thread performance and beats it in multi core. If Intel had not made all kinds of deals with laptop makers for exclusivity then the narrative would be totally different in my opinion.

AMD have a license from ARM. Supposedly, Zen is pretty flexible. I’d love to see where they’d get just by swapping out the ISA.

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

#894

Post by ses1984 »

Bayart wrote: post #512
ses1984 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which competitor has a touchpad that’s equal to or better than apple?

The very latest Lenovo laptops have touchpads made by Sensel. That should roll all over Apple's stuff, hardware-wise.

It’s not all about the hardware, how are Linux drivers for that thing?

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

#895

Post by ses1984 »

ModernMech wrote: post #441
ses1984 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which competitor has a touchpad that’s equal to or better than apple?

I prefer the touchpad on my Surface Book 2 to the one on my Macbook Pro (2019). The one on my Macbook is comically huge, and I also am not in love with the feel/click noise compared to the Surface Book. YMMV.

The bigger the better as far as I’m concerned that’s half the reason I went with a 15” model.

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

#896

Post by hajile »

bitL wrote: post #579

Would M1 scale up with 64GB or even 1.5TB of RAM? It's not possible to have that much memory integrated; what would be the performance difference in that case?

Samsung started shipping 16GB LPDDR5 modules last year. They are supposedly 1.5x the speed and 20% lower power.

Double the stacks from 2 to 4 and moving from 8GB to 16GB gives 64GB. The two extra channels and extra performance gives something like 3x the bandwidth at only a bit more power. That seems perfect for feeding more cores and a larger GPU.

I’d love to see a move toward 512-bit HBM3. It seems like the perfect compromise. It doesn’t need expensive silicon interposers and offers decent latency while still having a lot of bandwidth. HBM2e uses about half the power as GDDR6 for the same bandwidth (I don’t know about HBM3 power numbers)

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

#897

Post by slver »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #792
slver wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just explained above there's no single M1. They vary by core count, and by clockrate. And probably more. The only thing that's "one" about M1 is the brand. It's one brand. It's easy to have a clean brand, when you don't sell naked CPUs by themselves. "Oh everything we have has M1". It doesn't even matter if this is accurate or not, we realize that, right? Are we going to hold up Intel for having hundreds of SKUs be…

I thought you were making a claim that Apple would eventually trend like Intel with hundreds of SKUs. I don't see apple complicating its CPU line like that because it has no need to: the M1 works in a variety of scenarios, which which is what the OP was pointing out.

Apple has no need to complicate its CPU line like that because it doesn't sell CPUs. It sells the whole banana.

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

#898

Post by Bayart »

ses1984 wrote: post #894
Bayart wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very latest Lenovo laptops have touchpads made by Sensel. That should roll all over Apple's stuff, hardware-wise.

It’s not all about the hardware, how are Linux drivers for that thing?

No idea, it's very new so the driver side is probably flaky. This being said Lenovo is shipping it on Thinkpads and the likes, so Linux support shouldn't too far fetched.

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

#899

Post by leokennis »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #606
baybal2 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field. Not look too bad best to say. Even if we add a one node advantage, we still have a ~15 watt chip making 20W-30W chips sweat. If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get M1 beating it by double digit margin. M1 is simply a way more efficient chip than any X86 chip can be because…

Trust me, it does not have 40 years of architectural advantage, just an advantage. It's not going to take Intel "40 years to catch up" give me break. I have an M1 mini anad it's a great little desktop machine for browsing and light development but it's not 40 years ahead of intel.

> great little desktop machine for browsing and light development

Oh come on. You’re making it sound like a toy computer that’s nice for little Debbie who can now watch YouTube videos a little faster.

While my MacBook Air is unplugged, I can edit 4K video in full frame rate for hours and it doesn’t even get warm, let alone hot.

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

#900

Post by jbergens »

chrisco255 wrote: post #589
KMnO4 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core per Chrome tab.

Shouldn't that be one 8GB memory bank per tab?
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