Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

941–950 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#941

Post by gowld »

vlunkr wrote: post #930
throwaway4good wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

I think price comparisons depend on what you're looking for. You cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$. That's pretty steep, especially considering other laptops will let you upgrade the RAM yourself. And along with that you get the touch bar and the garbage keyboard. I'm just one person, but that's why I would never buy one of these.

> cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$

$1200 for the Macbook Air with 16GB RAM in USA. No touchbar, no garbage keyboard.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#942

Post by fiftyfifty »

hbbio wrote: post #519
maz1b wrote: post #48

This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years. For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out 16 inch MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600m and even with that I'm regularly hitting 100% usage of the card, and…

It's also funny that Johny Srouji and probably others in his team come from the team at Intel in Israel that "saved" Intel in the early 2000s by designing the Intel Core architecture which is still used by Intel today. cf. Anandtech article from 2003: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1083/2

It's also worth pointing out that Apple is also benefitting from TSMC's latest and best fab processes. Intel is not only behind architecturally but in manufacturing too:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3572624/tsmc-details-its-fu...

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#944

Post by valuearb »

marcan_42 wrote: post #934
valuearb wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rosetta2 is mind blowing. “ fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1” https://mobile.twitter.com/hhariri/status/132678854650246349... “…and ~14 nanoseconds on an M1 emulating an Intel”

How does it handle DSP inner loops? SIMD? x87 code? Floating point corner cases like denormals? What about the inevitable cases where impedance mismatch between the architectures causes severe performance loss? Is Rosetta2 binary translated code guaranteed to be realtime-safe if the original code was? What about the JIT? There's no way that is realtime-safe. What happens if some realtime code triggers the JIT? We sti…

Rosetta2 is not emulation.

Edit: And Apple has already discussed how Rosetta2 handles complexities like self modifying code. It probably won’t help with performance but the M1 has a lot of power to keep even that code running fast.

But more importantly video/audio apps aren’t going to be using Rosetta2 for very long. 99% of code written for x86 MacOS is going to be a simple recompile to native, if not more. Not going native when your competitors did and got 2-5x faster is corporate suicide.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#945

Post by greedo »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #818
Tepix wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance. That's exactly the reason why you would chose Apple Silicon right now where you can choose between Intel and Apple SoC. There are of course other reasons such as battery life and price.

Not really. Right now Apple Silicon would be translating most code and therefore be slower and possibly have worse battery life. By the time that isn't true anymore, the option of buying Intel from Apple will be gone and your choices will be ARM from Apple or a PC with Intel/AMD. The x64 options from Apple are also uncompetitive with existing PCs already because they're using Intel processors when AMD's are faster.

Most code? I would imagine that most code run on Apple laptops today would start with Safari. And then Slack, some IDEs, etc etc. These will all get ported extremely fast if they haven't already been.

There will be a long tail of edge case software that runs in emulation, but that won't affect the majority of users.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#946

Post by hundchenkatze »

valuearb wrote: post #919
gregoriol wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One has to remember that Apple is still selling an Intel mac mini at the top of the range: it likely means something about the performance to expect from M1 vs Intel.

I remember when Intel simultaneously released the first x86, 286, and 386 CPUs all on the same day. What exciting times it was! Apple released a killer low end SOC in the M1. It contains the highest performance single core processor in the world along with high end multi core performance. But it’s limited to 16Gb and two USB4/Thunderbolt ports, so it’s targeted at the low end. When the M2 is released mid next year, i…

Wait.. they've already announced specs for a M2 chip?

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#947

Post by greedo »

vlunkr wrote: post #930
throwaway4good wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

I think price comparisons depend on what you're looking for. You cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$. That's pretty steep, especially considering other laptops will let you upgrade the RAM yourself. And along with that you get the touch bar and the garbage keyboard. I'm just one person, but that's why I would never buy one of these.

The old butterfly keyboard that was prone to failure is history.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#948

Post by vlunkr »

gowld wrote: post #941
vlunkr wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think price comparisons depend on what you're looking for. You cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$. That's pretty steep, especially considering other laptops will let you upgrade the RAM yourself. And along with that you get the touch bar and the garbage keyboard. I'm just one person, but that's why I would never buy one of these.

> cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$ $1200 for the Macbook Air with 16GB RAM in USA. No touchbar, no garbage keyboard.

Ah, you're right there. I didn't realize you could modify that.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#949

Post by jimbokun »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #569
seunosewa wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many apps optimized for the x64 platform won't run as well as the benchmarks.

I think this is an important one to keep in mind. I'm sure most native Mac apps will be compiled to ARM, but a lot of existing apps won't. Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps. I for one really wouldn't mind if Apple would build a native app to replace Electron apps, e.g. a chat app that works as a good client for (what I have open right now in Rambox) Discord, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and multiple Slack chann…

> Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps.

Won't this be handled by just porting V8 to the M1?

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#950

Post by valuearb »

hundchenkatze wrote: post #946
valuearb wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Intel simultaneously released the first x86, 286, and 386 CPUs all on the same day. What exciting times it was! Apple released a killer low end SOC in the M1. It contains the highest performance single core processor in the world along with high end multi core performance. But it’s limited to 16Gb and two USB4/Thunderbolt ports, so it’s targeted at the low end. When the M2 is released mid next year, i…

Wait.. they've already announced specs for a M2 chip?

No, but it’s pretty clear what next release will be. They will move Apple Silicon to the rest of their MacBooks, and into their iMacs. 16 gb RAM and two ports ain’t going to cut it for them.

Where I can be wrong is that Apple could release two chips. First an upgraded M1, let’s call it M1x that supports a bit more on chip ram (24 or 32 Gb) and four ports. It would be only for high end MacBook Pros and again optimized for battery life.

And they would release a M1d for desktops that has more cores, but moves RAM off chip. That would improve multicore performance, but I don’t know how it much it would hurt single core with slower memory fetches. Probably they could compensate with higher clock speeds, power budgets, and more active cooling.

Post reply on HN