[HN Gopher] 2020 Mac Mini - Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
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2020 Mac Mini - Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
Author : kissiel
Score : 595 points
Date : 2020-11-17 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| anoncow wrote:
| Can AMD/Intel pivot to ARM and provide the efficiency benefits to
| the non-Apole ecosystem?
|
| Can Apple's M1X/M2 outperform desktop CPUs?
|
| Qualcomm tried their hand at desktop CPUs with Microsoft a few
| years back. Is it time they tried again?
|
| How comparable is a Surface Go with the performance/efficiency of
| M1?
| AgloeDreams wrote:
| AMD has tried a bit, Intel probably won't. You can still get
| great numbers on desktop x86 with better cores and processes.
| Zen 4 is perfectly good so far. Apple's M1 already outperforms
| most desktop CPUs, it goes to reason that a model with more
| cores and bigger L1 could outperform the whole industry.
|
| Surface Go is nowhere close, half as fast in single core, 1/5th
| as fast in multicore. The 5W TDP is really a generic number
| with no real meaning as Intel doesn't really abide by it, I
| would say it probably uses about the same power as the M1,
| possibly much more under turbo while also having a much higher
| power floor (IE: When at idle the Surface go uses much more
| power)
|
| Keep in mind that the Surface Go is very low-cost and the CPU
| is at a 14nm build.
| anoncow wrote:
| Would the M1 with more cores be able to beat the threadripper
| at the same wattage? Right now the M1 stands at a score of
| 8000 Vs Threadripper's 25000. The comparison I am sure is not
| just about comparing benchmark scores, but is there a
| prediction possible given that the M1 is at a 24W TDP whereas
| the threadripper has a 280W TDP (A 3x change in the
| benchmarks alongside a 10x change in TDP)
|
| Does Qualcomm or Samsung have a M1 beater in their kitty?
| hajile wrote:
| It costs more to move 2 bytes into the CPU than to actually
| add them. As you go bigger, you spend an increasingly
| larger amount of time and energy moving data as opposed to
| actually calculating things.
|
| Anandtech numbers showed 50-89% of total power consumption
| for the 7601 being used for Infinity Fabric. With 89w
| remaining spread among 32 cores, that's a mere 2.78w per
| core or 1.39w per thread at an all-core turbo of 2.7GHz.
|
| Oh, I'd note that the 7601 is a 14nm Zen 1 part.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-
| threadripper-29...!
| obblekk wrote:
| I'm really curious what Xcode and IntelliJ compile times look
| like for real world repos.
|
| It's a single use case, but by far the most common one for me
| where I genuinely feel productivity slowed by my computer.
| Hopefully good news there as well.
| arvinsim wrote:
| As someone using Jetbrains products, I would get no less than
| 32GB for my machine :)
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Dave2D had xcode benchmarks and it seems like... It's faster
| than the iMac Pro, and even faster than his friends hackintosh.
| Might be the fastest, or almost the fastest, out of Apples
| entire lineup.
|
| https://youtu.be/XQ6vX6nmboU at minute 3
| alfonsodev wrote:
| I'm looking this repo[1] for reference, something must be
| off, because a mid 2015 has half the time in incremental
| build, of course the project matters, but Dave doesn't reveal
| the name of the app they are compiling or I missed it.
|
| [1] https://github.com/ashfurrow/xcode-hardware-performance
| mtgx wrote:
| It seems that Apple kept its eyes on the goal of beating Intel,
| while underestimating AMD (like just about everyone else).
|
| Still, now Apple has the #2 fastest CPU on the market and with
| different ISA. Intel....#3. Oh, how the mighty has fallen.
|
| At least AMD won't get to rest on its laurels now, as Apple will
| definitely try to surpass Zen 4, too, now, or at least Zen 5.
| hu3 wrote:
| I wonder what will happen when AMD launches 5nm processors.
| wmf wrote:
| Apple will be releasing 3nm M3 processors that will probably
| still be faster.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| It's always a slippery slope comparing future products to
| present day products. Apple has additional CPUs coming out
| over the next 2 years as well. It's going to be an
| interesting couple of years.
| jmull wrote:
| Well, Apple released the M1 as their low-end chip, putting it
| in the entry-level slot of their low-power Macs.
|
| They may have something with substantially more power in store
| soon.
| vel0city wrote:
| The cheapest MacBook Air with an M1 chip is $1,000. The
| cheapest Mac Pro with an M1 chip is $1,300.
|
| I don't consider a $1,000+ laptop "entry level" or "low end".
| These are high-end machines.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| High-end, maybe. Not high-performance. There are segments
| and use cases where Apple simply doesn't have an offering.
| alwillis wrote:
| _I don 't consider a $1,000+ laptop "entry level" or "low
| end". These are high-end machines._
|
| In the Apple ecosystem, a $1000 laptops are low-end
| devices.
|
| The iMac Pro [1] and the Mac Pro [2] are high-end,
| professional level machines. The iMac Pro _starts_ at
| $5,000; the Mac Pro at $6000.
|
| The biggest difference is that Apple doesn't sell commodity
| hardware that virtually every PC OEM does. That was a
| deliberate choice many years ago.
|
| BTW, the M1 Mac mini starts at $699 and blows away all the
| PCs in it's class, including those that cost more.
|
| Some Hollywood studios have already talked about replacing
| much more expensive computers with the Mac mini because
| it's so fast [3]. No joke.
|
| To be clear, you're not going to render a full-length movie
| in 4k on an M1-based Mac mini--that's what the Mac Pro is
| for. But for less demanding 4k editing tasks that would
| have been unthinkable on an under $1000 machine a year ago,
| certainly.
|
| [1]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-pro
|
| [2]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro
|
| [3]: _Hollywood thinks new Mac mini 'could be huge' for
| video editors_:
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/12/hollywood-
| thinks-...
| ogre_codes wrote:
| At some point you have to recognize that different product
| lines and market segments have different entry points.
| Otherwise you end up comparing everything to the Raspberry
| Pi, and every computer is "High-End".
| romanoderoma wrote:
| Well, it depends
|
| The Renault Zoe EV and Tesla Model 3 have the same price.
|
| The Renault Zoe is very low end compared to a Tesla, what
| make them cost the same?
|
| An EV includes technology that is very costly and even a
| middle end car ends up costing like a base offer in a
| higher segment (because the Zoe EV is the premium offer
| in their segment)
|
| You can't get any lower than that
|
| A Zoe with an ICE engine costs in fact 10k less.
|
| The same exact car.
|
| There is no equivalent for Tesla, Tesla does not make
| cars in that segment and even if they could, they won't
| do it.
|
| Said in other words: a low end Mac costs and has specs of
| a high end machine
|
| Highly castrated from the manufacturer (only 16GB of RAM
| tops?) but definitely not low end, not even for Apple
|
| It's their base offer for the high end segment
|
| Which is very different from saying it's a low end
| machine.
|
| Their aren't low end, they are simply not premium (there
| isn't going to be a big difference in performances
| between the two, only a different positioning, equipment
| and less artificial limitations from the manufacturer)
|
| They are like AMD K6 CPUs that you could overclock using
| a pencil
|
| The conclusions of this review support the idea that the
| specs of the Mac mini are not far from what we could
| expect from the pro models
|
| > _In the new Macbook Pro, we expect the M1 to showcase
| similar, if not identical performance to what we've seen
| on the new Mac mini_
| mikey_p wrote:
| You may not consider it such, but they are the entry level
| Apple machines at the lowest end of their product range.
| acmecorps wrote:
| You have the Mac Mini, which is way below $1k, but for
| mobile macOS? yes, $1k is the minimum
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That doesn't mean they are low end laptops. A rolls-royce
| is also not ever a low-end car. They are the cheapest
| products Apple offers. But they are still high-end.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of Apple, but this makes me genuinely happy.
| Seeing discussions and benchmarks of CPUs where Intel isn't even
| a contender is fantastic. What a lovely day!
| akritrime wrote:
| The last sentence on the first page has a typo, I think. I am
| guessing it would be `tough competition`, not `though
| competition`.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I never understand downvotes in this situation. Like are you
| mad someone is calling out typos? I mean I'm not surprised, I
| got downvotes for the literally the same thing [0] a few days
| ago when anandtech published another article full of typos... I
| like their reporting but the typos and the multi-page nonsense
| is a huge turnoff.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25052892
| MBCook wrote:
| I would assume the down votes are because this doesn't really
| add to the discussion at all. If you spot typos why not
| notify the original website instead?
| akritrime wrote:
| That's what I hoped to do with the original comment. I
| didn't want to send them an email for something this
| trivial and I was just leaving the comment in case anyone
| from Anandtech stumbled upon it. The typo is not really an
| issue and my comment was not a criticism. I was just trying
| to be helpful but I can see how that can appear to be when
| my comment is just about the typo and not the content of
| the post.
| akritrime wrote:
| Honestly I don't mind. I was not commenting on the quality of
| the post, neither was the typo that much of an issue. I have
| seen people from Anandtech active in the hackernews and I
| just this is a good way of reaching them and letting them
| know something trivial with their posts.
| [deleted]
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I think I'm nearly ready to buy one of these... does anyone know
| of any benchmarks showing a Javascript test suite running? Be
| interesting to compare to to my current machine... the
| performance of node being good (and the sort of stop start choppy
| test suite stuff) would probably make me go for it.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I don't think there is enough test yet, why is it only Cinebench
| and Geekbench? Show us real test with ffmpeg, gcc etc ...
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| There are more pages behind that first page, see at the bottom
| of the article.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| They state in the article:
|
| > As we've had very little time with the Mac mini, and the fact
| that this not only is a macOS system, but a new Arm64-based
| macOS system, our usual benchmark choices that we tend to use
| aren't really available to us.
|
| I think most other benchmarks weren't compiled for MacOS on ARM
| yet.
| lizknope wrote:
| There are benchmarks for SPEC INT 2006 which includes a gcc
| benchmark.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Does ffmpeg even compile on M1 yet?
| zachberger wrote:
| There are multiple pages in the review with more benchmarks
| than the ones you mentioned.
| apetrovic wrote:
| WebKit compilation:
| https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1328700636926332928?s=21
| dtech wrote:
| Impressive results from Apple, and another well-deserved kick in
| the teeth for Intel after years of stagnation. The coming decade
| is going to finally see some interesting developments in the CPU
| market again.
| taftster wrote:
| Right, I think in the end, this is going to show just how bad
| monopolies (or near-monopolies) can be for innovation. These
| are super impressive results, just hoping that the rest of
| Apple (software, developer relations) can turn away from the
| draconian future they are currently heading.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The Cinebench R23 results seem kinda weird to me. The 5950X would
| have almost a 40 % clock speed advantage over the M1 (~5 GHz 1C
| vs 3.2 GHz 1C), yet the M1 is only about 8 % slower in an
| entirely ALU-limited SIMD benchmark? This suggests the M1 core
| has like 50 % more EUs and achieves much higher throughput than
| Zen 3.
|
| The SPEC results are... decisive to say the least. Without Zen 3,
| x86 CPUs would look, well... like shit. All Intel offerings,
| including the Sunny Cove part (so not a 7 year old uarch), look
| uniformly bad across all workloads.
| phire wrote:
| You overestimate how ALU limited Cinebench is.
|
| I managed to find an AVX vs AVX off benchmark run for Cinebench
| r20 [1]. Going from 128bit SSE to 256bit AVX and doubling the
| ALUs only results in a 10-12% increase in performance.
|
| I assume this has to do with how each SIMD lane of calculation
| might need to branch independently, limiting the performance
| speedup from just throwing wider SIMD ALUs at it.
|
| [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/post-your-
| cineben...
| diimdeep wrote:
| ELI5 please, how this change things for M1
| phire wrote:
| There is more than one way to scale. Over the last decade,
| Intel had been pushing wider SIMD.
|
| Instead of making your cpu able to execute more
| instructions per cycle, why don't you make each instruction
| do more work. SSE packs four floats/ints or two
| doubles/longs into a single 128bit register and then you
| can do the same ALU operation to each lane.
|
| It works great on certain workloads.
|
| With AVX, Intel increased the size of these registers to
| 256bit (eight floats) in 2011 and are currently pushing
| AVX512 doubles the width again (16 floats).
|
| Apple, and ARM in general are limited to 128bit vector
| registers (though they are plans to increase that in the
| future)
|
| Cinebench is well known as a benchmark which takes
| advantage of the 256bit AVX registers, and some people have
| speculated that Apple's M1 might be at a significant
| disadvantage because of this, with just half the ALU
| thoughput.
|
| But these numbers show that while cinebench gets a notable
| boost from AVX, it's not as large as you might think (at
| least on this workload), allowing the M1's IPC advantage to
| shine though.
| hajile wrote:
| I'd note that both arguments have merit.
|
| A SIMD is basically controller + ALUs. A wider SIMD gives
| a better calculation to controller ratio. Fewer
| instructions decreases pressure on the entire front-end
| (decoder, caches, reordering complexity, etc). This is
| more efficient overall _if fully utilized_.
|
| The downsides are that wide units can affect core
| clockspeeds (slowing down non-SIMD code too), programmers
| must optimize their code to use wider and wider units,
| and some code simply can't use execution units wider than
| a certain amount.
|
| Since x86 wants to decrease decode at all costs (it's
| very expensive), this approach makes a lot of sense to
| push for. If you're doing math on large matrices, then
| the extra efficiency will make a lot of sense (this is
| why AVX512 was basically left to workstation and HPC
| chips).
|
| Apple's approach gambles that they can overcome the
| inefficiencies with higher utilization. Their decode
| penalty isn't as high which is the key to their strategy.
| They have literally twice the decode width of x86 (8-wide
| vs 4-wide -- things get murky with x86 combined
| instructions, but I believe those are somewhat less
| common today).
|
| In that same matrix code, they'll have (theoretically) 4x
| as many instructions for the same work as AVX512 (2x vs
| AVX2, so we'd expect to see the x86 approach pay off
| here. In more typical consumer applications, code is more
| likely to use intermittent vectors of short width. If the
| full x86 SIMD can't be used, then the rest is just
| transistors and power wasted (a very likely reason why
| AMD still hasn't gone wider than AVX2).
|
| To keep peak utilization, M1 has a massive instruction
| window (a bit less than 2x the size as Intel and close to
| 3x the size of AMD at present). This allows it to look
| far ahead for SIMD instructions to execute and should
| help offset the difference in the total number of
| instructions in SIMD-heavy code too.
|
| Now, there's a caveat here with SVE. Scalable vector
| extensions allow the programmer to give a single
| instruction along with the execution width. The
| implementation will then have the choice of using a
| smaller SIMD and executing a lot or a wider SIMD and
| executing fewer cycles. The M1 has 4 floating point SIMD
| units that are supposedly identical (except that one has
| some extra hardware for things like division). They could
| be allowing these units to gang together into one big
| SIMD if the vector is wide enough to require it. This is
| quite a bit closer to the best of both worlds (still have
| multiple controllers, but lose all the extra instruction
| pressure).
| vdfs wrote:
| ELI5: Some things that ARM can do in one instruction, can
| be done with multiple instructions on x86
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| That's absolutely not the conclusion here.
|
| One person thought that benchmarks were saying that the
| M1 had strong SIMD performance, but the reality is that
| cinebench (and in fact most renderers) doesn't use SIMD
| very effectively when looking at the whole process, and
| the assumption that it demonstrates SIMD performance is
| not correct.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Intel's CPUs have been getting remarkably worse for a long time
| now.
|
| They trail the software improvements. To give you an anecdote -
| I got a ThinkPad T430s and it made my work feel 10x faster(Java
| EE development in 2012). I got my next ThinPad P51s in 2017 -
| an it was just one huge disappointment. It felt like Intel was
| stepping back. I now have ThinkPad P1 and computing power is
| still just OK, though still better than the U class i7 in P51s.
|
| I'll be happy to knock Apple for marketing BS("3 times faster",
| etc). But Intel has shown that they just need to crumble. I
| hope that my next laptop is not using Intel's ISA or cores.
| bigboii wrote:
| >I got my next ThinPad P51s in 2017 - an it was just one huge
| disappointment. It felt like Intel was stepping back.
|
| the microcode bugs cut performance by 20-30% varrying in your
| workloads. and it comes with a 4k display? That would also
| contribute to a performance loss, depending on what you're
| doing.
|
| That 2.8-3.9 cpu would be equal to a 2.3-3.3 before the bug,
| afaik. Thats _hardly_ faster than 10 year old duals, wow!
|
| >>they just need to crumble.
|
| >Less competition will only make things worse for us
| consumers. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| fakedang wrote:
| I'd say Intel has been enjoying the fruits of its pseudo
| monopoly for far too long now.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| > Less competition will only make things worse for us
| consumers. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Intel is so large that it is using up too much of
| production capacity for anyone to enter the market. Intel
| crumbling = more resources for new players to get lower
| cost manufacturing capacities.
| EmmEff wrote:
| Is it safe to assume that future ASi CPUs for desktops will have
| just Firestorm cores and no Icestorm, which should further
| increase MT performance?
|
| I know Apple was trying to get to market quickly, but I fail to
| understand why we need Icestorm cores in a non-mobile CPU,
| especially with this already (really) low TDP.
| AgloeDreams wrote:
| More likely they will ship more Firestorm cores and keep the
| Icestorm. Their future chip designs will likely be cross
| desktop/mobile. Keeping Icestorm lowers the cost in whole by
| allowing them to ship more chips and gives about a 30%
| performance gain in multicore.
|
| Far more interesting to me is the idea that in heavy use, the
| Icestorm cores can run the OS, notifications and all that,
| allowing full uninterrupted use of the firestorm cores. Also
| when the mac is in idle it uses far less power.
|
| Basically, I fail to see a reason to not keep them :).
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Dave2D found the air to be on par with the Pro, at least for
| tasks that took under ~8.5 minutes. It only really throttled
| after that point, according to him.
| Aperocky wrote:
| So.. if I place it on a slab of ice, it would work the same as
| Pro?
|
| Tbh, the only reason I didn't even think of buying a pro is
| because I don't want the touch bar. I might still buy an air if
| there's no touch bar on the pro, but the decision will be a lot
| harder.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Both currently released M1 Pros have the touch bar, so it
| looks like your decision will be quite simple!
| [deleted]
| heipei wrote:
| I watched and read multiple reviews and Dave2D seems to be the
| only one who tried to quantify the throttling to some extent,
| all the others only had useless statements like "The Pro will
| probably be able to sustain unthrottled workloads for longer
| thanks to it's active cooling" - No shit, sherlock. For me the
| fact that it only throttles after 8-9 minutes (!) of heavy use
| is going to be the deciding factor that will allow me to go
| with the Air (and actual physical function keys) over the Pro,
| so thanks Dave.
| runeks wrote:
| Couldn't the Pro just turn on its fans after 8-9 minutes (to
| avoid throttling), thus giving the best of both worlds?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I assume it does. My 13" 2016 MBP doesn't turn on its fans
| much unless it's busy.
| manmal wrote:
| My 16" MBP is running its fans basically all day (iOS dev
| work and ARQ backups)
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, I think the 45W laptops always run them, even if
| sometimes very slowly. The smaller laptops have been able
| to turn them off completely for a while, though, when not
| very busy.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| That's exactly what it does.
|
| But 8-9 minutes of full 100% CPU is a relatively rare
| occurrence for the vast majority of users. Developers might
| occasionally do that, but it will be _very_ language and
| project dependent.
| molszanski wrote:
| Best of both of worlds is:
|
| - active cooling
|
| - lack of a touchbar
| grovellogic wrote:
| I've been wondering if someone could make an active
| cooling dock for the Mac Book Air. I was even thinking
| the M1 wattage is low enough that you could have a
| thermoelectric cooler lowering case temp down to room
| temp.
| 93po wrote:
| I mean if you're desperate to get it to compile in 20
| minutes instead of 25 for a particular occasion, you
| could just grab a bag of peas from the freezer and set
| the laptop on them.
| Siira wrote:
| The touchbar is pretty great if you program it yourself
| using, e.g., BetterTouchTool. I especially love the
| clipboard widget - works fantastic with VIM/EVIL.
| xenonite wrote:
| That would be the Mac Mini.
|
| But seriously, I share your opinion on laptop keyboards:
| regular function keys please.
| masklinn wrote:
| Somebody on twitter reported that during Rust compilation the
| Air started throttling a bit (20-30% hit) after 3-4mn. The
| Pro doesn't throttle.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's one data point that's particularly interesting to me. As
| someone who (normally) travels a great deal, I'd probably go
| with the Air unless there were real throttling compromises,
| especially given that I use a different computer for multimedia
| editing at home.
| murukesh_s wrote:
| Wish they re-introduce the discontinued Macbook 12 inch with
| the same specs as air. It weighed only 970grams vs 1.29 kg
| for air. In fact air feels bulky compared to other light
| weight laptops like LG Gram, not to mention the design is
| outdated. Always wondered why Apple killed the smaller model.
| Perhaps they want to push the iPad pro so killed off the
| netbook line. The wannabe traveller inside me keep drooling
| at 12 inch whenever i see it in someones hands. It feels so
| light and compact. With new M1 silicon, it's the ideal time
| to bring it back. I would grab it without any thought.
| Tagbert wrote:
| The 12" MacBook could not be updated to newer Intel
| chipsets due to thermal issues. The single port was also a
| limitation. Once Apple upgraded the Air to retina, a large
| part of the market for the 12" was lost. They were too
| close to each other and cross-competed except for the super
| portable use cases which was not large enough.
|
| This model of Air is obviously a transition product with
| new guts in an old shell. I suspect that as Apple introduce
| fully redesigned, second generation Apple Silicon products,
| you might see something that is closer to the 12" MacBook.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| I'm also hoping for thinner bezels as the current models'
| ones are just huge compared to Dell's XPS line for
| example. It's slowly becoming obvious that the design has
| barely changed since 2016 or so. The 16" model was a step
| in the right direction, but it's still not even close to
| what Dell is delivering.
|
| It'd be amazing if they managed to squeeze a 13" screen
| into the old 12" form factor - you'd still get great
| battery life thanks to the M1.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It seems like Apple is capable of it--look at the bezels
| on a new iPhone or iPad. But it would certainly require a
| whole new shell, which probably takes a while for Apple
| to design and ramp up because of all the machining
| involved.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| I'm also surprised they didn't bring that back with an M1.
| Here's to hoping it will be released next year to balance
| out the higher end 16" pro and whatever others come out
| next yet.
|
| I had the 12" MacBook for a couple years and the form
| factor was amazing. I backpacked around the world with it.
| But it was so underpowered, it was barely useful. I found
| myself using my phone more and more because it was less
| frustrating. I would love to see what an M1-powered 12"
| MacBook could be like!
| sooheon wrote:
| The 12 inch is still my favorite MacBook experience, having
| owned pretty much every form factor since pre-unibody white
| plastic. Can't wait to see what they can do in that hyper
| minimal portable niche with Apple Silicon.
| murukesh_s wrote:
| haven't used it, but can feel it. you are making me want
| it more.. wish Steve was alive, he would have perhaps
| kept it alive at least for bragging rights as smallest,
| lightest laptop on planet. Still remember Steve jobs
| introducing air inside an office envelope.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm definitely part of the target market (well, depending
| upon my mood) for a <13" laptop for travel. I've never been
| able to make an iPad-based workflow work for me. If nothing
| else I spend too much time with my laptop on my, well, lap
| and nothing with a removable keyboard works for me.
|
| Based on the data I've seen so far, I'm not sure why they
| even did a with fan Pro variant. Even if the market for an
| 11-12" model is smaller I'm not sure why they didn't do
| that instead. I was sure that was going to be the reason
| they didn't refresh their 12" Intel system.
| djrogers wrote:
| > Based on the data I've seen so far, I'm not sure why
| they even did a with fan Pro variant.
|
| The 'pro' variant released was the low-end 13, aka the 2
| port, formerly the 'macbook escape'. The 13" line has
| been bifurcated since 2016, with this one firmly lower-
| spec'd and powered.
|
| It's very likely that the '4 port', or high-end 13" pro
| will make more use of the active cooling, so it was
| likely worth it to develop the new laptop with it.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| They should probably release an 11" version of the air, I'm
| not sure a 12" having the same specs as the Air would be
| viable.
|
| However the interesting part would be what are they gonna
| do with their iPad Pro line at this point I don't see a
| reason for it not to run Big Sur or the Bigger Sur they'll
| release next year and compete directly with the surface.
|
| What I see Apple doing is the following:
|
| iPhone/iPad non-pro continuing to use A series SoCs and run
| iOS
|
| iPad Pro migrate to M series SoCs and become what is
| essentially Apple's Surface Pro
|
| Macbook Air 13" and 11" (possibly drop to a single 12"
| model) with M series SoCs this essentially will be the
| Surface Laptop/Book competitor
|
| Macbook Pro's will continue as they are 13" and 16" models,
| if Apple goes for 11" and 13" MBAs they might move the MBP
| to 14" and 16".
|
| Without discrete GPUs and essentially no way to "upgrade"
| the CPU to a higher model I don't really see the MBP 13"
| being viable in the long term tbh, I think they'll need a
| model that will differentiate it much more from the MBA and
| unless Apple starts binning their future M series SoCs much
| more in line with Intel and AMD I don't see them having too
| much of a range here for upgrades.
|
| So alternatively I also see them dropping the 13" MBP
| altogether and having only a 15" or 16" on whilst the Air
| will occupy the smaller form factors.
| ghaff wrote:
| Convergence can be overrated. Arguably Apple finally made
| tablets mainstream because they didn't feel the same need
| to maintain compatibility with their desktop/laptop line
| that others did.
|
| But it's hard not to see some sort of convergence between
| mobile, laptops, and desktops over time.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| They are doing convergence now with allowing iOS apps on
| Macs I can definitely see the iPad Pro line being moved
| closer to MacOS from a UI perspective, especially since
| the pen now works on all iPads.
| em500 wrote:
| There are several rumours about a return of the 12-inch in
| 2021H1.
| tinodotim wrote:
| That would be a great device to also include a touchscreen
| in a mac for the first time... after all macOS is getting
| more and more touch-capable UI and got iOS app support. :)
|
| But like you said, likely would eat into the iPad market -
| on the other side, as long as they don't make it a 2-in-1,
| the iPad should still have more than enough reason to
| exist.
| em500 wrote:
| Here's one data point: a WebKit compile took 25min on the Air
| vs 20min on the Mini/Pro. That 25min is still a bit faster than
| the Intel 16-inch Pro, which took 27min and waaay faster than
| Intel 13-inch Pro at 46min.
|
| The crazy thing is that both M1 MacBooks still had 91% battery
| left after the compile, vs 61% on the 16-inch Pro and 24% on
| the 13-inch Intel Pro.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-
| pro... -> "Compiling WebKit"
| nwlieb wrote:
| Is this a 1-1 comparison? If the ARM compile is compiling to
| ARM binaries then there might be less work/optimizations
| since it is a newer architecture. Seems like a test with two
| variables that changed. Would be interesting to see them both
| cross-compile to their respective opposite archs.
| mlyle wrote:
| Maybe not, but A) it's close-- most of the work of
| compiling is not microarchitecture-level optimizations or
| emitting code, and B) if you're a developer, even if some
| of the advantage is being on an architecture that it's
| easier to emit code for... that's still a benefit you
| realize.
|
| It's worth noting that cross-compiling is definitely harder
| in many ways, because you can't always evaluate constant
| expressions easily at compile-time in the same way your
| runtime code will, etc, too, and have to jump through
| hoops.
| marmaduke wrote:
| Hm my experience was that compiling C on arm was always
| super fast compared to x86, because the latter had much
| more work to do.
| mlyle wrote:
| jar% time x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c
| insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api x86_64-linux-
| gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I 0.97s
| user 0.02s system 99% cpu 0.992 total jar% time
| x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I
| inc -I ../../shared/api x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99
| -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I 0.93s user 0.03s system
| 99% cpu 0.965 total jar% time x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc
| --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I
| ../../shared/api x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c
| insgps14state.c -I inc -I 0.94s user 0.01s system 99% cpu
| 0.947 total jar% time x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3
| -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api
| x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I
| inc -I 0.92s user 0.04s system 99% cpu 0.955 total jar%
| time arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c
| insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api arm-linux-
| gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I
| 1.43s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 1.458 total jar% time
| arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c
| -I inc -I ../../shared/api arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc
| --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I 1.46s user
| 0.03s system 99% cpu 1.486 total jar% time arm-linux-
| gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I
| ../../shared/api arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c
| insgps14state.c -I inc -I 1.55s user 0.04s system 99% cpu
| 1.587 total jar% time arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99
| -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I inc -I ../../shared/api arm-
| linux-gnueabihf-gcc --std=c99 -O3 -c insgps14state.c -I
| inc -I 1.44s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 1.471 total
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| As someone who knows relatively little about this, I'm
| very curious why this is downvoted. It seems like a
| rebuttal would be enlightening.
| attractivechaos wrote:
| Apple has been optimizing the compiler for a decade for
| iOS.
| freehunter wrote:
| If everything else is the same, that seems like a solid
| reason to prefer the ARM architecture even setting aside
| 1:1 comparisons. Isn't faster compilation and execution the
| whole point of a faster processor?
| kag0 wrote:
| The assertion is that compilation might be faster since
| there are fewer optimizations, and therefore runtime
| would be slower.
| zaroth wrote:
| How is that anything less than _mind blowing_?
|
| Twice as fast, using 1/10th the battery life.... and that's
| for a part that costs Apple $70 instead of, what, $400?
| bengale wrote:
| Can you imagine how frustrating it must have been at Apple
| knowing what you had and having to deal with intel's crap
| over the last year or two.
| tonyhb wrote:
| This is insane perf/watt. x86 backwards compatibility may
| have gotten us to where we are, but it's certainly holding it
| back. Arm is looking great, and maybe it's time for x86 to
| die.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| It's time for Intel and x86 to die.
|
| But I would also be a little wary, because ARM systems are
| way more locked down than x86 systems today.
| vmception wrote:
| Is some of this because of those processor level
| flaws/exploits where the fixes resulted in disabling some
| processor commands making them slower and less efficient
|
| With only a completely new/different architecture getting
| those advances back?
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Why does Intel need to die? Sure they're not exactly the
| company they used to be, but would it be enough for them
| to just move away from x86? I'm just thinking I don't
| want just one or two or three companies doing procs.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Intel stagnated and at the same time started implementing
| some rather anti-consumer practices. This allowed AMD to
| take the performance lead off them with their latest
| generation of products. It's fantastic that the market
| for processors is so competitive. I've grown to not like
| Intel very much recently, but I'm glad they're here.
| They'll keep the pressure on for further innovation, so
| AMD will either need to keep up or be overtaken again.
| Either of which is a good outcome for consumers.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Resource allocation.
|
| Intel dying would free up resources for development by
| other companies.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| They don't need to die, but if they don't begin to
| compete they simple will die.
| StreamBright wrote:
| Absolutely not. We need more competition because the #1
| reason we got to this situation is mono culture and a
| single platform (x86). We need Apple to succeed of
| creating an alternative ARM based desktop/laptop platform
| and for more competition we could add in Mips64 from
| China to the mix. I am really hoping that by 2025 we are
| going to have 3 major platforms available for end
| customers, so that there is real competition.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Isn't having a whole bunch of different processor
| architectures at the same time kind of bad for end-users?
| spijdar wrote:
| This really depends. Once-upon-a-time, at least in the
| UNIX (tm) world, there were a plethora of ISAs, and this
| was the environment where ideas like Java really made
| sense. Write once, run anywhere.
|
| Most OSes are still pretty well situated to handle this.
| Java remains, and is easily cross platform. I can run
| Java-based proprietary games like Minecraft on my POWER9
| desktop, despite no-one involved probably ever
| considering ppc64le a valid target.
|
| The CLR on Windows is also pretty easily cross-platform,
| although it won't help legacy x86 PE executables. Apple
| has solved this for ages on the tooling side, encouraging
| production of "fat" binaries with many arches since OS X
| was NeXT, and your .app packages needed to run on x86 +
| m68k + SPARC + PA-RISC.
|
| Emulators like Rosetta (and qemu's usermode emulation)
| can fill the gap of legacy executables, while these other
| technologies can make the end-user experience good. Of
| course, that's only if a) someone writes your platform's
| equivalent of Rosetta, and b) developers write
| crossplatform apps.
|
| So, the answer depends on how cynical or optimistic you
| are :-)
| JAlexoid wrote:
| And where are those chips going to be made? The issue
| with Intel's dominance is it's complete dominance on the
| supply side as well.
|
| You fail to realize that this isn't like 3D printing, or
| other low volume manufacturing. You can't just setup a
| 100nm Si lithography lab in your spare room and churn out
| RISC-V chips.
|
| In 5 years - realistically we will have a few high
| performance(non-mobile) ARM chips manufactured at
| economic scale. Any other type of disruption would
| require Intel and AMD to fail and relinquish the supply
| side capacity... or China investing billions into new
| chipmaking facilities now.(it takes a few years to build
| that capacity)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| China already has 14nm online, and should have 7nm in a
| year or two, so that means that we will probably see some
| real RISC-V chips from there soon, if sanctions continue.
|
| So I think that we will have a four way competition
| between Intel, AMD, Apple, and Chinese RISC-V chips.
|
| That being said, I don't see x86 dying, I think AMD and
| eventually Intel when they wake up will be competitive.
| StreamBright wrote:
| I don't see X86 dying either, I think it will be dominant
| in the desktop/laptop segment for a long time. I am not
| sure why Longsoon uses Mips64 over RISC-V. Is RISC-V
| generally available and ready for prime times?
| StreamBright wrote:
| That is a great question. I am not familiar with how much
| the production of these CPUs are dependent on ASML, TSMC
| etc. I think think China is kind of forced to have its
| own supply chain after the Obama era ban on Intel chips
| in Chinese supercomputers.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/10/us_intel_china_ban
| /
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| And that backwards compatibility may not even be necessary,
| given Rosetta's performance. Sure Apple is using lots of
| tricks, but if Microsoft or any Linux project could get
| even somewhat close...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Based off of what happened with Rosetta1, I don't think
| devs should count on Rosetta2 being around forever
| romanoderoma wrote:
| Just as testimony, it probably doesn't mean much, but
| bakcwards compatibility you either have it or you don't,
| there's no middle ground
|
| Apple is one of the most capitalistic companies out
| there, they want you to buy new stuff and they'll try
| everything they can to force users to upgrade sooner or
| later
|
| The story is this: a friend of mine is a well respected
| illustrator and he has been a long time Mac user (at
| least since I remember)
|
| Few days ago he asked me advices about a new laptop and
| he asked for a PC because "new Mac OS will not work with
| my Photoshop version"
|
| He owns a license for Photoshop 6, payed for it and has
| no need to uograde, especially to the new subscription
| based licensing
|
| MacOS Sierra doesn't even work with Photoshop CS6
|
| The only option he had to keep using something he owned
| was to switch platform (Adobe allows platform change upon
| request)
|
| End of story.
|
| Backwards compatibility has no value until you need it.
|
| Just like an ambulance or a pacemaker.
| macintux wrote:
| > Apple is one of the most capitalistic companies out
| there, they want you to buy new stuff and they'll try
| everything they can to force users to upgrade sooner or
| later
|
| The more charitable view is that by not being wedded to
| backwards compatibility they can make their ecosystem
| stronger, faster.
|
| See https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-
| relentless-stra... for some discussion of those
| tradeoffs.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I've used Photoshop CS6 on both Sierra and High Sierra.
| It's ever-so-slightly more crash-prone than on older
| OS's, but totally usable.
|
| It launches on Mojave as well, so I'm pretty sure it
| works, but I haven't personally used it for any length of
| time. Catalina is what killed it.
|
| IMO, backwards compatibility in OSX/macOS was perfectly
| decent for a long time. Most software compiled for Intel
| that wasn't doing something weird continued to chug on,
| frequently with significant glitches but not to the point
| where the software was unusable. Then in Catalina Apple
| just gave up or something.
| klelatti wrote:
| It's odd isn't it because if they invested a little bit
| in Catalina and Rosetta they could probably have had a
| great backwards compatibility story even in a few years
| time - but it's just not in the DNA I guess.
| djxfade wrote:
| In Catalina, Apple dropped 32 bit support. And in the
| same process dropped a lot of Frameworks that had been
| deprecated for ages. 64 bit software that didn't rely on
| deprecated Frameworks continue to function
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Isn't that the meaning of breaking backwards
| compatibility?
| romanoderoma wrote:
| Photoshop 6, not CS6
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The GP said:
|
| > MacOS Sierra doesn't even work with Photoshop CS6
|
| I'm not sure where they got that impression, but it
| definitely works!
| romanoderoma wrote:
| I got it from Adobe Web site
|
| > _Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7. Adobe Creative Suite 3, 4,
| 5, CS5.5, and CS6 applications support Mac OS X v10.8 or
| v10.9 when installed on Intel-based system_
|
| They work, maybe, they are not supported though
|
| It means that if it doesn't work, Adobe won't provide any
| support
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > He owns a license for Photoshop 6
|
| Uh, I'm guessing you mean CS6 rather than Photoshop 6,
| the program that came out in 2000.
|
| In any case, Adobe's help page[1] currently reads, "As
| Creative Suite 6 is no longer sold or supported, platform
| or language exchanges are not available for it." Since
| they're certainly not selling or supporting versions
| _older_ than CS6, it 's unlikely your friend is going be
| able to keep Photoshop CS6 by buying a new PC laptop.
| (And he sure as hell ain't gonna be able to get a copy of
| Photoshop 6 to run on Windows 10.)
|
| > Apple is one of the most capitalistic companies out
| there, they want you to buy new stuff and they'll try
| everything they can to force users to upgrade sooner or
| later
|
| That's not wrong, but s/Apple/Adobe and the sentiment is
| still true. I suppose he'll save money if he gets a
| cheaper-than-Apple PC laptop, but I don't think he's
| gonna avoid paying for Creative Cloud.
|
| [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-
| pricing/exchange-...
| bitL wrote:
| CS6 runs just fine on Windows 10. Of course it's not
| supported by Adobe as they were pretty aggressive in
| canceling CS6 licenses if one mistakenly accepted CC with
| the same account before in order to put everybody onto
| their extortion scheme, but I use CS6 as before just fine
| on PC, not on Mac.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| I'm talking about Photoshop 6
|
| That's why I said "MacOS Sierra can't even run CS6"
|
| Technically in Italy if you bought a license and the
| manufacturer won't support it anymore, you can use it on
| another platform even downloading an illegal copy.
|
| As long as you have the original license.
|
| That's the same reason why you can listen to mp3s if you
| own the original record, you have the right to keep a
| copy and the right to use it even if the manufacturer
| stop supporting it, because you bought it in perpetuity
| when you bought the product
|
| That's why I stay away from the new licenses that give
| you none of those rights
|
| And that's why backwards compatibility sometimes is what
| drives people choices
| lostlogin wrote:
| > He owns a license for Photoshop 6, payed for it and has
| no need to uograde, especially to the new subscription
| based licensing
|
| Sounds like the friend has a need to upgrade, and that
| upgrade is going to require new software. I don't think
| this situation is Adobe or Apple's fault, old stuff stops
| working at some point.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _I don't think this situation is Adobe or Apple's
| fault, old stuff stops working at some point._
|
| Old stuff stops working due to deliberate design choices
| made on both Apple and Adobe's parts. Apple deliberately
| stripped Rosetta and 32-bit support from macOS, and Adobe
| is deliberately making it nearly impossible to use older
| versions of the CS suite on their end.
|
| Meanwhile, I can run Photoshop 6 on Windows or WINE, and
| I can still run binaries that were statically compiled
| for Linux 20 years ago today.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| The hardware, which is not the main tool in his craft
|
| He draws by hand on paper and the final preparation on
| Photoshop is for printing
|
| After almost 10 years he needed a new laptop (things wear
| out with time and he could not install more RAM) but not
| a new Photoshop version with a different and more costly
| license
|
| The need to upgrade software is an artificial one and
| it's only needed because some platforms don't have a good
| backwards compatibility
|
| Windows does
|
| For many people the OS doesn't make any difference, as
| long as they can keep using the tools they already know
|
| There is a limit on the improvements a new software will
| provide if your workflow is already good as it is and you
| already paid for the version that works for you
|
| I know many small businesses that still use Office 2003
|
| They can install it on new hardware on new Windows
| versions, it's simply not possible to do the same on Mac
|
| It's not better or worse, backwards compatibility it's a
| feature and as any other feature some people value it a
| lot, some don't care at all
| bitL wrote:
| That CS6 issue was a major faux pas and a reason why many
| people stay with Mojave or are forced to use VMs.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Honest question. Does the ISA, as a language, really
| matter? Or is it more a by product of who owns the ISA, eg
| intel sucks, arm is more liberally licensed.
|
| I used to work at intel, and no one I knew there thought
| ISA mattered at all. That's just a few people though, so
| I'm curious if people think there's something better or
| worse about the different ISAs as a technology in their own
| right, or if it's more about the business interests behind
| them that matters.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It really doesn't. AMD has essentially the same perf/watt
| coming in a few months. ISA doesn't change anything
| nowadays because it all gets decoded into a per-CPU
| specific actual instruction set anyways.
| spear wrote:
| Exactly right. With today's transistor budgets, the x86
| ISA decoder/translator is just noise.
|
| This is not the difference between x86 and ARM -- it's
| the difference between Intel's team and Apple's (also
| AMD's). You don't see Qualcomm being competitive even
| though they also use ARM.
| tpetry wrote:
| The interesting information after which time the air was
| throttled and how much performance is lost when throttling.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Having the experience (or, love/hate relationship - so
| awesomely thin and quiet, so underpowered) with 12" Macbook,
| one surprise is that throttle time really depends on
| environment temperature and GPU use.
|
| In a cool room it can last few minutes before throttling, while
| outside on a warm day it throttles almost instantly.
|
| Also, a thermal budget is shared with GPU, so once you plug-in
| the external display, or start Sidecar, you run out of thermal
| headspace pretty much instantly.
|
| I'd love to see these two factors tested.
| ksec wrote:
| 1. This is roughly a 20-25W SoC. Apple could easily scale this to
| 50W, or a M1"X" with Double of everything, ( likely not with the
| Neural Processing Unit and the Image Signal Processing ).
|
| 2. That would give you double the performance in MultiCore
| Benchmarks, and Double the Graphics.
|
| 3. They will need to double the memory transfer as well, so it
| will either be a Quad Channel LPDDR4X or may be going with
| LPDDR5.
|
| 4. This hypothetical chip could be coming to MacBook 16" next
| year.
|
| 5. It is the nature of Chip and Devices that we are fundamentally
| limited by Heat Dissipation. I call this TDP Computing.
|
| 6. That is why in many, if not literally every explanation under
| every graph they will note the TDP difference and you _should_
| get the correct perspective or what is being measured.
|
| 7. That means you should not expect a 10W / 25W chip to out
| perform a 32 Core 250W Chip in MultiCore Benchmarks. You are
| basically comparing Apple to orange. And I dont know why there
| are _many_ comments in this thread doing it.
|
| 8. The M1, and SPEC scores ( no longer are we relying on
| Geekbench ) are to showcase what Apple is capable of.
|
| Edit: I just deleted a massive Rant specific to HN comments on
| Hardware.
| jeswin wrote:
| This is as much a ringing endorsement of AMD Ryzen as it is of
| the M1. The 15W 4800U is just as impressive as the M1, and the
| performance per watt gap seems small enough to bridge with AMDs
| upcoming 5nm switch.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It is an awesome CPU. But Apple have put in a sick GPU too.
| matteopey wrote:
| Not only that, but also the 4800U is Zen 2. The Zen 3 mobile
| processor (series 5000) are not here yet.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Yes, will Zen 3 give these mobile parts a 19% boost? That
| would be incredible if so...
| skavi wrote:
| You are making the mistake of equating TDP to actual power
| draw. The Yoga Slim 7, which uses a 4800U has an average load
| power of ~50W[0] vs the Mini's load power of ~30W.
|
| [0]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Ryzen-7-4800U-is-an-
| Absolu...
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| AMD definitely is the best of the rest, but it doesn't seem
| quite as close as it may be held to.
|
| In single core tests the 4800u is running that core at 4.2Ghz.
| Yet it gets soundly bested by the M1 @ 3 - 3.2Ghz (running at a
| 50%+ advantage, 65%+ clock per clock). The M1 has an enormous
| IPC advantage.
|
| In a multicore test the 4800u has 8 performance cores with HT.
| It only marginally beats an M1 with 4 performance cores and 4
| efficiency cores (by the scaling the efficiency cores look like
| they're 1/4 performance or worse -- these are very lightweight
| cores).
|
| Again, it's the best of the rest, but Apple clearly holds an
| enormous lead here. Somehow everyone is focused on 5nm, but the
| A13 on 7nm was still in a substantial lead. The 4800u on 5nm is
| only going to be marginally better.
|
| Apple clearly sandbagged this first entrant because they're
| packing it into their "entry level" devices. In six months or
| whatever they'll unveil the 6+2 core device in the mid range,
| the 12+2 in the high range, etc, and we'll be back at these
| discussions.
|
| (Speaking generally) - This whole discussion about Apple
| Silicon is fascinating because the goal posts have moved so
| much. Looking back to HN discussions a year ago and everyone
| was talking about some pathetically weak entrant that would be
| a joke, etc. Now people are celebrating that it doesn't beat a
| 24-core, 300W Threadripper. Now the narrative is that it isn't
| impressive because the v1 didn't overwhelming destroy
| everything else in the market.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > The 4800u on 5nm is only going to be marginally better.
|
| This is definitely not true. We already know Zen 3 is +20%
| IPC over Zen 2 on the same process at the same power. So add
| 20% to the 4800U without changing anything else as a starting
| point.
|
| Then toss in the process improvements from 5nm (which TSMC
| says is either 15% faster or 30% less power) as well as any
| further architectural improvements that AMD is doing in Zen 4
| and there's going to be a very significant gap between the
| 4800U and AMD's 5nm 6800U or whatever they end up calling it.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| To be clear, I said that a 4800u @ 5nm (if one could simply
| scale a design like that) would only be marginally better.
| That the 5nm boogeyman is more incremental than the big
| advantage it is held as.
|
| You replied that if you take the 4800u, switched it to 5nm,
| switch it to Zen 3...no actually switch it to to Zen 4 and
| a completely different chip, it would be lots better so
| what I said is "definitely not true".
|
| I'm not sure this logic follows.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| A 4800U on 5nm would be 30% more efficient or 15% faster.
| 5nm was a significant bump.
|
| And that's before considering the density improvement
| that came along with it (which is also substantial -
| TSMC's N5 is up to 1.8x the density of N7). Which is why
| I mentioned Zen 3 & Zen 4, because you don't make the
| same chip across a shrink. You use the extra budget to
| _do things_
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Why did the single threaded cinebench single threaded measure
| against the Ryzen 5950x a high end desktop processor then the
| multithreaded version of the same benchmark only list the 4900HS
| a high end laptop part with a fraction of the thermal budget and
| half the cores?
|
| Other sites had the Ryzen 5950x pegged at 28,641 in the
| multithreaded version vs 7833 for the m1 mac mini.
|
| Its not really surprising that something with 4x as many high
| performance cores as the m1 with a much higher thermal budget is
| almost 4x faster than the m1.
| [deleted]
| HJain13 wrote:
| This is bitter sweet moment for me, I hate Apple's walled garden
| approach so much, but they have the hardware (CPU, speakers,
| screens, etc) side of the things down (mostly)...
| HJain13 wrote:
| Interestingly Anandtech is feeding into the well deserved hype,
| by comparing 5950x to M1; Intel being 2 node generation behind
| still gives a good competition to M1 while still being a laptop
| chip.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Macbook air: $999 (2 ports, no hdmi)
|
| vs
|
| $699 mac mini (2 ports + hdmi) + ipad $329 = $1029
|
| Thinking of upgraing, my current macbook 2013 sits in a drawer
| 99% of the time connected to a monitor and keyboard. That 1% of
| the time when I travel, the macbook is too large to use
| comfortably on an airplane seat. The ipad would work better for
| this use. macbook air also only has two ports, so one would be
| used for external monitor, the other for power. No place left to
| connect external drives. Which I need to use for video editing,
| and sometimes need to connect two drives to transfer files
| between them. Seems like this would only be doable on macbook air
| running on battery.
| postalrat wrote:
| I wish apple or some company would make a computer stick that
| plugs into a usb c hub for power and peripherals. No battery
| and no buttons other than power.
|
| I don't see why it couldn't about the size of a wallet and
| offer at least as good thermals as a macbook air.
| freehunter wrote:
| Similar products do exist, although they're not very good:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KKYZL66
| postalrat wrote:
| I've seen those. They all are made to plug into the back of
| a tv through hdmi.
|
| HDMI doesn't have power and typically no peripherals like
| keyboard and mouse. To get that to work as I would want it
| would need multiple cables plugged into it.
|
| I just want to stick my computer into a hub like a flash
| stick and have it boot up.
| amwelles wrote:
| I switched from a MBP to a Mac Mini and iPad Pro last winter
| for my personal setup. I absolutely love it. I spend roughly
| equal time on both, but I'm not doing a ton of programming
| these days outside of work. Taking the iPad traveling is way
| easier than taking a laptop.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Are you using the Magic Keyboard? Just asking if that is a
| big part of your good experience with the iPad.
| spike021 wrote:
| Not who you replied to, but I have one of those non-numpad
| small Apple BT keyboards and it has worked really well for
| me when traveling with only my iPad. It fits in the same
| carry sleeve I use for the iPad, holds a long charge, and
| is usable when I ssh to a host for IRC or if I really want
| to code in VIM.
| amwelles wrote:
| Nope, I'm using the Smart Keyboard folio, since it came
| with the iPad. (Bought secondhand from a friend.)
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Similar setup (desktop Mac plus iPad Pro with keyboard), and
| similarly happy with it, but I'm afraid once the COVID
| situation has been resolved I'll need a MacBook again. The
| iPad works surprisingly well as a laptop replacement, and I
| can get things done on it, but it's not an optimal
| environment for serious work.
| amwelles wrote:
| I'm curious what you consider serious work? I write a lot
| on the iPad, can answer emails, get my shopping done, etc.
| I definitely wouldn't use it for programming, but I know
| some people have set it up to do so.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Yeah, programming. I agree it's a pleasure to do the
| other tasks you mentioned on the iPad, but coding is
| cumbersome (although still possible). I'm using a VPS and
| Blink, the upshot is that you become decently efficient
| working with tmux/vim/etc.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| > macbook air also only has two ports, so one would be used for
| external monitor, the other for power. No place left to connect
| external drives.
|
| You can do all this through one port. Most LG or Dell
| thunderbolt 3 monitors can supply 65 watts of power (some
| models may be higher, up to 80 or even 100w) any of which
| should be enough to run and charge this macbook air decently,
| and have 3 extra usb type A ports on the monitor.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I use a CalDigit Thunderbolt 3 doc on my macbook pro. Website
| says it works with M1 macs, but you only get one screen. It
| delivers power (87W), network, and has a bunch of ports,
| including allowing thunderbolt daisy-chaining. It has a 10Gb/s
| usb-c port, and five 5Gb/s usb ports. That uses a single port.
| So if you had, e.g. two TB3 external drives, you could plug one
| into the dock, and one into the other port on the Mac. This
| dock might be overkill for you (its $250), but I used it to get
| dual external screens on my MBP before I said "fuck it" and
| bought an eGPU.
| paulus_magnus2 wrote:
| This means there is (probably) plenty of opportunity for seasoned
| engineers to make serious money at Intel. But only for ones with
| thick skin who can deliver despite rotten company culture.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think this will get interesting if/when MS, Nvidia and others
| start using ARM cpus more widely as well. Nvidia just bought ARM
| so that would help them get rid of Intel as a middle man for
| gaming hardware. MS already has windows running on ARM but that
| seems to be a budget laptops only kind of thing so far. Also they
| are shipping AMD on x-box, which is interesting. But you could
| see Nvidia building an SOC graphics + cpu running windows
| potentially. Most game engines already target IOS and Android so
| there should be no issues porting to ARM on that front either.
|
| AMD ought to be paying attention. Risc V could be an alternative
| at this point if they want to push the market in a different
| direction. Having to license ARM from Nvidia would not be their
| dream scenario, I imagine.
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| AMD already licenses ARM. Ryzen CPUs have an on die ARM CPU for
| handling part of their platform security.
| itg wrote:
| Another source: https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-x86-mobility-
| cpus-destroy...
|
| At least in multicore, all of the Ryzen CPUs beat the M1.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| AnandTech (TFA) found the M1 performing very well compared to
| even Desktop-class Ryzen in SPEC:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Those are only Cinebench benchmarks.
|
| Have a look at SPEC2006 and 2017 benchmarks, M1 beating desktop
| class Ryzen 9 5950x, or just trailing behind (edit: in single
| threaded performance), keeping in mind cost of each and that:
|
| > While AMD's Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads,
| we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in
| power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is
| using 7-8W total device active power.
| TwoNineA wrote:
| > the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power.
|
| Anandtech showed almost 27W power draw under full load for
| the M1 Mini.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| That's Anandtech's quote. M1 beats or trails behind Ryzen 9
| 5950x in single threaded performance, hence they mention
| 7-8W.
|
| The 27W power draw comes from multi threaded performance.
| Ryzen's multi threaded power drain is at ~130W (as far as I
| know).
| levesque wrote:
| Am I reading this right? Is the new mac mini competing with a
| Ryzen 5950X? The whole mac mini costs the price of that processor
| alone. This is insane.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Only in single threaded performance, which nobody actually uses
| for rendering.
|
| In multi-threaded, the Ryzen 5950X is at 28,641 while M1 is at
| 7,833. So no, the Mac Mini is maxing out at 27% of the Ryzen
| 5950X if you use it properly. And I was already friendly and
| used the M1 number for a native port, while in reality you'll
| likely need Rosetta and take a 33% performance hit.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I think the overall point is that for the average user, who
| doesn't need all those cores or could make good use of them,
| the M1 may in fact feel / be faster.
|
| For users like you or I, of course we'd see a huge
| difference, but not everyone is running workloads that need
| more than 2 or 4 cores.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Just using a web browser these days requires many threads
| and processes to run at once.
| kissiel wrote:
| I have a theory on why ST perf is always the most important
| metric for me, and some other folks. When you're waiting
| for something synchronously, like rendering a webpage,
| stuff to open, etc. you're usually running a ST load. For
| stuff that can benefit from multithreading it's usually
| planned task. So does it make a difference if it takes 4
| minutes compared to 3? You will still context switch.
| sickygnar wrote:
| Right now I have ~20 tabs open and a few apps, a workload
| which is probably similar to the average user. My machine
| currently has 510 processes running with 2379 threads,
| though most of them are background. I'd wager core count
| is more important than ST performance nowadays,
| especially considering the fact that applications seem to
| be multicore optimized.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| An average user is going to buy a 5600X or whatever not the
| 5950X, and the 5600X's single-threaded performance is
| barely behind the 5950X. You only get a 5950X if you want
| multi-threaded performance.
| alwillis wrote:
| _For users like you or I, of course we 'd see a huge
| difference, but not everyone is running workloads that need
| more than 2 or 4 cores._
|
| It's hard to imagine a regular person playing games or
| editing the family photos or editing the kid's birthday
| party videos aren't using multiple cores for almost
| everything they do.
|
| Even browsing the web these days uses multiple cores.
|
| Apple wouldn't have made the investment if people couldn't
| see and feel real world results.
| snazz wrote:
| Depends on what you're doing. For example, compiling is
| multi-core, but linking is normally single-core. Many
| workloads are still heavily single-core-dependent, so great
| single-core performance is still a big asset.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > linking is normally single-core.
|
| GNU gold was doing threaded linking 15 years ago, and
| nowadays threaded linking is the default for new linkers
| like LLVM's lld. Unless you use very specific GNU linker
| hacks, there aren't any reason to not use lld, it works
| fine for linking large software like LLVM/Clang, Qt,
| ffmpeg...
| 3JPLW wrote:
| Yeah, but this is a laptop chip at ~20W. Of course it's not
| going to compete with a 16-core 120W monster.
|
| Getting 1/4 of the performance with 1/4 of the (high perf)
| cores and 1/6 of the power is very impressive.
| runeks wrote:
| But the Ryzen 5950X has 16 cores while the M1 has only 4 high
| performance and 4 low performance cores. So the Ryzen gets 4x
| multi-core performance with 4x the cores.
| kristianp wrote:
| I wonder if Apple will bother to produce a CPU with
| desktop-level TDP. That would really compete with the
| Ryzens.
| [deleted]
| a012 wrote:
| For very long time, the mac mini is attractive again with this
| new M1 performance. I feel like my Ryzen 2 sff build is old even
| though it's just less than 1 year.
| skavi wrote:
| Ryzen 2000 or Zen 2? The former is definitely more than an year
| old.
| kzrdude wrote:
| What kind of graphics APIs will it support? OpenGL?
| oblio wrote:
| The proprietary Metal API: https://developer.apple.com/metal/
|
| I think they might support OpenGL but I think everyone
| considers their support second rate.
| maeln wrote:
| Graphics API support is a OS/Driver thing. OpenGL has been
| deprecated on MacOS for a long while now, being stuck on a old
| version (4.1). Apple refuse to support Vulkan also so the only
| officially supported Graphical API on MacOS is Apple Metal.
| galad87 wrote:
| Metal. Then there are OpenGL and Vulkan wrappers that run on
| Metal.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised by their tagline "Integrated King, Discrete
| Rival".
|
| I'm using an Acer Aspire V15 Nitro Black 15" from 2016. On Aztec
| Ruins Normal Offscreen, I get 270fps. So my 4 year old $800
| laptop is still faster than the brand new M1. It seems Anandtech
| chose a very Apple-friendly set of laptops to compare to.
| kissiel wrote:
| So a 60W TDP dGPU (gtx 960M) is ~35% faster than this iGPU? I
| think this is what they called a Rival.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Agree. But don't you think this would come off as a lot less
| impressive if Anandtech had included all of the old rivals
| from 1-4 years ago that still rank above the M1?
|
| "If you currently own a 2016 15" Acer, buying the new 2020
| MacBook will be a downgrade." sounds pretty lame to me.
|
| That's why I said they had a very Apple-friendly comparison
| set.
| kissiel wrote:
| I don't think people are considering replacing a gaming
| 2kg+ laptop with a fanless macbook. Authors included two
| popular Turing dGPUs for comparison.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > But don't you think this would come off as a lot less
| impressive if Anandtech had included all of the old rivals
| from 1-4 years ago that still rank above the M1?
|
| Not really. Why would you compare against old rivals
| instead of the current market? They had 1660 Ti's on the
| charts, too, which both obliterated the M1 & are not at all
| the high-end of discreet mobile GPUs.
|
| The "discreet rival" was because the M1 was competing
| favorably against the discreet 1650 & 560(X). As in, entry-
| level discreet GPUs make increasingly less sense (they
| already weren't making much sense with Intel's new Xe and
| AMD's Vega 8 & 11 integrated, but more nails in that coffin
| with the M1)
| bluedino wrote:
| That would have you scoring higher than the Acer Nitro 5 (2020)
| with a 1650, so I doubt you're running the same benchmark.
|
| This might be more accurate, 88fps:
|
| https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=Windows&a...
| kissiel wrote:
| Lol. So that would be a +100% upgrade for fxtentacle.
| vermaden wrote:
| We will have to wait for AMD ZEN4 based CPUs which will also like
| M1 be based on 5nm TSMC process.
|
| Currently its apples (have to :>) versus oranges: 5nm M1 vs 7nm
| ZEN3
| goatinaboat wrote:
| 1) Can I run VirtualBox on M1 (yet)? 2) What is the overhead of
| doing so with Rosetta2 vs native on Intel? 3) What is the
| situation with VT-X?
| goatinaboat wrote:
| Thanks all
| my123 wrote:
| 1) VirtualBox is strictly x86_64 only, everywhere.
|
| 3) Arm virtual machines only. For now, Parallels has a preview
| that you can enroll to at
| https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-apple-sili...
| or you might use https://github.com/kendfinger/virtual which
| uses the high level Virtualization.framework, for Linux VMs.
| tomku wrote:
| The answer to all three of your questions is "If you are
| worried about this, absolutely do not buy an M1 Mac." Rosetta 2
| cannot magically turn VirtualBox from a virtualization
| management system into a high-performance x64 emulator. The
| long-term solution is probably going to be running ARM Windows
| or Linux in a VM and leaning on Rosetta-style
| compatibility/translation in the client OS to run x64 programs.
|
| Edit: Since this is attracting downvotes, maybe it needs some
| clarification. The things OP asked about fundamentally cannot
| work. Rosetta 2 is designed exclusively for user-mode programs
| and cannot cooperate with virtualization software to run
| arbitrary OSes in VMs. VirtualBox has no plans to port to ARM
| and will not work in Rosetta. None of this is negativity or
| cynicism towards M1 Macs - it's just the reality of how
| switching architectures affects virtualization. If your use
| case for Mac hardware is to run arbitrary x64 code at high
| speed in VMs, you should not buy an M1 Mac because that
| capability does not currently exist.
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah, I figure the only realistic solution for my work needs
| (running a bunch of x86/x64 Windows VMs) is to do that
| remotely on a Windows workstation.
|
| I probably won't buy an M1 anyway, but I'll be extremely
| interested to see what everything looks like when the M2
| rolls around.
| runjake wrote:
| You may be interested in this thread:
|
| https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=98742
|
| tl;dr: VirtualBox is an x86/x86 hypervisor, there's no porting
| to do. It would be a re-write.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Benchmarks show M1 with Rosetta2 beats previous Mac iterations
| in Cinebench benchmark. See page 2 here
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
|
| >> What's notable is the performance of the Rosetta2 run of the
| benchmark when in x86 mode, which is not only able to keep up
| with past Mac iterations but still also beat them.
| [deleted]
| bartread wrote:
| These are impressive performance stats and, given that I'm
| working from home all the time nowadays and with much less of a
| need for a laptop, the Mac Mini is actually a fairly attractive
| option.
|
| Except for one thing: it's maxxed out at 16GB of _unified_ RAM.
| 16GB. In 2020 (nearly 2021). FFS.
|
| Come on Apple: get your act together. The 16GB limit was
| frustrating as hell when I bought my last MBP in 2015: now it's
| absolutely unforgiveable.
|
| (The iMac obviously goes way beyond 16GB but isn't yet available
| with Apple silicon, and obviously the attraction with the Mini is
| the relatively ludicrous performance of that Apple silicon.)
| CitizenKane wrote:
| It's certainly an impressive achievement and makes it pretty
| clear why Apple is transitioning away from Intel. I'm a bit
| surprised that the fact that this is on the TSMC 5nm process
| seems to be glossed over in the comments. Apple is benefitting
| from some what seem like on the surface to be significant process
| improvements. Will be interesting to see how other players take
| advantage of it as well.
| phire wrote:
| No, the gains from Apple's A13 (TSMC 7nm) to Apple's A14 (TSMC
| 5nm and same cores as the M1) really aren't that large. About
| average for a node jump.
|
| This is mostly about architecture, not silicon process.
|
| From A13 to A14, Apple managed to increase the clockspeed by
| about 15% and increase IPC by 5% all while keeping power
| consumption the same.
| perardi wrote:
| That WebKit compile time is impressive.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
| mciancia wrote:
| Question is whether they were compiling for the same
| architecture on both x86 and arm.
| alwillis wrote:
| That's a good question but I don't think it would make a huge
| difference. Those details should have been included.
|
| Safari is already a universal binary on my Intel Mac running
| Big Sur; that means WebKit runs natively on Intel and M1
| processors.
| w-m wrote:
| Wow, the M1 MBP is on par with the 12-core Mac Pro from 2019
| for the WebKit compilation. And even more impressive: "After a
| single build of WebKit, the M1 MacBook Pro had a massive 91% of
| its battery left. I tried multiple tests here and I could have
| easily run a full build of WebKit 8-9 times on one charge of
| the M1 MacBook's battery. In comparison, I could have gotten
| through about 3 on the 16" and the 13" 2020 model only had one
| go in it."
| puranjay wrote:
| This might get me back into the Apple ecosystem. I'll still wait
| for the kinks to be ironed out in the first generation though.
| zf00002 wrote:
| I feel the same way. Very interested, but not going to go in
| for first gen.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| This is the 12th generation Apple Silicon processor design.
|
| A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12, A13, A14, M1
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Sure, but there are concerns beyond the chip itself.
| pwthornton wrote:
| I think this is 11th generation, where the A14 and M1 are
| the same generation. I expect we will see a few other chips
| from this generation, perhaps a A14X for iPad Pros and a
| M1X for bigger laptops and iMacs.
| kace91 wrote:
| The issue is with macos running on apple silicon. There was
| a thread today somewhere with docker mentioning that they
| are still working on support for example.
| lukeramsden wrote:
| First generation of MacOS on Apple Silicon?
| gayprogrammer wrote:
| iOS has always used the same kernel as macOS.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| iOS XNU is compiled with different features than macOS
| XNU.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| And that helps i.e. Docker how?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Sure, it's all Darwin, but userspace matters a lot - you
| can do lots of things on MacOS that you can't do on iOS
| (JIT, arbitrary web engines, assorted emulators, pop a
| root shell and load arbitrary kernel modules)
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I'm absolutely not worried about the silicon.
|
| I am worried about the other hardware and MacOSX being
| total POS right now.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| Likewise - so long as they don't ditch the headphone jack on
| this as well.
| terramex wrote:
| This, but I also hope they understand that most studio
| headphones have cable attached on the left side and come back
| to pre-touchbar era jack placement. With new, miniaturised
| components there should be enough internal space on left
| side.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Intrigued by the single-thread main memory bandwidth being a
| multiple of what you get from a single SKX. We also see this with
| Graviton 2. The latency is not terrible, either. How would this
| much available bandwidth change your choices when optimizing your
| algorithms?
| blunte wrote:
| This may be a bit of a stretch, but would the power savings
| (value of which, Earth aside, could be measured in local
| electricity costs) of an M1 Mac be significant enough in a year
| to justify upgrading an otherwise functioning Intel Mac?
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| Nope. Say the differential under heavy CPU load is 10W, say you
| run it under full load for 2,000 hours per year (which nobody
| does on a laptop), then you saved about 20 kWh, or roughly $3.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I find it amusing people thought that apple silicon was going to
| be crap. Or that they would lie about it being good.
|
| They are not insane! They wouldn't jump ship and go through all
| that expense and possibility of failure if they don't know they
| had something amazing at the end of the rainbow.
| k__ wrote:
| So, it's like AMD, but different?
|
| I am whelmed.
| cwxm wrote:
| not exactly, the performance per watt is what's impressive
| here.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Wow it must suck to be Intel right now.
|
| It wasn't so long ago that the trope was while others had better
| multi-core performance "...Intel still holds the lead for single
| core performance"
|
| Now not only do AMD have a better product, but also Apple now
| offer equal or better performance than the best that Intel can
| offer.
|
| I wonder what is next for Intel now their PS1000+ CPUs are firmly
| in third place. Looking forward to some new innovation and
| competitive (inc pricing!) products from them.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| That's the consequence of resting on your laurels and getting
| complacent. They relied too much on being the large incumbent,
| and they reap what they sow.
| yborg wrote:
| They reaped billions in profits. The issue is that
| organizations can't turn it on and off based on competition,
| once you are rich and lazy, the organization fills up with
| coasters and before they know it they no longer have a higher
| gear. Remains to be seen if Intel can come back, but I doubt
| it under their current leadership.
| bstar77 wrote:
| Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their
| version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that
| gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code
| with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product.
|
| I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even
| AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their
| version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling
|
| The Anandtech tests were on an actively-cooled Mac Mini and
| the power draw numbers they were observing were far outside
| of what can be passively cooled in a laptop. You'd need to
| wait for Air-specific results before drawing too many
| conclusions on how it performs.
| bstar77 wrote:
| AnandTech isn't the only one providing benchmarks, they are
| rolling in from all over the place now. People are running
| 15 minute finale cut pro jobs and the fan isn't kick in on
| the macbook pro.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Any word on if Final Cut and Logic X are recompiled for
| Arm ?
| bredren wrote:
| FCP 10.5 dropped on 11/2:
|
| * Improved performance and efficiency on Mac computers
| with Apple silicon
|
| * Accelerated machine learning analysis for Smart Conform
| using the Apple Neural Engine on Mac computers with Apple
| silicon
|
| Discussion: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-
| updates-final-cut...
| offtop5 wrote:
| Thanks , my M1 macbook pro gets here tommorow so we'll
| see what happens
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| They said in the keynote that Logic had major
| improvements under arm as well. I can't remember if it's
| actually shipping yet.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| If they are Apple they are Universal apps I believe?
| mlyle wrote:
| I installed updates a few days ago and the release notes
| say "support for Apple Silicon"...
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > "budget" laptop
|
| At this price it's more expensive than 80% of best-selling
| laptops, so not quite budget. If you compare in price to Dell
| for example, they only compete with their XPS line, which is
| their high-end one.
|
| Apple only does high-end products, which is fine but doesn't
| make that model cheap.
| danpalmer wrote:
| To look at these CPUs a different way, it's fairly
| competitive with Ryzen processors that cost $600-700 alone,
| except that will buy the whole Mac Mini.
| bstar77 wrote:
| That why I put the word budget in quotes. It's the cheapest
| laptop they make even though it isn't all that cheap.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| > Apple only does high-end products
|
| I know this gets repeated often, but this is simply not
| true. Apple _does_ make high-end products, and they market
| themselves as a high-end brand, but Apple has always filled
| as many market segments as they can. There are plenty
| examples that prove this statement wrong: iPod Shuffle,
| iPhone SE, the $250 iPad. They never do deep discounts on
| their products though, so when they age or go stale they
| are far overpriced; and they do _not_ make value or budget
| models.
| tonyhb wrote:
| This is really the 12th generation of Apple's own chips,
| though - and the third of this particular design, if I recall
| correctly.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Are you claiming that A1 is in the same category as M1?
|
| If so... then Intel's latest chip generations should be
| traced back to 8088 in 1979.
| seniorivn wrote:
| that's exactly how people describe Intel lineup
|
| And architectural similarities between their first 14nm
| chip and their last 10nm chips are as m1 is similar to
| a12z at least, may be even their first 64bit
| elteto wrote:
| Intel CPUs _literally_ boot pretending to be 8088s [0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_mode
| bstar77 wrote:
| When I say first gen product, I mean the whole product, not
| just the chip used. It would be a very different situation
| if we were talking about an upgraded iPad with a new chip.
| This is a platform defining moment.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Market share x86 overall (mobile + desktop + server), AMD vs
| Intel:
|
| Q3/2020 20,2% vs. 79,8%
|
| Q2/2020 19,7% vs. 80,3%
|
| Q1/2020 17,5% vs. 82,5%
|
| I don't know why the OEM business works that way, but it is
| very slow to shift, so Intel still has time. Self-built
| consumer PCs for gaming are already overwhelmingly AMD though.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Discounts and design lead time.
|
| Unlike modular desktops - you can't just drop in an AMD CPU
| into a laptop chassis and expect everything to work.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| At some point one wonders if Intel will just cede the desktop
| and enthusiast markets to AMD and/or Apple and just focus on
| server and high-end computing? As an IBMer this feels familiar
| for some reason...
| LegitShady wrote:
| Amd 2qe on the market for decades practically as second in
| the performance tier. I'm not sure why Intel who should
| ostensibly have lower unit costs would abandon a market for a
| possibly temporary situation one or two deign nodes away
| might now be able an issue.
| ginko wrote:
| What would keep AMD or Nvidia from eventually eating Intel's
| lunch in the server market as well?
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Nothing, they'd just die a lot slower
| Aperocky wrote:
| No reason why servers will always stick with Intel.
|
| Amazon already has their own Graviton ARM chips - And that's
| EC2, cloud native workflows might have already migrated.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Not to mention HPC, with the top three supercomputers being
| Power & ARM.
| Wohlf wrote:
| Not a chance, the consumer market it massive. Even among PC
| enthusiasts, AMD is in the minority. It's not even close:
| https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
|
| I'd sooner expect Intel to start making their own ARM chips
| to compete with Apple.
| dk1138 wrote:
| Thanks for the link! Didn't know steam made that kind of
| analysis public.
|
| But I'd take a closer look at those numbers: in 5 months
| intel has lost 2.5 points that AMD has gained. Doing some
| stupid, atrocious math of just taking the average point
| gain over those 5 months (and not accounting for the fact
| that my pc enthusiast friends are stating that their next
| machine will be AMD), that puts November of 2023 that they
| are 50% market share. That gives Intel very little time to
| pivot.
| patentatt wrote:
| Not long ago at all, like just a few weeks ago right before
| zen3 was out in the wild! A double whammy for sure for Intel,
| tough times ahead indeed. Apologists can hand wave AMD off by
| citing the huge lead in sales that Intel still enjoys, but that
| argument falls flat with Apple, a trillion dollar company.
| Maybe Intel will start to compete on price like AMD used to.
| whizzter wrote:
| I think they announced a short while back that they're
| "looking at trying to outsource manufacturing of some high
| end parts", ie they've known that they were falling behind in
| too many areas due to their shrinkage problems so they're
| taking in help from the outside to not become irrelevant.
|
| M1 is running on "5nm", looking at specs Intel 10NM is
| 100Mtr/mm2 vs TSMC's Apple 5nm chips being 173Mtr/mm2 (So
| even if Intel nomenclature seems more conservative they still
| lag by a lot in manufacturing capacity)
| arvinsim wrote:
| As someone who owns both Mac and PC, I am excited on what
| Ryzen can offer on 5nm.
|
| If Apple has these gains, I am sure Ryzen will have great
| performance leaps too.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I'm not massively familiar with CPU architectures, would
| you expect to see similar performance gains going to 5nm on
| x86 as you do on ARM?
| hajile wrote:
| Not strictly because of 5nm itself.
|
| 5nm will be Zen 4 which should bring 10-20% IPC uplift if
| AMD's current trend continues.
|
| TSMC's N5 5nm transistors are 85% smaller than their N7
| transistors which should lower power consumption
| significantly though SRAM only shrinks a modest 35% (this
| especially affects desktop Ryzen with tons of cache
| compared to their laptop versions).
|
| AMD currently makes the Zen 2/3 IO die on Global
| Foundries 12nm for contractual reasons. When they finally
| shrink that to 7 or 5nm, the power savings should be
| significant.
|
| Zen 4 is expected to bring DDR5 support which will both
| drastically increase bandwidth _and_ lower RAM power
| consumption. Likewise, it is expected to support PCIe 5
| which doubles the bandwidth per lane to a little shy of
| 4GB /s.
|
| All of these things together could mean a decent
| improvement in IPC and total performance and a very big
| improvement in performance per watt.
|
| Meanwhile, I suspect we'll start seeing large "Infinity
| Cache" additions to their APUs that is shared between the
| CPU and GPU as the bus width of DDR just doesn't offer
| the bandwidth to keep larger GPUs from fighting the CPU
| for bandwidth. This should not only improve APU total
| performance, but fewer trips to RAM has a significant
| effect on power consumption (it costs more to move 2
| bytes than to add them together).
| blunte wrote:
| This happens to every giant eventually (and to countries or
| civilizations). They get climb to the top, and then they hold
| such dominant positions that they aren't forced to try. They
| get lazy or sloppy (and in Intel's case, I'm not suggesting the
| engineers were the sloppy ones... more likely strategic
| decisions from management and quarterly earnings per share-
| focused execs). Eventually they are dethroned, and some never
| return to power.
|
| Intel will never go away, but they definitely will become
| laggards for the foreseeable future. In their industry it takes
| years or even a decade to see the fruits of your effort.
| amelius wrote:
| > In their industry it takes years or even a decade to see
| the fruits of your effort.
|
| So how long has Apple been working on this chip?
| ghshephard wrote:
| Roughly 10 years on this particular processor line:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-
| designed_processors#A_se... (According to Anandtech, the M1
| is a rough equivalent to the A14)
| copperx wrote:
| Why, exactly? As long as Apple keeps their chips to themselves,
| Intel or AMD will have nothing to worry about.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The best option seems to be a hybrid.
|
| Use the M1 Air to remote into a real non virtualized computer
| running linux.
| aero-glide wrote:
| I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The
| battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.
| crazygringo wrote:
| If you want to use Linux for the tools, then just use a VM.
|
| But if you want full control over your hardware... Apple isn't
| the way to go. I'm not even sure what the "OS of our choice"
| means when we're talking about a custom-designed SoC. The
| amount of reverse-engineering required to get _any_ other OS to
| work would be staggering, no?
|
| If you want to run a custom OS natively, you need to buy a
| laptop with a commodity chip, not a custom one. Fortunately,
| there are tons of them.
| josteink wrote:
| ARM actually has a defined architecture and UEFI equivalent,
| which would have worked wonders here.
|
| If Apple had decided to support it, that is.
| simonh wrote:
| You're likely to hit the common problems porters face with
| putting Linux on an arbitrary ARM SoC. These chips have lots of
| integrated components on them, requiring device drivers that
| may not exist for Linux. Take the custom Apple developed in
| house GPUs for example. Good luck finding any kind of Linux
| device driver for those, open source or not. It gets even worse
| for things there isn't even an external equivalent of, like the
| neural engines.
|
| Even if Apple does nothing to stop you running whatever
| software you like on the device, you're still likely to be out
| of luck. I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising folks
| have a good run at it, but it's likely to be a massive
| undertaking.
| alwillis wrote:
| _I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The
| battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux._
|
| Apple's hypervisor technology runs natively on the M1; Linux
| running on that will be faster than Linux running on anything
| else you can buy for the same amount of money.
|
| They showed Debian running on Apple Silicon during the WWDC
| keynote nearly 6 months ago.
| lhl wrote:
| Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers
| that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads
| and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren't quite
| as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh
| batteries, and have a better keyboard (I have one from a
| different OEM, but same ODM design). They also have user
| upgradable memory and storage - I am running with 64GB RAM
| and 2TB SSD at a total cost (with upgrades) of less than what
| Apple is charging for their base 8GB/256GB MacBook Pro.
|
| I expect a future "M2" to maybe take the performance crown,
| but AMD isn't standing still. Cezanne has Zen 3 cores, which
| should boost IPC by about 20%, and Rembrandt should get to
| 5nm and have RDNA2 graphics.
| alwillis wrote:
| _Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H
| computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy
| multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled.
| These laptops aren't quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in
| at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries..._
|
| 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life.
|
| 2. Don't forget it's not just the M1--it's the unified
| memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most
| CPU and GPU-intensive apps are going to run faster on the
| M1 than on your machine. Even x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2
| on an M1 Mac may run faster, since those apps are
| translated to native code on the M1.
|
| 3. Mac's SSD is probably faster; it's essentially a 256GB
| cache for the processor.
|
| 4. The Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps too.
|
| 5. If done right, Linux compiled for the M1 will likely run
| faster on an M1 Mac than it does on a machine like yours,
| especially if Apple provides a way to access certain
| hardware features.
|
| We'll have to see what happens but expect these machines to
| be pretty popular with users, even those who need to run
| Linux when that the distros are updated.
|
| We shouldn't forget that the underpinnings to all of this
| is Darwin, the BSD-derived Unix layer which is already
| running natively on M1, including the compiler and the rest
| of the toolchain.
| ucha wrote:
| You can't run Linux on Macbook Pros released after 2016 in any
| meaningful sense anyways...
| ghaff wrote:
| I can pretty much guarantee you that trying to run anything
| other than macOS on Apple's silicon is going to be an exercise
| in frustration. You will presumably be able to run an Arm build
| of Linux in a VM--given that Apple has demoed this--but if you
| want native Linux, I'm not sure why you would pay a premium to
| possibly get a bit more performance on a laptop while probably
| having various support issues.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| They have already stated they won't:
|
| "We're not direct booting an alternate operating system," says
| Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software
| engineering. "Purely virtualization is the route. [...]"
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...
| ravetcofx wrote:
| This researcher has said it may be possible with PongoOS and
| kernel signing https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/stat
| us/13273981029... https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/s
| tatus/13273946342...
| easton wrote:
| But you can disable Secure Boot and boot whatever OS you
| want, so unless there's some other hardware gotcha it's not
| like someone couldn't get Linux running if they wanted to put
| the time in (which is a big if, considering there's no UEFI-
| ish helper like on the Windows ARM devices).
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-
| ma...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There are quite literally millions of ARM devices out there
| that will never have Linux support, and millions more are
| being produced each year.
|
| When it comes to ARM SoCs, Linux requires vendor support to
| get it running. If you want mainline kernel support, that
| requires even more work that many vendors just aren't
| providing.
|
| A locked bootloader is just one issue to overcome for Linux
| support. A lot of the real issues come down to the lack of
| an enumerable bus on ARM SoCs, along with a lack of
| drivers.
|
| Without vendor support from Apple to support Linux, these
| devices will be like the millions of iPhones and iPads that
| don't run Linux and will never run Linux.
|
| Most ARM SoCs that are sold explicitly as mini Linux
| computers also have this problem. Many of them are stuck on
| old kernel forks, because vendors didn't give the proper
| support their SoCs needed to run a mainline Linux kernel.
|
| _tl;dr_ : For Linux to be a viable option on Apple's SoCs,
| Apple needs to put in a lot of work to explicitly support
| Linux. Without that vendor support, you will never be able
| to download a Linux ISO and install it like you can on an
| x86 Mac.
| dshpala wrote:
| Challenge accepted :)
| qz2 wrote:
| Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of
| these.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Hopefully it's not just secret apple sauce that makes these
| powerhouses, and other chip makers make arm based
| processors soon enough giving us the choice we deseeve.
| (given gravitons similar performance bump this is likely
| the case)
| foldr wrote:
| It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if
| you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot
| of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are
| dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly
| diminished on Windows or Linux.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Mac Mini doesn't raise those issues.
| abainbridge wrote:
| I've never been that impressed with the Mac Mini's
| battery life or touchpad :-)
| [deleted]
| foldr wrote:
| Touche. But seriously, most people who want to run Linux
| on Mac want to do it because they like Apple's laptop
| hardware. If you want a compact Linux desktop then a NUC
| should probably serve you just as well. Or at least, this
| was the case while Apple was still using Intel chips. If
| Apple Silicon lives up to expectations then I suppose
| there could finally be a compelling reason for running
| Linux on a Mac desktop.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly
| be any good reason for wanting to run Linux on a Mac
| desktop. But desktops are already a niche product for
| Apple, and people who want to run Linux on Mac desktops
| are arguably a tiny niche within a niche.
| qz2 wrote:
| Actually I had a Mac mini with the touchpad and the damn
| thing disconnected three times a day. All my input
| devices have wires now and the stick out of the right
| places.
| tonyhb wrote:
| libinput's touchpad support is pretty great recently.
| working on an xps 17, and the touchpad is - no joke -
| just like the touchpad on my previous MBP.
| postalrat wrote:
| You can speculate but we will never know for certain.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer)
| by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your
| computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they
| know what you want and need better than you.
| bscphil wrote:
| It's really kind of tragic that so much incredible
| research and engineering work goes into creating new
| hardware like this only for it to be locked into one
| particular company with very tight constraints on target
| audience, income bracket, and technical limitations.
| Think how incredible it would be if everyone could use
| this new silicon.
| jmagoon wrote:
| It is, in fact, already used by everyone, because it's an
| evolution of the chipset in basically every smartphone in
| the world with widely divergent target audiences, income
| brackets, and technical limitations.
| bscphil wrote:
| I don't know that that's a fair comparison. Just because
| it's an ARMv8 chip doesn't mean it's directly comparable
| to what's in smartphones. (I assume you aren't comparing
| it to Apple made chips for iPhone specifically, since
| then it wouldn't be true that it's in "basically every
| smartphone in the world".)
|
| In particular, this is the first 5nm chip to be widely
| available, and by most accounts on performance it
| competes with top of the line hardware at a small
| fraction of the power use. Most existing ARM chips are
| designed for the very-low-power market, e.g. in phones,
| not to be used in a high performance laptop.
|
| If there's a Dell or Thinkpad laptop with an ARM chip
| that's comparable, by all means, let me know.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| AFAIK you are correct. Apple has completely redesigned
| their own ARM chip. It has the same instruction set (or a
| superset of the instruction set) as what runs in a
| cellphone, but the design is completely different from
| say, Qualcomm chips.
| jmagoon wrote:
| I prefer for the class of device the Air fits into
| (travel, work laptop) to have a nicely curated _nix
| machine with working drivers out of the box. Apple has
| continued to improve on this by making this product class
| faster, more battery efficient,_ and* cheaper.
|
| There is a massive marketplace for tinkering on
| computers, from Arduinos to multi-GPU ML rigs. Trying to
| optimize for both classes of things seems like a foolish
| endeavor, especially when Linux users represent such a
| small fraction of the desktop market.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I hear this all the time from people "drivers working out
| of the box", but I've been running Linux machines for a
| decade now, and I've run into very few issues
| comparatively speaking. My work makes me use a MacBook
| for work, and it has a lot of significant bugs that are
| not getting fixed. The trick with Linux is to use a
| popular distribution. The one thing I will fully concede
| is that Linux laptops have poor battery life.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and
| tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are_
|
| That's part of the value proposition (leave it or take
| it).
| jb1991 wrote:
| Just because it is locked down, why is that the same as
| "renting"? Those are two very different concepts.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| Because you are not the ultimate decider of what to do
| with the machine. If you owned it, you could do anything
| outside of harm.
| coldtea wrote:
| The whole concept of the machine is to be bought and
| optimized for running macOS.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| Right, the point is that it didn't use to be that way
| exclusively and now it is, so the new machines are more
| restrictive than previous Macs, which also ran macOS.
|
| In fact macOS itself is more restrictive nowdays than it
| used to be.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I guess, but the "whole concept of the machine" that I'm
| typing this on was to run Windows... 7 (I think?); that's
| a completely artificial limitation, as shown by running
| Ubuntu on it years after the hardware went out of
| support.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I'm not sure what the problem is, then. You have a device
| that does what you (or the GP) want, which is to install
| any operating system, tinker, etc.
|
| Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate
| the industry to the point that you literally will not be
| able to turn on your current machine and use it?
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| > Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate
| the industry to the point that you literally will not be
| able to turn on your current machine and use it?
|
| I know you're joking, but I actually kind of am...
|
| Apple has a tremendous amount of industry influence, just
| see removal of the headphone jack.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| macOS deprecates support for Macs that are 5-7 years old
| with every release. I put Linux on them when new macOS
| releases no longer support them, and they're perfectly
| good machines afterwards.
|
| When macOS deprecates support for these ARM Macs in 5-7
| years, Linux isn't an option for them unless Apple puts
| in a lot of work to support a mainline Linux kernel on
| their hardware. Apple has said they won't support running
| other operating systems on these ARM Macs unless they're
| virtualized.
| jb1991 wrote:
| But renting implies you are continuing to pay money and
| will some day need to return it.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| No, not necessarily. Renting just implies you're not the
| owner and need to follow someone's rules, (that of the
| actual owner), in order to make use of the rented item.
|
| 'Purchasing' a Kindle book or video on Amazon is also
| renting for example and yet it does not mean you have to
| continue paying and yet you don't own the copy as
| Amazon's going to decide how you're allowed to consume it
| and if they're going to let you keep it[1][2].
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Criticism
|
| 2 - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/amazon-
| argues-user...
| jb1991 wrote:
| I don't think purchasing a computer is the same thing as
| buying a movie from Amazon. The computer is always gonna
| be yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, even
| if Apple has made it very difficult to do so. But there
| are lots of objects in my house that would fall under
| that category as well, but I consider myself as their
| owner.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There's a direct parallel you can draw between software
| licensing and leasing.
| js2 wrote:
| I realize Federighi's reply seems to rule out Linux, but the
| context of the question seemed to be with respect to Boot
| Camp and Windows. My take is that Apple doesn't want to
| continue to invest in Boot Camp, especially since Microsoft
| apparently isn't willing to license ARM Windows for this use
| case.
|
| It's not clear to me that the new Macs won't allow booting
| Linux if the Linux community can figure out how to do it. The
| number of folks booting Linux on Mac via Boot Camp has to be
| really tiny.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Getting drivers to work will be hard without Apple's help
| or blessing. And there are a lot of drivers.
|
| For comparison you can check the progress of Linux on
| iPhones (which is actually a thing!)
| js2 wrote:
| Yeah, agreed, but my take isn't that Apple is going out
| of their way to prevent it, just that they have no
| interest in spending any resources on it. Some conjecture
| here about what will be possible:
|
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/running-linux-on-
| apple-...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _It 's not clear to me that the new Macs won't allow
| booting Linux if the Linux community can figure out how to
| do it._
|
| Mainline Linux support requires a lot of work from vendors.
| Check out the ARM SoC Linux market for an abundance of
| examples of this problem. Many of the devices will be
| forever stuck an old kernel fork and will never run a
| mainline kernel.
| [deleted]
| k2enemy wrote:
| You can, but need to sign the OS image.
| sabana wrote:
| Why?
| bstar77 wrote:
| And that's your choice. I would start looking at AMD's Ryzen
| offerings because supporting Linux is not going to be high on
| Apple's list going forward.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| has it ever been?
| bstar77 wrote:
| I ran linux for years on my MacBook via Bootcamp. I'd be
| surprised if Bootcamp ever comes back.
| criddell wrote:
| What can you do on Linux that you can't do on macOS?
| toast0 wrote:
| Have a TCP stack with synflood protection? (The mac stack was
| copied from FreeBSD in 2001, before syncookies/syncache were
| added, and not meaningfully pulled since)
| choward wrote:
| Automate the entire set up of my computer using a declarative
| language. I use NixOS. Mac OS isn't even close.
| jdlyga wrote:
| I wouldn't pay for Apple hardware unless I wanted to use MacOS.
| OJFord wrote:
| Why? The hardware's the nice bit.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Yeah this. Imagine if we had the same hardware but designed
| for linux, I'd pay a premium for that.
|
| Although hardware specific software from Apple is probably
| a big part of that draw too. I don't think we're ever going
| to see Linux prioritize a certain hardware and put in the
| effort to make it integrate as well as macs does.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's
| fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI.
| Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly
| perfectly.
|
| Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much
| bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in
| the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax
| nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours
| to get Wifi working properly.
|
| Even assuming Apple released the specs so you could port
| Linux to M1, on top of the usual laptop driver issues
| around the trackpad, wifi drivers, and video drivers, you
| also have to deal with the Secure Enclave. Without that,
| you are stuck with either a non-encrypted drive or
| running drive encryption on the CPU which is likely going
| to kill many of the performance gains from using the Mac
| hardware. Likewise, without the Secure Enclave, you lose
| fingerprint auth.
|
| Not anti-Linux by any means, but dropping Linux on the M1
| isn't going to get you the same performance or battery
| life by any means. You are far better just going with a
| laptop which was designed to be Linux friendly to start
| with.
| lhl wrote:
| IMO, the BSD/Darwin stuff isn't the problem, but rather
| all the recent additions that are just super
| invasive/restrictive/bloated - Gatekeeper and trustd,
| that in my experience _often_ (not just when OCSP is
| down) chewed through CPU often for example. IMO, even a
| few years ago (when I mostly switched off from Macs) the
| LaunchDaemon /Agent situation was getting totally out of
| control, as were notifications and updates (worse than
| Win10 even).
|
| Here's a script (that no longer works apparently due to a
| new system signing restriction) that disabled some of
| those, to give an example of the amount of crap running
| by default: https://gist.github.com/pwnsdx/1217727ca57de2
| dd2a372afdd7a0f...
| reaperducer wrote:
| I think part of the aversion is that we're seeing a
| generation come into being that doesn't understand that
| Unix > Linux.
|
| The way that for Windows people Unix was "other" and bad
| and scary. Now we have legions of programmers who were
| brought up on Linux, and now think of Unix as "other."
| prewett wrote:
| Having had the fun experience of compiling a fairly heavy
| UI application on Unix, they all seem pretty "other" to
| me. Solaris didn't do anything weird, so it was maybe the
| only non-other. HP-UX had something really weird with
| linking and I feel like it was lacking some shell
| commands that were fairly standard. AIX did something
| strange with shared libraries and their error messages
| were decidedly non-standard, although they all had unique
| code at the beginning so at least it was easy to search
| for problems. I think AIX was the only one for which
| malloc(0) = 0, all the others at least produced a valid
| pointer. I can't remember what the problems with Irix
| were, I think it was just that by 2008 Irix was just old
| so getting an up to date compiler was troublesome. Linux
| was just as "other" compared to the rest, but it was
| increasingly full-featured. Solaris kept up for a while.
|
| And admining them was definitely very different aside
| from the basic shell commands.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| > Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the
| "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working
| properly.
|
| I can assure you that you didn't have to do that for
| quite some time and it's not that which people are
| looking for.
|
| - Am looking for a system that lets me run any damn thing
| I want without pipups, blocks, firewalls, warnings,
| requiring signed binaries etc.
|
| I am looking to run and develop for the same environment
| I end up deploying on.
|
| - I want a system that has native docker support, systemd
| and makes updating the whole system or installing pretty
| much anything as easy as one terminal command.
|
| - It's important for me to trust my system; where I know
| no single entity has more power over the machine than
| myself and no secret upgrades I didn't desire are going
| to be pushed my way.
|
| - There's no telemetry in my ideal system, certainly not
| at the system level and patched out at the app level
| where possible.
|
| - I want a system that is open, configurable, respects
| the four freedoms and is community ran.
|
| macOS cannot give me this, no matter how "fundamentally
| BSD" it is. I value the freedom that free software gives
| that no closed-source BSD ever could.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _I switched to MacOS because it 's fundamentally BSD
| with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good
| OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly._
|
| This is the reason I initially started using macOS more
| than a decade ago.
|
| However, I've been told that I'm the wrong kind of user
| by Apple fans whenever I criticize Apple for transforming
| macOS from a pretty Unix into a locked-down App Store
| appliance.
|
| > _Perhaps I 'm a bit jaded after running into too much
| bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in
| the 90s and 00s_
|
| Linux has gotten much better, and the problems of the 90s
| and 00s have vanished for my use case.
|
| These days, at least to me, Linux is the pretty Unix that
| just works that macOS used to be.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Well... That's why I have a ThinkPad, that is certified
| on Linux. (So your prejudice is dated)
|
| I'm literally trying to figure out how to install Python
| 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not
| a one line command.
|
| So... No. It has massive issues with developer
| friendliness. New OSX stalls with bluetooth mice and
| randomly locks my keyboard(MBP 2020). The only thing I
| can commend OSX on - battery life on a MacBook and
| nothing else
| wenc wrote:
| Python: another way to do this is to install Anaconda and
| then spin up virtual environments with specific Python
| versions. conda create -n myenv
| python=3.6
|
| Having multiple versions of system Pythons can be
| complicated. I've learned not to touch the system Python.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right
| now, and it's not a one line command
|
| To be fair, that's not easy on any OS (well, maybe
| Windows). Certainly on CentOS it is a chore to get two
| versions of Python installed simultaneously.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I'm on Ubuntu - it's not as mindbogglingly hard as on
| MacOSX.
|
| Unsupported versions - harder, but still a few
| commands...
|
| Supported versions? sudo apt install python-3.6 and done.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| pyenv[1] might help you out in this department. It's also
| cross-platform.
|
| [1] https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Because the software is also the nice bit
| OJFord wrote:
| Well if you like both there's no problem is there.
|
| Comment I replied to was 'I wouldn't pay for Apple
| hardware if I didn't want the software' implying that
| would be a stupid thing to do.
|
| I prefer its hardware to anything else; I prefer Linux to
| macOS. So that's exactly what I'd want to pay for.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| The hardware is the only good part unfortunately. I would
| have clicked buy faster then the flash could if the M1 could
| run Linux.
| foldr wrote:
| Isn't this pretty much an impossible ask, though? The
| hardware is great largely because Apple have invested so
| much in developing a custom SoC. But as a result, you can't
| easily run a generic OS on it. It's not like Apple just
| need to bridge the Linux jumper on the motherboard.
| Supporting Linux would require Apple to maintain millions
| of additional lines of code, and either hold themselves
| hostage to decisions made by the Linux kernel team, or
| maintain their own fork of Linux (which, aside from being
| based on BSD, is essentially how we got to Mac OS in the
| first place!)
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Actually it would only require Apple to release internal
| documentation. There are enough Linux nerds to write all
| the drivers. Graphics will probably be the hardest.
| foldr wrote:
| "Only". It would probably be easier for them to maintain
| the Linux drivers themselves than to thoroughly document
| every feature of the SoC.
|
| It's not just about individual drivers though, it's about
| the surrounding kernel infrastructure and the whole
| desktop experience. For example, getting instant
| suspend/resume working on Linux is not (I'm fairly sure)
| just a matter of writing a driver for a particular bit of
| hardware.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| They don't need to anything new. What they already have
| is enough. Their own software engineers could handle it
| fine. It's good enough for people who want this.
|
| There are people who have clean room implemented entire
| nvidia drivers. Without doc. We can manage fine with
| whatever incomplete doc Apple allready has.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| It's been a few years since I used Linux so forgive me if
| I'm off base here. But last time I used Linux with
| Nvidia, you had the choice of using FOSS drivers with
| mediocre performance, or having closed source drivers
| that performed on-par with Windows.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Not very impressive considering 5nm process. But a good start. I
| expect impressive CPUs in the coming years with more cores and
| more TDP. Hopefully Mac Pro Mini rumours will be true. That will
| be strong candidate for my next computer.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Not very impressive a CPU at 7-8W power drain beats or just
| trails behind a desktop class $799 Ryzen 9 5950x at +49W
| consumption in single threaded performance?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Mac mini is a plugged computer. I don't care whether it
| drains 7W or 700W. Electricity is cheap. And the fact that it
| trails behind AMD on a better node means that its design is
| inferior or not fully uncapped.
| nottorp wrote:
| Are you the kind that can't hear their computer fan because
| they wear headphones?
|
| And/or the kind that keeps their laptop plugged in all the
| time?
|
| Some people do care about cool, quiet and long battery
| life.
| singemonkey wrote:
| Actually it's very impressive.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Its starting to look like ARM is the way forward in terms of
| performance and battery life, and I feel PC's will soon follow in
| the next few years.
|
| My only hope is this doesn't mean things get further locked down
| (such as being able to install linux distributions or dual boot)
| but I have a bad feeling they will.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| Interesting that it is not able to outperform the Zen3 CPUs. I
| had expected it to do somewhat better, especially it being a 5nm
| processor, and with all the hype around ARM processors.
|
| I don't know how well it will hold up to its x86 competitors like
| this, especially once they launch their 5nm CPUs next year.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Have you seen benchmarks post 1st page? M1 at 7-8W power drain
| beats or just trails behind a desktop class $799 Ryzen 9 5950x
| at +49W consumption in single threaded performance. What did
| you expect?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| 5950X's CPU cores at 5ghz consume around 20w, not +49W. And
| it's extremely non-linear power scaling, such that at 4.2ghz
| it's already down to half the power consumption at 10w/core.
|
| The 5950X's uncore consumes a significant amount of power,
| but penalizing it for that seems more than a little
| unreasonable. The M1 is getting power wins from avoiding the
| need for externalized IO for GPU or DRAM, but those aren't
| strictly speaking _advantages_ either. I, for one, will
| _gladly_ pay 20w of power to have expandable RAM & PCI-E
| slots in a device the size of the Mac Mini much less anything
| larger. In a laptop of course that doesn't make as much
| sense, but in a laptop the Ryzen's uncore also isn't 20w (see
| the also excellent power efficiency of the 4800U and 4900HS)
| Slartie wrote:
| That doesn't say too much. There is a single thread
| performance ceiling that all CPUs based on current
| lithography technology available just bump against and can't
| overcome. The Ryzen probably marks that ceiling for now, and
| the M1 comes impressively close against it, especially
| considering its wattage.
|
| But you cannot extrapolate these numbers (to multi-core
| performance or to more cores or to a possible M2 with a
| larger TDP envelope), nor can you even directly compare them.
| The Ryzen 9 5950x makes an entirely different trade-off with
| regard to number of cores per CPU, supported memory, etc.,
| which allows for more cores, more memory, more
| everything...and that comes at a cost in terms of die space
| as well as power consumption. If AMD had designed this CPU to
| be much more constrained in those dimensions and thus much
| more similar to what the M1 offers, they would surely have
| been able to considerably drive down power consumption - in
| fact, their smaller units 4800U and 4900HS which were also
| benchmarked and which offer really good multithreading
| performance for their power envelope, even better than the
| M1, clearly demonstrate this fact.
|
| What I read out of these benchmark numbers is: the ISA does
| matter far less than most people seem to assume. ARM is no
| magic sauce in terms of performance at all - instead, it's
| "magic legal sauce", because it allows anyone (here: Apple;
| over there: Amazon) to construct their own high-end CPUs with
| industry-leading performance, which the x86 instruction set
| cannot do due to its licensing constraints.
|
| Both ISAs, x86_64 and ARM, apparently allow well-funded
| companies with the necessary top talent to build CPUs that
| max out whatever performance you can get out of the currently
| available lithography processes and out of the current state
| of the art in CPU design.
| SJetKaran wrote:
| > What I read out of these benchmark numbers is: the ISA
| does matter far less than most people seem to assume.
|
| This was my conclusion too. Does this mean, there is not
| much possibility of desktop pcs moving to ARM anytime soon?
| Perhaps, laptops might move to ARM processors, but even
| that seems iffy, if AMD can come up with more efficient
| processors (and Intel too with its Lakefield hybrid cpu)
| acchow wrote:
| I fully expect the 16" MBP to launch with a 12 or 16-core Apple
| chip.
| matsemann wrote:
| Yeah, as someone whose next laptop wont be a Mac again, this
| was a good ad for what AMD has achieved lately. MyLenovo P1 got
| a Intel Xeon of some kind, and while I'm otherwise very happy
| with the Laptop, the CPU is hot, uses way too much power and
| constantly throttles.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| In multi-threaded mode - which is what Zen3 are optimized for -
| the M1 barely reaches 30% of the Zen's performance.
|
| I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power CPU
| with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop monster
| with much more cores.
|
| The M1 will likely be an amazing laptop chip, but still
| unusable for demanding desktop work, e.g. CGI.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| I've posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the M1 on SPEC
| reaches Desktop-tier performance, going toe to toe with the
| 5950X: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| In single core performance, yes, but as the next page on
| the article shows, it's more comparable to the 4900HS, AMDs
| mobile CPU in multithreaded performance.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Yes, sorry if that came off as misleading. I'll edit this
| in elsewhere.
| foldr wrote:
| The 4900HS has a 35W TDP, though. The M1 in the Mac Mini
| is estimated at around 20-24W TDP.
| ip26 wrote:
| We might be able to chalk that level of difference up to
| process advantage.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The 4900HS has way more I/O and is on 7nm, as well as has
| more powerful graphics.
| gruez wrote:
| >I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power
| CPU with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop
| monster with much more cores.
|
| Are we looking at the same charts here? For cinebench
| multithreaded, the AMD 4xxx series CPUs are zen 2 parts with
| 15/35W TDP, hardly "unlimited-cooling desktop monster" like
| you described.
| foldr wrote:
| From the article: "While AMD's Zen3 still holds the leads
| in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this
| comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W
| range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device
| active power."
|
| Looking through the benchmarks, the zen 2 parts generally
| seem to have lower performance than the M1. The cinebench
| multithreaded benchmark is one exception. It's not that
| surprising because the 4800U has more cores than the M1 has
| high performance cores. The M1 wins the single threaded
| cinebench benchmark.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The Zen2 4800HS also outperformed the M1 in the
| Specint2017 multi-threaded results, too.
|
| The M1's float results are weirdly good relative to the
| int results, though. Not sure why Apple seems to have
| prioritized that so much in this category of CPU.
| foldr wrote:
| It's a higher TDP part (I think - it's 35W) and has more
| high performance cores, so it's not surprising that it
| would win some of the multicore benchmarks.
| ric2b wrote:
| Maybe because of javascript, where all numbers are
| floats?
| hajile wrote:
| Not strictly true.
|
| Taking a loop and adding a bunch of `x|0` can also often
| boost performance by hinting that integers are fine (in
| fact, the JIT is free to do this anyway if detects that
| it can).
|
| The most recent spec is also adding BigInt. Additionally,
| integer typed arrays have existed since the 1.0 release
| in 2011 (I believe they were even seeing work as early as
| 2006 or so with canvas3D).
| danaris wrote:
| Interesting that your takeaway from all this is "oh, it can't
| beat some of the top x86 chips in existence--it can only meet
| them on even footing. Guess it'll be falling behind next year."
|
| This is Apple's _first_ non-mobile chip ever. You think this is
| the best they can do, ever?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'd expect NVIDIA to join the ARM CPU race, too. And they
| have experience with the tooling for lots and lots of cores
| from CUDA. So I'd expect to have 5x to 10x the M1's
| performance available for desktops in 1-2 years. In fact,
| AMD's MI100 accelerator already has roughly 10x the FLOPS on
| 64bit.
|
| That said, it's an amazing notebook CPU.
| danaris wrote:
| To quote from Ars Technica's review of the M1 by Jim Salter
| [0]:
|
| > Although it's extremely difficult to get accurate Apples-
| to-non-Apples benchmarks on this new architecture, I feel
| confident in saying that this truly is a world-leading
| design--you can get faster raw CPU performance, but only on
| power-is-no-object desktop or server CPUs. Similarly, you
| can beat the M1's GPU with high-end Nvidia or Radeon
| desktop cards--but only at a massive disparity in power,
| physical size, and heat.
|
| ...So, given that, and _assuming_ that Apple will _attempt_
| to compete with them, I think it likely that they will, at
| the very least, be able to match them on even footing, when
| freed from the constraints of size, heat, and power that
| are relevant to notebook chips.
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-
| the-ap...
| athms wrote:
| >I'd expect NVIDIA to join the ARM CPU race, too.
|
| Nvidia has been making ARM SoCs since 2008. They have been
| used in cars, tablets, phones, and entertainment systems.
|
| What do you think powers the Nintendo Switch?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Agree. Yeah I should have thought about the Switch and
| write things more clearly.
|
| I meant that NVIDIA will start producing ARM CPUs
| optimized for peak data-center performance, similar to
| how they now have CUDA accelerator cards for data
| centers, which are starting to diverge from desktop GPUs.
|
| In the past, NVIDIA's ARM division mostly focussed on
| mobile SoCs. Now that Graviton and M1 are here, I'd
| expect NVIDIA to also produce high-wattage ARM CPUs.
| dtech wrote:
| > This is Apple's first non-mobile chip ever. You think this
| is the best they can do, ever?
|
| They have been making mobile ARM chips for quite some time,
| so it's not like they are inexperienced.
| canes123456 wrote:
| Look at the tread lines. They been able to keep increasing
| single core performance every year. There is no reason to
| think that is stopping this year.
| hajile wrote:
| They increased IPC only around 5% with A14. The remaining
| performance increase was from clockspeeds (gained without
| increasing power due to 5nm).
|
| Short, wide architectures are historically harder to
| frequency scale (and given how power vs clocks tapers off
| at the end of that scale, it's not a bad thing IMO).
|
| 4nm isn't shipping until 2022 (and isn't a full node).
| TSMC says that the 5 to 3nm change will be identical to
| the 7 to 5nm change (+15% performance or -30% power
| consumption).
|
| Any changes next year will have to come through pure
| architecture changes or bigger chips. I'm betting on more
| modest 5-10% improvements on the low-end and larger
| 10-20% improvements on a larger chip with a bunch of
| cache tweaks and higher TDP.
|
| Intel 10nm+ "SuperFin" will probably be fixing the major
| problems, improving performance, and slightly decreasing
| sizes for a final architecture much closer to TSMC N7.
|
| I'm thinking that AMD ships their mobile chips with N6
| instead of N7 for the density and mild power savings
| (it's supposedly a minor change and the mobile design is
| a separate chip anyway). Late next year we should be
| seeing Zen 4 on 5nm. That should be an interesting
| situation and will help resolve any questions of process
| vs architecture.
| canes123456 wrote:
| I agree that most of the gains were due to the node
| shrink. However, being able to stick to these tick tock
| gains for the last several years is impressive. They
| could have hit a wall in architecture and were bailed out
| by the node shrink but I doubt they would have switch
| away from Intel if that was the case.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I'd argue that the M1 is a mobile chip and it's the low end
| model. You're still right, the M1 is no where near the best
| Apple is able to deliver.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I'm not buying into Apple's eventually-closed desktop computer
| systems - I don't care what the performance is. They've been
| slowly marching towards iOS's closed ecosystem model on the Mac
| and with an in-house CPU, they can effectively lock users out of
| alternate OS choices on their hardware. Buyer beware.
| sschueller wrote:
| I'm with you. I'm not going to support this crap.
|
| We might be in the minority at the moment but the harder Apple
| makes it to repair their machines by 3rd parties the less
| likely people are going to buy such an expensive machine in the
| future where a broken key means $500+ in repairs.
| [deleted]
| Findeton wrote:
| Exactly, I don't care whatever they do, I'm not buying into
| their closed garden of eden. I've already replaced Spotify with
| Funkwhale, and I'm using Linux, I'm not their target and I'll
| never be.
| singemonkey wrote:
| Appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to let us
| know that.
| millzlane wrote:
| Thank you, for letting us know you appreciate his opinion.
| matvore wrote:
| I get why this idea of becoming iOS-like is uncomfortable for a
| lot of people, but will they take away the POSIX-ness of the
| OS? What about all the people that spend all their time in Vim,
| TMUX, Emacs, and/or zsh? I think these people will continue to
| be pretty happy on macOS if they already are.
|
| In my experience, installing alternate OS's on Mac hardware has
| never been frictionless or satisfying anyway.
| aero-glide wrote:
| >In my experience, installing alternate OS's on Mac hardware
| has never been frictionless or satisfying anyway.
|
| It would be if they take some effort to support it.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Bootcamp has always run fine for me. I've never tried to
| install Linux on my Macs.
| matvore wrote:
| > It would be if they take some effort to support it.
|
| Oh, definitely. But the Linux (or alternate OS) fans are
| not really on Apple's radar. OTOH, they do a good job of
| keeping some core binaries up-to-date, like zsh and Vim,
| and they did appeal about getting good compile times during
| the M1 release event, so they consider POSIX users part of
| their target market.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| There's no link between - compile time and "POSIX users".
|
| Last I checked, I can compile and deploy an iOS app
| without the need for anything POSIX.
| karteum wrote:
| > will they take away the POSIX-ness of the OS?
|
| It's not only about POSIX. After the X years of planned
| lifetime (with proper software/OS updates), will there be any
| solution to extend the lifetime (which is what I used Linux
| for, on > 10 years-old laptops) ? I guess there will be no
| solution against planned obsolescence...
|
| And with regards to control and privacy : will Apple finally
| give-up their policy of deciding (and tracking) "for your own
| good" which apps you are allowed to install and launch ?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I don't see why they would do this. If they just want to sell
| iPads, they could do that tomorrow. Just release XCode for
| Linux and Windows so that devs can create iOS apps and call
| it a day.
|
| Obviously they still intend for the Mac to remain a general
| purpose computer or they wouldn't be putting this much effort
| into it.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I wouldn't count on Apple leaving the PC market.
|
| Tablet dominated world never materialized.
|
| Post PC era isn't here, the PC is dominant still. Even iPad
| Pro got laptop like, than any laptop got iPad like. iPad's
| sales are either stalling or declining.
|
| Yes - Apple clearly wants to keep that laptop market and be
| general enough to be useful. But general purpose is for
| general public, not your average HN reader.
| michaelt wrote:
| When GiorgioG speaks of a closed, iOS-style ecosystem, I
| don't think they mean literally running iOS on laptops.
|
| Rather, they foresee OS X becoming a system where you can't
| run programs that haven't received Apple's blessing and
| been brought through Apple's store. Blessings that will be
| denied to software like youtube-dl.
|
| As to why they would do this? A combination of the good of
| most users, who will enjoy protection from malware and
| viruses; and the irresistible temptation of a 30% cut of
| all sales.
| FreakyT wrote:
| Exactly. They still need something to develop iOS and MacOS
| themselves on, so unless they want to move all their
| internal lower-level development over to Windows or Linux
| (which, IMO, doesn't seem like something Apple would do),
| they'll need to continue producing something resembling a
| general purpose computer.
| rvense wrote:
| I feel exactly the same way, but I do wonder how this gap is
| going to close. If Microsoft team up with another ARM vendor
| and make similarly closed-off, proprietary glue sandwiches as a
| response, where does that leave Linux? I doubt PC-compatible,
| x86 laptops are going to disappear off the face of the Earth
| anytime soon, but... if there's basically two types of
| machines, and ours have worse performance and half the battery
| life at twice the thickness (plus a fan, as a free bonus), a
| Linux machine is a tough sell to someone who hasn't already
| bought in. For the Linux workstation experience to keep up, we
| need more people coming in, and if new people can't dip their
| toes on hardware they already own, that raises the bar
| significantly.
| massysett wrote:
| Look at that new Raspberry Pi where everything is built into
| the keyboard unit like the old Apple 2 and Commodore 64.
| Linux's future is brighter than ever. Linux hardware that is
| unique in its own right is much more interesting than trying
| to install Linux on PC or Mac hardware and beat it into
| submission.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm guessing we are moving towards the same system as
| embedded vendors use. Patch the Linux kernel so it runs. But
| never upstream anything so you will run around with an old os
| never to be updates again.
| igneo676 wrote:
| You just have to look at the phone community (XDA Developers,
| etc) to see how this will (eventually) go.
|
| A good example were the old Asus Transformer tablets. They
| were a super niche device, but it still lended itself to
| Linux and so a small team of people managed to load Ubuntu on
| it.
|
| Another are Samsung phones. They try to lock people out, but
| they have popular enough devices that people find a way to
| put LineageOS on them.
|
| Finally, even iPhones aren't immune. Small teams of people
| have managed to load Android on them and get it (partially)
| working. More people would give them even greater
| functionality.
|
| If laptop manufacturers lock things down with ARM, there will
| be people who work around those mitigations and install their
| own OS on that hardware. Tooling will be developed to make
| that process easier and easier for the next round of people
| with that device (or future devices). It'll suck up front
| until the community grows large enough to work around issues
| faster and faster.
|
| And that's even supposing worst case scenario. I'm not fully
| buying the idea that you _won't_ be able to change the OS on
| these laptops. Microsoft has tried (and failed) to lock other
| OS's out of their laptops. Chromebooks are (currently) the
| largest market of ARM laptops and you're able to change the
| OS on them. Apple might be the only company even remotely
| able to hinder freedom on their devices.
|
| Either way. In the war on general computing, I'm generally
| optimistic for the users.
| m4rtink wrote:
| That's actually quite a depressing look - while the
| community can often get undocumented & closed user hostile
| hardware run their OS of choice, it's hardly ever as
| seamless as installing a modern Linux distro on about
| anything x86, usually without issues - mostly thanks to
| standards such as BIOS/UEFI, ACPI & others.
|
| Also even if you liberate a single device, it does not mean
| all your hack will work on the next one - it's a never
| ending battle. And without making sure manufacturers
| actually respect some standards such as they do on x86, it
| might become a loosing battle long term...
| igneo676 wrote:
| Sure, the lockdown situation is worse than things are
| currently. You're likely to need per-device hacks that
| unlock it and enable freedom for users.
|
| Even in that scenario though, ARM devices use standards
| too. There's a reason I can generally pick up any Android
| device and know what needs to be done to build my own OS
| for it. We just lack tooling that makes that incredibly
| easy and lack maintainers who want to make those devices
| work with the mainstream linux kernel.
|
| Having open devices though (outside of Apple) is still my
| bet. We still need to make that process smoother but that
| just means there's lots of low hanging fruit :)
| faitswulff wrote:
| As someone who sympathizes with your perspective, I do believe
| that this is a minority position. Most people don't care about
| closed ecosystems - just look at Facebook's popularity. Look at
| the Apple App Store. Government intervention would be needed to
| break up these closed gardens.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| > I do believe that this is a minority position. Most people
| don't care about closed ecosystems
|
| You're absolutely right. I bought my first MacBook Pro (17")
| in 2007 (and it's still running at my parents' house!) Over
| time all the machines in the house save my work/gaming rig
| have been replaced by Macs (iMacs, MBP, 12" MB, etc.)
|
| Now I plan on reversing course. I'll keep my iPhone for now
| because everyone in the family lives in the blue bubbles
| (iMessage.)
| electriclove wrote:
| Re: Reversing course.. what will you replace your Macs
| with?
| GiorgioG wrote:
| The iMac will be replaced with a custom-built PC.
|
| The MacBook Pros are another story. I don't know. I can't
| see me buying any new Intel Macs since they'll be phased
| out at some point.
|
| I've never had much luck with the Dell XPSes. I may give
| ThinkPads a look (I have a P50 at my current job which
| has been fine (if not for all the corporate antimalware
| slowing it to a crawl.))
| electriclove wrote:
| Thanks for the response. I'm hesitant to move my family
| away from Macs because they have been relatively easy to
| support.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I'm hesitant as well, for the same reason. Having said
| that my personal PC (desktop) is still running well 3+
| years after initially installing Windows on it. My
| inlaws' very old laptop is still running fine (it's at
| least 8 years old and was upgraded (on accident!) from
| whatever version of Windows it was running prior to 10.)
| Aside from user errors (accidentally installing adware
| toolbars in Chrome, etc) there really hasn't been any
| real issues as it pertains to Windows itself.
| konart wrote:
| >they can effectively lock users out of alternate OS choices on
| their hardware
|
| People buy mac to use macOS. Some will also use bootcamp for
| windows if VM is not enough for their tasks. And installing
| linux instead of macOS on a mac even sounds strange.
|
| So - nothing to be aware of. Macs always were build to run
| Apple OS
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Going on internet comments they've been marching towards this
| for years. I've yet to see anything actually happen.
| matvore wrote:
| Eminent Internet speculation about Apple is correct
| surprisingly often.
|
| EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, maybe because I was too cryptic.
| To clarify, it seems like the rumors that gain traction with
| mainstream sites and Apple-focused YouTube channels and
| forums tend to have strong correlation with _something_ that
| will happen later.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| This speculation has been going on for years.
|
| They're not going to remove the ability to run arbitrary
| code or the unix core. There would literally be no reason
| to buy a mac over another product of theirs.
| matvore wrote:
| I suspect there is an element of truth to it. I agree
| they will keep the Unix core and allow you to use clang
| and ld however you want. I suspect, however, they're not
| interested in supporting alternate OS's nor are they
| interested in allowing typical users to download normie
| GUI apps from anywhere.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Oh absolutely, it's just not as extreme as people make
| out.
|
| Yes, they won't support dual booting linux - you can run
| a VM, but if that's a dealbreaker - fair enough.
|
| There's absolutely no chance however that savvy users
| will not be able to continue running non app store apps.
|
| Apple want control, but they're not stupid enough to
| completely lock down the development machines for their
| entire ecosystem.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > Going on internet comments
|
| So instead of going on evidence and public statements by
| Apple executives - statements that have repeatedly said the
| Mac is the Mac - you choose to believe random internet
| comments?
|
| There is a delicate balance between protecting average users
| who have no clue what is safe software and what isn't vs
| allowing power users and developers to do what they want.
| Since the days of ActiveX controls we've know if you give
| users a "Please pwn me" dialog they'll just click "OK".
| They've been trained that computers put up lots of pointless
| dialogs they can't understand even if they take the time to
| read them so just click until it gets out of the way. Even
| with default security settings if opening an app from an
| "unidentified developer" fails you can go into System
| Preferences > Security and click "Allow".
|
| macOS is trying to protect people by default while still
| allowing the HN crowd to turn these protections off if they
| so wish.
|
| Apple Silicon Macs still allow you to disable SIP which turns
| off a lot of modern protections. You can still downgrade boot
| security. It is a deliberate decision to continue allowing
| ad-hoc code signing. Software can still be distributed
| outside the Mac App Store either with a Developer ID or
| without. The vast majority of Mac users don't know or care
| what any of these things are but the Mac has always allowed
| them and as Craig has said several times over: the Mac is
| still the Mac. It is still the system that supports hobbyists
| and developers - people who sometimes want to poke at the
| system, install their own kernel extensions, etc.
|
| If your complaint is that things are not wide-open by default
| anymore then I don't know what to tell you. We don't live in
| the same software landscape we once did and there are far
| more malicious actors out there. Protecting users by default
| is the right thing to do IMHO.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Are you sure you've replied to the right comment?
|
| I was literally making the point that these rumours have
| persisted for years and nothing has ever come of it.
|
| I couldn't agree more with the rest of your comment!
| xuki wrote:
| Performance per watt of this thing is INSANE, take a look at the
| battery left after compiling WebKit, compared to older Mac:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/WebKit-Com...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
|
| IMO the all day battery will be THE killer feature of the new
| laptops.
| stevehawk wrote:
| will it? do people really spend that much time away from an
| outlet while on their laptop?
| xuki wrote:
| All day battery and very light laptop will change people's
| behavior. Previously they might not bring the laptop out as
| much because of power constraint.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Yes. Even at home it's so much nicer to be able take the
| laptop anywhere without worrying about wires.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| My school had a policy of no chargers at school due to safety
| regulations (Fires/tripping) so the macbook air made an
| excellent choice.
| interestica wrote:
| These gains are just through improvements in processors. Now,
| combine that with parallel leaps for battery tech... It's also
| good that battery tech hasn't jumped too far ahead already -
| the constraint has helped in the development in these mobile
| chips. The display panel is still the biggest energy draw on my
| laptop. There's a lot of chance for improvement there too. A 2
| day battery in 5 years isn't that crazy.
| legulere wrote:
| Apple is slowly moving to mini led displays and probably
| micro led displays after that. That should also improve
| energy use.
| xuki wrote:
| Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down
| the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.
| Razengan wrote:
| Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down
| the laptop and improve the performance AND increase the
| battery life.
|
| Like they just fucking did with the M1 MacBooks.
| xuki wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. They know the
| battery range they need and keep it there, to make room
| for other features.
| oblio wrote:
| As much as I dislike them doing it while disregarding other
| aspects, we need/want slimmer. A notebook PC should be as
| thin as a real notebook or maybe even less. And it should
| be sturdy enough, after all, a 5-6 mm plate of metal is
| quite robust.
| munificent wrote:
| I think that's the right call, honestly.
|
| I need to recharge my own wetware at least once a day. So
| there is a nearly guaranteed several hour idle period where
| I'm not using any technology and where laptops and phones
| can be recharging too.
|
| I don't see much end user value in not taking advantage of
| that.
|
| It's like if you parked your car literally at a gas station
| every night anyway. Would you really care about a fuel tank
| that could let you drive for more than 24 hours?
| murukesh_s wrote:
| I would want a 2, 3, even 7 day battery. Why not? I don't
| want to bother about charging every day.
|
| But my worry is that with more and more efficiency in
| computing and battery tech, if Apple instead decides to
| reduce the battery capacity? Especially with no
| competition in sight, or competitors trying to follow
| Apple, we may end up with smaller batteries instead of
| more battery life. They seems to be doing that with
| iPhone. Also 18 hour battery life can quickly degrade to
| few hours if some processes are spinning the CPU
| continuously which can happen knowingly or unknowingly
| with several apps open (Docker occasionally does that to
| my MBP).
|
| With several days battery life, I can even go for short
| travels without even bothering about how to charge it.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| The problem with multi day battery life is you never get
| in to a routine and you get caught out every time. I had
| a pebble watch which had a 10 day battery life and almost
| every 10th day it would go flat on me mid day or I'd get
| a warning about low battery while I'm outside and then
| forget about it when I get home.
|
| Now I have an Apple Watch that lasts almost but not quite
| 2 days, I charge it every night and it has never gone
| flat on me and I find it no hassle since I take it off
| before bed anyway so I just drop it on the charger.
| jakear wrote:
| External battery for cases when you need it, ultralight
| for cases when you need it. The ancient carpet the world
| vs wear slippers debate.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Especially now that thanks to USB-C, it's easier than
| ever to augment laptop batteries. For $60 you can grab a
| 100Wh RavPower battery pack that can double the lifespan
| of a MacBook.
| AgloeDreams wrote:
| I'm not sure I or really anyone actually wants a 2 day
| battery life. Like, we can do that on smartphones right now
| but users have signaled that the 1 day device is fine for
| them, notably because of the human gap.
|
| You know the gap.
|
| If you charge your phone every night it becomes a habit
| tied to your daily routine.
|
| If you were to charge your phone every other night, you
| might lose track of what day you are on, not charge it and
| then the perceived battery life experience is worse. This
| is why smart watches with 3-4 days of battery have not
| prevailed over those with one heavy day of battery. They
| are annoying to know what day you are on so you might just
| charge it every night and if you do, the platform is
| trading off so much power that the experience is worse.
|
| Plus, then you have to carry 2 days worth of battery or
| have half the power envelope as a laptop with one day. the
| concept all sounds great but the reality of people using
| things really has honed in on the fact that these things
| need to fit into habit and use cases that make sense.
| twhb wrote:
| Why are you assuming you need to charge a 2-day device
| every other day? You charge it every night, and in
| exchange you make it through heavy use days, late nights,
| and the times you forget to charge it. I had a 2-day
| phone and downgraded to a 1-day phone and my phone now
| dies on me much more often, including in each of those
| scenarios, and looking at the battery level and charging
| have become a bigger part of my life.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Do you think that's still true in 2020? Seems like thinness
| hasn't been a major consideration for a couple of years
| now.
| xuki wrote:
| They're doing it again with the new iPhone. All of this
| year iPhone have a smaller battery.
| reaperducer wrote:
| And they all added hardware features to fill that space.
| Look at the iFixit teardowns and you'll see it wasn't to
| make the phones thinner. It was to make room for wireless
| charging, LIDAR, and other features.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down
| the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life._
|
| Hopefully the Era of Ive is over. There are promising signs
| around, but I'm not ready to believe it yet.
| threeseed wrote:
| Ive doesn't unilaterally decide how thin the laptop is.
|
| It's a joint decision made by Hardware Engineering,
| Product Management, Design, Operations etc.
|
| And frankly everyone wants thin laptops just with top
| tier performance which it looks like we will get.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| It gets 18 hours battery life. For most people, that is 2
| day battery life.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Apple just increased battery life on the MacBook Pro from
| ~12 hours to 20 hours and kept the form factor the same.
| Likewise the MacBook Air. Feedback from people using them
| suggests gains are even bigger for people who use them on
| battery under load.
| samatman wrote:
| ...maybe?
|
| The Air form factor is already pushing the limit of what
| you can do with aluminium and still have high confidence it
| won't warp when you shove it into your bag, or have it fall
| over when you open the screen past vertical.
|
| I could see them slimming down the battery to get more
| components in, maybe, rather than two day battery life.
|
| Which would probably be the right call. There just aren't
| enough circumstances where not plugging in your laptop
| while sleeping is necessary to justify it.
|
| Personally I'd like them to make a model with a cellular
| modem, with all-day battery life even reasonably far from a
| tower. That would be fun.
| anuila wrote:
| This metric is hilarious and perfect.
| faitswulff wrote:
| The takeaway quote I've been sending people from the TC article
| is:
|
| > And, most impressively, the M1 MacBook Pro used [just] 17% of
| the battery to output an 81GB 8k render. The 13" MacBook Pro
| could not even finish this render on one battery charge.
| kowlo wrote:
| Should I be annoyed about buying a 2020 iMac 27" i7 5700XT 32
| days ago?
| jakeva wrote:
| I wouldn't be, the M1 isn't available in that form factor yet
| and even if it was it would be first gen, and in the meantime
| you still have a really great computer.
| kowlo wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to reply! I will try to remind
| myself that it's a good machine. Only real issue I have with
| it is the audible fan at idle... not ideal when recording!
|
| I suppose the M1 release has just amplified my buyer's
| remorse
| klelatti wrote:
| It's interesting what this will do for the positioning of Mac
| Mini. If you want a desktop with decent performance in a compact
| package the Mini might just be first choice having languished
| with underpowered Intel CPUs for so long.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not surprised it's doing well.
|
| Apple has deeper pockets than anyone else on the planet, and they
| have considerable experience doing this kind of thing -literally,
| _decades_.
|
| Say what you will about Apple; this is a strong point for them.
|
| But I'm still waiting for the M2 before I upgrade. I'm also
| interested in new form factors. Right now, they are still relying
| on the currently-tooled production line for their shells. They
| now have the ability to drastically change their forms.
| dtech wrote:
| I'd say Intel has the deepest pockets regarding CPU R&D, and
| yet they are being overtaken left and right.
| mastax wrote:
| Intel's architectures have been massively delayed by process
| issues. They're still shipping Skylake (Aug 2015)
| architecture processors on the desktop and server because
| they waited too long to change strategy. About a year ago
| they announced they're going to start decoupling the
| microarchitecture from the manufacturing process. 2021 will
| be show the first fruits of that labor with Rocket Lake,
| which is Ice Lake (Sept 2019) backported to 14nm. If they had
| done that at the first sign of manufacturing trouble (2014?)
| they could have 2 more generations of IPC improvement and
| still be ahead in every way except efficiency. I guess Intel
| management was more concerned with not rocking the boat.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| There is a natural progression where companies go from
| engineering-driven to finance-driven. It's usually a death
| march.
| AgloeDreams wrote:
| I also feel like Intel's depth is also limited by the breath
| of CPUS they must develop. With every release they are
| shipping tons of specific sets of cores and clock speeds to
| meet their market. Then you have the raw investment in Fab
| that has turned out to be just lighting cash on fire for
| Intel. They make all kinds of claims and then fail over and
| over, plus they are hemorrhaging key talent. I think their
| soul really isn't in the game.
|
| Apple has the luxury of building two or three chips total per
| year and simply funding TSMC fab. All of this is to fund the
| largest grossing annual product launch. If their chips fail
| at being world beaters, hundreds of billions of dollars are
| on the table. All in, Apple spends an incredible amount of
| money here, ~$1 billion. Per chip design shipped, Apple is
| probably spending much more but also getting their return on
| investment. It's such a tight integration that if TSMC were
| ever delayed by say, four months, I have no idea what Apple
| would do.
|
| AMD is playing smart, fast and loose. Best chip CEO by a wide
| margin. AMD's gains really are on Apple's back, their chip
| design is brilliant and they get to reap the leftovers when
| Apple turns out their latest chip. They don't have to fund
| Fab, they don't have to make crazy claims to appear relevant
| like Intel does. They just ship great bang for the buck and
| the fab gains and their own hard work has given them best
| performance title too. Going Fabless was one of the most
| controversial choices ever made in the industry...and wow,
| was it the right move.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Best chip CEO by a wide margin_
|
| Reminds me of this story:
| https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/16/amd_ceo_f1/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Probably right. I have family that works for Intel, and I
| have heard stories about the amenities and infrastructure
| (like "Air Intel," a fleet of corporate jets that take
| employees between Intel campuses).
| [deleted]
| snazz wrote:
| > The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro get chips with all 8 GPU cores
| enabled. Meanwhile for the Mac Mini, it depends on the SKU: the
| entry-level model gets a 7 core configuration, while the higher-
| tier model gets 8 cores.
|
| This appears to be wrong. From what I can see on apple.com, the
| Air offers the choice of a 7 or 8 core GPU, while the Pro and
| mini start with the full chip.
| wincy wrote:
| They mixed up the GPU configurations in the article, currently it
| says the Mac Mini has 7 and 8 core configurations, but that's
| actually the MacBook Air that has the lower gpu option.
| fareesh wrote:
| I feel like if one can hold out another year or two for the
| second iteration that will probably be a better long-term bet. My
| current macbook is about 6 years old.
| Technically wrote:
| It makes me very annoyed they aren't selling a minimal laptop
| version. I really don't get why they're doubling down on forcing
| the touch strip onto their laptops when nobody is demanding this
| and, thankfully, no competitor wants to acknowledge such a
| feature or the software burden requiring that hardware implies.
| CapriciousCptl wrote:
| From the article's conclusion... "The M1 undisputedly outperforms
| the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and
| battles it with AMD's new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in
| the mobile space in particular, there doesn't seem to be an
| equivalent in either ST or MT performance - at least within the
| same power budgets."
|
| This is the first in-depth review validating all the hype.
| Assuming the user experience, Rosetta2 things, first generation
| pains, kernel panics, are all in-check, it's amazing. At this
| point I'm mostly interested in the Air's performance with its
| missing fan.
| desireco42 wrote:
| Yeah me too. I expect that there will be another release
| sometime next year with updated "package". It is cool that they
| put it in old Air box, but I think I can wait for better
| camera, overall package. By that time it will be clearer all
| the benefits and issues that come with it.
|
| I wouldn't mind plastic edition of MacBook /w M1. Aluminum and
| metal overall, not the best for everyday use. I prefer "warmer"
| feel of plastic, like ThinkPad for example.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I suspect the aluminium frame is a key part of the passive
| thermal cooling. I'd be very surprised if we see a plastic
| version.
| qz2 wrote:
| I do miss the plastic ones myself. My sweat dissolves
| macbooks and they give me a rash.
| skavi wrote:
| lol, clean your computer.
| luto wrote:
| I can't find that quote or even the words "undisputedly" or
| "Zen3" in the article. Was it changed or, if it wasn't, can you
| give me a pointer, please?
| ajb wrote:
| It's on page 7
| juliand wrote:
| You have to jump to the article's conclusion.
| toxik wrote:
| A jump to conclusions, if you will.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Of course, we'd already know that if only we had a jump
| to conclusions _mat_!
|
| It's a shame it wasn't a commercial success.
| [deleted]
| alnorth wrote:
| You have to use the dropdown to select the right page. As
| they said, it's in the conclusion of the article.
| mbrd wrote:
| The article has multiple pages. You can find the conclusion
| here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
| [deleted]
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| It's insane how bad the website's UX is for first time
| visitors not seeing there's more content behind the first
| page.
| 727564797069706 wrote:
| Wow, indeed! I thought the conclusion part in the article
| was weird. Now I see why - I was at the end of the first
| page!
| freehunter wrote:
| That's how websites used to fit more ads into an article
| before constantly-updating Javascript ads became the trend.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Yes, but with a big huge button "NEXT PAGE" or something
| like that. Look at the number of comments here that
| didn't even notice there's more content other than the
| 1st page.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| AnandTech split some articles onto multiple pages. The print
| view gets you the whole article on one page, so I rather
| prefer it: https://www.anandtech.com/print/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-test...
| porphyra wrote:
| Wow, I never knew about the print view. It's way more
| readable, and the lack of comments section makes it quite
| fast to load despite the very long page.
|
| The tiny drop-down menu in the default view is very hard to
| discover and quite annoying to click on (many other review
| sites, like Phoronix, have similar annoying drop-downs).
| jdeibele wrote:
| As I remember, they charged a membership fee for being able
| to download the whole article as a PDF.
|
| It seemed somewhat reasonable that an article that would be
| passed around the department or on to your boss would
| require a fee.
|
| I can't find any mention of it on their website, though. Am
| I getting my websites confused or did they drop it
| altogether?
| _djo_ wrote:
| You're thinking of Ars Technica, I think.
| jdeibele wrote:
| Yes, you're right. Thank you. And they're still doing
| offering PDF's only to members. Which I don't have a
| problem with.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Chrome and 20-50 tabs, and my Intel Macbook can be used as a
| blow dryer. Assuming Chrome's power needs don't change, it
| seems that the only way to control for overheating an M1 is
| going to be throttling down - slowing everything down. Curious
| how M1 machines feel during day to day usage.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I have a 2017 MBP (base, no TB) and found that Chrome made my
| fan rev like crazy. A friend told me about Brave and I tried
| it out. Now my fan only kicks on when I'm doing serious work.
| I know some folks don't like Brave for various reasons, but I
| love it because my MBP is almost always silent.
| pwthornton wrote:
| The reviews I saw said that using Chrome gets good better
| life, but if you want great battery life you need to use
| something like Safari.
|
| I switched to Safari a few years ago, and I couldn't be
| happier. Chrome's performance and battery life are atrocious.
| I only use Chrome when I need something specific from it.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I saw that comment in a couple different places. Presumably
| Chrome is running through Rosetta 2, whereas Safari is
| native to the M1. I imagine once Chrome is available
| natively, performance will be somewhat better, though
| probably still not as good as Safari.
| simonh wrote:
| On the new machines yes, but none if the people you read
| about before today had AS machines, they were all
| comparing Chrome and Safari on Intel, so it's unlikely
| that stays quiet will change once Chrone is native on AS.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| IIRC Chrome is a battery hog / memory hog on all
| platforms.
|
| Am I wrong in this regard?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Afaik it's a memory hog but it doesn't really use more or
| less battery then other browsers.
| megablast wrote:
| Chrome is just awful on a mac. I am not sure why anyone uses
| it. FF is much nicer to use.
| markholmes wrote:
| I've been using Safari as my daily driver for some time and
| it's quite nice to use. Don't be afraid to give it another
| chance.
| sumedh wrote:
| Does Safari have extensions like Ad Blocker and does it
| have good developer tools?
| aculver wrote:
| 1. Yes, it does. I use AdBlock Pro. 2. Yes, it does. I've
| been using Safari as my primary browser as a Rails
| developer for at least the past decade and have always
| found the developer tools at least adequate. I don't use
| the developer tools on other browsers, so I don't know
| what I might be missing.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Adblock Pro no longer exists for Safari (in the form of
| an "official" extension).
|
| Now there's "AdBlock for Safari" developed by BETAFISH
| INC, which offers in-app purchases including "Gold
| Upgrade" which "unlocks" some basic features that
| gorhill's uBlock Origin already has for every other
| browser.
|
| https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60
| 002...
|
| Not switching until there are some better options for
| this.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Safari is migrating to a new system of extensions that
| will make it much easier to port from Chrome. However, I
| understand it still requires Xcode (which non-Mac folks
| can't run) and a developer license (which not everyone
| wants to pay for). I hope to bring my Chrome extension to
| Safari, but honestly it's not a priority because most
| people who install extensions are not running Safari
| (when you consider that most people are not on Mac, and a
| large chunk of folks on desktop Safari are there because
| it's the default -- and therefore would not likely
| install extensions).
| mattnewton wrote:
| Speed mostly, though the last time I tried out Firefox
| seriously was over a year ago, it was noticeably much
| slower on pages (ab)using lots of javascript.
| mycall wrote:
| Does Edge Chromium for MacOS have the same awfulness?
| testfoobar wrote:
| I particularly like Chrome profiles. I have a few profiles
| with their own bookmarks/histories/open tabs/etc. For
| example, one of my profiles is "Shopping". Another is
| "Work" and yet another is "Social Media".
|
| Context switching profiles at a macro level - as opposed to
| intermingling work/shopping/social - is beneficial to me.
|
| When I switch over to "Shopping", I have my tabs on
| whatever purchase I'm researching open. I can drop the
| whole project for a few weeks and resume it later right
| where I left off. None of it can bleed over into my "Work"
| profile. I like the separation. Helps keep my head clear.
| majormunky wrote:
| Firefox has something like this called containers. The
| best example is one for facebook, where any call to any
| facebook servers only works in the facebook container. It
| has similar setups as well, Work, Home, Commerce, etc.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Not quite the same. I want to set-up and tear-down entire
| macro groups of windows and tabs while keeping others
| active.
|
| Opening my 'Shopping' profile brings up windows and tabs
| from where I left off. Same with "Social". When I don't
| want distractions, I just close those profiles. No
| notifications, no updates, etc. I like the separation.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Simple Tab Groups [0] + Multi-Account Containers [1] are
| my workflow for that exact case. Simple Tab Groups hides
| the tabs based on the group you're in and the Multi
| Account Containers can keep them segmented from a
| contextual standpoint.
|
| I can't stand Chrome either and so I've been using these
| two together for about a year now I believe. Using a
| naked version of Chrome is jarring given my browser feels
| like it fits how I use it being setup like this.
|
| [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... [1]
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
| account...
| feanaro wrote:
| Firefox also has profiles, though they're not a very
| prominent feature and are a bit less polished as a
| result. firefox --ProfileManager
| TsomArp wrote:
| Is that a Chrome for Mac feature? Never seen it before.
| Care to elavorate?
| spacenick88 wrote:
| As for kernel panics, with iOS likely sharing most if not all
| of it's kernel code with macOS I'd be surprised if Apple hasn't
| had an iPhone macOS build since before they released the first
| iPhone.
| paulpan wrote:
| Unsung hero here is TSMC and their industry-leading 5nm
| fabrication node. Apple deserves praise for its SOC
| architecture on the M1 and putting it together, but the
| manufacturing advantage is worth noting.
|
| Apple is essentially combining the tick (die/node shrink) and
| tock (microarchitecture) cadences together each year, at least
| the past 2-3 years. The question, perhaps a moot one, is how
| much the performance gains can be attributed to either? The
| implication is that the % improvement due to tock is available
| to other TSMC customers, such as AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and
| even Intel.
|
| We'd have to wait until next year (or 2022) once AMD puts Zen4
| on 5nm and see an apple-to-apples comparison on the per thread
| performance. But of course by then Apple will be on TSMC 3nm or
| beyond...
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > At this point I'm mostly interested in the Air's performance
| with its missing fan.
|
| I think the clear store here is that the Air will definitely be
| slower than the rest over time. This isn't a 10W SoC, clearly,
| so it definitely can't run at its best while being passively
| cooled.
|
| How it behaves when throttled will be interesting for sure
| though.
| pwthornton wrote:
| It looks like it only begins to throttle after 8.5 minutes of
| sustained high loads -- like exporting 4K video.
|
| In a lot of day-to-day work that is much more peaks and
| valleys, you may never see the throttling.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Seeing reddit reports of gaming throttling more quickly
| than that, which would make sense since the GPU is going to
| sit at or near 100% pretty easily with a game and you'll
| still be seeing a decent CPU load.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| The macbook air is probably the worst machine you can
| think of for gaming. Even without the M1 you won't have a
| great time. Its the perfect machine for students because
| it can last all day in a browser and word.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That conclusion is quite misleading, in my opinion.
|
| They write "outperforms the core performance" and the keyword
| here is "core". What they mean is that if one had a single-core
| Zen3 and a single-core M1, then the M1 would win some and lose
| some.
|
| But in the real world, most Zen3 CPUs will have 2x or more
| cores, thus they'll be 2x to 4x faster.
|
| So what they mean to say is that they praise Apple for having
| amazing per-core performance. But it kind of sounds as if the
| M1 had competitive performance overall, which is incorrect.
| 314 wrote:
| The Zen3 processor that they are comparing it to is the 5950x
| - the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W. The
| entire system power of the M1 mini under load was 28W.
|
| What the article is pointing out is that the mobile low-power
| version of the M1 (as the mini is really just a laptop in a
| SFF box) is competitive with the top-end Zen3 chip; the
| benchmark gap is smaller than 2x.
|
| We don't know yet how far the M1 scales up, e.g. a
| performance desktop will presumably have a higher TDP and
| probably trade the integrated GPU space for more CPU cores.
| But we don't known if/how this will translate into
| performance gains. Previous incarnations of the Mac Pro have
| also used multiple CPUs so it is not yet clear if "in the
| real word, most Zen3 CPUs will have 2x or more cores".
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| oefrha wrote:
| Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs
| almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| Well that CPU has 16 cores / 32 threads while the M1 has
| 4 high power cores and 4 low power ones.
| mey wrote:
| The single core performance between the 5600x and the
| 5950x isn't significantly different. The charts have some
| interesting gaps...
|
| Edit: Putting it head to head with the 5600x would make a
| lot of sense for price/core/desktop space comparison.
| qz2 wrote:
| Yes. I'd like to see a decent-ish Ryzen APUs such as the
| 3400G up against one of these as well.
|
| I did notice that the cinebench for the M1 is only about
| 10% higher than my Ryzen laptop (T495s) which is
| laughable as it's a 3500U and the whole thing cost me
| PS470 new!
| alwillis wrote:
| _Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs
| almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air_
|
| The M1-based Mac mini starts at $699.
| oefrha wrote:
| Yeah, forgot about that. Everything else being equal
| (ostensibly), the M1 Mac Mini is $200 cheaper than the
| crappy Intel i5 Mac Mini, more if you upgrade the Intel
| CPU.
|
| As an owner of a decked out 2019 Mac Mini, in hindsight I
| made a shitty purchase decision.
| jdeibele wrote:
| I bought what I thought was a 2020 Mac Mini in April
| direct from Apple. The only significant difference on
| paper was that the base model came with 128GB for the
| 2018, 256GB for the 2020.
|
| As it turns out, that's true: About This Mac says "Mac
| mini (2018)" even for the 2020.
|
| I replaced the 8GB base RAM with 32GB of aftermarket and
| have been thrilled with it. But then I was coming from a
| 2018 MBP 4-Thunderbolt with only 8GB and the fan noise
| with it drove me nuts.
|
| I got the i3 because I thought the CPU wasn't the weak
| point, the RAM was. And so far, for me, that's held up.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No matter what the purchase, I always force myself to
| stop comparing for a bit of time after the purchase. By
| the time I pull the trigger, I have shopped and compared
| as best I can. Inevitably, as soon as I complete the
| sale, one of the places I was looking will have lowered
| the price or release the next-gen.
| arvinsim wrote:
| I sold my 2018 Mac Mini with high specs 1 week before the
| keynote.
|
| The guy must be feeling bad right now.
| adolph wrote:
| The Resulting Fallacy Is Ruining Your Decisions
|
| http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-
| rui...
|
| _There's this word that we use in poker: "resulting."
| It's a really important word. You can think about it as
| creating too tight a relationship between the quality of
| the outcome and the quality of the decision. You can't
| use outcome quality as a perfect signal of decision
| quality, not with a small sample size anyway. I mean,
| certainly, if someone has gotten in 15 car accidents in
| the last year, I can certainly work backward from the
| outcome quality to their decision quality. But one
| accident doesn't tell me much._
| alwillis wrote:
| _As an owner of a decked out 2019 Mac Mini, in hindsight
| I made a shitty purchase decision._
|
| Probably not. If you need a machine to get work done, as
| you probably did, it always makes sense to buy what's
| current.
|
| It's different if you can afford to wait for a particular
| upgrade we know is coming.
|
| I bought a 4k Retina iMac a little over a year ago
| because I needed to badly and it's been great.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Why?
|
| Today's purchase of Mac Mini will be a crappy decision in
| hindsight in about a year... and that is true every year.
|
| It would have been a crappy decision - if you got a worse
| product at the time of purchase. So don't get FOMO.
| secabeen wrote:
| I actually just bought an Intel Mac Mini to run MacOS VMs
| with using ESXi. I expect it will be quite a while before
| stable Mac VM support is available for Apple Silicon
| Macs.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > The Zen3 processor that they are comparing it to is the
| 5950x - the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W.
| The entire system power of the M1 mini under load was 28W.
|
| This is a very misleading statement. They primarily only
| used the 5950X in single-core tests, and in those tests it
| doesn't come remotely close to 105W. In fact per
| Anandtech's own results[1] the 5950X CPU core in a single-
| core load draws around 20w.
|
| Take the M1's 28W under a multi-threaded load, that's going
| to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5w/core for the
| big cores probably (single-core was ~10w total, ~6w
| "active" - figure clocks drop a bit on the multi loads, and
| then the little cores are almost certainly much less power
| draw particularly since they are also much, much slower).
| In multithreaded loads the per-core power draw on a 5950x
| is around 6w. That's a _much_ closer delta than the "105W
| TDP vs. ~28W!" would suggest.
|
| M1's definitely got the efficiency lead, but it's also a
| bit slower and power scales non-linearly. It's an
| interesting head-to-head, but that 105W TDP number of the
| 5950X is fairly irrelevant in these tests. That's not
| really playing a role. Just like it's about as irrelevant
| as you can get that the 5950X is 4x the big CPU cores,
| since it was again primarily used in the single-threaded
| comparisons. Slap 16 of those firestorm cores into a Mac
| Pro and bam you're at 60w. Let it run at 3.2ghz all-core
| instead of the 3ghz it appears to now since you've got a
| big tower cooler and that's 100w (6w/core @ 3.2ghz per the
| anandtech estimates * 16). That'd be the actual multi-
| threaded comparison vs. the 5950X if you want to talk about
| 105W TDP numbers.
|
| Critically though the M1 is definitely not a 10W chip as
| many people were claiming just a few days ago. You're
| definitely going to see differences between the Air & 13"
| MBP as a result.
|
| 1: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-
| deep-di...
| 314 wrote:
| > This is a very misleading statement. They primarily
| only used the 5950X in single-core tests, and in those
| tests it doesn't come remotely close to 105W. In fact per
| Anandtech's own results[1] the 5950X CPU core in a
| single-core load draws around 20w.
|
| It would seem that the switching of AMD chips in the
| various graphs have caused some confusion. I was
| referring to the "Geekbench 5 Multi-Thread" graph on page
| 2. This shows a score of 15,726 for the 5950x vs 7715 for
| the M1. This is about 2x. I do not see any notes that the
| benchmark is using less cores than the chip has
| available.
|
| I don't follow your argument for why it is misleading to
| characterize the 5950x as a 105W TDP in this benchmark.
| Could you expand a little on why you believe this is
| misleading? The article that you have linked to shows
| over 105W of power consumption from 4 cores - 16.
|
| Edit: I put in the wrong page number in the clarification
| :) Also, I see later in the linked article that the 15726
| score is from 16C/32T.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| If you're referring to the single time the 5950X's multi-
| threaded performance was compared then sure, the 105W TDP
| is fair. But you should also be calling that out, or
| you're being misleading, as the _majority_ of the 5950X
| numbers in the article were single-threaded results, and
| it did not appear in most of the multi-threaded
| comparisons at all.
|
| But in multi-threaded workloads it also absolutely
| obliterates the M1. Making that comparison fairly moot
| (hence why Anandtech didn't really do it). It's pretty
| expected that the higher-power part is faster, that's not
| particularly interesting.
| 314 wrote:
| It's really not clear what you are trying to argue here.
| The number of single-threaded benchmarks are irrelevant
| to this point: when the M1 was compared to the 5950X in a
| multithreaded comparison:
|
| * The 5950X was 2x faster * The 5950X was using 4x the
| power (28W system vs 105W+ for the processor). * The M1
| only has 4 performance cores, the 5950X has 16.
|
| Even counting the high-efficiency cores as full cores in
| the comparison has the M1 with 8-cores providing 1/2 the
| performance of the 5950X with 16-cores, i.e. it implies
| that the lower performance cores are providing as much as
| the 5950X cores.
|
| That is certainly not the 5950X obliterating the M1, as
| the article stated (and was the quote that started this
| thread) the M1 is giving the 5950X a good run for its
| money. If you think otherwise could you provide some kind
| of argument for why you think so?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The 2x number you're claiming was only for geekbench
| multithreaded, which was the only multithreaded
| comparison between those two in the Anandtech article.
| You're trying to make broad sweeping claims from that one
| data point. That doesn't work.
|
| Take for example the CineBench R23 numbers. The M1 at
| 7.8k lost to the 15W 4800U in that test (talk about the
| dangers of a single datapoint!). The 5950X meanwhile puts
| up numbers in the 25-30k range. That's a hell of a lot
| more than 2x faster. Similarly in SPECint2017 the M1 @ 8
| cores put up a 28.85, whereas the 5950X scores 82.98.
| Again, a lot more than 2X.
|
| This is all ignoring that 2x faster for 4x the
| performance is also actually a pretty good return anyway.
| Pay attention to the power curves on a modern CPU or what
| for example TSMC states about a node improvement. For 7nm
| to 5nm for example it was either 30% more efficient or
| 15% faster. Getting the M1 to be >2x faster is going to
| be a lot harder than cutting the 5950X's power
| consumption in half (a mild underclock will do that easy
| - which is how AMD crams 64 of these into 200W for the
| Epyc CPUs, after all). But nobody cares about a 65w
| highly multithreaded CPU, either, that's not a market.
| Whatever Apple comes up with for the Mac Pro would be the
| relevant comparison for a 5950X.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You're being obtuse. The only test you're using is
| Geekbench, which just isn't useful for these kinds of
| comparisons.
|
| In other multicore benchmarks, the M1 gets beaten by
| parts with lower TDPs by AMD, and the 5950X has something
| like 3 to 4+ times more performance.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| An author who deliberately switches which chip to test in
| different versions of the same test in order to paint the
| desired picture isn't much different than one who
| literally makes up the numbers. The whole article ought
| to be flagged and deleted.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| M1 has a lot of great things about it and I'm excited to
| see the what it can bring. Intel needs to be humiliated
| by something great, to remind that they have been crap
| for a long time.
|
| But... Other than ST performance, the multi-core CPU
| isn't linear at scaling. At 16cores - core-to-core
| communications take a hit, that is not as bad as for 4
| cores.
| egsmi wrote:
| > This is a very misleading statement. They primarily
| only used the 5950X in single-core tests, and in those
| tests it doesn't come remotely close to 105W.
|
| That's true but keep in mind this is the power going into
| the AMD CPU only. The power number measured for the mini
| was the entire system power pulled from the wall, so that
| 28W included memory, conversion inefficiencies and
| everything. That's crazy.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Actually a significant power, maybe around 20 W, is
| consumed by the I/O chip, which consumes a lot because it
| is made in an old process.
|
| In 2021, when the laptop Zen 3 will be introduced, that
| will have a much better power efficiency, being made all
| in 7 nm.
|
| Of course, it will still not match the power efficiency
| of M1, which is due both to its newer 5-nm process and to
| its lower clock frequency at the same performance.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > which consumes a lot because it is made in an old
| process.
|
| And also because it's doing a lot. Infinity fabric for
| the chiplet design isn't cheap, for example. A single-die
| monolithic design avoids that (which is why that's what
| AMD did for the Zen2 mobile CPUs).
| JAlexoid wrote:
| When we get to the detailed comparisons - it's almost
| impossible to compare without deconstructing the chips.
|
| In the end it'll be a question of - can Apple scale it
| without incurring massive costs?
| saltminer wrote:
| >the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W
|
| TDP is a useless marketing figure. Anand measures the AC
| power consumption of the Mini, which is a good measure, but
| that is not comparable against CPU TDP because TDP has a
| tenuous relation to actual power draw at best [0]. A better
| comparison would be ARM Mini vs Intel Mini AC power draw,
| and a similarly spec'd AMD system for good measure.
| Unfortunately, unless I missed something, the article only
| measured AC power draw from the ARM Mini.
|
| The M1 is certainly more power efficient than Intel or AMD
| for the average user, but as far as performance per watt,
| we cannot make any judgements with the data we have.
|
| [0] https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3525-amd-ryzen-tdp-
| explai...
| piyh wrote:
| It bodes really well for future chips with higher power
| budgets. The Pro seems a bit underwhelming for what it could
| be though.
| Tagbert wrote:
| That new MacBook Pro replaces the low end of the Pro line
| which had a slower CPU and only 2 ports.
|
| I would expect that, when Apple brings out their next
| iteration of chips, they would target the higher end of the
| Pro line with more cores and ports along with higher RAM
| capacities.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| I'm guessing they also want devs of tools like docker to
| finish porting their software before they switch the rest
| of the macbooks over.
| arvinsim wrote:
| They only need to add 2 ports to the Pro to differentiate
| it from the Air.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| On performance, ya I agree. Although, they basically
| doubled the battery life over the previous generation so
| that alone might be worthwhile for some users.
|
| I think we'll see an additional higher end Macbook Pro 13"
| when they start to release Apple Silicon models with
| discrete GPUs.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| I feel like most people here haven't seen the SPEC benchmarks
| AnandTech performed (and they're partly to blame for that;
| their UX is awful). But the M1 is toe-to-toe with desktop
| Ryzen: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste...
|
| E: And multi-core SPEC:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-
| apple-m1-teste..., where they're on par with mobile Ryzen.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I looked up multi-core Cinebench R23 and the AMD 2990WX
| comes in at 33,213 vs. 7,833 was given for the M1 in the
| article.
|
| Apple markets this as a "Pro" device for professional video
| editing. That's why I believe it is fair to take their word
| and compare it against my other options for a professional
| video editing rig. And in that comparison, which Apple has
| chosen itself, the M1 comes out woefully inadequate at a
| mere 24% of the performance.
|
| Of course, for a notebook, the M1 is amazing. But I feel
| irked that Apple and Anandtech pretend that it's
| competitive with desktop workstations by having such a
| misleading conclusion about it being on par with Zen3 -
| which it clearly isn't.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > * the AMD 2990WX comes in at *
|
| Oh, neat. What kind of battery life do you get on your
| AMD 2990WX laptop?
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > Apple markets this as a "Pro" device for professional
| video editing. That's why I believe it is fair to take
| their word and compare it against my other options for a
| professional video editing rig.
|
| That's ridiculous. Threadripper has 8 to 16 times as many
| cores, runs on hundreds of watts of power and such a CPU
| alone costs the same as several Mac Minis. Them claiming
| you _can_ use it for video editing doesn 't mean you can
| expect that a 1.5 pound notebook will measure up to
| literally the biggest baddest computer you can buy.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| He knows it's ridiculous, but you're going to see a large
| group of people who hate macs take this turn of fortune
| quite poorly. My hope is that it really puts pressure on
| intel to start firing on all cylinders but who knows? A
| MacBook Pro 16 with higher clocks and more gpu cores
| would be a really hard system to not buy.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It is ridiculous, that being said on a per-core basis at
| a similar wattage Zen 3 is equivalent to the M1 chip, but
| has an order of magnitude more I/O.
| djrogers wrote:
| > Apple markets this as a "Pro" device for professional
| video editing.
|
| No they don't. Claiming something is capable of video
| editing and marketing it as a video editor are two very
| different things.
|
| The 3 macs introduced this week are apples _lowest end_
| devices, 2 of which still have 'big brother' intel
| versions for sale today.
|
| If you're truly 'irked' that the lowest-end, lowest
| power, first release devices aren't comparable in
| performance to the highest end desktop chips, then you're
| putting the wrong stuff in your coffee.
| alwillis wrote:
| _Apple markets this as a "Pro" device for professional
| video editing_
|
| No, they don't. Because Apple keeps raising the ceiling
| on low-end devices like the 13-inch MacBook Pro, in many
| aspects, it's more performant than a high-end laptop or
| desktop Mac from just a few years ago.
|
| Please read the best article so far that explains what
| "Pro" means for Apple--it just means _nicer_ ; it doesn't
| mean _for professionals._ https://daringfireball.net/2020
| /11/one_more_thing_the_m1_mac...:
|
| _Wait, wait, wait, you might be saying, the MacBook Pro
| is pro. But as I've written numerous times, pro, in
| Apple's product-naming parlance, doesn't always stand for
| professional. Much of the time it just means better or
| nicer. The new M1 13-inch MacBook Pro is pro only in the
| way, say, AirPods Pro are. This has been true for Apple's
| entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pros -- the models with only
| two USB ports -- ever since the famed MacBook "Escape"
| was suggested as a stand-in for the then-still-missing
| retina MacBook Air four years ago._
| d3nj4l wrote:
| That is an absurd comparison. AnandTech clearly mentioned
| that the M1 was on par in _single core_ , not in multi
| core.
| ksec wrote:
| I am not even sure if you are serious or if you are
| trolling.
|
| Not only did Apple Not compared a Laptop CPU against a
| _Workstation_ CPU, Anandtech didn 't pretend it to be
| competitive with Desktop Workstation.
| caycep wrote:
| You can do toe to toe best of the best speeds and
| feeds...
|
| But I think the broader strategic outlook is: yes, the M1
| loses on a few benchmarks, but the fact that it gets
| ballpark to some monster rig multiple times in price and
| power - is this not the whole picture of the Clayton
| Christensen disruption curve?
|
| The other point is - Apple's Logic and Final Cut software
| are probably optimized for the M1, and they can likely
| achieve much of the capabilities of the monster AMD rig
| for a fraction of the cost/power budget.
| nicoburns wrote:
| IIRC the biggest Zen3 mobile CPUs are 8-core. So they'll have
| at most 2x cores. And that's ignoring the low-power cores on
| the mac which probably still count for half a core each.
|
| AMD is likely to be faster in multicore overall, but not by
| much it seems.
| neogodless wrote:
| There are no announced or released Zen 3 mobile CPUs at
| this time. You are correct in that the Zen 2 mobile CPUs
| currently top out at 8 cores, and up to about 54W TDP - the
| top CPU is the "45W" Ryzen 9 4900H which can be configured
| up to about 54W by the OEM. We might see Zen 3 mobile early
| in 2021.
| msie wrote:
| M1 has multiple cores. 2x-4x multiple cores does not
| necessarily mean 2x-4x faster.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| The M1 has a big.LITTLE design with only half of the cores
| being performance-oriented, so if there is a gap, it would
| almost always be in Ryzen's favour.
| Uehreka wrote:
| They'll be 2-4x faster in some multicore tasks. CPU
| benchmarks specifically break out single core performance as
| a separate metric, because as of 2020 a lot of everyday work
| is single core bound (stuff like 3D graphic design, video
| editing or compiling large codebases not considered "everyday
| work").
|
| Not to mention that even in multicore tasks, you don't
| usually scale perfectly linearly due to overhead. And also,
| the biggest Ryzen processors are usually in desktops, and
| Apple Silicon hasn't entered that market yet.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| For most everyday work - Raspberry Pi is fast enough, so
| it's not even an argument. Raspberry Pi 8GB is 10x cheaper?
| There are mini desktops starting at $250 that will do
| everyday work.
|
| If you throw in "everyday work" - then we have passed the
| need for new chips altogether.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > For most everyday work - Raspberry Pi is fast enough
|
| That really stretches the meaning of 'everyday work'
| quite a lot. The pi is dog slow, even compared to an
| Intel i9 ;)
| hajile wrote:
| That's a bit of an overstatement. Booting from SSD
| instead of SD card has an enormous uptake in performance.
| I have yet to hear of a Pi 4 that couldn't overclock to
| 2GHz which is a pure uplift of 25%. Moving to 64-bit PiOS
| gives another double-digit jump in performance too. Not
| record-breaking, but not unusable either.
| [deleted]
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Single thread performance still matters a lot for personal
| computer use. It's not everything, normal people do benefit
| from some degree of parallelization, but there's a reason
| _all_ of the major PC chip designs continue to push single
| thread performance even as that becomes more difficult. Most
| end users see more benefit from those improvements than from
| more cores.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Passively cooled first generation macbook air chip isn't
| quite as fast as an absolute monster grade PC Ryzen chip on
| its 3rd generation. Color me shocked.
|
| I think you're just trying your hardest to convince yourself
| that these chips aren't competitive.
| Shivetya wrote:
| Interesting for many gamers, Blizzard announced native support
| for World of Warcraft[0] on Apple Silicon. This give hope to
| other games from Blizzard coming to the platform as well and may
| encourage other developers to join in.
|
| The M1 has been shown to run Civ6 and Rise to Tomb Raider through
| Rosetta faster than previous integrated GPU mac hardware[1]
|
| [0]https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/mac-support-
| update-n...
|
| [1]https://www.macworld.com/article/3597198/13-inch-macbook-
| pro...
| mciancia wrote:
| It's funny to see Intel falling from 1st place in essentially 2
| player game around two-three years ago to the 3rd place now
| hyperrail wrote:
| In reviews of the new M1 Macs as a whole, I'd like to see a
| comparison with Qualcomm's best: meaning the fastest current
| Windows ARM laptops. Up to now, their performance has at best
| only kept up with comparably priced x86 models, despite pressure
| on Qualcomm by Microsoft and the device makers. Maybe some new
| competition will shake Qualcomm out of its complacency...
| alwillis wrote:
| _In reviews of the new M1 Macs as a whole, I 'd like to see a
| comparison with Qualcomm's best: meaning the fastest current
| Windows ARM laptops._
|
| You may recall that Apple already embarrassed Qualcomm years
| ago when they shipped 64-bit ARM-based chips at least a year
| before Qualcomm could do it.
|
| When the new iPhone ships, the next fastest phone is the iPhone
| being replaced by the new flagship phone. The Android phones
| based on Qualcomm's best processors are way behind Apple's mid-
| level and entry-level phones.
|
| The A series chips used in Apple's phones and tablets are way
| faster than anything Qualcomm is shipping for laptops, never
| mind the M series.
| hyperrail wrote:
| From what I've heard myself in the past, I don't think
| Qualcomm is as far behind as you say, but I would not be
| surprised if it was.
|
| This puts me in mind of one time that I was ranting to a
| Microsoft colleague over lunch about how MS shouldn't be
| exclusive with Qualcomm for ARM chips given the very low
| rewards over the years. They said to me that when Windows
| Phone 7 first was under development in 2008-2010, choosing
| Qualcomm exclusivity seemed best because Qualcomm was the
| only one willing to make decent BSPs for us at Microsoft.
|
| Upon reflection, I realized that this was still the case as
| of our conversation years later. The Mediateks, Samsungs, and
| Nvidias of the world either did not work with Microsoft at
| all, or got spurned by Microsoft themselves, or gave up after
| 1 or 2 high-profile failures (such as Surface RT). Texas
| Instruments was a notable exception as they gave up on ARM
| SoCs altogether, thus killing what would have become a TI-
| based Windows RT tablet platform.
|
| Now neither me nor my coworker was in a position to actually
| know what was going on here, but I think this anecdote
| illustrates the value of a trustworthy business partner even
| when their products look mediocre.
| ksec wrote:
| Qualcomm was never far behind.
|
| And the 64bit ARM Apple chip surprised even ARM themselves.
| As ARM didn't even have a reference Cortex design out when
| Apple shipped their first 64 bit SoC. ( Apple was part of
| early member programme ) And no one thought they will need
| 64bit so early. ( Which was also true at the time ).
|
| Qualcomm has to optimise for cost, for the same Die Space
| Qualcomm already includes a Modem, while Apple has Modem as
| separate pcs of silicon. It isn't Qualcomm is technically
| subpar, they just have different objective and goals. And
| vendors are already calling foul for Qualcomm's continue
| increase in price. ( Which is actually normal due to the
| complexity of 5G, CPU, GPU and leading edge node
| development )
| samgranieri wrote:
| This is really impressive for (what I perceive to be) an entry-
| level computer. I always enjoy reading the technical rigor of
| AnandTech's deep dives, and seeing Apple's first chip go head to
| head with Intel and AMD's chips indicates the future is bright. I
| can't wait to see how the 16 inch MacBook Pro, the iMac
| replacement, and the Mac Pro replacement test out.
| pdpi wrote:
| Someone posted these results on Reddit earlier:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jvrck7/m1_macboo...
|
| As far as I know, DotA 2 is running on Rosetta.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Those are some significant improvements. I'm actually really
| tempted to get a Macbook Air now versus my current plans to
| build a cheap gaming rig.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Ehh, if you are going to game you are going to want the Pro
| at a minimum but honestly the mac gaming scene is still
| sparse. It all really comes down to what type of game you
| want to play I guess but even if all the games you want are
| on mac then I'd still say you want the fan in the MBP.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I'm still playing nearly decade old games. I just need some
| thing competitive in decade old gaming so that my wife and
| I can play together.
| nottorp wrote:
| Not Apple then. They ditched 32 bit applications and in 2
| years they'll ditch 64 bit x86 applications.
|
| You want your old games to run forever, you sadly have to
| do that on x86 Windows (or maybe Linux with more or less
| of a headache setting them up).
| coder543 wrote:
| Agree 100%. If you wouldn't buy an iPad to play your
| games, don't buy a Mac to play those games either. Unless
| by "games" you literally just mean WoW, which seems to be
| one of the only major cross platform games that seriously
| cares about Mac support.
|
| Personally, I would lean towards suggesting the purchase
| of a console. The new generation has some really nice
| consoles, and the Nintendo Switch is still really fun in
| other ways.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Rosetta 1 was around for 5 years, so I expect Rosetta 2
| to last at least that long, but that's still a good
| point. Thanks!
| akritrime wrote:
| I am confused about one thing, in multithreaded scenarios, can an
| application use 8 threads or 4? Also how does the scheduling
| work, can I pin a task that I know will be demanding on the
| firestorm cores?
| MBCook wrote:
| Applications can use all 8 cores. There is one benchmark in the
| article where they somehow turn off the efficiency cores to
| figure out they add about 30% to the total CPU power in multi-
| core.
| akritrime wrote:
| Oh I see it. I missed their SPEC2017 page.
| CivBase wrote:
| I wouldn't care if their laptops have 10x the performance and
| power efficiency. Apple's closed ecosystem and "big brother knows
| best" mindset are bad enough on their own - but together, they
| are downright intolerable.
| davidhyde wrote:
| > "Whilst the software doesn't offer the best the hardware can
| offer, with time, as developers migrate their applications to
| native Apple Silicon support, the ecosystem will flourish."
|
| I think that more developers would be excited about migrating
| their apps to support native apple silicon if Apple wasn't so
| developer hostile at the moment. I am referring to stuff like
| Apple's Online Certificate Status Protocol
| (https://blog.jacopo.io/en/post/apple-ocsp/) and their Apple Tax
| war.
|
| They need customers but they also need developers.
| rimliu wrote:
| You should quit HN for a day or two. The stuff echo-chamber of
| HN repeats often has very little to do with reality. Apple has
| many thousands of developers. It is not hostile to them in any
| way, shape or form. For some reason this cliche is most often
| repeated by the people who never wrote a single line of code
| for iOS or MacOS
| millzlane wrote:
| >It is not hostile to them in any way, shape or form. For
| some reason this cliche is most often repeated by the people
| who never wrote a single line of code for iOS or MacOS.
|
| Maybe the word "hostile" is the wrong word. But I have apps
| on windows that ran on 95 that still work to this day without
| having to be "rewritten". It's no surprise it's often
| repeated by people who never wrote a single line code for an
| OS that they have come to expect will change things so
| dramatically that they will have to spend more time and
| effort supporting those OS changes and not creating software.
| qz2 wrote:
| Wrong. Apple's iOS/macOS development footprint is far far far
| smaller than the footprint of generic software development
| using macOS. I have seen a lot of developers shitting the bed
| this week over the state of macOS both in person and in
| various other places.
|
| We already have a couple of people who have got so fucked off
| with macOS their macs are running Ubuntu 24/7 and they're
| buying Dell/Lenovo next time. Hell I sold my Apple kit
| earlier this year because I was completely fed up of dealing
| with broken shit all the time. It's just a horrible
| experience.
| x87678r wrote:
| Is there a media ban? I thought we'd get a bunch of macbook
| reviews today. I guess wont be long, they'll be in the shops
| soon.
| MBCook wrote:
| Today is the day the embargo drops it seems. So all the normal
| sites are posting their reviews.
| fithisux wrote:
| Good incentive to warm to Risc-V ecosystem.
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