Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049079&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049079&p=3
There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air
When comparing the mini to other SFF computers be sure to note that the mini has the power supply built in though where most of the others have it external.
I was just window shopping a new gaming rig, and 32gb is affordable (100 bucks), 64gb (200 bucks). Cheap as shit, what’s the hold up?
Can you please provide the link to 64GB DDR5-5500 for $200? I'd love to buy some too!
I guess DDR 500 runs you 350. It looks like Apple charges you 600 for ddr 400 32gb. I don’t know, what am I missing here?
They have a ton of fantastic consumer-level computing devices, and one ridiculously-priced mega-computer.
But there are many of us that want something in the upper-middle: a fast computer that is upgradable, but maybe $2k and not $6k (and up).
(The iMac Pro is a dud. People that want a powerful desktop generally don't want a non-upgradable all-in-one.)
I use MacStadium for compiling and testing iOS apps. I was wondering if the ARM machines would be worth a look, but they are disappointing. If I was still using Macs as my daily driver, I would buy the new MBA for a personal machine.
Seems absurd.
And they will have significantly upgraded CPU/GPUs to match the memory.
Think web developers, photographers, bloggers etc.
And while I understand that many people are stuck on photoshop, I bet it would be easy to beat 800MB by a whole lot. But so I can grasp the situation better, how many non-adjustment layers do those professional photographer use? And of those layers, how many have pixel data that covers more than 10% of the image?
For a model photo shoot retouch, you'd usually have copy layers with fine skin details (to be overlaid on top) and below that you have layers with more rough skin texture which you blur.
Also, quite a lot of them have rim lighting pointed on by using a copy of the image with remapped colors.
Then there's fake bokeh, local glow for warmth, liquify, etc.
So I would assume that the final file has 10 layers, all of which are roughly 8000x6000px, stored in RGB as float (cause you need negative values) and blended together with alpha masks. And I'd estimate that the average layer affects 80%+ of all pixels. So you effectively need to keep all of that in memory, because once you modify one of the lower layers (e.g. blur a wrinkle out of the skin) you'll need all the higher layers for compositing the final visible pixel value.
Still, an 8k by 6k layer with 16 bit floats (which are plenty), stored in full, is less than 400MB. You can fit at least eleven into 4GB of memory.
I'll easily believe that those huge amounts of RAM make things go more smoothly, but it's probably more of a "photoshop doesn't try very hard to optimize memory use" problem than something inherent to photo editing.
Also, your "could be stored in a compact way" is meaningless. Unless your name is Richard and you've designed middle out compression, we are where we are as end users. I'd be happy if someone with your genius insights into editing of photo/video data would go to work for Adobe and revolutionize the way computers handle all of that data. Clearly, they have been at this too long and cannot learn a new trick. Better yet, form your own startup and compete directly with the behemoth that Adobe is and unburden all of us that are suffering life with monthly rental software with underspec'd hardware. Please, we're begging.
> Also, your "could be stored in a compact way" is meaningless. [...]
That's getting way too personal. What the heck?
I'm not suggesting anything complex, either. If someone copies a layer 5 times and applies a low-cpu-cost filter to each copy, you don't have to store the result, just the original data and the filter parameters. You might be able to get something like this already, but it doesn't happen automatically. There are valid tradeoffs in simplicity vs. speed vs. memory.
"Could be done differently" is not me insulting everyone that doesn't do it that way!
It was surprising to see essentially the same form factor, the same operating system and not much to distinguish the three machines presented (lots of repetition like "faster compiles with XCode").
BTW, what's the size and weight of the new Air compared to the MacBook (which I liked, but which was killed before I could get one)?
Seeing two machines that are nearly identical reminds me of countries with two mainstream political parties - neither discriminates clearly what their USP is...
The M1's memory is LPDDR4X-4266 or LPDDR5-5500 (depending on the model, I guess?) which is about double the frequency of the memory in the Intel Macs.
Apparently, this alone seems to account for a lot of the M1's perf wins — see e.g. the explanation under "Geekbench, Single-Core" here: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1-1804
Bleeding-edge-clocked DRAM is a lot more costly per GB to produce than middle-of-the-pack-fast DRAM. (Which is weird, given that process shrinks should make things cheaper; but there's a DRAM cartel, so maybe they've been lazy about process shrinks.)
Apparently DRAM and NAND do not shrink as well because in addition to transistors in both cases you need to store some kind of charge in a way that is measurable later on - and the less material present, the less charge you are able to store, and the harder it is to measure.
Am I missing something?
Mind you with 16Gb, Docker won’t be that useful.
Then again I would have expected them to have discussed it as much as the video editing.
I am guessing that they’d need a M2 type chipset for accessing more RAM for that. Or maybe they’ve got a new way to do virtualisation since that is such a key thing these days.
Edit: thanks for pointing that out though, that’s why I mentioned it
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922846
And the mentioned Virtio here:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Virtio
How well this fits in with current virtualisation would be interesting to find out; I guess this will be for a later version of Big Sur, with a new beefier M2 chip.
That's a high frequency, but having two LPDDR chips means at most you have 64 bits being transmitted at a time, right? Intel macs (at least the one I checked), along with most x86 laptops and desktops, transfer 128 bits at a time.
> Apparently, this alone seems to account for a lot of the M1's perf wins — see e.g. the explanation under "Geekbench, Single-Core" here
That's a vague and general statement that site always says, so I wouldn't put much stock into it.
On iOS they can get away with less RAM than the rest of the market by killing apps, relaunching them fast, and having severely restricted background processes. On Mac they won't have that luxury. At least they have fast SSDs to help with big pagefiles.
With the heterogeneous memory, your 8GB computer doesn't even have its whole 8GB of main system memory.
When the touchbar MBP launched in 2016 people were already complaining that it couldn't spec up to 32GB like the competition. Four years later, and it's still capped at 16GB.
Hopefully they can grow this for next year's models.
The difference was incredible
Have you looked at Activity Monitor to see what is butchering your memory?!
Second: web browsers, which can easily grab 5-10GB by themselves or even more if RAM is available.
So in other words: everything.
I'm not a mac user but that seems ridiculous. I'd be investigating what's hogging it all.
I have chrome, Firefox, photoshop, vs code, docker and a few other things running. As a kid I had to manage RAM. As an adult, I buy enough RAM to not need to think about it.
I was committed to buying an M1 on day one. I won’t buy a machine with only 16gb of RAM.
For example Chrome will scale the amount of RAM it reserves based on how much you have available.
Cache is excluded from just about any tool that shows RAM use, at least on desktops. If the ram shows as in use, the default assumption should be that it's in active use and/or wasted, not cache/preloading.
> For example Chrome will scale the amount of RAM it reserves based on how much you have available.
Which features are you thinking about that reserve ram, specifically? The only thing I can think of offhand that looks at your system memory is tab killing, and that feature is very bad at letting go of memory until it's already causing problems.
I'm betting this is due to Thunderbolt controller and PCIe lane capacity. They couldn't do four Thunderbolt ports with the M1 SoC, so they dropped the ports. Having four USB-C ports but only two supporting Thunderbolt would be a more obvious step back from the previous MacBook Pro. This way people can just blame it on Apple doing Apple things, instead of seeing a technical limitation.
Yes, it seems crazy, yes it's a lot of ram, but I like to be able to run VMs locally and not have to boot up instances on AWS (insert provider of choice), I like to keep tabs open in my browsers, I like not to have to close apps when I'm using them and I like my computer to be snappy. 64 GB allows that 16 doesn't, 32 barely does.
or perhaps it's not 'paging', and just dumb luck I hit and see beachballs on multiple new higher-end macbook pros regularly.
And one tip is to use the right hand side USBC ports for charging, not the left hand ones as for some reason or other they tend to cause the machine to heat up more...
thx for tip.
On my machine it is true that charging on the right is better. Charging on the left spins up the fan.
I bet they’re only upgrading it because it was essentially free. They already developed it for the developer transition kit.
I commend the idea of a small enthusiast mini desktop like a NUC but I don’t think the market is really there, or if they are, they’re not interested in a Mac.
I thought with the last update they'd finally seen the light and moved to 512/1tb, now we're back with the silly 256gb.
If you factor in having to upgrade ram to 16gb and ssd to 512 it's only £100 shy of the old price. Good, but not as good as it looked to begin with.
I'm hoping it can wait for v2 of the MacBook Pro 16"
Apple's second version of everything is always worth the wait.
Shocked they're still selling the two port machine, it's been nothing but hassle for me as someone who has to use one.
Not too far-fetched when you see the direction MacOS is headed, UI-wise. And it sounds nice, but if it means that repairability suffers then we'll just end up with a whole wave of disposable laptops.
With RAM and SSD already soldered to the motherboard, repairability can't really get much worse than it already is.
As I recall, consumers didn’t care or wouldn’t live with the awful designs that they initially brought out. I don’t remember. I remember thinking I wouldn’t touch one after seeing a bunch of engineering samples.
It's been years since Apple did away with this stuff, and nobody expected them to suddenly allow after-market upgrades.
Perhaps instead, it might be a better idea to directly regulate the actions which cause the environmental impact? i.e. the disposal of those items themselves?
Engineers tend to get frustrated with laws that micromanage specific design choices, because engineering practices change over time. Many of the laws that attempt to do so, backfire with unintended consequences.
It is quite possible that your solution might be just that -- many industries with high security needs are already very concerned with hardware tampering. A common current solution for this is "burner" hardware. It is not uncommon for the Fortune 500 to give employees laptops that are used for a single trip to China, and then thrown away. Tech that can give the user assurance that the device hasn't been compromised decreases the chance that these devices will be disposed of.
As a side note, I don't think serialized components is even one of the top 25 factors that does(/would) contribute to unnecessary electronics disposal.
Mostly because, its doubtful if state level actors (or even organized crime) aren't going to pay off an employee somewhere to lose the reprogramming device/etc. Meaning its only really secure against your average user.
A typical "Upgradable" PC is in a box 10 times the size of the mini. If you upgrade the GPU on a PC, you toss out an older GPU because it has pretty much zero resale value. Typical Apple hardware is used for 10-15 years, often passing between multiple owners.
This is particularly true on the lower end where a 10 year old part is even interesting.
Like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, at what point does a thing no longer have sufficient continuity to its past to be called the same thing? [1]
Regardless, I have a hard time believing a 20 year old computer is "working like a champ". I've found the most people who say their <insert really old phone or computer> works perfectly have just gotten used to the slowness. Once they upgrade and try to go back for a day, they realize how wrong they were. Like how a 4k monitor looks "pretty good" to someone that uses a 1080p monitor everyday, but a 1080p monitor looks like "absolute unusable garbage" to someone who uses a 4k monitor everyday.
This isn't some new. Since day 1, the iPhone has always been a tiny computer with a forked version of OS X.
> but if it means that repairability suffers then we'll just end up with a whole wave of disposable laptops.
Laptops have been largely "Disposable" for some time. In the case of the Mac, that generally means the laptop lasts for 10-15 years unless there is some catastrophic issue. Generally after that long, when a failure happens even a moderate repair bill is likely to trigger a new purchase.
I expect it would work the other way, too. Improve the cooling and performance under load would improve.
This is a video from Linus Tech Tips that demonstrates that no matter how much you cool it, they've physically prevented the chip from taking advantage of it.
And if it could be fixed with software, they would have worked out how, they're into that kinda tweaking.
These new M1 laptops are the first laptops that have complete thermal solutions designed by a single company.
As an example, there is the potential to design a computer with no throttling at all if you are able to control the entire thermal design.
This is not true. A laptop needs to work in a cold room, in a hot room, when its radiator is dusty, etc. If your CPU is not willing to throttle itself then a company with Apple's scale will have machines overheating and dying left and right.
For a computer to never _need_ to throttle, either (1)the cooling system has to be good enough to keep up with the max TDP of the CPU, or (2) you "pre-throttle" your CPU by never delivering it more power than the cooling system could handle. Apple refuses to accept solution 1, so they went with solution 2. If you watch the video I posted, it shows that even when there is adequate cooling, the new macbooks will not deliver more power to the CPU. In effect, the CPU is always throttled below its limit.
No, not in the sense that the cooling lockout would make him unable to fix MacBooks - he clearly has the industry connections to get whatever tools he needs to break that lockout. Yes, in the sense that many Apple laptops have inadequate cooling. Apple has been dangerously redlining Intel chips for a while now - they even install firmware profiles designed to peg the laptop at 90C+ under load. The last Intel MBA had a fan pointed nowhere near the heatsink, probably because they crammed it into the hypothetical fanless Mac they wanted to make.
Apple actually trying to lock the heatsink to the board would indicate that Apple is actually taking cooling seriously for once and probably is engineering less-fragile hardware, at least in one aspect.
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/
I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.
The GPU parts might be the tightest silicon and highest rate of failure so this approach reduces waste.
I would assume that macOS sends at least some basic usage data for the touch bar back to Apple HQ. I wonder how often it is actually used... and I would love the hear the responsible product manager defend it.
It's possible to set the default touch bar display to only ever show the expanded control strip (System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Touch Bar shows: Expanded Control Strip). In that mode you tap volume up and down instead of using a volume slider.
Again, I know you're looking for physical keys (aren't we all) but it's better than nothing.
I've been using the MacBook Pro 16 (with a physical esc key plus a touch bar) and I think it's a pretty good compromise between me who wants physical keys and apple who wants to push the touch bar.
The other thing that kept happening to me: I would accidentally tap the brightness button when reaching for ESC. For that, you can "Customize Control Strip..." and remove individual buttons, so that there's a big gap on the touch bar near the ESC key so that stray taps near ESC don't change the brightness.
It's often unused, yes, but when I fire up Rider for my day job it automatically flicks to the row of function keys and back depending on which app has focus and it fits quite nicely for me between work and entertainment (I like having the video progress bar if I'm watching something on the laptop). Maybe I'm just strange but the non-tactile function keys didn't really bother me much either.
In any case, I could live without it, which is probably not a roaring endorsement in any case, but I'd rather have it than not.
There's a lot of things to complain about with Apple products, but if you ask me there's been enough touch bar bashing by now and people should just get over it. It's pretty useful in some situations, and IMO no real downsides, especially now that the esc key is a real physical key again. Why all the hate?
I've been holding out on upgrading my 2013 MBP (mostly out of frugality) to a newer version, mostly due to the butterfly keys and the TouchBar.
Adding an extra row of physical keys that do the same thing as the row of virtual function keys, at the expense of trackpad size and possibly ergonomic (harder to reach the touch bar) doesn't make a lot of sense IMO.
The touchbar is the second worst thing Apple has ever done in the history of the Mac, following closely on that abomination of a “keyboard” they used from 2016-2019.
I’ve opted to buy a 2015 Mac Book Pro this year, it might be easier to get over apple than the touch bar even...
I've also found the touchbar pretty useful in zoom calls, because my zoom client shows keys for common actions.
All in all, I think a physical escape key plus the touchbar is a slight win. I would not pay more for it, but I have reversed my previous opinion that I'd pay more not to have it.
I suspect these new machines are going to be quite nice, although I won't buy one for a while since I purchased a mbp a few months ago.
I will not remove that safety key until they make the touch bar pressure sensitive so that "buttons" on it only activate with a similar amount of force that was required to activate the tactile buttons they replaced. Until then, I consider it a failed design improvement.
Also I think every device which makes sound should have a physical mute control. The worst is when I want to mute, and the touchbar freezes, and I have to go turn the volume down with the mouse.
https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...
Fully customizable while being much better for muscle memory by giving you exactly what you want where you want it, gives you icon-shortcuts to script, and still allows you to have as much dynamic functionality / information as you like. So, for example, mine looks roughly like this:
- Fullscreen
- Bck/[play|pause]/Fwd
- CURRENTLY_PLAYING_SONG
- AirDrop
- ConfigMenu
- Emoticons
- (Un)Caffeinate
- (Dis)connectBluetoothHeadphones
- (Dis)connectMicrophone
- (Un)muteVol
- VolDown
- VolUp
- ScreenDim
- ScreenBright
- Date
- Time
- Weather
- Battery%
CURRENTLY_PLAYING_SONG playing shows the album cover, song name, and artist, but only shows up if there IS something playing. Same with AirDrop, which shows up only if there's something that I could AirDrop to, and then gives me a set of options of who to AirDrop to. The Emoticon menu opens an emoticon submenu on the TouchBar with most-recently-used first.
That all fits fine into the main touchbar, with other dynamic touchbars available modally (ie, holding CMD shows touchable icons of all the stuff in my Dock (my Dock is entirely turned off)), CTRL shows LOCK AIRPLAY DO_NOT_DISTURB FLUX KEYBOARD_DIM/BRIGHT, etc. ALT shows me various window snap locations.
Edit: BetterTouchTool also replaced a bunch of other tools for me. Gives you the same kind of tools for scripting eg Keyboard macros, Mouse macros, remote-control via iPhone/Watch etc with a lot of reasonable defaults.
The people who complain about the touchbar functionality must not be putting any effort at all into it. I customize so many other things on my system, regardless of the OS. Why would a new hardware feature be any different?
I didn't know about this GoldenChaos thing though, thanks for that.
I would say that people who complain about uselessness of F-keys must not have put any at all effort into using them.
Upon getting my MBP 2016, I spent numerous months trying to make the TouchBar useful; from customizing the contents where apps allowed it, to BTT.
What it came down to is that things worthy a keyboard shortcut are things I want to be able to do fast, reliably, and instinctively. I don't want to search for the button on the TouchBar – I'm using the keyboard, it needs to be as natural as typing, without the need to look down at it. I have a screen already, I don't need another one on my keyboard.
I firmly believe TouchBar can't even come close to the same realm of usefulness as F-keys, much less being worth the price hike it imposes. Function keys are twelve, tactile, solid, free, reliable(1) buttons for keyboard shortcuts; TouchBar is a touchscreen that sometimes(2) works.
> a button to "toggle mic in zoom" actually solves a real problem
I haven't used Zoom, but if it's a decent-ish Mac app, it either already has a keyboard shortcut to toggle microphone, or you can set one in Keyboard Shortcuts, in System Preferences.
(1) as far as anything is reliable on the butterfly keyboards.
(2) same story as butterfly keyboard – if it's even slightly sporadic, it is a shitty input device.
In exchange, I get to add other buttons which can also display customizable state. Yes, zoom has a global shortcut to toggle the mic. The problem is, the mic state is not visible on your screen unless the zoom window is visible. This is a frustrating design flaw IMO, which really should be addressed in some consistent way across every phone/video app. But, it's not, and so I need to pay attention to my mic state. My touchbar button toggles the mic, and displays the current mic status. I would imagine that every phone/video chat app is similar.
I use this app alongside BTT; it attempts to supplement haptic feedback via the trackpad haptics. It's no where near as good as a real haptic solution would be but does provide some tactile feedback when pressing buttons https://www.haptictouchbar.com/
I continue to be disappointed about the lack of haptics though. It's such a strange thing to not have when they've proven to know how to make very convincing haptic feedback. It works very well in both the Apple Watch and the MacBook's trackpad.
I love it.
If it was more customisable I wouldn't mind it, but the apparant inability to force it to show me the things I actually want is annoying.
I can imagine there are some people for whom the application specific buttons are useful, but for me they are not worth it for what they displace.
I did this on like day 2 of having my MBP for what sounds like the same reason you want to. The setting I have turned on is "Expanded control strip" and I never see any application-specific controls, only volume, brightness, etc.
I had the exact same frustrations as you. Took me 10 mins digging into settings to figure it out. Now I have my touchbar constantly displaying all of the controls that are buttons on the Air (ie a completely over-engineered solution to get the same result)
I'm sure someone somewhere finds it amazing, but I have no time for it.
To me it's no different than volume controls in a car. I've been in a cadillac with a touchbar for volume, and a new ram truck with a volume knob - there's absolutely no room for debate in my opinion. One of these allows me to instantly change the volume 100% up or down without taking my eyes off the road. The other requires hoping I get my finger in just the right spot from muscle memory and swipe enough times since there's 0 tactile feedback.
The main exception being things like controlling a progress bar (mouse works fine for me, though it's a neat demo), or changing system brightness/volume with a flick or drag (which is the one thing I find truly better... but I'd happily trade it back for a fn toggle and F keys). But that's so rarely useful.
I just hated the lack of ESC key (which they brought back, though my Mac is older). I have no muscle memory for any other key in that row.
With the physical media keys, if they want to mute, it's always the same button. Pause music, always the same button. They're great in a way that the touchbar completely destroys.
(and yes, I know you can change this setting, but if we're assuming non-techy-users we also generally have to assume default settings.)
I'd probably pay a little extra to get one on future non-Mac laptops, but not too much extra.
There's no more core i7 for Macbook 13. You have to go to Macbook 16. I'd rather get a Dell XPS or other Core i7/Ryzen 7 ultrabooks.
So now, spec-wise, Macbook Air and Macbook Pro are too close.
Along with the MBP16 refresh (which will use the "M1X", the higher-end chip), we'll probably see the higher-end MBP13s refreshed with said chip as well, but rebranded somehow, e.g. as the "MacBook Pro 14-inch" or something (as the rumors go: same size, but less screen bezel, and so more screen.)
And then, next year, you'll see MBP14 and MBP16 refreshes, while the MBP13 fades out.
> "Need a powerful tool for your business that’s compatible with your existing systems? Let’s talk. We’ll help you compare models and find the right Mac for you and your team."
That's a corporate-focused legacy-model refresh if I've ever seen one.
There's no more core i7 for Macbook 13
The MBP should be built with better thermals to avoid throttling since you might be running simulations or movie encoding all day. The air should throttle after a certain amount of time.
Aside from the loud fan and slow performance which should be fixed in this release, my biggest complaint is that they only have the usbc plugs on one side of the laptop.
Really obnoxious when the outlet is in a difficult spot.
Unclear whether the new MBP13 also has this problem...
Edit: the new M1 MBP13 has both usbc ports on the same side. No option for 4 (yet). Ugh.
If you are doing lightweight stuff where the cores don't really need to spin up, then they'll probably be about the same. Otherwise, you'll be stuck at a much lower base clock.
To me the fact that the Air is fanless and the pro has a fan would indicate to me that they have different clock rates on the high end. I am sure the Air is capped lower than the Pro in order to make sure it doesn't overheat. It is probably a firmware lock, and the hardware is identical. But once we do benchmarks I would expect that the pro outperforms the air by a good margin. They added a fan in the pro so that it can reach higher speeds.
Surely the Air is capped so that users don't ruin their computers by running a process that overheats the computer.
But of course Apple doesn't want to reveal clock speeds. The best they can give us is "5x faster than the best selling PC in its class". What does that mean? The $250 computer at Walmart that sells like hotcakes for elementary age kids that need a zoom computer or the Lenovo Thinkpad Pro that business buy by the pallet? Who the hell knows.
The MBP and Mini are there for people who want maximum sustained performance.
So, the sustained performance might make quite a difference for pro use.
My Macbook from 2014, is still excellent but it started throttling to 1ghz with video encoding.
After going to a repair shop and telling them about the problem they put high quality thermal paste in it for about 100 usd and the problem disappeared. Now i get 100% CPU no matter what i throw at it, pretty incredible with a computer from 2014!
Just fyi..
And on hot day, that boost might last 30 seconds and then that's it.
Air is clearly the better value option, if you really want to get one of these.
That left me wondering if there are different variants of the M1 with different core counts.
(Note: It always said 8 CPU cores)
But my point here is that the fact they are both the same supports the theory that the logic board is the same on both models.
For example, the $1,249 air is very similar to the $1,299 pro. The MBA has a bigger SSD, but the MBP has a bigger battery, isn't throttled (i.e. has a fan), and also has the touchbar (which may be controversial, but for the sake of comparison, remember that it comes with a manufacturing cost).
It seems reasonable that these are priced similarly. Of course, the machine I want is the MBP with the bigger SSD and no touchbar :)
I took me a solid half hour to at last understand this pie-thingy was Python... in my head I had always pronounced it the French way. Somewhat like "pee-ton", I don't know how to transcribe that "on" nasal sound... (googling "python prononciation en francais" should yield a soundtrack for the curious non-French speakers).
it shouldn't be, it should be a badge of honor of some sorts - it points to somebody reading to expand their knowledge that is not available in oral form around them, so kudos to them !
Until you use some concept so frequently you need to label it to compress information for discussion purposes, you often don't have names for them. Chances are if you solve or attempt to solve a wide variety problems, you'll see patterns and processes that overlap.
It’s often valuable to use jargon from another discipline in discussions. It sort of kicks discussions out of ruts. Many different disciplines use different terminology for similar basic principles. How those other disciplines extend these principles may lead to entirely different approaches and major (orders of magnitude) improvements. I’ve done it myself a few times.
On another note, the issue of “jargon” as an impediment to communication has led the US Military culture to develop the idea of “terms of art”. The areas of responsibility of a senior officer are so broad that they enter into practically every professional discipline. The officer has to know when they hear an unfamiliar term that they are being thrown off by terminology rather than lack of understanding. Hence the phrase “terms of art”. It flags everyone that this is the way these other professionals describe this, so don’t get thrown or feel dumb.
No one expects the officer to use (although they could) a “term of art”, but rather to understand and address the underlying principle.
It’s also a way to grease the skids of discussion ahead of time. “No, General, we won’t think you’re dumb if you don’t use the jargon, but what do you think of the underlying idea...”
Might be a good phrase to use in other professional cultures. In particular in IT, because of the recursion of the phrase “term of art” being itself be a term of art until it’s generally accepted. GNU and all that...
Fascinating. Would you happen to have any example off the top of your head?
My favorite is the idea of "let's expand functions over a set of Gaussians". That is variously known as a Gabor wavelet frame, a coherent state basis [sic], an Gaussian wave packet expansion, and no doubt some others I haven't found. Worse still, the people who use each term don't know about any of the work down by people who use the other terms.
I hope my reply didn’t come out as gatekeeping, it was genuinely just to help put a name to a thing.
I think what you are trying to refer to is frequency binning.
For example, AMD sells 12 and 16 core CPUs. The 12 core parts have 2 cores lasered out due to defects. If a particular node is low-yield, then it's not super uncommon to double-up on some parts of the chip and use either the non-defective or best performing one. You'll expect to see a combination of lasering and binning to adjust yields higher.
That said, TSMC N5 has a very good defect rate according to their slides on the subject[0]
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-tha...
I'm much more interested in actual benchmarks. AMD has mostly capped their APU performance because DDR4 just can't keep the GPU fed (why the last 2 generations of consoles went with very wide GDDR5/6). Their solution is obviously Infinity Cache where they add a bunch of cache on-die to reduce the need to go off-chip. At just 16B transistors, Apple obviously didn't do this (at 6 transistors per SRAM cell, there's around 3.2B transistors in just 64MB of cache).
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
when i started with computers, they had a few KB of L2 cache, L3 did not exist. Main Memory was a few MB.
DRAM is denser, but difficult to build on the same process as logic.
That said, with chiplets and package integration becoming more common, who knows... One die of DRAM as large cache combined with a logic die may start to make more sense. It's certainly something people have tried before, it just didn't really catch on.
What makes it so difficult to have on the same chip?
so ram is your 1gb cache
Would you mind elaborating a bit? I'm not following how this would significantly close the gap between SRAM and DRAM at 1GB. Since an SRAM cell itself is generally faster than a DRAM cell, and I understand that circuitry beyond an SRAM cell itself is far simpler than DRAM. Am I missing something?
We regularly use chips with an L3 latency around 10 nanoseconds, going distances of about 1.5 centimeters. You can only blame a small fraction of a nanosecond on the propagation delays there. And let's say we wanted to expand sideways, with only a 1 or 2 nanosecond budget for propagation delays. With a relatively pessimistic assumption of signals going half the speed of light, that's a diameter of 15cm or 30cm to fit our SRAM into. That's enormous.
Look at a Zen-based EPYC core- 32KB of L1 with 4 cycle latency, 512KB of L2 with 12 cycle latency, 8MB of L3 with 37 cycle latency.
L1 to L2 is 3x slower for 8x more memory, L2 to L3 is 3x slower for 16x more memory.
You can reach 9x more area in 3x more cycles, so you can see how the cache scaling is basically quadratic (there's a lot more execution machinery competing for area with L1/L2, so it's not exact).
So what's the problem? Well, your desk is the fastest place you can get books from but you clearly can't make your desk the size of the entire library, as that would defeat the purpose. You also can't move all of the books to the innermost ring of shelves, since they won't fit. The closer you are to the central atrium, the smaller the bookshelves. Conversely, the farther away, the larger the bookshelves.
Circuits don't follow this ideal model of concentric rings, but I think it's a nice rough approximation for what's happening here. It's a problem of geometry, not a problem of physics, and so the limitation is even more fundamental than the laws of physics. You could improve things by going to 3 dimensions, but then you would have to think about how to navigate a spherical library, and so the analogy gets stretched a bit.
For reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count lists all the largest cpu as of 2019 amd's epyc Rome at 39.54 billion MOSFETs, so even if you replaced the entire chip with Sram you wouldn't even quite reach 1GB!
Dram would be enticing, but the details matter.
Most likely this is why the CPUs are all limited to 16GB. It's likely when they unwrap the 16 inch MacBook Pro, it will open up more configurations (more RAM in particular!) for the 13" MacBook Pro and hopefully the mini.
1. "Wow" the audience given the anticipation without a full overhaul of the range. 2. Deliver some solid products that enable the transition while being effective for non-enthusiasts.
From my viewing they hit both. I expect they'll fill in the range next fall with bigger upgrades to the form factor.
I wonder if they use 2 4GB chips or 1 8GB chip in the low-end SKU?
There are no 32 or 64 GB models because Apple isn't making a CPU with 32 or 64GB of RAM yet.
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/2020-11-10%2019_08_4...
[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196596/...
This is relevant. This means that the performance increase vs Intel is using the extremely throttled 1.2 GHz i7 as the baseline.
I think it's a good CPU, but I don't think it'll be a great CPU. Judging by how heavily they leaned on the efficiency, I am pretty sure that it will be just good enough to not be noticeable to most Mac users.
Can't wait to see actual benchmarks, these are interesting times.
The important part there is "in their class".
I'm sure the Apple silicon will impress in the future, but there's a reason they've only switched their lowest power laptops to M1 at launch.
The higher end laptops are still being sold with Intel CPUs.
I'm really impressed by what they've done in this part of the market - which would have been impossible with Intel CPUs.
They said the Macbook Air (specifically) is "3x faster than the best selling PC laptop in its class" and that its "faster than 98% of PC laptops sold in the last year".
There was no "in its class" designation on the 98% figure. If they're taken at their word, its among every PC laptop sold in the past year, period.
Frankly, given what we saw today, and the leaked A14x benchmarks a few days ago (which may be this M1 chip or a different, lower power chip for the upcoming iPad Pro, either way); there is almost no chance that the 16" MBPs still being sold with Intel chips will be able to match the 13". They probably could have released a 16" model today with the M1 and it would still be an upgrade. But, they're probably holding back and waiting for a better graphics solution in an upcoming M1x-like chip.
The most powerful Macbook Pro, with a Core i9-9980HK, posts a Geekbench 5 of 1096/6869. The A12z in the iPad Pro posts a 1120/4648. This is a relatively fair comparison because both of these chips were released in ~2018-2019; Apple was winning in single-core performance at least a year ago, at a lower TDP, with no fan.
The A14, released this year, posts a 1584/4181 @ 6 watts. This is, frankly, incomprehensible. The most powerful single core mark ever submitted to Geekbench is the brand-spanking-new Ryzen 9 5950X; a 1627/15427 @ 105 watts & $800. Apple is close to matching the best AMD has, on a DESKTOP, at 5% the power draw, and with passive cooling.
We need to wait for M1 benchmarks, but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. There is no evidence that they aren't capable of scaling multicore performance when provided a higher power envelope, especially given how freakin low the A14's TDP is already. What of the power envelope of the 16" Macbook Pro? If they can put 8 cores in the MBA, will they do 16 in the MBP16? God forbid, 24? Zen 3 is the only other architecture that approaches A14 performance, and it demands 10x the power to do it.
For example, I can say with 100% confidence that M1 has nowhere near 32MB of onboard cache. Once it starts hitting cache limits, it's performance will drop off a cliff as fast cores that can't be fed are just slow cores. It's also worth noting that around 30% of the AMD power budget is just Infinity Fabric (hypertransport 4.0). When things get wide and you have to manage that much wider complexity, the resulting control circuitry has a big effect on power consumption too.
All that said, I do wonder how much of a part the ISA plays here.
Another important consideration is the on-SOC DRAM. This is really incomparable to anything else on the market, x86 or ARM, so its hard to say how this will impact performance, but it may help alleviate the need for a larger cache.
I think its pretty clear that Apple has something special here when we're quibbling about the cache and power draw per core differences of a 10 watt chip versus a 100 watt one; its missing the bigger picture that Apple did this at 10 watts. They're so far beyond their own class, and the next two above it, that we're frantically trying to explain it as anything except alien technology by drawing comparisons to chips which require power supplies the size of sixteen iPhones. Even if they were just short of mobile i9 performance (they're not), this would still be a massive feat of engineering worthy of an upgrade.
So you expect the M1 MBP will outpace the more expensive Intel 13 MBP they are selling for more money!!
How would that not destroy sales of their “higher end” intel MBP 13?
If so do you think it will be better across most workload types?
There are likely many people who are not ready to switch yet either.
It has been a while since the ppc/x86 transition, but I want to say it was a similar situation then
Some people especially developers may be skeptical of leaving x86 at this stage. I think the smart ones would just delay a laptop purchase until ARM is proven with docker and other developer workflows.
Another consideration - companies buying Apple machines will likely stay on Intel for a longer time, as supporting both Intel and ARM from an enterprise IT perspective just sounds like a PITA.
I run Linux on all my machines, and even running many (5-10) containers, 16GB was plenty. I now understand a bit better.
I would not buy a new machine today for work with less than 32 GB.
But, just looking at A14 performance and extrapolating its big/little 2/4 cores to M1's 4/4; In the shortest tldr possible; Yes.
M1 should have stronger single-core CPU performance than any Mac Apple currently sells, including the Mac Pro. I think Apple's statement that they've produced the "world's fastest CPU core" is overall a valid statement to make, just from the info we independent third-parties have, but only because AMD Zen 3 is so new. Essentially no third parties have Zen 3, Apple probably doesn't for comparison, but just going on the information we know about Zen 3 and M1, its very likely that Zen 3 will trade blows in single core perf with the Firestorm cores in A14/M1. Likely very workload dependent, and it'll be difficult to say who is faster; they're both real marvels of technology.
Multicore is harder to make any definitive conclusions about.
The real issue in comparison before we get M1 samples is that its a big/little 4/4. If we agree that Firestorm is god-powerful, then can say pretty accurately say that its faster than any other four-core CPU (there are no four-core Zen 3 CPUs yet). There's other tertiary factors of course, but I think its safe enough; so that covers the Intel MBP13. Apple has never had an issue cannibalizing their own sales, so I don't think they really care if Intel MBP13 sales drop.
But, the Intel MBP16 runs 6 & 8 core processors, and trying to theorycraft what performance the Icestorm cores in M1 will contribute gets difficult. My gut says that M1 w/ active cooling will outperform the six core i7 in every way, but will trade blows with the eight core i9. A major part of this is that the MBP16 still runs on 9th gen Intel chips. Another part is that cooling the i7/i9 has always been problematic, and those things hit a thermal limit under sustained load (then again, maybe the M1 will as well even with the fan, we'll see).
But, also to be clear: Apple is not putting the M1 in the MBP16. Most likely, they'll be revving it similar to how they do A14/A14x; think M1/M1x. This will probably come with more cores and a more powerful GPU, not to mention more memory, so I think the M1 and i9 comparisons, while interesting, are purely academic. They've got the thermal envelope to put more Firestorm cores inside this hypothetical M1x, and in that scenario, Intel has nothing that compares.
Anandtech's spec2006 benchmarks of the A14 [0] suggest the little cores are 1/3 of the performance of the big ones on integer, and 1/4 on floating point. (It was closer to 1/4 and 1/5 for the A13.) If that trend holds for the M1's cores, then that might help your estimates.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
This release is entirely within Apples control, why would they risk damaging their brand releasing a chip with lower performance than the current Intel chips they are shipping. They would only do this at a time when they would completely dominate the competition.
The bigger issue here is bandwidth. AMD hasn't increased their APU graphics much because the slow DDR4 128-bit bus isn't sufficient (let alone when the CPU and GPU are both needing to use that bandwidth).
I also didn't mention PCIe lanes. They are notoriously power hungry and that higher TDP chip not only has way more, but also has PCIe 4 lanes which have twice the bandwidth and a big increase in power consumption (why they stuck with PCIe 3 on mobile).
It's also notable that even equal cache sizes are not created equal. Lowering the latency requires more sophisticated designs which also use more power.
To me it seems pretty unlikely to be that important because if you can have 16gb of memory in the chip, how hard can it be to increase the caches a fraction of that?
If 32mb would be too hard they could have easily went for 1mb.
But they didn’t and that’s a pretty good indicator it doesn’t make a lot of difference.
Next, SRAM doesn't scale like normal transistors. TSMC N7 cells are 0.027 nanometers while MY cells are 0.021 (1.35x). meanwhile, normal transistors got a 1.85x shrink.
I-cache is also different across architectures. x86 uses 15-20% less instruction memory for the same program (on average). This means for the same size cache that x86 can store more code and have a higher hit rate.
The next issue is latency. Larger cache sizes mean larger latencies. AMD and Intel have both used 64kb L1 and then move back to 32kb because of latencies. The fact that x86 chips get such good performance with a fraction of the L1 cache points more to since kind of inefficiency in Apples design. I'd guess AMD/Intel have much better prefetcher designs.
No, when your chip has many billions of transistors that’s not a big number. For 1 mb that’s about 0.2%, a tiny number, also when multiplied with 1.85.
Next the argument is that x64 chips are better because they have less cache while before the Apple chips couldn’t compete because Intel had more. That doesn’t make sense. And how are you drawing conclusions on the design and performance of a chip that’s not even on the market yet anyway?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the 1.85x number does not apply to SRAM.
I've said for a long time that the x86 ISA has a bigger impact on chip design and performance (esp per watt) than Intel or AMD would like to admit. You'll not find an over-the-top fan here.
My point is that x86 can do more with less cache than aarch64. If you're interested, RISC-V with compact instructions enabled (100% of production implementations to my knowledge) is around 15% more dense than x86 and around 30-35% more dense than aarch64.
This cache usage matters because of all the downsides of needing larger cache and because cache density is scaling at a fraction of normal transistors.
Anandtech puts A14 between Intel and AMD for int performance and less than both in float performance. The fact that Intel and AMD fare so well while Apple has over 6x the cache means they're doing something very fancy and efficient to make up the difference (though I'd still hypothesize that if Apple did similar optimizations, it would still wind up being more efficient due to using a better ISA).
I’ll just wait for the independent test results.
The meme of saying that Geekbench is not a useful metric across cores, or that it is not representative of real-world usage, and therefore cannot be used needs to die. It’s not perfect, it can never be perfect. But it’s not like it will be randomly off by a factor of two. I’ve been running extremely compute-bound workloads on both Intel and Apple’s chips for quite a while and these chips are 100% what Geekbench says about them. Yes, they are just that good.
In this case, it's high speed differential signaling, and that's going to have a /lot/ of active power. There's a lot of C*dv/dt going on there!
>but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of.
This just means you know nothing about processor performance or benchmarks. If it was that easy to increase performance by a factor of 3x why hasn't AMD done so? Why did they only manage a 20% increase in IPC instead of your predicted 200%?
[0] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/a12-fvcurve_575px.pn...
The closest it could get I think would be running a variant of Unix optimized for the Ryzen.
There's no way to say what "faster" means or what 98% they used. Is it faster than 98/100 models? or faster than 98% of the 261M laptops sold in 2019?
"faster than 98% of laptops sold last year" is a nice quotable soundbyte that will be spread without any of those details.
I'm actually a big fan of Apple's products. I'm sure all the numbers, R&D, and benchmarking will prove the M1 to be impressive.
Plus, given use of Rosetta 2 they probably need 2x or more improvement over existing models to be viable for existing x86 software. Interesting to speculate what the M chip in the 16" will look like - convert efficency cores to performance cores?
The M1 supposedly has a 10w TDP (at least in the MBA; it may be speced higher in the MBP13). If that's the case, there's a ton of power envelope headroom to scale to more cores, given the i9 9980HK in the current MBP16 is speced at 45 watts.
I'm very scared of this architecture once it gets up to Mac Pro levels of power envelope. If it doesn't scale, then it doesn't scale, but assuming it does this is so far beyond Xeon/Zen 3 performance it'd be unfair to even compare them.
This is the effect of focusing first on efficiency, not raw power. Intel and AMD never did this; its why they lost horribly in mobile. Their bread and butter is desktops and servers, where it doesn't matter. But, long term, it does; higher efficiency means you can pack more transistors into the same die without melting them. And its far easier to scale a 10 watt chip up to use 50 watts than it is to do the opposite.
My only worry about the systems with more cores (Mac Pro etc) are about the economics for Apple of making these chips in such small volume.
PS Interesting that from Anandtech the M1 has a smaller die area than the i5/i7 in the Intel Airs so plenty of room for more cores!
If you want a more efficient processor you can just reduce the frequency. You can't do that in the other direction. If your processor wasn't designed for 4Ghz+ then you can't clock it that high, so the real challenge is making the highest clocked CPU. AMD and Intel care a lot about efficiency and they use efficiency improvements to increase clock speeds and add more cores just like everyone else. What you are talking about is like semiconductor 101. It's so obvious nobody has to talk about it. If you think this is a competitive edge then you should read up more about this industry.
>Their bread and butter is desktops and servers, where it doesn't matter.
Efficiency matters a lot in the server and desktop market. Higher efficiency means more cores and a higher frequency.
>But, long term, it does; higher efficiency means you can pack more transistors into the same die without melting them.
No shit? Semiconductor 101??
>And its far easier to scale a 10 watt chip up to use 50 watts than it is to do the opposite.
You mean... like those 64 core EPYC server processors that AMD has been producing for years...? Aren't you lacking a little in imagination?
Keep in mind that the $3k MBP is probably part of the 2% in the above quote. The large majority of laptops sold are ~$1k, and not the super high end machines.
Smacking that with single cores on a 5nm process is probably pretty easy.
If you buy a Ferrari, they won't market saying its latest car is better than 98% of cars sold last year.
it is not a good metric to compare performance of budget laptops where sales is going to be higher to premium laptop.
I saw some graphs that looked unrealistically smooth with two unlabeled axis
AKA, I suspect a big part of those perf uplifts evaporate when compared with the laptops that are appearing in stores now.
And the ipad benchmarks also remain a wait and see, because the perf uplifts I've seen either are either safari based, or synthetic benchmarks like geekbench. Both of which seem to heavily favor apple/arm cores when compared with more standard benchmarks. Apples perf claims have been dubious for years, particularly back when the mac was ppc. They would optimize or cherry pick some special case which allowed them to make claims like "8x" faster than the fastest PC, which never reflected overall machine perf.
I want to see how fast it does with the gcc parts of spec..
And I got so excited about it...
When the name i7 is mentioned people are more likely to think it's one of the high end desktop processors rather than the mobile processors.
But then they throw in code compilation... that's where they stop being honest.
The "Neural Engine" is a special compute unit specifically for machine learning. The iPhone Camera app uses it for semantic segmentation, for example.
It's all the wires and buffers and pipeline registers and arbiters and decoders and muxes that connect the components together.
It's dominated by wires, typically, which is probably how it came to be known as a fabric. (Wild speculation on my part.) I've been hearing that term for a long time. Maybe 20 years?
Not Intel's fastest chip but, if these benchmarks are correct, that's a big speed bump and the higher end Pro's are to come. How fast does it have to be in this thermal envelope to get excited about?
Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim.
Thats per core performance.
M1
> Apple M1 chip
> 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
> 8-core GPU
> 16-core Neural Engine
Intel
> 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz, with 128MB of eDRAM
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0W42LL/A/refurbished-133...
Apple's claim:
> With an 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU, M1 on MacBook Pro delivers up to 2.8x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 5x faster graphics² than the previous generation.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...
Fine print:
> Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Open source project built with prerelease Xcode 12.2 with Apple Clang 12.0.0, Ninja 1.10.0.git, and CMake 3.16.5. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
> Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 10‑second project with Apple ProRes 422 video at 3840x2160 resolution and 30 frames per second. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
A more fair comparison would be Tiger Lake (20% IPC improvement) on Intel's terrible 10nm process. The most fair comparison would be zen 3 on 7nm, but even that is still a whole node behind.
I'm not sure exactly what your point is. The fact it is IT IS on a better node. That's probably a big part of the performance picture. But, as a user I don't care if the improvement in performance is architectural or node. I just care that it's better than the competition.
So comparing a
4-Core, 5nm, 16 MB cache, 10 watts TDP vs
4-Core, 14nm, 8 MB cache, 15 watts TDP.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/192996/...
"Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim."
Not sure what the custom instructions you're referring to are.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
Quote:
"In the overall SPEC2006 chart, the A14 is performing absolutely fantastic, taking the lead in absolute performance only falling short of AMD’s recent Ryzen 5000 series.
The fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including the SoC, DRAM, and regulators, versus +21W (1185G7) and 49W (5950X) package power figures, without DRAM or regulation, is absolutely mind-blowing."
"The craziest thing is how close [to 1/56th of a Xeon 8176] they get at 3W. That's the part that's staggering. What could Apple do with, say, laptop thermals? Desktop thermals? The mind creeps closer to boggling." -- me, 5 October 2018
Guess we're finding out.
That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. They might use variations of it in their own data centers, maybe.
I wonder if this could potentially be a good time to bring back Xserve...
1) Is Apple interested (and capable) making macOS into a realistic choice for servers again?
2) If not, is Apple comfortable with selling a box that most people will put Linux on? Would they put resources into a Bootcamp-esque driver package?
"See, you don't need native Linux on the machine, just use our hypervisor & Docker/VMs"
Experience counts, but Apple is pretty old-hat at this by now as well.
I am also noting that they have killed the "ARM SoC's will never match what Intel can do" story line. That always reminded me of the "Microcomputers will never be able to do what minicomputers can do" story line that everyone except DEC and HP seemed to realize wouldn't hold up over time. "Never say never" is a good motto in the computer business.
That said, as the integration continues apace re-usability and repairablilty reach all time lows. When you consider that you could take a 1970's minicomputer, disassemble it to the component level, and create an entirely different (and functional) computer out of those components, you get a sense of how quaint that notion seems these days. I doubt anyone will ever desolder an M1 chip and put it onto a new board of their own design. And that reminds me more of the IBM "die on substrate" modules that they started using in mainframes which made them basically nothing more than low grade gold ore if they no longer worked as a mainframe.
The more interesting question is how does this affect the Mac desktops? It would be a shame to throw out a whole Mac Pro machine just because it only has 64GB RAM. Then again, this event did release the Mac Mini, which is a desktop and does not have upgradable RAM or storage or CPU. Hmmmm...
Also, the previous Mac Mini has 64G max memory and not the laughable 16G.
I'm unsure if we're at a point where these things are even feasible. e.g I have configured my MBP a lot, the .zsh file, home directory and endless configuration.
I would not be surprised if they ditch the kernal completely, and make everything an App (much like chromebook)
How often do phone users actually upgrade their phones for more power? I mostly use my computer to develop software, play video games, and edit media, and stream videos. I mostly use my phone to text, play music, and access the internet.
Almost every PC purchase I've ever made was driven by a need for better performance, but I've never upgraded my phone for that reason. I've upgrade my phone for a better screen, a better camera, a bigger battery, software support, new hardware features (4G, biometrics, USB-C, etc)... but never because I felt like I needed a faster processor or more system memory.
Edit: just to clarify, the Neural Engine itself is not really "new":
> The A11 also includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Neural Engine". This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billion operations per second and is used for Face ID, Animoji and other machine learning tasks.[9] The neural engine allows Apple to implement neural network and machine learning in a more energy-efficient manner than using either the main CPU or the GPU.[14][15] However, third party apps cannot use the Neural Engine, leading to similar neural network performance to older iPhones.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A11#Neural_Engine
Besides, can the neural engine be used to speed up other tasks?
https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/04/tensorflow-lite-core-ml-...
So don't think of it as Apple walked right in with this so much as Apple has been shipping the neural engine for years and now they're finally making it available on macOS.
Unfortunately Apple was very vague when they described the method that yielded the claimed "9x faster ML" performance.
They compared the results using an "Action Classification Model" (size? data types? dataset- and batch size?) between an 8-core i7 and their M1 SoC. It isn't clear whether they're referring to training or inference and if it took place on the CPU or the SoC's iGPU and no GPU was mentioned anywhere either.
So until an independent 3rd party review is available, your question cannot be answered. 9x with dedicated hardware over a thermally- and power constrained CPU is no surprise, though.
Even the notoriously weak previous generation Intel SoCs could deliver up to 7.73x improvement when using the iGPU [1] with certain models. As you can see in the source, some models don't even benefit from GPU acceleration (at least as far as Intel's previous gen SoCs are concerned).
In the end, Apple's hardware isn't magic (even if they will say otherwise;) and more power will translate into higher performance so their SoC will be inferior to high-power GPUs running compute shaders.
[1] https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/article...
Now the accelerator in the M1 is only 11 TFLOPs. So it’s definitely not trying to compete as an accelerator for training.
But in the development phase, when you are testing on a smaller corpus of data, to make sure your code works, the on-laptop dedicated chip could expedite the development process.
If ML developers can assume that consumer machines (at least "proper consumer machines, like those made by Apple") will have support to do small-scale ML calculations efficiently, then that enables including various ML-based thingies in random consumer apps.
It can be surprisingly cost-effective to invest a few $k in a hefty machine(s) with some high-end GPU's to train with due to the exceedingly hefty price of cloud GPU compute. The money invested up-front in the machine(s) pays itself off in (approximately) a couple of months.
The "neural" chips in these machines are for accelerating inference. I.e. you already have a trained model, you quantise and shrink it, export it to ONNX or whatever Apple's CoreML requires, ship it to the client, and then it runs extra-fast, with relatively small power draw on the client machine due to the dedicated/specialised hardware.
(If they are or can be, I'm interested)
Exactly. Currently I am training my models using Google Colab and then exporting the model to run on my MBP. Would be interesting if I could do it locally
Another interesting thing is that ( if this is for training ) this will become the only accelerated version of Tensorflow for macOS as: - No CUDA drivers for latest macOS - AMD ROCHm only supports Linux runtime
Tensorflow includes stuff for inference.
M1 looks impressive, hopefully it scales as well to higher TDPs.
Pretty much what I expected today with all the low power models getting updated.
With no fan I expect the Air will throttle the CPU quickly when using the high performance cores. Calling it an "8-core CPU" is a little cheeky IMHO but I guess everyone does it.
Looking at the config options it seems the CPU/SoC is literally the "M1" and that's it. No different speeds like before so apparently the same CPU/SoC in the Pro and the Air? I guess the fans in the Pro will allow the high performance more headroom but still kinda odd. I wonder if that will carry over to the 16" MBP next year?
I am disappointed to see the design is identical to what we currently have. I was hoping we would see a little refinement with thinner screen bezels, perhaps a slightly thicker lid to fit in a better web cam (rather than just better "image processing") and FaceID.
Overall I am disappointed due to 16GB max RAM and the same old design. I guess we will see the bigger machines get updates sometimes between March and July 2021.
Also are we calling it the M1 CPU or the M1 SoC?
Yeah one possible explanation I can think of is that they're not 100% confident in how rollout will go, and they want to avoid the situation where people in the wild are showing off their "brand new macs" which are still going through teething issues. There's less chance of souring the brand impression of M1 if they blend into the product line better.
Alternatively, maybe they want to sell twice to early adopters: once for the new chip, and again in 12-18 months when they release a refreshed design.
As you say, I think the average consumer doesn't understand the difference between an Intel chip and an Apple chip, and will probably not understand what if anything has changed with these new products.
I would say developers would be the group which would be most anxious about an architecture change (which is probably why this announcement was very technically-oriented), and developers on average are probably going to understand that design changes and architecture changes basically orthogonal, and thus won't be comforted that much by a familiar design.
On the other side, average consumers probably aren't all that anxious due to the arch change, and would be more convinced that something new and exciting was happening if it actually looked different.
If the reaction here to the touchbar is representative, perhaps they didn't want the M1 announcement to be overshadowed by the new feature related whining.
Less reliant on perfect compatibility of enterprise software, which I am sure is something they want a little more time to sort out before committing their higher end lineup.
Lot's of moving parts in a single generation is risky for scheduling and changing CPU architecture is huge enough for a generation change.
Honestly, people who don't use their computers as Facebook machines or have very specific things they want to do with the ML engine should probably stay away from Arm Macs for a couple years. There's bound to be plenty of software that doesn't work or doesn't work well, Docker will have ~limited usefulness until more and more people publish Arm images, etc. Plus I'm waiting for the typical Apple move of screwing early adopters by announcing that next year's model is 3x as fast, $200 cheaper, etc.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...
Some things still won't run though. Among other issues, there's a page size difference (16 kb vs 4 kb) that bit Chrome (since fixed): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110219...
Rosetta 2 on shipping hardware uses 4kb pages; it was only the DTK that was 16kb-only.
https://twitter.com/code/status/1326237772860981249?ref_src=...
They aren’t screwed, the early adopters adopt the new model early by definition. They get the new model and the move on to the next new model.
I know several of these bold individuals.
I think this was the fastest way to get something out quickly and cover as many SKUs as possible.
We'll need to wait for the next/larger SKU models to get out of the 16B / 2TB / 2-port limitations. Maybe they should call those devices the Macbook Pro Max.
I wonder how many more SKUs will be needed. Obviously they are going to minimize them, but will they be able to cover Macbook Pro 16", iMac, iMac Pro and Mac Pro with only one (unlikely) or two (likely) more SKUs?
This is a small detail that is easy to miss.
The "higher-end" MBPs with 4 ports are only availabe with the intel CPUs for now
The "we integrated thunderbolt" bit is also implying an untruth that nobody else does that. Intel did that last year with Ice Lake. AMD will do that next year when they upgrade their IO die.
The point is that it's mostly Apple's fault to begin with. They choose to use outdated processors without integrated thunderbolt. They chose to add their massive A10 die instead of a normal, optimized SSD controller (not to mention this screws over data recovery and SSD replacement). They are exaggerating at best about RAM as the chips merely sit beside the core. The only thing they should really claim is the IO die and even that's nothing too special.
The M1 Chip: https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/
The Mac has turned into a very nice luxury-consumer business. It is a status signal even if its just used to check email and watch YouTube. It's a pretty smart idea to let these users be the gen 1 guinea pigs.
Need a day off? Have some errands? Hit the compile button.
What about inodes and cpu spikes even running node on osx? Let alone doing that inside a container.
Nah. OSX is long gone for "better dev experience". Linux always wins.
what constitutes a better dev experience?
- Same text editing shortcuts that work consistently throughout all apps in the system including your editor/IDE, browser, and terminal.
- iTerm2 having so called "legacy full screen mode" that I use exclusively. (I've been searching for something similar for windows/linux for quite some time).
- The general system polish and usability. This is not directly "dev experience", but it's something you interact with while doing development throughout the day and it's just hands down a lot better than anything linux has atm.
Is that about disabling animations? That can be done globally on windows and linux desktop environments.
Essentially, I always have terminal in the background even when I'm not working acting as my wallpaper.
A lot of my iPhone app builds are pretty quick though, < 1 minute.
Our unit tests took around 30 minutes on a fast system though and were simply not worth running outside of the specific tests I was writing.
But better thermals will probably mean they can run the CPU in the Pro at higher base clock speed anyway, so it will probably be faster than the air all around - we'll have to wait for benchmarks to know for sure though.
Historically speaking, Apple doesn't underdelivier on their claimed numbers. I'm excited to see what they'll do with a full desktop power budget.
The smaller machines are also likely held back by cooling solutions, so if you have Intel beat on power efficiency in a tiny form factor, you can boost your clock speed too.
I would say on your topic though that Intel has a hybrid chip that might interest you. Lakefield pairs 4 modified Tremont cores with 1 Sunny Cove core.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15877/intel-hybrid-cpu-lakefi...
I'd like to see 2 zen cores paired with 4 updated jaguar cores.
Normalizing for performance (say A14 vs 5950X at 4.5GHz instead of 5GHz) would close the gap somewhat, but it's still huge. Perhaps 4x instead of 10x - those last 500MHz on the AMD chip cost a ton of power.
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering Apple is using both a newer process and gets nearly 60% higher IPC.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
AMD has a laptop series of CPUs, M1 compared to that is the only relevant comparison - the rest is apples to oranges.
That being said Apple has an advantage in that they control the entire stack and on the power efficiency side of things they have experience with mobile CPU design, they can do stuff like heterogeneous cores and can optimise for it throughout the stack, I think it would be challenging for x86 to do the same.
A beefy chip in an MBP 16 will be exciting, and I'm sure they are working on that, but it will make far more sense once ARM is established in the "normal" consumer models.
It seems likely the higher end of the performance curves are only attainable on the systems with active cooling. Or at least only sustainable with active cooling. So the MacBook Air would still realize the efficiency gains, but never the peak performance on that chart.
But yeah, agreed that not having a 32GB option is somewhat disappointing.
(sent from my MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM)
I am very curious about the performance.
If the macbook air is editing 6k videos and scrubbing smoothly, I am optimistic.
But I do believe the dust will settle, and I'm optimistic about the future of Apple Silicon.
Of course, we'll need to wait for third party verification in the end.
Please take this shallow retort back to Kotaku.
You have every right to support your Sony stocks, but blatant lies though ?
I play modern games with RX 5700XT 8GB video card and 8GB RAM machine without issues.... So maybe there's not much need for more memory...
The consumer price for 2TB is $450. $800 is absurd.
For me personally, I used to buy the lower-end models with small HDD and RAM, then upgrade them. But that's no longer an option with these machines.
EDIT: I don't mean VAT/sales tax, I've considered sales taxes in the comparison, but also exchange rates of $1.18/1€. The difference is almost exactly 30%. It looks like the cost of doing business in the EU is much higher, and/or Apple chooses to price their products however they want by region.
I can actually get a round-trip economy flight (pre-COVID and now) to LA just to buy a Mac mini, and save about $400. It's really.. unfortunate.
$139 is NOT 30% difference.
I'm comparing retail pricing in France (with a 2-year EU warranty) to business pricing in the US (with a 1-year warranty). That comes out to 1949€ including VAT in France, or about $2299 USD, vs $1749 USD including Los Angeles/CA sales tax with business pricing.
About 31% more.
Since you use words like “misleading” and “honest”, I wonder what your agenda is. Maybe you’re an Apple shareholder who’s allergic to any perceived criticism.
It's not Apple's fault, that our governments decided to tax the crap out of everything.
I think 16GB is the bare minimum for a professional machine. Apple clears the bar here, but doesn't exceed it.
Maybe next year's machines? As a first product, I think it's good enough. And the performance gains elsewhere--if what Apple says is true--are actually pretty radically impressive.
...And we might even be doing dev in something like VS Code in the first place.
We all like to dunk on Electron, but it's kind of become part of the furniture at this point, for better our worse.
Sometimes they're not worth it. Electron's existence itself is proof of "sometimes it's not worth it."
Total 14G of ram. My combined browser ram use is about 3G. The flutter project is barely 20 lines of code. The PC was started up about 2h ago.
I'd feel much better with 32G on a dev machine (to be fair, my .net projects require much less ram than this).
There are probably a number of useless Windows services that could be shut down as well.
Every developer who makes frontend things for the web should have a minimum of three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, but maybe others as well) open any time they're testing or debugging their code. That's quite a lot of developers.
People used to tell me that Java development was resource consuming... But I somehow manage to build systems with 16GB. I didn't even go for 32G on my new laptop.
I upgraded it only because my keyboard died.
You can still be productive right this moment on 8GB of RAM (you're proving it!), but the march of time will inevitably start to make that amount feel less and less tolerable, if it isn't already.
Personally, when I buy a dev machine, I'm generally trying to look at the next few years of ownership. Will 8GB of RAM cut it in 2023? Doubtful. 16GB? Yeah, a little safer. But 32GB would make me feel better.
I’m out
8Gb of RAM for £200 they can piss off. I paid £240 for 64Gb of decent stuff in my desktop.
Like, you might get super frustrated, develop mental health issues, not that the corporate cares. Expenditure reduces, ROI might even slightly improve, why bother then?
Uh, what? Is your comment literally "because I don't have enough RAM in my computer my mental health will decline"?
I’m talking about 4GB DDR4 non-SSD Office machines still in production that are borderline crime against humanity.
the kinda company that can't afford to give you the latest stuff is more likely to have those kindsa days all the time too so it feels even worse. management even rides your ass coz you can't make it work...
part of "making it" as a software dev in a lot of countries is getting a machine per your specs not having a machine specced out to you by IT.
I wonder if they're working on a version with discrete memory and GPU for the high end? They'll need it if they ever want to get Intel out of the Mac Pro.
Or, inspire me. Which processes really require occupying and allocating bigger blocks of RAM?
I personally don't want to purchase another machine with 16gb RAM but that's mainly because I want the option of having a powerful Windows guest or two running at the same time. But if you take out that possibility, for now, what if the paradigm has changed just a tad.
The most vocal and visible (and rich) ones have Macbook's though, i guess that's where the idea comes from.
So currently the majority of responding dev use a POSIX (mostly)-compliant operating system. That is actual food for thought.
Sources: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#technology-_-... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-de...
Build code in Xcode up to 2.8x faster.
[...]
Compile four times as much code on a single charge, thanks to the game-changing performance per watt of the M1 chip.
I have a hunch it will be adequate for single-threaded tasks and the real gains will come for multithreaded compilation, since its superior thermals should enable it to run all cores at full blast for longer periods of time without throttling, relative to the intel silicon it replaces.
A wild unsubstantiated guess of course, at this point (or rather, a worry of mine).
Intel's Optane SSDs are based on a completely different technology than other SSDs, and their low queue depth latency is significantly better than any other SSDs out there, but good luck talking Apple into using more Intel stuff just when they're trying to switch away, and even then... just having some more real RAM would be better for most of these creator/pro workloads.
Which processes really require occupying and
allocating bigger blocks of RAM?
They don't always need to be in RAM, particularly with modern SSD performance, but if you're using a laptop for your day job and you work with largeish data...
Then again, maybe their in-house SSD controller is so blazing fast that the performance gains from this would, for most applications, be minimal.
So that’s the context to interpret the Ram they offer.
You might have looked at the 16" one, which did not get updated today.
edit: spelling
Could someone try to help me figure out the reasoning behind Apple changing the target customer?
That's the point the above poster was making.
This is Apple's first CPU, there is a reason Apple said the transition will take 2 years. More powerful CPUs with more RAM for the 16" MacBook, the iMac, and the Mac Pro lines will be coming later. Some of those CPUs will likely be available for the 13" and the Mini.
Basically I'm guessing that no one who wants more than 16GB on their professional machine was going to upgrade on this cycle anyway. We'll see
I think today's presentation is just confirming what we've known for a while, Apple is pivoting away from professionals.
Although OSX used to be popular with the indie-professional scene, it's disappearing quicker than it appeared years back.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/3.0ghz-intel-cor...
Also how much OS X optimisation can help with that. The iPad Pro is a lot faster than most laptops with, what, 6gb memory? And iPhones always seem to have a lot less RAM than Samsung phones but still run faster.
MacOS doesn't get to use any of those tricks.
Not yet. MacOS has been moving towards becoming iOS for a long time now. Now with iPad and iPhone apps running natively on them, they only need to lock a few more things down until it becomes an iPad with a windowed interface.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
Amazon price for 2x32gb modules is lower than it ever has been as of today ($218.58) [1] and I have had no problem making full use of that memory in MacOS. [2]
So I def have eyes on the new mini. My suspicion is the rx580 will still provide 2x or more graphical power than any of these machines.
I expect the Pro to run faster as it has a fan to support it but how much faster than the Air would it be?
They purposefully launched with consumer-level hardware. There is no way that the "real" pro machines will not let you ratchet all those specs up.
Apple said the transition is going to take 2 years. This is day 1. You can still buy Intel based Macs with 64GB RAM. When Apple phases those out and you still can't buy 64GB Macs, then you can complain.
What are the chances that happens?
I might have to get an Air for myself, just to have an ARM based computer again, like it's 1988.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
Interestingly enough Stac was apparently co-founded by Nvidia/Stanford's Bill Dally. The story of them being "sherlocked" by MS-DOS 6.0 and successfully suing Microsoft is interesting as well.
I guess they made a cost trade-off for these machines, which will not be carried forward to the high-end. Perhaps a new "M2" chipset, with discreet RAM and graphics. Next year?
It would be amazing if they could bring ECC for a decent price as well, time will tell.
I develop Django and unfortunately have to run a 4GB Windows 10 vm in the background for work, still have plenty of ram and don’t even have swap enabled.
The memory market is getting fragmented with Nvidia having seemed to moved from HBM2 to GDDR6X (Micron being only supplier). LPDDR super low power (cell phones) and DDR4/5 for rest of market...
They’re still selling the intel mini which supports up to 64GB, so that option has not been taken off the table if you need the RAM. This is just an additional option with a different trade off. Faster RAM but less of it.
So they decided to reuse the A14X / M1 across all three products. And the only differentiation are their TDP cooling. The MacBook Air is 10W TDP, and both Mac Mini and MacBook Pro are likely ~35W range.
The did mention MacBook Air's SSD performances is now twice as fast, so this isn't exactly an iPad Pro with Keyboard. That is great except I suddenly remember the 2019 MacBook Air actually had a slower SSD than the 2018 MacBook Air. Where the 2018 do Read at 2GB/s, 2019 could only do 1.3GB/s. So even at 2x / 2.6GB/s it is still only slightly better than 2018. And considering modern day NVME SSD, this is barely good enough.
Pricing kept at $999, and same old ridiculous upgrade pricing of RAM and Storage. Although they did lower the Education Pricing to $899, a little bit better than previous ~$829. But for MacBook Pro, You are essentially paying $300 more for a Fan and Touch Bar. And Pro still limited to 16GB Memory ( because it is now using the LPDDR RAM as used on iPad ).
I guess may be this is exciting for many, but extremely underwhelming to me.
A Quote from Steve Jobs:
“When you have a monopoly market share, the people who can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies, the product people get driven out of the decision making forums. Companies forget what it takes to make great products. The product sensibility, the product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position is rotted out... The people running these companies have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They've got no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. They really have no feeling in their heart about wanting to really help the customers”
And my small rant and wishes, Dear Tim Cook / Apple, Please Stop Saying you LOVE something. There is no need for you to tell me that, because if you did love something; We will know. Steve never said anything along those lines, but we all know he cares way more than any of us could even imagine.
To put another way. They could have taken an iPad Pro, expanded the screen to 13.3 inches, added a keyboard and put MacOS on it instead of iOS and it would be probably 1.8lbs. I don't know what the tradeoffs would be but I was excited by that possibility. It didn't happen though.
iPad Pro 12.9" 1.391 lbs
Magic Keyboard 0.5 lbs
Total 1.891 lbs
Apple doesn't list the weight of an iPad Pro but wikipedia does
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Pro#Fourth_generation#Mod...
Those are the Gram series, right? They use a magnesium alloy chassis that feels like flimsy plastic. They are light, but they feel like a something that's going to imminently break compared to Apple's aluminum unibody.
In my view, the Gram trades off too much stiffness and chassis robustness for weight to be palatable to a non-niche audience.
I thought I was in the niche of users that prized weight over all else but I had concerns that a light on-the-go laptop that was so flimsy would last. I returned my Gram due to the fact that I just couldn't get used to Windows (after using Linux and Mac for >10 years) so the build robustness and weight ended up being a moot point
As for weight, carrying a 4.4lbs notebook to and from work and to meetings never bothered me. Carrying the same notebook for days on end as a digital nomad, especially in hot and humid weather did.
Apple isn't really hellbent on making the lightest laptop and don't really have the luxury of creating SKUs just for these niche needs.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+A...
More than that. Better screen. Bigger battery. Better speakers. Better mics (although I don't know how much I would buy this one as 'studio quality' is silly). A "USB Power Port". The fan will make the MBP perform without throttling a lot longer than the air.
The price difference is minor for all that IMO.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
Stop letting them live rent free in your head.
It's a consumer product. WHO. CARES.
For the average user, these are fantastic. A laptop that lasts beyond the number of waking hours in a day and has no noisy fans with basically untouchable performance in that form factor. And YOU'RE STILL MAD...about the vocabulary that Tim Cook speaks with compared to Steve Jobs, who has been scientifically verified as being a completely different person. (I highly doubt Steve never said anything about loving Apple products, either)
In other words, Steve Jobs has been dead for almost 10 years, it's time to leave his personality cult. If you liked what he said better, it's probably because he was one of the best salespeople who has ever lived - that doesn't change what the product actually IS.
And oh my goodness, stop getting worked up about specs and industry-standard price segmentation practices. 99% of customers DO. NOT. CARE. The VAST majority of MacBook Air buyers buy the base model and don't need anything more than that. macOS is perfectly usable on 8GB, heck my parents are using 4GB on theirs and it works fine - yes, with Catalina. No joke, you need to open up something like 40 chrome tabs before it matters. RAM requirements have completely stagnated for anything but the most exotic workloads.
Long time Apple fans who would in the past have championed how much care and vision Apple puts into their products now champion how working this way is so important because apparently building shareholder value is something an end customer should care about.
The reality of this is that it is very likely they focused on yield for the chip vs market segment for what they can ship today. For the professional user I would very much to expect to see follow on products with more RAM and cores in 1Q21 (MacBook Pro 16" and iMacs).
I use vim to develop primarily in python/js. So my need for performance is super low.
One of my colleagues placed an order for the Air about 10 seconds after you could.
All we need is huge battery life (check), better heat management (check), and snappy enough performance for our thin client machine (check). We're not training the next GPT on our laptop anyways.
I had a 300 dollar 7" netbook. Turns out that unless you're doing deep learning, etc. (which you might as well just run remote IMO), a bottom of the line intel atom processor can handle the workloads that a CS program throws at it no problem. I mean, in reality you're doing things like solving sudoku puzzles or making some syscalls 95% of the time.
Admittedly, I ended up buying a desktop because I wanted the screen real estate when things got more complex, but I thought it was funny how many people had this conception that they would need to run their ray tracer from CS101 on their i7 with 32gb RAM
Usually the other courses when it comes to computer would need either office suite or specific software, both are vastly more demanding than the CS toolchain that has been mature since the 90s.
That is, unless the course somehow uses Java, which practically forces you to use an IDE that are full of bloat.
I honestly thought that the ability to interact with java code without all the boilerplate was a great way to introduce people to coding. That being said, I'm sure languages and interpreters like python's were pretty mature in 2010 too.
They don't want a separate desktop for heavy tasks.
I loved that little netbook.
It also saved my bacon when I forgot my decryption strategy for my uploaded bitcoin wallet and I remembered I kept a backup of the wallet on that thing that was under a pile of books in my closet.
its $1,000+ price tag is pretty steep if exclusively targeted towards consumer market.
Also the wife and kids have plenty of alternative devices including the iPad to do basic school, web and multimedia, the value prop for just that market is not convincing enough for me
Why would I buy and iPad and MB Pro if they are basically going to do the same type of work ?
While Apple's phones are not really "pro", I can see a phone being designed for the professional market primarily like the Blackberries and Nokia communicators of old.
For me, we just went all in on the Apple ecosystem because it is simple and the least invasive privacy wise. I do tech for a living so when I get home the last thing I want to do is debug anything. I think in the last 5 years the number of times my family has asked me for help to resolve something is under 5. This was not the case when we had Windows systems, Windows media centers, etc.
I have considerably less problems troubleshooting Chromebooks for the technically challenged than I have ever had with macOS or windows combined [1]
[1] TBF Windows has improved, S Mode, seamless upgrades etc have helped its user experience to improve. It is funny that windows is considered the more complex OS, their user friendly practices like strong backward compatibility and focus on GUI based workflows shot them to mainstream in the 90's, times have changed indeed.
[2] They are not going to lose professional user base overnight there will be stickyness, anecdotally I bought the first 2017 touch bar MBP, for 10-15 years Apple had delivered good hardware for me, that is the last Apple I will buy in a while. There is some stickiness in the professional market however the brand loyalty is very limited, if a device does not fit your needs you find one which does . You may feel sad you still need to make money though so you move on.
Finally real competition for intel. If only these chips were available to others. they are literally running laps around the competition.
Curious where Apple's pro offerings will go, and whether these will be available as servers...
AMD would like a word.
I would expect there to be an arms race on... ARM. And maybe MS suddenly stops treating Windows on ARM as a hobby project.
More performance/watt in the server room ultimately translates to cloud provides being able to offer more performance/dollar to users.
Unless Apple is going to sell these chips for other laptops, desktops and servers the only competition going on here is Apple competing with itself. Besides, AMD has been competing with Intel very well for the last couple years and have now pretty much taken over the market with their latest CPUs.
The new M1 SOCs max out at 16GB RAM, which seems like a major limitation, but the timing and latency of this integrated RAM is probably much better than what you could otherwise achieve. Meanwhile, improved SSD performance will probably have a larger impact on the whole system. I remember when I bought a 15k RPM hard drive ca. 2005 - it was like a new computer. Upgrading the slowest part of the storage hierarchy made the largest difference.
One slight disappointment in the Mac mini is the removal of two USB C / Thunderbolt ports and no option for 10G ethernet vs. the Intel model. An odd set of limitations in 2020.
Overall, at the price they're offering the Mac mini (haven't really considered the other models for myself), I think it's ok to take the plunge.
- Sent from my Dell hackintosh
I thought the same. I actually wonder whether the low prices aren't due to the App support being extremely limited at this point (basically only first party stuff)
No thanks, not for my boot drive.
This is the same concept as L1 -> L2 -> L3 Cache -> RAM -> Disk.
When you need something, bump it up, when you don't, move it away.
Do you need a 512GB boot drive?
I have a base level 2 port MBP from work and having to do any work with large files has been a nightmare because of this, having to juggle power/monitor and storage constantly.
Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processing?
What are you doing that needs them all actually running simultaneously? Disk-backed VM pause/resume is extremely fast when your SSD's sequential read/write performance is measured in GBps.
I have a hard time imagining a workflow that actually uses multiple systems all at once, so to me what you're saying sounds like "Well of course my RAM gets filled if I fill it on purpose."
Often it is. And so whilst SSDs are fast they still aren't fast enough to not slow everything else doing under high load.
I have 74GB on my system (10GB of which is GPU) so I can run my dev env (Kubernetes, PGSQL, Visual Studio), data science, machine learning and do 6K video editing. But then, there's also zero chance that I would consider doing this on a laptop.
Which is why I use Final Cut Pro. It was a little sluggish from time to time on my Air with 8GB of RAM, now on my mid-2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM it never stutters or slows down. Editing 1080p.
If you have a microservices architecture or are using Kubernetes then you will easily need more than 16GB. I have 128GB on my desktop purely so that I can have my full platform running in the background whilst also doing development.
Also if you're doing data engineering e.g. Spark then you will likely want more than 16GB.
I've bought One Plus 3 (6GB RAM) in 2016, still strong. Computing power has not changed much, limiting factor is RAM.
I don't want to be forced to close my complete dev. environments to work on another project; or play with a ML project.
The cost of additional RAM is marginal, to me it's the way it should be. Your time matters, your productivity matters, why not max it out?
When I buy an Apple computer, I pay a premium but I plan to use that computer for several years.
To offline a core:
echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/online
To online a core:
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/online
Where cpuN is 0-4. Keep in mind there's always one core you cannot disable to process interrupts.
There isn't an option like taskset on Linux to pin or move tasks among different cores, or like anything that's exposed in Linux's sysfs.
No fan however, is impressive....
Also: People who use graphs without numbers on the axis should be shot on sight.
Comparing the new 13" MacBook Pro with the previous one that's a regression in every aspect as the Intel-based ones allow up to 32GB RAM and 4TB storage and offer 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports.
In other words, M1 is for the majority of consumers.
- power efficiency
- 16GB RAM
- 2TB storage
- 2 Thunderbolt/USB4
Tim said at the beginning that 50% of Mac buyers were buying their first Mac. Apple’s quarter that just concluded at the end of Oct was massive for the Mac. $7.1B which is a 22% YoY growth. And 50% of those macs went to first time Mac buyers. That is insane growth in new users for a 36 year old product
My guess is that they'll introduce one other ARM-based chip for Macs in 2021, targeted at all remaining Macs (except for the Mac Pro). I believe the differences in performance can be achieved with a single chip simply by binning and different power envelopes.
I expect (or rather I hope) that chip then supports at least 64GB of memory, 8TB of NVMe storage and 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports.
I assume there will be a “four ports“ Apple Silicon version down the road.
The 4 port 13" MBP will most likely get upgraded early next year and also support more RAM. Apple did announce the transition will take them two years, not sure why people are surprised that their high end hardware is not updated yet on day one.
Think about it. If you want to introduce a new architecture, you can sell a bunch of entry-level devices to pandemic-constrained consumers during the holiday season. Their take-up of the product will spur development and flesh out the software ecosystem for Apple Silicon devices.
Once you cultivate the software ecosystem, more advanced users (professionals with very specific needs) can migrate toward the new architecture.
They're basically using Christmas to slingshot the new chip into the mainstream.
Edit: Never-mind, it looks like they are not porting bootcamp.
Why and for who though? Yes, there is an ARM version of windows, but there is pretty much no software for it - and most of the Windows ARM software (Office?) likely has already iOS versions and will have upcoming Mac ARM versions.
I have the feeling that 99%+ of Bootcamp users use it for x86 software.
And people went crazy over MS trying to mandate UEFI secure boot on these systems.
Now Apple does the same... And the result? Absolute silence. A world-wide mass of Apple fans suddenly not giving a fuck.
Talk about double standards.
These CPUs aren't meant for professionals but 18 to 20 hours of battery without all the heat from Intel CPUs is really nice.
Shame they didn't mention clock speeds
I only use Linux at home. Will I be doomed to inferior H/W going forward?
This is not a rhetorical question or a flame... It's an honest question... Is Apple pulling ahead of everybody else and soon going to be our only option?
On top of it for a foreseeable future I think a lot of professional software will stay on x86 architecture simply because most of it must be also available on Windows.
Turns out Windows on ARM is a farce and never had a chance in the first place. The available SoCs were crap, no hardware manufacturer actually launched ARM laptops in significant quantity, apps had to be ported to UWP, etc... It's basically Windows RT again and it was a total failure at that.
H/W is more than performance alone.
Personally I would consider a closed platform which can only run a single proprietary operating-system inferior, no matter what performance it has to show for.
I'm with you in not fully understanding the benefit. Maybe this is a technology that is hard to imagine, but is difficult to go back from (60hz, Retina displays).
With my Mac Pro, as soon as I wake it, I can see the LED on my monitors are 'alive', but it still takes that same 10s or so to be displaying data.
Also on macOS, if you have an always-on VPN, that can absolutely cause wake time challenges.
Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.
Seems like the A14 is within 10-20% of the desktop 5950X in single threaded workloads. The M1 will probably close the gap with higher clock speeds. AMD will probably still be ahead on multithreaded workloads until Apple releases a chip with 8 high-performance cores.
A14 has some important and kind of crazy architectural differences like being 8-wide and having double Zen's per-cycle throughput. It's a very different chip from anything else on the market.
The M1 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD is at £1299, with a 512GB SSD option at £1499. To bump the RAM to 16GB is another £200(!), so £1699 for 16/512.
The Intel options are £1799 for 16/512 or £1999 for 16/1024. So on the Intel side they seem to have cut out 8/256 options, and then they've re-introduced them for the M1 only - which makes the M1 look like it has a much lower starting price. It is cool if 16/512 M1 is £100 cheaper with more power and better battery life though. Intel can of course still increase the memory to 32GB (for £400 lol).
The other downside is only 2 ports on the M1 ones, Intel have 4.
My 2014 13inch MBP has 16GB and 512 storage and I'm almost certain it only cost me £1200 at the time. Back then we considered the storage upgrade expensive because SSD was still considered new tech... Today my desktop machine has a 2TB NVME m2 SSD in it, £285 on Amazon.
One comment mentions the possibility of using old ARM tablets in a hackintosh build, but this seems to run against one of the two reasons for using hackintosh over Mac directly - performance. Cost would definitely be a benefit, but I'm less convinced of the value here.
I imagine though that this is literally the end of the hackintosh entirely. With control over basically all the hardware, there are no more workarounds or backward compatibility aspects. Hell, even external GPU aren't supported as-yet.
The big letdown are the upgrade prices for RAM and SSD. Even at half the prices Apple would make a decent profit. As a consequence, the excitement about the affordable entry prices quickly vanishes and many people might not get the amount of storage they should - or they go somewhere else. At least for the Mini, you would probably only upgrade the RAM and buy a TB SSD.
For the Mini and the MB Pro, not having a 32GB option hurts. These are machines which should be made for real workloads.
Edit: Considering the fact that the RAM won’t be upgradeable (it’s part of the SoC), this limitation is a big bummer. What may be worse is that all these machines will start with an 8GB RAM configuration option at the low end, which isn’t going to age well at all in 2020.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
“Memory 8GB unified memory Configurable to: 16GB”
While I agree that RAM won't be upgradeable (as it hasn't been in all new models the past few years), are you sure that the RAM is part of the SoC? I believe what they labelled with "DRAM" in the M1 schmatics is very likely the L3 cache instead.
Adding RAM to the SoC would make little sense from a cost and yield perspective. I also believe that 16GB of DDR4 memory are much larger than the "DRAM" part of the SoC.
Here is a picture of the SoC with the 16GB of DDR4 RAM: https://www.apple.com/v/mac/m1/a/images/overview/chip__fffqz...
And here is the picture which confused by and tricked me into thinking the OP talked about the RAM integrated into the CPU (although upon closer inspection that picture also seems to cover the whole SoC package): https://www.apple.com/v/mac/m1/a/images/overview/chip_memory...
My work machines on the other hand were all specced with 32GB.
Shame no 16 inch pro though. Surely they need to update that quick because who is going to want a 16 inch intel Mac now?
Signs point to another event in January, I'd expect it there with a heftier SoC.
They also say "up to" 3.5x CPU performance (total performance) of previous generation macs, then make references to a Mac with a 1.2 GHz quad core Core i7 (MacBook Air) and a quad core 3.6 GHz Core-i3 (Mac Mini).
I would like to see some independent benchmarks personally...
> Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD.
I think it's a fair comparison, since the new M1 MacBook Pro 13" is a 2-port model that replaces the existing 2-port models, while Apple still sells Intel 4-port models.
Similar situation on the MacBook Air page. The tests are done with the maxed-out previous-generation MacBook Air:
> Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction MacBook Air systems with Apple M1 chip and 8-core GPU, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD.
Will it run things like R, Julia, Postgres, Docker (which I can work with reasonably well on my late 2013 MBP) and will we see any of the speed improvements or will some of the packages that work fairly well on the Intel-based models just not work?
But I also think they'll be fixed quickly. RIP my dependency packages...
For developers, scientists, etc., it would be interesting if it improves any of their typical use-cases – memory is one big limitation (I don't necessarily need 32GB on the laptop, that's what I use a workstation for, but after using my current Macbook for 7 years, I don't want a new laptop that feels limited after a few years)
"Developers can compile up to 4x code"
It sounds like that is possibly the only binning they did, where one GPU core is disabled? Perhaps the 13" ones can run faster & more efficiently or something but they're not saying that.
That’s a little disappointing - probably won’t be getting this first generation model :/ Apparently eGPUs are not supported either (https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/10/new-apple-silicon-macs-with-m...) although perhaps there will be some "traditional" USB display adapters that would work?
Use case being docking the machine to my desk the majority of the time. I'd like at least 2 and preferably 3 display outputs to match my current setup.
seems like external GPUs are not supported https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559200/apple-m1-macboo...
I agree, although caveat emptor until independent benchmarks drop.
> I wonder if Valve and Epic will start compiling games for ARM
There are plenty of other problems besides lack of raw processing power that prevent the mac and macOS from being good gaming platforms. And of course, Epic and Apple are fighting it out over App Store policies, so they're unlikely to do each other any favors.
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X: 32KB I-Cache, 32KB D-Cache, 8MB L2 Cache
Isn’t this difference huge? What am I missing here?
A closer comparison is probably Intel's 10900K which has a 20MB L3.
This moment has been brewing for years now, and the new Apple Silicon is both shocking, but also very much expected. In the coming weeks we’ll be trying to get our hands on the new hardware and verify Apple’s claims.
Intel has stagnated itself out of the market, and has lost a major customer today. AMD has shown lots of progress lately, however it’ll be incredibly hard to catch up to Apple’s power efficiency. If Apple’s performance trajectory continues at this pace, the x86 performance crown might never be regained.”
Current top of the line for notebooks would be the Qualcomm 8cx (ARM, 7? Watts) and AMD 4800U (x86-64, 15 Watts TDP) from quick search around. Would be interesting to see independent reviewers benchmarking those 2 in comparison to Apple's first in-house processor.
Here are some spec comparisons for the time being:
- https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m1-1804-vs-a...
- https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m1-1804-vs-q...
This is far from Apple's first in-house processor, and they were already way ahead of other ARM chips before the M1
This is, depending on how far back you want to go the 4th change. 6800 > 68k > PPC > Intel > Arm ... The idea that there will be a 5th one eventually isn't unreasonable
Is there an upgrade path to install Linux on them like you currently can with Intel-based Macs? Or are these SoCs like every other ARM SoC that requires a custom kernel and bootloader to get Linux running on them?
The other part is most ARM SoCs don't have an enumerable bus, and thus require customized kernels to run Linux. As a result, they almost always require explicit Linux support from the vendor.
There are millions of ARM devices out there that will never run Linux, or will only ever support an old and outdated fork of Linux, and will never have mainline support in the kernel.
Are we going to see that vendor support for Linux from Apple? Or will these Macs end up like iPhones and iPads where no one will be able to get Linux to support them?
Clock speeds are another metric that would cost Apple nothing to disclose.
Beyond that though, processor speed is increasingly useless as a single metric. This thing has eight cores, half high-performance and half high-efficiency; GPUs are everywhere and doing seemingly everything; and RAM is always important. The speed cannot be summarized in Hz, but in standardized tests and "The stuff you care about is way faster now."
Previous models had a massive delta in CPU performance based on using low power (Air, no fan) or medium power (Pro, with dual fans) Intel chips
I guess apple didn't officially say what intel processors they have in their computers, but at least you could look it up and know what you're getting.
Apple's web site lists the following for the Mac Mini:
"Maximum continuous power: 150W"
I thought they might use FaceID as a "Pro" only feature like they do on the iPads but nope, they also released an updated 13" MacBook Pro without FaceID.
Would you add a feature to an application or hardware if you knew that less than 1% of your users would make use of it?
At the end of the day, after four years, I want to be buying a replacement laptop that feels even moderately evolved from what I already have. I have a 12" MacBook that I love, so that will be my on-the-go computer for the times I need that.
With the money I'm saving going with the mini, I'm upgrading my daughter's iPad and still have some left over after that.
I'll re-evaluate in the future when hopefully Apple puts some more energy into the laptops. I do actually like the TouchBar but I would expect that after four years, they could at least add proper haptic feedback. As well, the USB-C ports only one side (and the wrong side for me) feels like a downgrade from my 2016 model which has two on each side.
But every new release is the same or worse for memory. Is there something about these new architectures that I'm missing which should negate my desire?
Why can't I get a machine with 32GB RAM for under $3k or whatever they are now?
If you are developing for web... it depends what you are writing and how you are deploying it, but it probably won't have much impact dependent on your toolchain.
Seeing as how Apple has zero presence in the server/cloud market, how do you figure? Are you hoping they bring back xserve?
Otherwise I don't see how Apple having a custom power-efficient chip in a laptop is going to do anything at all in the server/cloud market?
This is all assuming you're doing anything at all that depends on the ISA and pushing prebuilts of it somewhere. Otherwise it's not like deploying Java, Python, JavaScript, etc... changes at all here.
ARM doesn't have any such benefits. The ISA has minimal impact on power efficiency, performance, or even core counts.
Apple's specific CPU has so far been pretty good, but that isn't the result of running ARM nor does it translate to other ARM CPUs. The specific CPU implementation matters here, not the ISA.
Plus, there have been features of Arm implementations that have clearly given them power efficiency advantage vs x86, big.LITTLE which is now coming to Mac and up until now has not been a feature of x86 implementations.
Removing barriers to developers building software on the desktop for the Arm ISA will have an impact on deployment in the cloud. How much - who knows and it's not measurable, but it will.
Both things can be true though.
At first it seems like just a cost/power/size saving measure, like not having dedicated RAM in a discrete GPU
But the CPU-vs-GPU RAM distinction means there's a cost to moving work to the GPU as data has to be copied, leading to it only be used in cases where you can either do the whole work purely on the GPU or queue up batch jobs of work so that the cost of copying data can be amortised over the faster parallel GPU
They sort of hinted at it in the presentation, but the unified memory architecture potentially allows more flexible distribution of tasks between CPU and GPU and "Neural" cores, because the data doesn't have to be copied.
I wonder if this is then potentially something compilers will be able to do take more advantage of, automatically.
It will be interesting to see how useful the "Neural" cores are for non-ML workloads.
Edit: If it wasn't clear, this was not a joke. I develop a relatively heavyweight service on the JVM, and between my IDE, the code I run, and all the gradle build daemon stuff, I regularly use up more than 32GB. Often over 50GB. (Although some swap is tolerable, having the majority of my resident set being swapped at any given time means things get very slow.)
I added various machines to my hash benchmarks. My MacAir with an i7 CPU is about 2x slower than a desktop CPU or AMD laptop cpu, and has about the same speed than my ordinary Cortex A53 phone. That's mostly the 2 vs 4 GHz difference.
Their latest A14 Chip is described here https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... and it's with its 3Ghz entirely plausible that it is 3x faster than the MacAir or my current A53 phone.
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-air-4th-gener...
You're a little confused. Those were two very separate transitions. Mac OS X came out in 2001. Intel Macs came out in 2006.
The process names are completely detached from reality in terms of actual transistor feature size. The only thing we can be reasonably certain of is that 5nm has some kind of improved density over 7nm.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/176391/which-macbook-doesnt-have-any-fans/176393How much are you willing to bet that there will be next to no public documentation for this SoC, just like with all the other tablet/phone ones out there? This is a scary turn of events - I still remember when Apple introduced their x86 transition and focused on how you could also run Windows on their "branded PCs", and the openness and standardisation was much welcomed... but then Apple slowly started to change that, and now they are on their way to locking down everything under their control.
I'm referring to Anandtech article's claim that they have a 8 wide decode (vs. zen 3's 4), 600+ estimated ROB and 192KB instruction cache. Note I'm not a cpu expert but I know these are hugely different from other high performance chips out there.
If a $1400 M1 powered MacBook Pro can edit and cut 8K Canon RAW Light And ALL-I HEVC from the Canon R5, it’s very attractive to me.
They're looking for marketshare gains.
Some people would have paid more for iOS apps on their Mac.
Given this is an architecture shift, I guess it seems to make sense to test it out with a midrange product.
We will see when we get a full teardown
Are there any M.2 slots in these or will they'll just be set in stone with the storage they have?
With ease, I imagine. eGPUs are niche at best, and user-serviceable hardware and GPU vendors are two of Apple’s least favourite things. Macs’ support for eGPUs, such as it is, has always struck me as a strange aberration. I say this as the owner of an eGPU, which I’ve given up any hope of using outside Boot Camp.
Either it's a machine that will serve those professionals, in which case it needs to be able to access a real GPU somehow or it's not a machine for those "Pro"-fessionals, in which case why make it part of your sales pitch.
It's hard to imagine that anyone will be training ML models on their Mac laptop. So presumably, this must be some kind of accelerator for executing models which have been trained elsewhere... right??
What do they expect those models will be used for?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
What's the catch here? Did Apple just blow x86 out of the water?
EDIT: added [faster than the]
Apple has a history of pretending things like Nvidia or Ryzen don't exist when it suits them so I'm sure there will be gotcha benchmarks down the line.
Apple also compared against "best-selling PCs" several times, but the best-selling PCs are the cheapest junk so obviously Macs will be faster than those.
“World’s fastest CPU core in low-power silicon”: Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM measuring peak single thread performance of workloads taken from select industry standard benchmarks, commercial applications, and open source applications. Comparison made against the highest-performing CPUs for notebooks, commercially available at the time of testing."
So, "Comparison made against the highest-performing CPUs for notebooks, commercially available [one month ago]". I guess there could be wiggle room on interpreting "highest-performing", but this seems pretty good.
> with up to 2.8x faster processing performance than the previous generation [2]
> Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Open source project built with prerelease Xcode 12.2 with Apple Clang 12.0.0, Ninja 1.10.0.git, and CMake 3.16.5. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
Geekbench is not a _great_ benchmark, but it's common enough that we could use it to roughly compare.
EDIT: Apparently there are Geekbench results that are unofficial that suggest it's faster than current MBPs, but we'll have to see.
The Mac Mini and MacBook Pro will be able to sustain higher speeds for longer periods — this is already the case with the Intel versions of them.
Cons: * Wont not run all apps in full speed for now (temporary) * Memory expansion is expensive and limited to 16GB (temporary)
Most limitations are temporary, I think these are amazing products unless you want more than 16GB memory.
To be honest I'm a bit skeptical about performance here.
I'm going to assume the Air is under clocked to prevent over heating.
Anyway, considering I've had my mac mini for about 8 years, I jumped at buying this. Looking forward to getting some 4k !
Anyone knows if the M1 would be faster for GPU bound work than 2020 MacBook Pro 16-inch with AMD Radeon 5600? I just spent over $4K and just got it delivered yesterday. Thinking of returning it if it does not compare favorably on GPU performance to the new M1 13-inch MacBook Pro. Insight/advice?
http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/misc/pc_compatibility_card.pd...
> Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest 5950X Zen3 – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
Intel 11th gen H series are nowhere near available.
Also, only two Thunderbolt ports down from four!
"Immersive, graphically-intensive titles!"
If you normally boot into x86 linux, you might be in a tricky spot. Emulation will be your only bet.
Can I run Windows VM?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...
In fact, the virtualization framework does not seem to have anything to do with rosetta at all. Note that those are two different sentences, and they appear to be not related.
It actually depends on the app and what it’s doing. For example they said photoshop wouldn’t be available on it until early 2021.
If not true, then my original comment seems to still stand.
The only thing that comes close to being "universal apps" would be applications that run in a browser.
* Universal apps (also known as "fat binaries") that run natively on Intel and M1 Macs
* ARM-native Mac apps
* Intel-based Mac apps via Rosetta 2
* iOS/iPadOS apps (developer’s choice)
* Unix/BSD command line apps (Vim, tmux, bash, zsh, etc.)
* Linux via’s built-in hypervisor
* Java
* Electron apps (VS Code, Slack, etc.)
* Windows via virtualization
* Web apps (Service Workers, WASM, push notifications, etc.) on Safari, Chrome, etc.
Safari is already a universal app; I'm sure Chrome, Firefox, etc. will follow shortly.
Any apps that rely on specific intel libraries will have a bit more work to do.
If we have same CPU on MacbookAir and MacbookPro - why would I get more expensive "Pro"? Can someone explain how is Pro faster than Air with same CPU?
Also, the "Windows Guy" bit is a bit lame IMO. I have two MacBooks and one custom built PC. The PC is faster than both MacBooks combined.
Accusing people not not reading the article is against the rules here.
> CPU, GPU, memory, I/O
Screens, batteries, form-factors.
Active cooling.
The Mac is becoming just an more powerful iPad with an integrated keyboard. Apart from the the software and design difference.
I can believe how stupid and backwards that’s is and I would classify myself as a fanboy.
Are they really saying this vs dGPU?
Course i'm viewing this with a healthy dose of skepticism, having been around in the PPC days when you would think from apple's marketing that the PPC based macs were massively faster than your average PC. In reality they were ok, but rarely even the fastest device across a wide swath of benchmarks, mostly sort of middling.
> the end of Intel inside Apple notebooks and desktops
Is this really a good idea for Desktops? Notice the graph is for laptops.
To develop apps for macOS and iOS.
Reasons to not use Linux: getting hardware working right is a PITA - note that I already have a powerful desktop PC, but I haven’t been successful in making it work reliably with Linux after several attempts. I’m going to build a new one, specifically researching user experience with Linux for each part because it really is a minefield. I’m also going to have to buy a new 4K monitor, because while Linux DEs can handle high DPI, they really struggle with mixed DPI.
The desktop experience on macOS is quite nice, and you don’t need to worry about whether apps will work most of the time. It handles mixed and high DPI beautifully - you don’t have to think about it and you don’t have to mess with X.Org configs.
I like the idea of Linux, and I am going to move forward with it, but I do that knowing I’m paying a heavy price in my time to do so.
If you only live in the terminal then I'm sure it's fine but as a desktop it's not there yet.
I'll get one when the M2 has worked things out.
I think I want to know how much RAM is in my MacBook Pro where I don't really care how much is in my iPhone.
edit: Store is LIVE, and has lots of specs!
Apple sends the hash of every binary you execute to Apple in current (and presumably future) macOS, and the changes in macOS 11 mean that Little Snitch will continue to work for all processes, except OS/system processes.
This means that it may be impossible to disable the telemetry without external filtering hardware.
This situation is extremely troubling to me, because Stallman and Doctorow have been predicting just this for about twenty years.
Today, it’s here.
I really hope these things can boot OSes other than macOS, or that a way to do such can be worked out.
230€ for 8GB to 16GB RAM. (and RAM is shared between CPU and GPU)
230€ for 512 to 1TB SSD.
They sure know how to milk their customers.
So while the starting price seems surprisingly low, an acceptably specced 13 pro comes in at 2139€. And that's without knowing how the GPU will hold up.
The presentation is brilliant marketing though and so much better than the competition. As long as you disable your brain for claims like "Universal Apps are the fastest and most powerful apps you can get!", and never mentioning specifics like the chips the benchmark actually compared with or what that game is that runs faster under emulation than native.