Whats the point of these submissions? ARM has been around forever and yes theres software for it.
Excluding smartphones/tablets, X86 has been the defacto computer architecture of personal computers. Microsoft tried an ARM processor but the tradeoffs were evident and it was considered half baked, leading to poor reviews.
For quite some time in our industry the main limitation has been clock speeds, nowadays the main limitation is temperature control.
Apple launched an ARM chipset that remains as cool as 50C when intel reaches 95C, this will forever change the industry of personal computing.
That's why people are raving about it.
- If this gives Apple a major competitive advantage at the higher end (where presumably most of the margins are) then we may see some moves to try to compete with Arm based machines.
- A lot will depend on where MS takes ARM Windows - could MS do a competitive Rosetta style layer to give backwards compatibility?
- Much less lock-in in servers - eg AWS Gravitron and Ampere.
Whatever about the highest end (really have to wait for the M1X or whatever to evaluate that), it clearly gives Apple a _huge_ advantage for the $1000-ish ultrabook market; battery life. There's simply no thin-and-light to rival the M1 MacBook Air's battery life without very severe compromises. I think the market will have to respond to that, or just cede most of the ultrabook market (which is significant).
I doubt the industry really cares all that much about the 45W 15" laptop market; no-one buys them. Mid-range ultrabooks, though, are a good combination of margin and volume.
There's a very long history in consumer computing where the industry as a whole tries something, executes badly, says "ah well, we tried" and kind of gives up on it, then Apple does it well, then the industry notices "oh, it's possible" and does it well.
Obvious examples: Smartphones: WinMob/Symbian, then years later iPhone, then almost immediately after Android (with WinMob and Symbian quietly dying)
Personal media players: Creative Nomad et al, then iPod, then lots of stuff.
Ultrabooks: A variety of unusable hideously expensive compact PC laptops going back to the 90s and mostly abandoned by the late noughties, then MacBook Air, then every PC manufacturer makes a MacBook Air clone.
ARM computers: Surface RT (ridiculously slow, no software support), modern ARM Surface (expensive, slow, poor software support), M1 (good), ???
Not to say it's inevitable, but once Apple shows it can be done, history suggests that it will be done. Possibly complicated by the chicken and egg problem here; Microsoft needs Qualcomm to make good laptop chips to invest much in ARM Windows, while Qualcomm needs Microsoft to make good ARM windows to invest much in good laptop chips.
I guess the extent to which M1 is great because its ARM isn't clear - there are some advantages in instruction decoding, having bigLITTLE etc - but the impact of all these together hasn't been quantified. Plus there is the deeper integration with Apple's software.
I mean, they could, but the A12Z in the devkits, produced on TSMC's 7nm process, also showed very impressive results. It's not clear how much gain the M1 is getting from 5nm, but I'd be _extremely_ skeptical that it's the whole story, especially given limited improvements between the directly comparable A13 (7nm) and A14 (5nm, some microarch changes).
> Plus there is the deeper integration with Apple's software.
This is relevant to some OS niceties (eg the disconcertingly instant wakeup and resolution shifts) but should have no bearing on, say, SPECInt2017.
I think the software integration goes a bit further than wake-up etc e.g. they seem to have speeded up handling of reference counting through architectural changes (not sure I could explain how though and even Apple's software engineers seem a bit in the dark!)
I mean, depends what you mean by 'good enough'. It would, obviously, be good for AMD; I don't see that it would make it competitive in perf per watt terms, though.
> e.g. they seem to have speeded up handling of reference counting through architectural changes
They have, but that wouldn't be relevant to (most) synthetic benchmarks, I wouldn't have thought. SpecInt2017 won't be doing much if any reference counting, for instance :) The M1's advantage in ObjC and Swift should be expected to be even greater than its advantage in 'normal' (ie C) code, but beyond refcounting microbenchmarks I don't think there are many tools to demonstrate that (and the vast bulk of performance-sensitive code running on MacOS is C/C++ anyway).
PowerBook 100 before the Air. 12" PowerBook G4, too.
It's, for my understanding, more than amazing, knowing what's already known about M1 and Apple's newest OS and surely newsworthy.
Other commenters here covered other benefits as well.
I'm not sure to what extent they've done so, but with their own silicon Apple has the freedom to simply not implement the unnecessary optional bits of ARM, like 32 bit support, and the optional extensions to the ISA not applicable to desktop class general purpose compute.
The saved space in transistor budget could allow them to save precious time and energy in performance critical spaces like the instruction decoder/fetcher.
No idea what they're actually doing (they're not exactly very open about their designs) but with their own processors they're free to optimize for a specific use case and a specific kernel. A specific example of this is how they've reduced the time spent in garbage collection by a factor of 3-5 IIRC, which has pretty dramatic ramifications for both performance and memory usage (as you can do GC quicker and more often)
- M1 is indeed 64 bit only
- Apple's software doesn't use GC - it uses reference counting which has indeed been speeded up dramatically.
The M1's (two) CPU designs are Apple's own and there is a lot of information out there on them e.g.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
I counted ARC as a sort of GC, though I've heard the opinion it is and isn't a type of GC, and see both sides' points
I love that article and the research behind it, but it's worth pointing out the details are sort of "reverse engineered" by probing XNU and running some diagnostic programs, not from apple supplied docs. I doubt apple will ever directly document it like IBM or Intel document their CPUs, though I hope I'm wrong!
https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performanc...
With ARM, any company is able to get an architecture license and go hog wild. The architecture (sticking to AArch64 since nobody cares about 32 bit ARM anymore for general purpose computing) is much cleaner and simpler with less cruft than x86. This makes it easier for a variety of companies to offer different solutions at different price, performance, and power points. Plus with the weight of Apple behind it there will surely be much more development in both the ARM software and hardware space as it applies to general purpose desktop computing.
I don't really see how this benefits Linux or Windows.
The difference here is Apple has a very fast x86 translation layer called Rosetta 2 that can run almost all Intel apps at 80% or so of the native M1 performance. Most folks don't even notice the difference. Windows 10 on ARM (SPX) had to emulate it at all time, with massive performance regressions.
What Apple has done is a complete transition that includes both hardware/software to ARM at the same time. All of their apps including development tools (Xcode) were native, huge number of macOS devs already shipped native support on day 1 or within the first week and Rosetta 2 made waiting for native support okay.
And that's just the software. The hardware? Super fast, long battery life, fanless in MBA, very quiet fan in MB and more. For a lot of people, it's a complete experience that worked out for them.
Note, not all developers are going to be ready for this, there's no docker support, some tooling will take awhile to update but they're going at much faster pace than MS at this point.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/30/21495510/microsoft-window... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/visual....
Switch to Geekbench 4 for x86 vs. ARM for emulation on the same device.
One of the definitions of revolution is:
> a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people's ideas about it.
Apple didn't change from a x86 CPU to a ARM CPU, they went from a third party Intel CPU to a complete Apple-designed/customized/built system on a chip (SoC) that includes the following: an Apple CPU (4 high-pref/4 high-effiency cores), Apple GPU that's using Apple's TBDR implementation, Neural engine (ML accelerators), ISP, media en/decoder, disk controller, Secure Enclave, Unified Memory Architecture with memory dies on the same package that allows all of the cores to talk to the same memory space without copying back and forth, and so much more. They did all of this in a familiar package that runs faster, quieter and last much longer without major impact on the customer's experience.
A complete package that was executed well on the first try and for some, this is considered to be a game-changer. Especially as it is changing many people's understanding of how a laptop should behave, specifically not having to worry about heat, battery life and having too low of memory as Apple's UMA actually makes swapping to disk a non-issue, there's no difference in the overall experience.
SPX isn't a complete package either, it uses Microsoft customizations on top of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx CPU but solely Qualcomm's GPU, Adreno. I don't think there's anything else that MS has customized for SPX.
> From what you're saying the most important improvements have been the emulation and that it is better supported.
That's just one part. The overall experience matters. You can invent a technology that changes the world but if no one can use it well, it wouldn't matter much until someone take that technology and make it useful. Sadly, it's the latter that matters the most.
It's the same thing with iPhone being called one of the most important technological revolutions. iPhone was definitely not the first nor the second touch screen mobile device but it was a complete package that sold it, just like these Macs.
I think you're trying as hard as possible to convince yourself Apple haven't done anything special here, but that just isn't true.
Does it? As I said, I ain't keeping up with hardware news.
>I think you're trying as hard as possible to convince yourself Apple haven't done anything special here, but that just isn't true.
I didn't say that. I specifically referred to calling it a revolution. If what you mentioned above is true then it will be one.
And it isn't just that the Apple hardware is some of the fastest available, it's that it does so with far lower power requirements. That's the really significant piece to all this.
But this is.
- Quite slow relative to similarly priced Intel laptops.
- Quite expensive; started at $1500, so 1.5x the cost of the MacBook Air. And that $1500 didn't even get you a keyboard; if you wanted one of those it was an extra $150 or something.
- Very poor support for x86 software by Microsoft.
There was little convincing reason to buy one over an Intel equivalent. Realistic starting price was $1650 for something that was slower than Intel laptops for ARM software, was essentially unusable for x86 software, didn't have significant battery life advantages, and wasn't in a normal laptop form factor.
> Thus the real question is, though there are ARM laptops since mid-2010s why is Apple taking once again credit for making a "revolution"?
The usual. Apple took a thing that people had previously done, badly, and did it well. That is more or less Apple's thing; they rarely invent truly new markets, but they do take existing but irrelevant markets and make them relevant.
Given how Apple treats iPads and iPhones, I wouldn't be surprised if these M1 Macs have a much shorter usability period than Intel Macs.
My wife uses old MacBook Pro and air, pre retina, yet i5, running Debian stable, Firefox, zoom and some VMware horizon client for remote work. Stable, usable, just great. In my experience, intel macs weren’t supported as long as the iPads and iPhones but they are for sure easier to upcycle to something else. They are just fancy PCs.
The iPhone 6 does not run the latest version of iOS (14) nor the previous version (13): https://osxdaily.com/2019/06/04/ios-13-compatible-iphone-ipa...