The fact that we are even able to realistically compare a CPU in an ultralight laptop with no fan to an i9 is absolutely amazing. To me that would be an upgrade even if performance is a complete wash.
m1, like the a* chips are great at single core performance m1, like the a* chips are underwhelming at multi-core performance last gen ryzen was competitive at single core performance, and great at multicore current gen ryzen is great at both
A fair number of these benchmarks were multithreaded, and the M1 held its own very well, despite being at a substantial disadvantage (8 threads (only 4 on performance cores) for M1 versus 24 for Ryzen 3900X).
That said, single threaded performance is extremely important, since not everything can be parallelized. Amdahl's Law, eh?
Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple Silicon is coming with many more cores. Amazon's Graviton2 shows how ARM can perform with massive core counts...
As to the current Ryzen (5000 series), it's a great chip and what I'm planning to use in a new build, but it also has a 105W power budget. We'll see what Apple produces for its desktop entries soon enough!
Under half the weight?
That's about a quarter lighter but not anywhere near half.
I still use a 12" MacBook, and it's just amazingly small and light. If Apple makes a 12" MacBook with a M1, it would be awesome. A dream machine for me.
I don't have any insider knowledge but I am fully convinced (and so are many others) that we will see a newer Apple ARM based processor before the end of 2021. If you are a programmer and you have a machine to work on, I'd say hold out for the next one.
If you're not on a super tight budget it's not terrible to just pick up the new machine and swap it out for the next one that ships if you want to.
If true, then neither are close to the 2017 12" MB.
> and maybe just a tiny bit heavier.
It's almost a pound heavier.
I wish Apple would make everything" MacBooks with M1. I hate that I have to wait another year or whatever for a 15/16" screen and will have to pay a measurable weight penalty to get it when nothing stops them from making a 15" ultralight model now that they don't need fans for stunning performance.
That's 90g of difference ... I'd say that qualifies for Ultralight still.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/coming-soon/ThinkPad-X1-Nano/p/...
From the page linked to:
> 11th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-1130G7 Processor
From https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...
> Launch Date: Q3'20
It surely wasn't less than half as heavy. So what do you mean?
LG Gram 2020: 2.07 lbs
MacBook 2017: 2.03 lbs
MacBook Air 2020: 2.8 lbs
MacBook Pro 2020: 3.0 lbs
Also... I suspect benchmarking the LG or the 12" MacBook versus the Air would be pretty humiliating.
14-inch and 16-inch with same size but thinner bezels are expected to next year.
MacBook Pro 2019 (Intel): 3.02
As far as I see the M1 models aren't heavier than the Intel ones? But run much longer before they have to be recharged, spending much less power.
Instant waking from sleep was one of the key points in M1's presentation. Something my 2007 model Macbook Pro could do. But then the subsequent releases of MacOS just couldn't do that. Despite significant increases in disk speed, and CPU speed, and RAM speed.
We are effecivey running supercomputers. And we can't seem to be able to do anything with them.
I have an example right here, in front of me. I have a Dell monitor. My Macbook Pro is connected to it via Thunderbolt/USB-C->HDMI. My Windows box is connected to it via DP.
So, I'm on my Windows box, playing a game. I turn on my Macbook Pro, and it shows me a proper resolution on the laptop screen. The laptop sees that the display is on, and I see that many windows are missing because they are on the other screen. So, I switch my display from DP (coming from Windows) to HDMI (coming from my Macbook Pro).
The only thing that changes is the source input to the display.
And yet. Macbook takes up to 10 seconds to renegotiate the resoltion again. First it slowly disconnects from the display, screws up the resolution, brings all the windows to the laptop screen. Then it reconnects to the display, renegotiates the resolution and restores the windows as they are supposed to be.
Why? And what is so magical about the M1 CPU that it seemingly can do this in an instant? There's nothing magical: whoever implements all this crap simply doesn't care. And in a couple of years M1 (or M1 X Pro whatever) will forget how to to that just as MacOS forgot how it could instantly wake up from sleep 12 years ago.
- Did the protocols such as HDMI and DP change for M1? No.
- Did the Extended Display Identification Data [1] change? No.
That leaves two things:
- The OS that matches the extended data against what the user wants
If the OS is responsible, then there's nothing stopping others from doing what Big Sur does.
- graphics cards that actually pump out pixels and have their own support for possible resolutions
If graphics card is responsible, you're asking me to believe that M1 is driven by fairy pixel dust and has some magical powers that are absolutely impossible on any other hardware?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio...
How instant? My late 2016 MBP wakes in around a second. My 2014 Mac mini usually takes only a few seconds.
Now, especially if you require password you need to wait a second or so after it wakes up, because input is no longer immediately available. And then it takes some time to actually wake up and start the window server etc.
No. But for many use cases that’s not a big deal, since you’re likely to be running Linux & other open source software that already has ARM versions or can be recompiled.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/announcin...
I think this should put arguments over X86 efficiency disadvantages to bed. The X86 is obviously a huge boat anchor. There is no other explanation for this monstrous of a performance efficiency gap... unless Apple has invented something fundamentally new that has never been done in the entire history of CPU design. I doubt that.
However, there are still some other aspects to consider. One is Apple's process lead against both Intel and AMD. The next is the memory situation; it'll be interesting to see if increased latency from more conventional configurations will change the dynamics much. (I suspect no, but some people suspect yes.)
In other words I think the problem has to do with the semantics of x86 more than the syntax of decoding x86.
The weaker memory model should help extracting additional memory level parallelism, but I doubt that ordering has large impact. M1 is quite good even when running in TSO mode.
[1] of course they need to be commended for this, they went against the usual wisdom, probably because their CPU was designed to be low power first then high performance, not the other way around.
[2] typically the average ILP for normal applications is 1.5 instructions per cycle, but the variance is high, so if you reduce the amount of cycles the cpu is stalled, the ILP can go up fast.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXFJLebXkAYkXTr?format=jpg&name=...
In case that link dies, it’s from [1] which is linked from [2]
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/GPUsAreMagic/status/1256866465577...
[2]: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/05/26/kreg2.html
It would be equally fair to say that the same die uses less than 5% of it's space for the integer ALUs. It could also be said that the decode unit is so complex that it takes as much die space as all the integer ports put together.
SRAM may use most of the die, but it isn't using huge amounts of power most of the time as it's static. Those big SIMD units are also powered off when not used (no doubt it's the same with the other ALUs).
In contrast, the entire 5% of the die that makes up the decoder never power gates and is always running flat out. By size it's the same as leaving all your integer cores running full-out all the time.
The bigger issue seems to be that neither AMD nor Intel have been able to make those units much wider over the years which puts a hard limit on total throughput (they've hinted that the power cost on widening the decoder is very big which would mean loads of power used for diminishing returns).
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-announces-delay-to-7...
There's a reason the only laptops getting 10nm are low-quantity premium laptops.
There was a youtube video where the guy used a scanning electron microscope to compare gate sizes between 14nm intel and 7nm AMD and both were basically the exact same size.
The conclusion was that the term is useful only to compare a single companies product line against other offerings in that line (eg comparing Intel's 14nm to Intel's 20nm makes sense but comparing Intel to AMD based on node size is meaningless).
Semiconductor manufacturer has been able to use refractive optics (lenses) for decades and decades. The biggest change until now was to immersion lithography as we started getting into UV. Now we're into EUV (extreme UV). Lenses no longer work, everything has to be done with reflective optics (and even then the mirrors get ablated over time). It's the biggest single change in lithography we've seen and Intel still hasn't been able to pull it off in volume.
Apple is getting performance that matches the best of Intel has while beating the power draw of basically all they have.
And it's not just the CPU. The built in GPU of the MBA is surprisingly powerful, and the neural engine is beyond what Intel has.
Yes, Intel needs to get their chip fab back on track, but I also think they have issues with their chip designs (and perhaps something larger with x86).
There is a lot you can do to improve a CPU without changing the instruction set or manufacturing process just by doing a better job at designing the CPU itself. (look at Ryzen 5000 series with 15 to 20% IPC gain over the 3000/4000 series while staying on the same manufacturing process for example)
Basically there is a lot to gain just by doing a better design on the CPU itself. Also faster CPUs/GPUs allows one to build faster CPUs/GPUs just because as with more compute around you can run simulations faster/with more accuracy thus allowing faster development/better designs.
https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...
Both Intel and AMD try to overcome the memory wall with larger caches and clever prefetching, which is going to chew up more die space and power than x86 decoders.
I mean, that's exactly how an 11th Gen Core laptop is constructed.
You can run basically any Intel CPU at DDR4-4266 without any issue. Or you can go thread ripper and laugh in quad channel memory. Or Intel x299 and triple-channel memory.
You don't have to tune anything, either, the RAM comes pre-tuned with the right timings in the XMP profile.
but it's pretty straightforward to just copy giant buffers in order/out of order and squint really hard at the results
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
The cache on the M1 is also massive. If Intel/AMD have clever prefetchers to make up for this, it looks like the M1 might be doing something more.
I get that people on this site are excited, but please be excited about the right things.
The chip area can be re-used for compute-sized transistors and wires (much, much smaller than interface transistors and wires, so there can be many more of them).
I'd really like to see what AMD could do with a huge die that combines 8 Zen 3 cores, 16 GB of LPDDR4X-4266, and their GPU all on a single chip.
I'm very excited about the performance that Apple has been able to generate with this silicon, but these tests don't put anything to bed.
You're giving up extreme choice and expandability for performance by going the M1 route. You can spend $1700 for a Mac Mini with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD, but that's what you're stuck with. Forever. Until its time to buy a new computer. People who bought into AMD's AM4 platform at the start were able to go up from the 1000 series to the 3000 series, able to upgrade their RAM from nearly any size to 64 GB, and able to upgrade their SSDs by slotting in a new NVMe drive. To say nothing of the GPU, which for developers of specific solutions, is becoming a serious concern. Also if you game in your spare time, you're at a disadvantage not just due to the Apple ecosystem, but also limited by the GPU.
For most of us, our machines are disposable. Even though I still build myself a new workstation every 2-3 years, I never bother selling it, I just give it away to family because for me its not worth the hassle, and then I order $3-4000 in parts and build a new one all over again. So buying the new Mac Mini made sense for me, although I opted to go with the base model for $699 so I could evaluate it and determine if going "all-in" for a higher-end model made sense (it does), but not for one second am I under the illusion that this chip is going to be the death of x86.