Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

It’s not that it doesn’t matter at all, it’s just that it matters a lot less once you’ve checked boxes like that. The effective experience of both would be “you only need to charge it overnight”

On the other hand, I think if you can go a full day on a battery, that should be enough. You won't be using your laptop for 20 straight hours.

But do you think that Apple stopped innovating after releasing the M1 last year? Don't you think the M2 (or M1X whatever it's called) is well into design and prototyping at this point?

Eh, I'm not sure that's true. They did with the original PPC, and also the G3 and G5.

It's the twin brother of all the "Currently, successful Apple product feature technically existed on [not-Apple] Product years ago (even though basically nobody used it)."

People read those articles and conclude it's all marketing hype but never ask themselves why it seems to happen again and again where simply checking off the box for having a specific feature never seems to actually lead to broad adoption. And if it truly is ONLY marketing hype leading to those ecosystem effects, then maybe you should start thinking of marketing hype as a feature?

I see what you did there. Really casting shade on Intel!

Microsoft already have a Surface product with an ARM chip that didn't get updated in this round AFAIK. It already has solid ARM performance, but it's not as good as M1. It was let down with how well x86 emulation worked, but there seem to have been improvements including x64 support. If they focused on improvements with the chip design then they could see improvements along the lines of Apple. It's a question of whether the investment is made rather than whether it's possible.

I considered that keyboard to be designed to fail. I'm not interested in gambling that another component won't fail the same way. It's easier to use products that have not demonstrated such designed failures.

The good news however is that due to this garbage tier engineering I've discovered that desktop Linux is more stable for me than post-Catalina OSX - I'd have probably never found this out otherwise.

If a product fails within the first 10% of expected lifespan I'm no longer interested in that product. If it fails _AND_ the manufacturer refuses to take responsibility until months of bad press and class action lawsuits then I'd have to be insane to trust them with another device.

(Honestly I never even noticed that the apple touchpad was better than any other touchpad, but I understand that touchpad users will notice things I didn't.)

Coming from lifelong Linux-land it's actually comical reflecting on how poor these things operate in day to day. The most prominent issue for me is how poorly they operate with my USB-type C dock I use for multi-monitor.

That’s one of the highest end ThinkPads though, so I guess that’s to be expected. Have heard that getting a good panel on more mainstream models like the T-series can be tough.

I repeat my stance that x86 instruction decoding is a tiny part of a processor, and things like vector units (which are also often powered down when idle) and reordering logic take far more power.

There's a paper about this that compares the efficiency of different ISAs, and basically concludes that ARM and x86 are no different in that respect. Only MIPS is an awful outlier.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-sho...

The 5800u is a 15w part, you might be confusing the normal part with some overclocked implementation.

But the 5800u at 15w is still faster than the M1 in multicore.

Yes, Zen has to downclock, but it has more cores.

So I had thought there may be something learned in the mass deployment that would trigger even minor design changes.

Perhaps those are software issues. Or maybe the M1 as a product name should not be taken literally to describe the SoC in the current lineup.

We know the Secure Enclave component appears to have been updated mid-production this past fall for a host of A-series chips.

Perhaps, if light changes were needed Apple would not see them a sufficient to designate a new moniker.

Or perhaps they are but the iMac and (theoretical) apple silicon-based data centers are intending to build consumer confidence in this bold foray.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/12/apple-security-a12-and-s5-pro...

Also do you know how many machines it would take to outfit a reasonable demonstration scale facility?

Is that number so large that it constrains the ability to just go that much further?

I'm not sure that they can easily add more cores to the M1. If they can, that would also raise the TDP. And adding more cores does not increase performance linearly, even if the architecture is made for it.

Also keep in mind that comparing it to 14nm Intel processors with an architecture from a decade ago is a fair comparison when comparing M1 vs prior Apple products, but is not a fair comparison when comparing it against what x86 can do in general. You would need a modern x86 processor targeting the same watt usage to have a completely valid comparison. As discussed in the thread above.

So yeah, it's a great processor for its target. And it likely will also be a very strong processor when scaled up - it bodes well for the future of ARM. But don't extrapolate the performance too linearly, that is likely to be misleading.

One of the ways we already know that beefy ARM processors can work well (and with better power efficiency than Intel CPUs) for heavier workloads/at higher scale than mobile or embedded devices is that it's already being done in the server space. Is scaling ARM processors up for the desktop radically different? (If so, I'd love to learn a bit about how )

The problem that remains for anyone who wants to sell PCs with something other than x86 is that desktop users want their apps, and for Windows users those apps are distributed as x86 binaries, and users aren't in control of that (especially for unmaintained or legacy software). Software publishers won't build or optimize for a new architecture if they suspect it's just going to be a flash in the pan, and this creates a chicken-and-egg problem.

But Apple can just declare that their new architecture is the only option for you if you're buying a new Mac, and a ton of their users will come with them no matter what. App publishers will just deal with it, knowing that they have to play along if they want their application to have a first-class experience on Mac. This is a huge deal, and not a position any particular PC manufacturer could hope to be in!

I'm sure Apple has done lots of technically impressive stuff that I'm not even competent to really appreciate in order to make this architecture change happen. But other vendors are more capable of technically impressive stuff than they are of forcing adoption for enough users to reach critical mass to get people who sell/distribute proprietary software to come along with them.

Thing about your comment is "Who would buy it" assumes it's basically the same and people are indifferent. My griping is assuming ARM is generally worse. But if we take this alternate world seriously then the reason for ARM is superior performance, so the answer to "who would buy it" and "why would developers switch" is driven by that - like when Apple was falling behind with PowerPC - it wouldn't be Microsoft pushing it on an unwanting market, it would be a demanding market pulling it with demand.

If Samsung could push a better-than-Intel chip, would Microsoft not want a piece of it?

If Samsung Chromebooks were suddenly more powerful than an Intel i7, would developers not sit up and take notice?

My contention is they can't, because ARM isn't that different, and it's Apple's black magic that is the real difference.

I didn't insinuate anything like that. I was just pointing out that it exists.

Also, given that AMD copied Intel's 3/5/7/9 numbering, I'll be interested to see if in a few years they're selling a 10800x.

Noone would ever say it like that. They would simply say: “hey man check out my new M1 machine!” And if it happened to come at a generation shift the context would make it obvious if it was the old generation at a bargain or the brand new generation. (or that the person saying it couldn't care less about specs and generations)

Now if you would buy a used computer, or would like to compare your current i7 to the latest i7 - then you would take notice. How much difference is there between a i5 2021.04 vs. i7 2016.8 ?

That is dead simple to google and reason about.

Compare that to: So what computer do you have? Oh, it is an i7 with 16 GB of RAM. I have no idea what decade that machine is from. And noone remembers the specific version, and if they do I have no idea how to parse it anyway.

Apple never says iPad 2019 on their website, until you start digging really hard.

Of course intel also released new CPUs and AMD didn't want their newer CPUs to have lower numbers than their old one, so that number eventually got inflated.

Generally speaking, AMD had some more advanced microarchitecture features than Intel, leading to better per-clock performance.

Intel marketing struck back by emphasizing GHz, GHz, GHz. At least until Pentium 4 scaling hit a brick wall.

Then, a chip was sold as a "Pentium 4" "2.8 GHz" (or a "Pentium II" "300 MHz"). No other codes.

By the end of that range, the multicore era had started, and both Intel and AMD had moved to new systems of processor labelling.

There's two main Eras of this;

During the P5/P6 Days, AMD, Cyrix, and NexGen made CPUs with 'PR' ratings, based on what they felt their CPU's compared to.

Ironically, this first era is probably why folks got so soured on 'PR ratings'; As far as the AMD K5 and Cyrix 6x86 went, These numbers were based more on integer performance, additionally Intel's P5 had a very novel (at the time) pipeline that some Game developers were optimizing for (Quake comes to mind here.) For NexGen the situation was even worse, in that some of their models completely lacked an FPU.

All those factors together made consumers a bit more wary of PR ratings for quite a long time.

Thankfully, AMD Bought out NexGen, took their arch and made it into the K6, which was very competitive with the P5 Clock for clock, and PR ratings went away.

They came back in the days of the Palomino K7s, but what a lot of people might not remember is that the Athlon XP's PR ratings were technically supposed to relate to a Thunderbird core. IOW, an Athlon XP 1800 was supposed to be 'equivalent' to an TBird Athlon running at 1800Mhz.

But, of course, PR ratings drifted again, as they tended to... and now we are in model number hell.

iX-YYZZZ[Suffix]

X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better

Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops

ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better, more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing.

Suffixes:

H = "High Performance" - laptop CPUs with higher perf and higher energy usage. The fastest laptop chips in a given gen previously got branded "HQ" (originally the Q meant quad core), but otherwise HQ = H.

U = "Ultra portable" - laptop CPUs with lower perf and energy usage. Usually can boost well for short tasks, so you might not notice if the most intensive thing you do is compiling code but fall flat for longer workloads such as gaming.

Y = Lowest power usage - These are all garbage, to be honest. You might have one in your windows tablet or netbook.

M = "Mobile" - dead these days, as the H chips replaced them, there were a couple of gens where H and M co-existed with H > M > U.

G_N_ - Integrated graphics rating. All G3 cpus in the same gen will have the same igpu. This only exists on tenth gen/eleventh gen 10nm chips. These chips are more efficient than H/U series chips at the same perf, but don't yet reach the performance peaks of the H series due to lower clock speeds.

K - Unlocked overclockable CPUs, mostly desktop chips, but HK chips for laptops exist too.

F - No integrated GPU. Mostly desktop only.

T - Power efficient desktop CPU (thanks mehlmao)

These suffixes can be combined, e.g. HK for overclockable laptop cpus or KF for desktop cpus with overclocking and no IGPU.

---

So the rule of thumb version for a laptop buyer is H = high power, U/Gx = better battery life, within that, pick highest perf ranking number (ZZZ) within your budget. Deduct 1-2 positions per generation out of date. If you need to compare cross-gen or vs AMD, you need to go look at reviews.

The G numbers in particular are pretty meaningless to consumers. Basically all Intel iGPUs fall into a bucket that is "Good enough for windows or esports titles, not good enough for new or recent AAA games".

Other features are more of interest to DIY builders, nobody is going to sell you a laptop with no igpu and no dgpu, and if you're not interested enough to read up on this, you certainly don't care about overclocking.

- At one point everyone upgraded their PC every few years anyway.

- Just having Intel on the box was sufficiently impressive to make the sale.

Now they really need to push their latest CPUs as the latest and greatest.

I like the Lake names but I've never understood from a marketing perspective (what have chips got to do with lakes - were they designed near these lakes?) they feel more like code names that accidentally got leaked.

You can probably get pretty far by adding the 3/5/7 to the generation number and sorting by the sum.

I think you will find many people thinking that is a very useful thing to compare.

Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.

But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a majority of the time. There’s no value to this at all.

I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.

As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.

The best part is that it was a drop in replacement for my 2700X. I already had a great Noctua air cooler so I was all set.

It's true that a lot of people are just fine with a a 10-year old i5 or an i7. Hell, a lot of store owners and front-end offices grumble at an i3 CPU because it's still too powerful for the daily activities of the staff.

But when it comes to routinely compiling C / C++ / Rust then you need all the power and hardware innovation you can get.

For chips with massive cache, that isn’t super cost effective (I suspect as a cost saving measure that we’ll see L2/L3 cache moving to a separate chip on a larger process while the rest shrinks down).

When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.

Apple bin them only because of yield.

I also think Apple doesn't want to use their M1 as differentiator. They use RAM and Storage instead which is an easier concept to grasp by consumers.

I'm not suggesting that no parts can ever be a commodity (like capacitors in a laptop), but as I spend more, I increasingly tend to look for a technical advantage that justifies the marginal price.

I'll give you an example. If you want to buy a docking station for an Apple TB3 enabled MacBook, you have a couple of controller options at the higher end: Alpine Ridge and Titan Ridge. Better chips exist but they haven't found their way into truly well engineered consumer docks. I have a multi monitor setup with one superultrawide screen that can do 120Hz, so I opted for the Titan Ridge dock. It was buggy, so I ended up returning it and buying an Alpine Ridge dock that lacks the ability to push my big monitor at its best-looking resolution. And that's for a sub-$300 peripheral.

Like most of us here on HN, I'm one of the "few" that GP mentioned. But these are consumer products and they are mass marketed based on their technical specs.

Apple itself markets technical innovations in its 6k IPS monitors. The back is designed to dissipate heat, the monitor works with TB3 (ie, an Intel chip)...they even market the glass treatment in a deeply specific way.

Why does Apple put different amount of cores and clocks into different products if the choice doesn't matter? It seems like there are performance differences there if they choose to install differently configured SoCs in different devices and even split them by pricing on the iMac.

So, please, explain where's this big difference? (With more than a single sentence of your words if possible.)

I am not defending apple in any way whatsoever, I even mentioned in the first sentence of the comment. I stated that they are able to do that because they compensate with compression and SSDs, applications in the background can be thrown in the swap and the user will rarely notice.

Such as?

My desktop is an ML container train/test machine. I also have ssh into two similar machines, and a 5 machine, 20GPU k8s cluster. I pretty much continuously have dozens of things building /running at once.

Maybe I'm an outlier though?

On my particular team we also run a dockerfile that includes elastic search, sql server, rabbitmq and consul—-I had to upgrade my work laptop from 16GB to 24GB to make it livable.

Though truth is that I use zram, which everyone should who is not fortunate enough to have plenty of RAM, but does have a decent CPU.

If you're on macOS, there's no such thing as a “lightweight Docker container”. The container itself might be small, but Docker itself is running a full Linux virtual machine. In no world is that “lightweight”.

I do most of my development in Chrome, bash, and sublime text and I'm still using 28GB of RAM.

10 klocs is huge for a student project but tiny for a real-world project.

I didn't claim it was all that matters, and I haven't seen anyone else do that either.

I do take the point of the rest of your comment though, and it may well be the case that Apple does some clever stuff. But realistically there is only so far that optimisations can take it - DDR4 is DDR4, and it's the workload that makes the most difference.

> I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple used telemetry to make an intelligent bet around the amount of RAM they’d need.

Your average Apple user is likely not a developer though (as others are very often pointing out on HN, whenever they make non-dev-friendly hardware choices). Furthermore, I would think such telemetry would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you have a pitiful 8GB of RAM, you're not going to punish yourself by trying to run workloads you know it wouldn't support.

In my experience as a web dev, all the performance goes out the window as soon as the tracking scripts are added.

PMs and executives are the ones you should give slow machines to if you want more focus on performance.

Like Jobs said in his Stanford speech, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

It seems like Apple uniquely combines open development of technology in known products with secrecy around new product development.

This allows people to be so surprised by the M1, when the late AX processors were obviously pointing toward massive capability.

I believe there are other examples of this happening--specifically with the Apple Watch.

On that product, the size limitations combined with increasing expectations of performance and functionality have allowed Apple learn and improve production-capability in many areas that will be in any forthcoming AR/VR products.

I do some low level system developing and I doubt I would ever switch to MacOS for this. Higher level software? Maybe, but as I said, why give Apple any handle here and these sandboxes don't provide security for me. I will also not get a dev cert from anyone, that is just something that will never happen.

- macbook pro: 9 minutes

- mini: 5 minutes

- imac: 4 minutes

And as long as there's something to gain from going smaller/denser/bigger, and as long as the cost-benefit is good, we'll have bigger chips with smaller and denser features.

Sure, cooling is a problem, but it's not like we're even seriously trying. It's still just air cooled. Maybe we'll integrate microfluidic heat-pump cooling into chips too.

And it seems there's a clear need for more and more computing. The "cloud" is growing at an enormous rate. Eventually it might make sense to make a datacenter oriented well integrated system.

As a programmer to another, I'd rather ask... what's one example of a problem we have today that needs faster linear performance than our best chips (not in a nice-to-have way but in a must-have way).

I'd rule out all casual computing like home PCs, smartphones, and so on, because honestly we've been there for years already.

Also due to decades of bias we have serialized code in our programs that doesn't have to be serial, just because that's "normal" and because it's deemed easier. Also we have a huge untapped potential of better performance by being more data-oriented. None of this requires faster hardware. It doesn't even require new hardware.

But anyway, I'm open to examples.