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This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji
by maz1b 6y ago
This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years.
For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out 16 inch MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600m and even with that I'm regularly hitting 100% usage of the card, and not to mention the fan noise.
Looking forward to a version from Apple that is made for actual professionals, but I imagine these introductory M1 based devices are going to be great for the vast majority of people.
- martinald 6y agoSurely a version that can beat a 8 core Xeon is made for 'actual professionals'?
- kalleboo 6y agoIt still has a lot of limitations that matter to many pros - max 16 GB of RAM, max 2 displays (only 1 external for laptops), only enough PCIe lanes to support 2 thunderbolt ports. eGPUs aren't supported either, but hopefully that is a software thing that will be fixed. It will be very interesting to see what the performance will be of the more "pro" chip that overcomes those limitations that they'd put in the 16" and iMacs
- rickbutton 6y agowhy would it be only 1 external display? Can you not plug into a thunderbolt dock and use multiple external displays? I do exactly that with my 2012 MacBook Pro.
- eli 6y agoIt's a limitation of the M1 chip apparently https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/11/how-apple-silicon-on-a-m1-mac-changes-monitor-support-and-what-you-can-connect https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/11/how-apple-silicon...
- dawnerd 6y agoThat’s merely speculation as to why.
- rorykoehler 6y agoYou can use sidecar with an ipad for a second external display.
- Fnoord 6y agoWith some iPads. Not all. I was thinking of using an older iPad for this purpose, but alas. Won't work. Too old.
- kalleboo 6y agoThe embedded GPU doesn't support it
- reaperducer 6y agomax 2 displays (only 1 external for laptops) I wonder if that includes AirPlay screens, or just wired.
- Joeri 6y agoThis may work. On a 2014 macbook air, which officially only supports only one external display, I've been able to use two external screens at the same time by sharing one through airplay. However, you're always limited in resolution and latency that way.
- kalleboo 6y agoI would imagine just wired - it's probably a lack of DisplayPort/HDMI encoders rather than rendering resources.
- jrobn 6y agoIt’s a first generation chip in a thin-and-light laptop. I suspect all those problems will be fixed as they scale it up. Not to mention their unique position of leverage dedicated acceleration silicon in their software now.
- simcop2387 6y agoeGPU support will depend on if they have a way to work around the need for a PCIe I/O BAR. Many GPUs require that to initialize and as far as I know no ARM cpus support it since it's a legacy-ish x86 thing. It'll be the same problem that prevents gpu use on raspberry pi 4s still. I bet you can make a controller that'll provide a mapping for that to allow it but that'll mean needing a new enclosure (probably not a huge deal) and new silicon and drivers.
- dwaite 6y agoI don't quite get how Apple could claim to be Thunderbolt-compatible with this sort of limitation in hardware, though.
- djxfade 6y agoIt's not a limitation in hardware. It's a legacy feature of the x86 that isn't supported on ARM. This could be solved by the GPU engineers by removing the legacy compatibility. "Nobody" boots a modern PC from BIOS anymore
- SXX 6y agoAMD GPUs work just fine with POWER8 hardware so this is certainly solved.
- marcan_42 6y agoAMD GPUs do not require I/O BARs, and highly doubt Nvidia ones do either. The VBIOS will probably assume it can use it, but most modern cards can be initialized without actually running the VBIOS (because people use them on headless servers, for virtualization, and things like that). The I/O BAR is only required for legacy VGA compatibility, you can ignore it.
- sliken 6y agoDunno, seems like most professionals would want to use docker, virtual machines, or enough video/data to want more than 16GB ram. Or maybe even plug in more than a charging cable and one more device. Or run more than one external monitor. Doesn't seem very "pro" to me. The MBP16" intel has 4 x USB-c ports, can drive two monitors, and can have >= 32GB ram.
- sosborn 6y ago> most professionals would want to use docker, virtual machines, or enough video/data to want more than 16GB ram. Again, what definition of "pro" are you using, and how is that relevant to professionals with other occupations?
- wlesieutre 6y agoMost professionals aren't software developers and don't need to run virtual machines. But regardless of professional requirements, "Pro" in Apple's product line just means "the more expensive slightly better version." Nobody's arguing that AirPods Pro are the wireless earbuds of choice for people who make money by listening to wireless earbuds.
- Fnoord 6y agoHm, a good VM is one you don't even notice. Say you run Qubes. Not necessarily for development (I would argue Nix is the best OS for DevOps). If all goes well, such an OS becomes very adequate for an average user. For example, a hardware VM could allow you to run a browser more secure.
- grecy 6y ago> most professionals would want to use docker, virtual machines, or enough video/data to want more than 16GB ram I'm a Sofwware Engineer / pro photographer / videographer. I sling code from time to time, edit thousands of RAW files from my cameras and edit together 1080p footage day in and day out. I did that for years on a 2013 MBA with 8GB of RAM. Now I have a 2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM. It's perfectly adequate.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 6y agoLaptop Macs of late are known for heavy throttling due to inadequate cooling, which cannot have been unnoticed in simulations
- Bud 6y agoBut not anymore. That era is over.
- numpad0 6y agoSo it’s natural that devices from that era and devices after that era behave differently
- rayiner 6y agoI have the 16” MacBook Pro. It doesn’t throttle and will happily run at max boost for tens of minutes.
- perfmode 6y agomine throttles to 30% within a minute of ffmpeg
- adrianN 6y agoMine doesn't throttle when the ambient temperature is below 21°C, but throttles almost immediately if the ambient temperature is above 24°C.
- sliken 6y agoWhich one? I have the i9 flavor and it sounds like it's taking off if I run a video conf with zoom or Microsoft teams.
- numpad0 6y agoThrottling refers to throttling down. Choking up. Going up is boosting.
- 6y ago
- Bud 6y agoIt's not just outperforming the MacBook Pro. It's also blowing away the current 2020 top-end iMac, which has a 10-core Intel i9. And it's doing this while using more than an order of magnitude less power (10W vs. a TDP of 125W for that Intel part). That's stunning.
- xvector 6y agoIt’s also outperforming the 5950X in single core. Incredible!
- Bud 6y agoYeah, and doing this without a fan. It's almost like Apple is rubbing Intel's face in it for sport. It's not even fair.
- jeswin 6y agoBut did the test run long enough to need the fan, and what was the ambient temperature? The fanless Intel Core-M CPUs could post excellent benchmark scores (for its time). But if you give it a lengthy compile task, it'll slow down dramatically.
- lostlogin 6y agoAren’t they both running the same test? Or are you saying that the test needs to run for way longer to be fair?
- Phrodo_00 6y ago> Or are you saying that the test needs to run for way longer to be fair? Yes, the main computing constraint of mobile devices is heat management (This doesn't really reflect the CPU but the complete device. Putting the CPU in a more ideal setup like a traditional desktop or water cooling will improve the CPU's performance in longer tasks)
- 6y ago
- bigdict 6y agoI wonder if M1 dominates an i9-9980HK at multithreaded workloads that make full use of available SIMD? Does an M1 dominate at peak theoretical flops?
- rbanffy 6y agoM1 is not magic and can't break the laws of physics. SMT makes better use of silicon and will probably push speeds closer. OTOH, M1 has a fast memory that the i9 can't match. I still bet on the i9, but it'd be interesting to run a test.
- pg314 6y agoWhat are the laws of physics that would be broken in this case?
- rbanffy 6y agox86 needs to use more complicated logic to deal with the instruction stream than ARM, freeing more of the silicon for things like better reordering and more execution units. OTOH, the SMT somewhat mitigates the delays caused in reordering by working on more than one instruction stream at once. I'd say the 16-thread chip will end up being overall faster than the 8-core one, if cache misses don't create a huge penalty for the slower memory bus of the x86. The i9-9980HK is also two generations behind, which doesn't help it much. When I said there is no magic, I was warning that we shouldn't expect huge speedups or a crushing advantage, at least not for long. The edge M1 has is due to a simpler ISA (which is less demanding to run efficiently, freeing more resources for optimization and execution) and a faster memory interface (which makes an L3 miss less of a punishment). This fast memory interface also limits it to, for now, 16GB of memory. If the dataset has 17GB, it'll suffer. Another difference is that all of the i9 cores are designed to be fast, whereas only 4 cores of the M1 are. This added flexibility can be put to good use by moving CPU-bound processes to the big cores and IO-bound and low-priority ones to the little ones. In the end, they are very different chips (in design and TDP). It'd be interesting to compare them with actual measurements, as well as newer Intel ones.
- 6y ago
- hbbio 6y agoIt's also funny that Johny Srouji and probably others in his team come from the team at Intel in Israel that "saved" Intel in the early 2000s by designing the Intel Core architecture which is still used by Intel today. cf. Anandtech article from 2003: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1083/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/1083/2
- kar1181 6y agoDid not know that, and indeed the pentium m / core / core 2 series microarches have done incredibly well. I've become something of CPU collector in recent years, and I have a nice line of p6 cpus from thePentium Pro -> Pentium 2 -> Pentium 3 -> Pentium M -> Core 2 that conveniently sidesteps those awful Netburst p4 CPUs. It feels like this (p6+) microarch has finally run out of road and needs a rethink. What 'saved' intel was a change in philosophy rather than chasing MHz they chased power savings. And with Apple's new chips that history is repeating itself (and appears to be with a similar outcome). It's an exciting time for hardware again because Intel and AMD are going to have to react to this and I think there's still legs to x86, it's survived everything thats been thrown at it so far...
- m12k 6y agoIt's fascinating to see history repeated - the architecture and design with the most power efficiency generally also turns out to be the one that can be pushed furthest for performance when you want to go that route.
- nuker 6y ago> I've become something of CPU collector in recent years, and I have a nice line of p6 cpus from thePentium Pro I bought i486DX for $20 month ago, as a memo of my first CPU.
- intricatedetail 6y agoI got a Pentium 100 last month with a motherboard and a psu. I plan to run W95. It's going to be fun!
- jimbokun 6y agoAgreed that the vast majority of Hacker News comments about the M1 Macbook Air are very glass half empty. This seems like a really cool piece of technology, and I'm kind of bummed that everyone is so cynical and pessimistic about everything these days (albeit understandably so).