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Need less talk and more actual innovation. I'd love to see something around the performance and power efficiency of the M1 without it all needing to be built in
by ziml77 6y ago
Need less talk and more actual innovation. I'd love to see something around the performance and power efficiency of the M1 without it all needing to be built into a single chip. The M1 definitely gets a lot of benefits from being all packaged together, but it unfortunately leads to fewer options since you can't mix-and-match CPU, GPU, and RAM.
I'm hopeful that M1 will drive both AMD and Intel to do better in the mobile space. AMD got a lot of praise for the 4000 series, but it's had nearly no availability.
- jacknews 6y agoYes kudos to apple for delivering astonishing performance and performance/watt, but to use these chips you'll have to accept Apple's full embrace - the chip, the device it powers, the OS, the app ecosystem and restrictions.
- zaroth 6y agoThat’s the beauty of it. To turn the phrase, there’s a lot of innovation in the M1 that only Apple can do.
- cromwellian 6y agoIf you look at the way MS works with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel this advantage isn’t that large. AMD SoCs have Unified Memory, there’s DirectStorage to let SSDs load directly into GPU memory without the CPU, etc There’s also a downside to being a walled garden, Apple is building itself a Great Wall, but the barbarians eventually got the better tech. So for example, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs have Directx ray tracing. How many generations before Apple GPUs catch up with Ampere or RDNA3? To some extent having the GPU architectures discrete allows them to iterate much faster as they aren’t tied to other dependencies, or left with inferior thermal and power constraints.
- zaroth 6y agoI think you’re absolutely right if you need the highest absolute performance regardless of performance per dollar or performance per watt. But I think a lot of people are more concerned with Perf/$ and Perf/Watt and will find Apple’s fully integrated approach is extremely hard to beat or even compete with. In this case perf/$ is going to provide Apple an unbeatable margin, not necessarily the consumer an unbeatable price.
- Kyro38 6y agoWhat restrictions are you referring to for the Mac ecosystem ?
- jacknews 6y agoNot yet for mac, but appstore for iphone. I'm sure it's coming for M1 macs too.
- gumby 6y agoWhy are people so sure? The Mac is a different sort of device with a different use case and people who use it don't have the same expectations about it that they, and others, have about phones.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoIt’s not likely in the near term that Apple will lock down Mac software to the extent they do on iOS. But they’ve already taken many steps—over several macOS iterations—to either lock it down more than it had been, or to make overriding default restrictions difficult (SIP) or non-obvious (right click -> open to bypass gatekeeper). It’s unlikely they could take it drastically further without alienating a lot of developers, or without providing some kind of blessed escape hatch (e.g. you can run arbitrary software if you have a developer license; even that would alienate anyone developing software for non-Apple targets like web/server).
- tinus_hn 6y agoApple has stated they will not support running alternative operating systems on Macs with Apple Silicon.
- chaorace 6y agoIs that entirely true? I don't see any reason you couldn't load Linux on, for example, the Mac Mini. I would normally never consider Apple products, because I don't care for the lock-in either, but... the value proposition packed into these new M1 chips is certainly tempting given the <$700 price tag! For me personally, I could easily be persuaded once any teething pains (related to loading Linux on this new hardware) are figured out.
- choeger 6y agoYou cannot load Linux on an iPhone. So don't be surprised if you cannot on your Mac, either.
- snazz 6y agoTo be pedantic, it sure is possible to run Linux (and Android) on an iPhone 7, although it requires some security vulnerabilities: https://projectsandcastle.org https://projectsandcastle.org
- duskwuff 6y agoAnd a lot of stuff just doesn't work yet -- like graphics acceleration, audio, cellular networking, the camera... it's pretty rough, and the support matrix only starts looking worse for newer devices. https://projectsandcastle.org/status https://projectsandcastle.org/status
- mauricio 6y agoFor sure, it will only run MacOS barring any jailbreak from the community. Even previous gen Mac Mini's with the T2 chip made it difficult to reinstall even MacOS due to Find My Mac.
- 1-more 6y agoI could see this being the time when they prevent 3rd party OSes using some kind of code signing/hardware verification, idk what. But that's speculation, no need to prematurely come up with things to be mad/disappointed about when there's no evidence of that now.
- darklion 6y agoYes, but to some degree, that’s _why_ Apple can deliver these chips with their level of performance while performing a near-seamless architecture transition.
- coldcode 6y agoCompetition is good for everyone. Having Intel dominate the market was never a good idea (clearly AMD is making some inroads). For Apple, control of all suppliers has always been a goal of hardware design. It only took 20 years...
- api 6y agoThe problem with AMD in the mobile space is that changing the CPU on a laptop board is much more difficult than a desktop board. There is no commodity market for those. Intel has a real lock on laptops, which is a big problem for AMD.