5 ms·

I think a lot of the performance gain is due to switching from an aging 2017 Intel processor to a modern processor on a recent TSMC node (5nm in Apple's case).

I think a lot of the performance gain is due to switching from an aging 2017 Intel processor to a modern processor on a recent TSMC node (5nm in Apple's case). Had Apple switched to AMD Ryzen processors on TSMC's 7nm node the performance improvement will have been similarly stark.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
But not the battery life.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Power efficiency is indeed one of the benefits of smaller process nodes, so it has a direct impact on battery life.
- nightski 6y ago
  That's not entirely true. My Ryzen 4900hs laptop gets great battery life with integrated graphics. Not as good as the m1, but it's a zen 2 chip and we have yet to see what zen 3 mobile will do. Apple clearly has a huge advantage here with a cutting edge process and for all practical purposes unlimited money to throw at this. Their cash on hand is more than AMD s full market cap.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    Can you clarify what you mean by "great" i.e. in hours. From all benchmarks the Apple M1 laptops are around 1.8-2x more battery life than anything from AMD/Intel.
    - neogodless 6y ago
      My friend sent me a screen shot from `powercfg /batteryreport` on his Asus Zephyrus G14 (Ryzen 9 4900HS) and it had consumed 16,704 Wh of battery in 1:47:27 of active use. That tracks to about 8.5 hours (capacity showed just under 80 Wh).
      - X-Istence 6y ago
        I've been averaging about ~15 hours per charge on my 13" MacBook Pro M1 so far. That includes compiling/running tests/and not just web browsing/checking mail.
        Rillen 6y ago
        Its such a hard comparision though. You are running the newest of the newest. My Lenovo Thinkpad X390 which i'm sitting on right now for a while, still has ~8h left to go. Chrome with 30 tabs, intellij etc. open and running. I do assume the M1 is doing a great job, don't get me wrong, but i would like to see a more objective comparison. Personally speaking, the most interesting thing for me to see is that Apple now put a very strong SoC on all its models. From Air to Pro, with a relative good price point (as long as you don't upgrade anything...)
        dr_zoidberg 6y ago
        Going by TSMCs claim of 30% better power consumption at iso-speed would put the battery of the G14 at 11-12 hours. So that places the Apple system on a 25-36% better battery range, instead of 80-100%. And still, there are more catches: Apple is probably driving the screen at 60Hz instead of 120Hz for the G14, and the screen tends to be one of the main drivers of battery life. What I'm trying to say is that the talks revolve around the M1 vs x86 for battery consumption, but the big savings can probably come from other components in the system.
      - meditative 6y ago
        mWh? Otherwise that's one hell of a battery.
        neogodless 6y ago
        Oops I missed my edit window! That'd also be some insane power consumption! Let's pretend I'm not from the U.S.A. and the comma is used as a decimal.
- tbrock 6y ago
  Or the coolness (lack of heat). I bought a laptop with an AMD chip once, never again. Thing was a fire hazard.
  - adar 6y ago
    Gotta be more specific when you say AMD chip. Was it a newer Zen chip or one of the old ones pre-Ryzen?
dreamcompiler 6y ago
I think the most important performance benefit of the M1 is having all RAM within a few millimeters of the CPU. Can you do that with a Ryzen?
- Rillen 6y ago
  Huh? Is there anything to support your assumption?
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    The speed of light is a huge limiting factor on modern processors. https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/are-processors-pushing-up-against-the-limits-of-physics/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/are-processors-pushi... Light travels about a foot in 1 nanosecond so moving RAM from a foot away to touching the CPU saves 2 ns in round-trip latency. That's a big win on modern systems. In reality it's a bigger effect since electric signals travel slower than light. And the effect is yet bigger because off-package memory must be accessed through buses with several levels of synchronization and buffer and gate delays. Apple gets away with "unified memory" in the M1 because having the memory on-package means a good deal of the bus and sync and contention logic becomes unnecessary. So everything that touches RAM gets a lot faster. And almost everything touches RAM. https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwidth_memory_performance/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwid... https://www.macworld.com/article/3597569/m1-macs-memory-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3597569/m1-macs-memory-isnt...
    - wulfklaue 6y ago
      Plenty move advantages then just round trip latency. The fact that its a single SOC, what in turn reduces traces on the MB. Freeing up real-estate. We are finally moving to the conversion point between smartphone's and PCs. It has been in the making for a while. Now, if that is a good thing for the consumers ( losing upgradability ) is another thing? But given how PC's have become less and less flexible anyway. We used to have slots for everything ( GPU, Network, Audio, ...). Now we have ATX boards where you maximally put in a GPU. SATA is going the way of the dodo with m.2 becoming the new standard for anything data. I mean, what do we even change anymore on PC's... CPU, Memory, GPU. GPU's will become a external device with USB4. Mass storage has been moving to NAS more and more or USB3 devices. The people that need 4+ HDD's are more exceptions. And you can get away with USB3 HUB's + external enclosures. I questioned for a long time, why we still have Chipset, that artificially segment MB's when the difference has become very small between them anyway. You can easily move that last bit of IO into the CPU SOC. The days that we buy AMD or Intel SOC's with some default CPU+RAM+IO is probably closer then what most think. Separate hardware is probably going to become a Server / Workstation Pro only feature ( with big $$$ prices ). The reality is that hardware has reached a point, that most people did not even upgrade for years anymore. And its more a smaller group / minority that really needs ultra fast hardware. Flexibility is moved from big MB's to external devices, connected over high speed connections. Sorry if i have gone a bit off topic but when you mentioned the onboard memory, it got me thinking about how we really are moving to a SOC/NUC/... future for even powerful hardware.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

But not the battery life.

totalZero 6y ago
Power efficiency is indeed one of the benefits of smaller process nodes, so it has a direct impact on battery life.
nightski 6y ago
That's not entirely true. My Ryzen 4900hs laptop gets great battery life with integrated graphics. Not as good as the m1, but it's a zen 2 chip and we have yet to see what zen 3 mobile will do. Apple clearly has a huge advantage here with a cutting edge process and for all practical purposes unlimited money to throw at this. Their cash on hand is more than AMD s full market cap.
- threeseed 6y ago
  Can you clarify what you mean by "great" i.e. in hours. From all benchmarks the Apple M1 laptops are around 1.8-2x more battery life than anything from AMD/Intel.
  - neogodless 6y ago
    My friend sent me a screen shot from `powercfg /batteryreport` on his Asus Zephyrus G14 (Ryzen 9 4900HS) and it had consumed 16,704 Wh of battery in 1:47:27 of active use. That tracks to about 8.5 hours (capacity showed just under 80 Wh).
    - X-Istence 6y ago
      I've been averaging about ~15 hours per charge on my 13" MacBook Pro M1 so far. That includes compiling/running tests/and not just web browsing/checking mail.
      - Rillen 6y ago
        Its such a hard comparision though. You are running the newest of the newest. My Lenovo Thinkpad X390 which i'm sitting on right now for a while, still has ~8h left to go. Chrome with 30 tabs, intellij etc. open and running. I do assume the M1 is doing a great job, don't get me wrong, but i would like to see a more objective comparison. Personally speaking, the most interesting thing for me to see is that Apple now put a very strong SoC on all its models. From Air to Pro, with a relative good price point (as long as you don't upgrade anything...)
      - dr_zoidberg 6y ago
        Going by TSMCs claim of 30% better power consumption at iso-speed would put the battery of the G14 at 11-12 hours. So that places the Apple system on a 25-36% better battery range, instead of 80-100%. And still, there are more catches: Apple is probably driving the screen at 60Hz instead of 120Hz for the G14, and the screen tends to be one of the main drivers of battery life. What I'm trying to say is that the talks revolve around the M1 vs x86 for battery consumption, but the big savings can probably come from other components in the system.
    - meditative 6y ago
      mWh? Otherwise that's one hell of a battery.
      - neogodless 6y ago
        Oops I missed my edit window! That'd also be some insane power consumption! Let's pretend I'm not from the U.S.A. and the comma is used as a decimal.
tbrock 6y ago
Or the coolness (lack of heat). I bought a laptop with an AMD chip once, never again. Thing was a fire hazard.
- adar 6y ago
  Gotta be more specific when you say AMD chip. Was it a newer Zen chip or one of the old ones pre-Ryzen?

dreamcompiler 6y ago

I think the most important performance benefit of the M1 is having all RAM within a few millimeters of the CPU. Can you do that with a Ryzen?

Rillen 6y ago
Huh? Is there anything to support your assumption?
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  The speed of light is a huge limiting factor on modern processors. https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/are-processors-pushing-up-against-the-limits-of-physics/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/are-processors-pushi... Light travels about a foot in 1 nanosecond so moving RAM from a foot away to touching the CPU saves 2 ns in round-trip latency. That's a big win on modern systems. In reality it's a bigger effect since electric signals travel slower than light. And the effect is yet bigger because off-package memory must be accessed through buses with several levels of synchronization and buffer and gate delays. Apple gets away with "unified memory" in the M1 because having the memory on-package means a good deal of the bus and sync and contention logic becomes unnecessary. So everything that touches RAM gets a lot faster. And almost everything touches RAM. https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwidth_memory_performance/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwid... https://www.macworld.com/article/3597569/m1-macs-memory-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3597569/m1-macs-memory-isnt...
  - wulfklaue 6y ago
    Plenty move advantages then just round trip latency. The fact that its a single SOC, what in turn reduces traces on the MB. Freeing up real-estate. We are finally moving to the conversion point between smartphone's and PCs. It has been in the making for a while. Now, if that is a good thing for the consumers ( losing upgradability ) is another thing? But given how PC's have become less and less flexible anyway. We used to have slots for everything ( GPU, Network, Audio, ...). Now we have ATX boards where you maximally put in a GPU. SATA is going the way of the dodo with m.2 becoming the new standard for anything data. I mean, what do we even change anymore on PC's... CPU, Memory, GPU. GPU's will become a external device with USB4. Mass storage has been moving to NAS more and more or USB3 devices. The people that need 4+ HDD's are more exceptions. And you can get away with USB3 HUB's + external enclosures. I questioned for a long time, why we still have Chipset, that artificially segment MB's when the difference has become very small between them anyway. You can easily move that last bit of IO into the CPU SOC. The days that we buy AMD or Intel SOC's with some default CPU+RAM+IO is probably closer then what most think. Separate hardware is probably going to become a Server / Workstation Pro only feature ( with big $$$ prices ). The reality is that hardware has reached a point, that most people did not even upgrade for years anymore. And its more a smaller group / minority that really needs ultra fast hardware. Flexibility is moved from big MB's to external devices, connected over high speed connections. Sorry if i have gone a bit off topic but when you mentioned the onboard memory, it got me thinking about how we really are moving to a SOC/NUC/... future for even powerful hardware.