12 ms·

>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my th

by nix23 6y ago

>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.

trinix912 6y ago
This is not a completely fair comparison, your threadrippers surely use more energy and produce more heat than the M1 chip.
- hajile 6y ago
  Add 50 more PCIe lanes, double the bus width, 270mb of cache, 60 cores and a communication protocol then get back to me. Anandtech ran the numbers a couple years ago and an EPYC processor spent around 60% of its budget on Infinity Fabric (up to 90% of used power with only a couple cores being used). An M2 based chip might get more done, but it won't use much less power. In truth, I'd guess there's a good chance it bottlenecks on the IO and performance doesn't increase as expected (without widening IO further with all the extra power costs).
- reallydontask 6y ago
  Sometimes it matters other times not. If you want absolute performance then it doesn't matter, if you want efficiency then it does.
zionic 6y ago
Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper.
- soneil 6y ago
  I really can't wait to see what they'll do in the desktop space. For all the gushing reviews the M1 is receiving, it's worth remembering this is their entry-level machines. As it stands right now, I have an 18 month old 27" iMac with 64GB ram and an AMD gpu - and an 8GB M1. And I'm preferring the M1 for almost any task that doesn't demand the real estate.
- nix23 6y ago
  >Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper. It will not, my TR has 64 cores 128 Thread and you know whats the best thing? 128GB Ram...and imagine that..they aren't even soldered...and i even can exchange my GPU..or slap in 2 others. And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.
  - valuearb 6y ago
    Your TR is what, 280 watts TDP? nearly 20 times more than a M1. And is 30% slower in single core. Firestorm Cores use less than 4 watts each. A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR, with a less than 70 watt TDP. And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power. Top end ThreadRippers cost $2,000 to $3,000 each. You can bet an Apple Mx ThreadRipper killer isn’t going to cost more than $500 given it only needs 4x the cores of the $65 M1.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      How does that matter though? His machine isn't sitting on his lap or running on a battery. Electricity isn't that expensive.
      - valuearb 6y ago
        It matters because its not just adding electricity, its adding heat. Pretty clearly Apple can add a whole bunch of Firestorm cores to future M1 derivatives and still fit in smaller power/heat budgets that current generation Ryzen and Threadrippers operate in.
        thu2111 6y ago
        Maybe. I don't know enough about CPU design to argue with that. There are others elsewhere in this thread saying that a lot of the energy and heat goes on the communications systems and other resources you need more of when you ramp up the core count. I suspect we'll never know. Apple have shown little interest in anything other than prosumer workloads for a long time. I doubt they'll be making an M1 server platform anytime soon.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  The M1 core is roughly on par with the Zen 3 core, so how exactly would an 8 core part manage to embarrass a 64 core Zen 2 part?
  - sliken 6y ago
    Depending on the benchmark the M1 wins at per core vs the Zen3. The threadripper is substantially behind at per core performance with the Zen2. The apple also has twice as many memory channels (8 vs 4) and runs the memory significantly faster (4266 vs 3200). The m1 also has about half the latency to main memory. So for highly random workloads that aren't cache friendly I'd expect the M1 to win.
- ianhowson 6y ago
  They might embarrass today's Threadripper. They don't exist yet, at least not outside an Apple lab. AMD's not sitting on their hands, either.
- walshemj 6y ago
  Then there will be 64/128 5990x parts out
simonh 6y ago
He's talking about the vast majority of PC chips sold today, who's power consumption / performance / thermal ratios just got marmalised. You're quite right, your machine and in fact everyone else's are still just as good as they were a few weeks ago. I got an Intel 5K iMac in the summer and I'm still very happy with it. I need to be able to run windows and Linux in VMs so M1 isn't for me right now. It's no for you either. Having said that, your manufacturer of your Threadripper is now on notice. Apple isn't done with the M1, more powerful desktop chips are on their way over the next few years and there's a very good chance they'll do exactly what they just did to Intel and AMDs mobile chipsets to the high end stuff. Apple are coming for them, and not being impressed now isn't going to serve them well down the line.
- pathartl 6y ago
  It's all going to come down to user experience and versatility. Apple is doing some crazy stuff with the M1, but I personally would chock (most of it) it up more to being clever than true innovation. I think only Intel needs to be concerned right now because they're being outpaced by both AMD and Apple. Additionally if the acquisition of Arm by Nvidia results in what people expect, Intel will basically be losing out in every market. Going back to versatility, there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure, so there's still a massive market for AMD or other Arm manufacturers to target. For the consumer side unless Apple releases a chip that results in them making a sub-$800 laptop, they're just simply not going to capture a large market. With the rise of devices like Chromebooks in education and home there's still something to be said for Apple devices just being too expensive. In general, Apple devices also leave a LOT to be desired for any sort of large scale enterprise organization. Unless they go back to their 90's and early 00's mindset, I just can't see this changing. It's certainly exciting to see the CPU market being upended by Apple and AMD, as well as the potential future for a large architecture shift, but I don't think there's any real threat to market shares as a whole.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    You don’t just go and make ever part of your chip architecture wider by being clever. Well, there was probably some cleverness involved, but it’s not like this has been a one-off trick.
alwillis 6y ago
but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1 The M1 has 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores. It also runs at 10 watts and maxes out at 24 watts. A Threadripper starts at over 100 watts…
- bfgoodrich 6y ago
  To be fair, 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). An 8 performance core M1 would be a monster. Not sure if it maxes out at 24 watts. Someone measured wall power of a Mac Mini hitting 21 watts at full load, but that's including power supply inefficiency, all of the supporting circuitry and IO, a fan, flash storage, etc.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    > 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.
    - bfgoodrich 6y ago
      Pulling other cores into this discussion does nothing but muddy the waters. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 4.5X faster at SPECfp than the Icestorm cores. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 3.1X faster at SPECint than the Icestorm cores. In my world, the 3.1 - 4.5X faster sibling makes them very low performance, relatively. In a fully working together scenario, the "8" core M1 is equal in performance to a conceptual 4.5 core Firestorm part (see the Geekbench scaling, for instance). This, again, has positively nothing to do with any other core or part. Bizarre that anyone thinks this is somehow negative or dismissive of the M1. It is an extraordinary chip. But they intentionally, purposefully put 4 very low performance -- compared to Firestorm -- cores because it matches the computing model of users average workload.
sib 6y ago
Well, if you're not going to consider about power consumption, Fugaku (and its 28MW consumption) would like a word with you. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/311995-japans-new-arm-based-supercomputer-is-the-fastest-in-the-world https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/311995-japans-new-arm-ba... I think his point about moving the bounds of the power (and heat) / performance tradeoff is valid.
free2OSS 6y ago
I'm completely with you. The hardest programs to run will not benefit here. I don't need chrome to open up 0.1s faster.
- nix23 6y ago
  Well it's really good for a laptop, but praising it as the fastest and best cpu is just rubbish.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1. Gruber greatly exaggerates here. Particularly mentioning the Mac Pro in the same paragraph. Apple's M1 isn't competing with higher end Intel/ AMD desktop class CPUs with external GPUs. The M1 is a laptop CPU, designed for good performance with good thermals and excellent battery life. It will be interesting to see what they come up with over the next couple years to replace the CPU in the iMac and Mac Pro. But that is next year.
viktorcode 6y ago
The fact that you have to compare a high-end CPU against the base level M1 to show it isn't the fastest underlines Gruber's point pretty well.

by nix23 6y ago

trinix912 6y ago

This is not a completely fair comparison, your threadrippers surely use more energy and produce more heat than the M1 chip.

hajile 6y ago
Add 50 more PCIe lanes, double the bus width, 270mb of cache, 60 cores and a communication protocol then get back to me. Anandtech ran the numbers a couple years ago and an EPYC processor spent around 60% of its budget on Infinity Fabric (up to 90% of used power with only a couple cores being used). An M2 based chip might get more done, but it won't use much less power. In truth, I'd guess there's a good chance it bottlenecks on the IO and performance doesn't increase as expected (without widening IO further with all the extra power costs).
reallydontask 6y ago
Sometimes it matters other times not. If you want absolute performance then it doesn't matter, if you want efficiency then it does.

zionic 6y ago

Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper.

soneil 6y ago
I really can't wait to see what they'll do in the desktop space. For all the gushing reviews the M1 is receiving, it's worth remembering this is their entry-level machines. As it stands right now, I have an 18 month old 27" iMac with 64GB ram and an AMD gpu - and an 8GB M1. And I'm preferring the M1 for almost any task that doesn't demand the real estate.
nix23 6y ago
>Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper. It will not, my TR has 64 cores 128 Thread and you know whats the best thing? 128GB Ram...and imagine that..they aren't even soldered...and i even can exchange my GPU..or slap in 2 others. And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Your TR is what, 280 watts TDP? nearly 20 times more than a M1. And is 30% slower in single core. Firestorm Cores use less than 4 watts each. A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR, with a less than 70 watt TDP. And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power. Top end ThreadRippers cost $2,000 to $3,000 each. You can bet an Apple Mx ThreadRipper killer isn’t going to cost more than $500 given it only needs 4x the cores of the $65 M1.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    How does that matter though? His machine isn't sitting on his lap or running on a battery. Electricity isn't that expensive.
    - valuearb 6y ago
      It matters because its not just adding electricity, its adding heat. Pretty clearly Apple can add a whole bunch of Firestorm cores to future M1 derivatives and still fit in smaller power/heat budgets that current generation Ryzen and Threadrippers operate in.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Maybe. I don't know enough about CPU design to argue with that. There are others elsewhere in this thread saying that a lot of the energy and heat goes on the communications systems and other resources you need more of when you ramp up the core count. I suspect we'll never know. Apple have shown little interest in anything other than prosumer workloads for a long time. I doubt they'll be making an M1 server platform anytime soon.
formerly_proven 6y ago
The M1 core is roughly on par with the Zen 3 core, so how exactly would an 8 core part manage to embarrass a 64 core Zen 2 part?
- sliken 6y ago
  Depending on the benchmark the M1 wins at per core vs the Zen3. The threadripper is substantially behind at per core performance with the Zen2. The apple also has twice as many memory channels (8 vs 4) and runs the memory significantly faster (4266 vs 3200). The m1 also has about half the latency to main memory. So for highly random workloads that aren't cache friendly I'd expect the M1 to win.
ianhowson 6y ago
They might embarrass today's Threadripper. They don't exist yet, at least not outside an Apple lab. AMD's not sitting on their hands, either.
walshemj 6y ago
Then there will be 64/128 5990x parts out

simonh 6y ago

He's talking about the vast majority of PC chips sold today, who's power consumption / performance / thermal ratios just got marmalised. You're quite right, your machine and in fact everyone else's are still just as good as they were a few weeks ago. I got an Intel 5K iMac in the summer and I'm still very happy with it. I need to be able to run windows and Linux in VMs so M1 isn't for me right now. It's no for you either. Having said that, your manufacturer of your Threadripper is now on notice. Apple isn't done with the M1, more powerful desktop chips are on their way over the next few years and there's a very good chance they'll do exactly what they just did to Intel and AMDs mobile chipsets to the high end stuff. Apple are coming for them, and not being impressed now isn't going to serve them well down the line.

pathartl 6y ago
It's all going to come down to user experience and versatility. Apple is doing some crazy stuff with the M1, but I personally would chock (most of it) it up more to being clever than true innovation. I think only Intel needs to be concerned right now because they're being outpaced by both AMD and Apple. Additionally if the acquisition of Arm by Nvidia results in what people expect, Intel will basically be losing out in every market. Going back to versatility, there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure, so there's still a massive market for AMD or other Arm manufacturers to target. For the consumer side unless Apple releases a chip that results in them making a sub-$800 laptop, they're just simply not going to capture a large market. With the rise of devices like Chromebooks in education and home there's still something to be said for Apple devices just being too expensive. In general, Apple devices also leave a LOT to be desired for any sort of large scale enterprise organization. Unless they go back to their 90's and early 00's mindset, I just can't see this changing. It's certainly exciting to see the CPU market being upended by Apple and AMD, as well as the potential future for a large architecture shift, but I don't think there's any real threat to market shares as a whole.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You don’t just go and make ever part of your chip architecture wider by being clever. Well, there was probably some cleverness involved, but it’s not like this has been a one-off trick.

alwillis 6y ago

but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1 The M1 has 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores. It also runs at 10 watts and maxes out at 24 watts. A Threadripper starts at over 100 watts…

bfgoodrich 6y ago
To be fair, 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). An 8 performance core M1 would be a monster. Not sure if it maxes out at 24 watts. Someone measured wall power of a Mac Mini hitting 21 watts at full load, but that's including power supply inefficiency, all of the supporting circuitry and IO, a fan, flash storage, etc.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.
  - bfgoodrich 6y ago
    Pulling other cores into this discussion does nothing but muddy the waters. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 4.5X faster at SPECfp than the Icestorm cores. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 3.1X faster at SPECint than the Icestorm cores. In my world, the 3.1 - 4.5X faster sibling makes them very low performance, relatively. In a fully working together scenario, the "8" core M1 is equal in performance to a conceptual 4.5 core Firestorm part (see the Geekbench scaling, for instance). This, again, has positively nothing to do with any other core or part. Bizarre that anyone thinks this is somehow negative or dismissive of the M1. It is an extraordinary chip. But they intentionally, purposefully put 4 very low performance -- compared to Firestorm -- cores because it matches the computing model of users average workload.

sib 6y ago

Well, if you're not going to consider about power consumption, Fugaku (and its 28MW consumption) would like a word with you. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/311995-japans-new-arm-based-supercomputer-is-the-fastest-in-the-world https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/311995-japans-new-arm-ba... I think his point about moving the bounds of the power (and heat) / performance tradeoff is valid.

free2OSS 6y ago

I'm completely with you. The hardest programs to run will not benefit here. I don't need chrome to open up 0.1s faster.

nix23 6y ago
Well it's really good for a laptop, but praising it as the fastest and best cpu is just rubbish.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1. Gruber greatly exaggerates here. Particularly mentioning the Mac Pro in the same paragraph. Apple's M1 isn't competing with higher end Intel/ AMD desktop class CPUs with external GPUs. The M1 is a laptop CPU, designed for good performance with good thermals and excellent battery life. It will be interesting to see what they come up with over the next couple years to replace the CPU in the iMac and Mac Pro. But that is next year.

viktorcode 6y ago

The fact that you have to compare a high-end CPU against the base level M1 to show it isn't the fastest underlines Gruber's point pretty well.