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Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing,

Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing, tiny, and more close to the ARM chip than anything out there for x86, right? I'll be interested to see if Apple can keep this up with 128GiB of RAM and a beefy GPU. So far to me M1 is great, ARM is great, but comparing a tiny amount of RAM soldered onto the CPU compared to flexible and huge RAM potential devices seems dishonest. Unless Apple manages to squeeze 128GiB of RAM on their chip, at least. I want to see what my Blender workstation looks like on Apple's Architecture. Where i purpose built a huge CPU, GPU, and RAM for Blender rendering and large scenes. I suspect Apple will start seeing huge falloffs in the SoC design under larger workloads. Apple is dominant in making phones though. And this Laptop is designed like a Phone. So yea, it's amazing for that.

spijdar 6y ago
Architectural analysis of the chip [0] suggests it is a massive improvement as a general purpose CPU, not just because of Apple's vertical integration and streamlining. The magnitude of extra ROB entries, having an 8x wide instruction decoder, that massive L1I cache, and such fat cores with lots of ALU and other op units while simultaneously keeping over a 3GHz clock is a phenomenal architectural improvement overall. Apple may not need to add more RAM locally. Other silicon designers like IBM with POWER10 are moving to serial memory with massive "L4" caches, seen previously with their Centaur memory controllers. I can see Apple using OMI or a similar serial memory bus to add extra memory, using 16/32/etc GB of PoP RAM for caching reads and writes to slower off-chip memory. I expect Intel and AMD will eventually move to a similar memory model, at least in server grade hardware. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  Yea and to be clear i'm not saying it's not awesome. I'm just saying that a lot of things - like real world benchmarks of programs/etc - massively benefit from the proximity and speed of the RAM. Proximity seems to be a very difficult beast to scale. Works great in small scale, horrible in large scale. Sidenote, even if Apple rolled out 128GiB tomorrow i probably couldn't afford it. As the OP says: > including automobile-priced Mac Pros That's rough.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    Hypothetically, with these new memory architectures, you could get the best of both worlds. Best case, you get a huge speed up if everything fits in the high-speed RAM, worst case, you fall back to the "old" RAM. Side note, while Apple charges ridiculous prices for their upgrades, Mac Pros are actually some of the more ""reasonably priced"" computers comparatively. I've looked at HP and Lenovo's equiv. workstations, and you pretty much get screwed by everyone at that scale. My desktop can take up to dual 128 GB sticks but one stick costs over $1,000, so I'm stuck with my 32 GB stick :( ... OTOH, it's pretty insane you can get 128GB of RAM for $1,000 nowadays. I remember when 8GB was a lot and cost several hundred. Time and miniaturization go on I guess...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rootusrootus 6y ago
> RAM soldered onto the CPU It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything. There are laptops that already have a shorter physical path to RAM than the M1 MacBooks, stacking the RAM right next to the CPU is common. So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round.
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  > It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything. Yea, i was just simplifying. Though in SoC i think that's a perfectly fine simplification lol. > So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round. Think there will be > 32GiB?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Almost certainly, although maybe not immediately.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Let the Pro devices come out next year.
rsfinn 6y ago
I know I'm probably older than most people here, but the notion that 16 GiB is "a tiny amount of RAM" is tremendously amusing to someone who paid $740 in 1986 (with a developer's discount) for 2 "MB" of RAM (we didn't have MiB back then)...
- redler 6y ago
  To be fair, we sort of still don't have MiB even now.

spijdar 6y ago

Architectural analysis of the chip [0] suggests it is a massive improvement as a general purpose CPU, not just because of Apple's vertical integration and streamlining. The magnitude of extra ROB entries, having an 8x wide instruction decoder, that massive L1I cache, and such fat cores with lots of ALU and other op units while simultaneously keeping over a 3GHz clock is a phenomenal architectural improvement overall. Apple may not need to add more RAM locally. Other silicon designers like IBM with POWER10 are moving to serial memory with massive "L4" caches, seen previously with their Centaur memory controllers. I can see Apple using OMI or a similar serial memory bus to add extra memory, using 16/32/etc GB of PoP RAM for caching reads and writes to slower off-chip memory. I expect Intel and AMD will eventually move to a similar memory model, at least in server grade hardware. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

adkadskhj 6y ago
Yea and to be clear i'm not saying it's not awesome. I'm just saying that a lot of things - like real world benchmarks of programs/etc - massively benefit from the proximity and speed of the RAM. Proximity seems to be a very difficult beast to scale. Works great in small scale, horrible in large scale. Sidenote, even if Apple rolled out 128GiB tomorrow i probably couldn't afford it. As the OP says: > including automobile-priced Mac Pros That's rough.
- spijdar 6y ago
  Hypothetically, with these new memory architectures, you could get the best of both worlds. Best case, you get a huge speed up if everything fits in the high-speed RAM, worst case, you fall back to the "old" RAM. Side note, while Apple charges ridiculous prices for their upgrades, Mac Pros are actually some of the more ""reasonably priced"" computers comparatively. I've looked at HP and Lenovo's equiv. workstations, and you pretty much get screwed by everyone at that scale. My desktop can take up to dual 128 GB sticks but one stick costs over $1,000, so I'm stuck with my 32 GB stick :( ... OTOH, it's pretty insane you can get 128GB of RAM for $1,000 nowadays. I remember when 8GB was a lot and cost several hundred. Time and miniaturization go on I guess...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

rootusrootus 6y ago

> RAM soldered onto the CPU It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything. There are laptops that already have a shorter physical path to RAM than the M1 MacBooks, stacking the RAM right next to the CPU is common. So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round.

adkadskhj 6y ago
> It's just very close to the CPU, on the same package. It's not on the same die or anything. Yea, i was just simplifying. Though in SoC i think that's a perfectly fine simplification lol. > So it's just a matter of time before >16GB is available with an M1. These are just entry level machines in the first round. Think there will be > 32GiB?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Almost certainly, although maybe not immediately.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Let the Pro devices come out next year.

rsfinn 6y ago

I know I'm probably older than most people here, but the notion that 16 GiB is "a tiny amount of RAM" is tremendously amusing to someone who paid $740 in 1986 (with a developer's discount) for 2 "MB" of RAM (we didn't have MiB back then)...

redler 6y ago
To be fair, we sort of still don't have MiB even now.