6 ms·

Groan. I suppose the smart thing is to just ignore this and let this weird fascination and appraisal of mediocrity echo on its vehement chamber. This is OK. Wh

Groan. I suppose the smart thing is to just ignore this and let this weird fascination and appraisal of mediocrity echo on its vehement chamber. This is OK. Why is it lauded as impressive? I honestly have no clue. The hardware is good enough to do some normal tasks, right? So why pretend it's some kind of beast at doing at heavy computation measured in flops, when it's absolutely nothing even remotely impressive? If it's compute power in tflops is about half that of the Jackson tx2, which is also just cool because its a tiny computer... What's going on here? Is it a sunken cost fallacy thing? I get that the m1 hardware is pretty good for the battery life and the portability. If there is such a fanfare over this kind of mediocre performance... It leaves me confused. If its top end performance that is important, then, surely the hardware is pretty bad for the price, and even ignoring the price, its far down the list. So, what's going on here? Why are people this excited over something like this, if not to justify a purchase that is highly questionable?

echelon 6y ago
Apple.
Miraste 6y ago
There's excitement because, as it says in the post, this is a 𝟿̶𝟶̶𝟶̶ 800% improvement. The Jetson TX2 (assuming that's what you meant) is a development board and not really comparable. That said, you're comparing raw performance with webGPU, which has a big performance hit; raw vs raw the M1 is faster than the TX2.
- lohfu 6y ago
  800% improvement. 100% improvement is times 2, so 800% improvement is times 9
  - TheRealSteel 6y ago
    I'm on your side but like "bimonthly" this is a lost cause.
    - josephg 6y ago
      The USA is a hard country to get presents for, because you seem to have everything. But as an Australian, I'd like to give a gift of the word "Fortnight". Fortnight is a word that means "2 weeks". Its a little old fashioned but awfully useful. Its a common word in Australia (and the UK I think) and you can find it in every English language dictionary. Like "week", fortnight can be used as an adjective. For example, "Fortnightly meeting" - which means "A meeting that takes place every 2 weeks." Unlike "bimonthly meeting", a "fortnightly meeting" is clear and unambiguous. It is also well understood by the rest of the English speaking world. I hope this gift finds you well. You're welcome.
- okamiueru 6y ago
  So, it's an 800% improvement over an older mac? Have you seen the other posts around here? Judging by the comments here, people are saying things like "the m1 is unreal", "might disrupt Google/Amazon in the compute space". That last one wasn't even said as a joke. When you think 800% improvement is relevant, you kinda have to consider how great those 100% were to begin with. Otherwise, it reaaaally looks like a bunch of people in an echo chamber. I honestly have no gripes against people liking the m1. But it annoyes me that the marketing of it was so unbelievably misleading, and it lead to this completely disconnected from reality notion that this is anywhere close to the performance you can get from a top end laptop. And a top end desktop? Yeah... It's an OK hardware, that is pretty good at being power efficient. Raw performance? Do you need it? Like, honestly. Are you running heavy compute calculations. Somehow not bound by 8 GiB memory? And you need to do this while commuting. Well, I suppose the m1 hardware is OK. Nothing to write home about. But OK.
  - bredren 6y ago
    Presumably Apple will build new data centers using Apple Silicon. This would be most disruptive to Intel but deeply affects Microsoft and Amazon. Given what we know about compute to power consumption in the M1 and Apple’s track record of performance gains, how could Amazon or Microsoft compute not be under serious threat? Apple wouldn’t sell server hardware to these companies. While Amazon has been working on Gravitron2 from what I understand, the cores seriously underperform what is shipping in M1, and there is no evidence of serious work in this area from Microsoft.
    - RealityVoid 6y ago
      The way I see it, compute is a commodity. On such things, you compete on price. Apple, in its current incarnation simply does not compete on price and refuses to do so. So how would they be a threat?
      - bredren 6y ago
        Because Apple would be selling to themselves. There is no markup, and the chips could be sold into consumer machines as well. This would allow scaled costs because production can be both for data centers and consumer products simultaneously. X86 not only suffers from poor performance / power / thermal each chip sold has to return for Intel or AMD too. The facilities that run these machines must be bigger, provide more power and work harder to keep cool while resulting in less actual compute. It’s hard to compete on price when the architecture is unexpectedly antiquated and vertical integration through chip design either doesn’t exist or is pales in comparison.
bloqs 6y ago
It's like an abusive relationship, mediocrity with plenty of downsides seems like a treat. The SSD wear issue is not being discussed at all.

echelon 6y ago

Apple.

Miraste 6y ago

There's excitement because, as it says in the post, this is a 𝟿̶𝟶̶𝟶̶ 800% improvement. The Jetson TX2 (assuming that's what you meant) is a development board and not really comparable. That said, you're comparing raw performance with webGPU, which has a big performance hit; raw vs raw the M1 is faster than the TX2.

lohfu 6y ago
800% improvement. 100% improvement is times 2, so 800% improvement is times 9
- TheRealSteel 6y ago
  I'm on your side but like "bimonthly" this is a lost cause.
  - josephg 6y ago
    The USA is a hard country to get presents for, because you seem to have everything. But as an Australian, I'd like to give a gift of the word "Fortnight". Fortnight is a word that means "2 weeks". Its a little old fashioned but awfully useful. Its a common word in Australia (and the UK I think) and you can find it in every English language dictionary. Like "week", fortnight can be used as an adjective. For example, "Fortnightly meeting" - which means "A meeting that takes place every 2 weeks." Unlike "bimonthly meeting", a "fortnightly meeting" is clear and unambiguous. It is also well understood by the rest of the English speaking world. I hope this gift finds you well. You're welcome.
okamiueru 6y ago
So, it's an 800% improvement over an older mac? Have you seen the other posts around here? Judging by the comments here, people are saying things like "the m1 is unreal", "might disrupt Google/Amazon in the compute space". That last one wasn't even said as a joke. When you think 800% improvement is relevant, you kinda have to consider how great those 100% were to begin with. Otherwise, it reaaaally looks like a bunch of people in an echo chamber. I honestly have no gripes against people liking the m1. But it annoyes me that the marketing of it was so unbelievably misleading, and it lead to this completely disconnected from reality notion that this is anywhere close to the performance you can get from a top end laptop. And a top end desktop? Yeah... It's an OK hardware, that is pretty good at being power efficient. Raw performance? Do you need it? Like, honestly. Are you running heavy compute calculations. Somehow not bound by 8 GiB memory? And you need to do this while commuting. Well, I suppose the m1 hardware is OK. Nothing to write home about. But OK.
- bredren 6y ago
  Presumably Apple will build new data centers using Apple Silicon. This would be most disruptive to Intel but deeply affects Microsoft and Amazon. Given what we know about compute to power consumption in the M1 and Apple’s track record of performance gains, how could Amazon or Microsoft compute not be under serious threat? Apple wouldn’t sell server hardware to these companies. While Amazon has been working on Gravitron2 from what I understand, the cores seriously underperform what is shipping in M1, and there is no evidence of serious work in this area from Microsoft.
  - RealityVoid 6y ago
    The way I see it, compute is a commodity. On such things, you compete on price. Apple, in its current incarnation simply does not compete on price and refuses to do so. So how would they be a threat?
    - bredren 6y ago
      Because Apple would be selling to themselves. There is no markup, and the chips could be sold into consumer machines as well. This would allow scaled costs because production can be both for data centers and consumer products simultaneously. X86 not only suffers from poor performance / power / thermal each chip sold has to return for Intel or AMD too. The facilities that run these machines must be bigger, provide more power and work harder to keep cool while resulting in less actual compute. It’s hard to compete on price when the architecture is unexpectedly antiquated and vertical integration through chip design either doesn’t exist or is pales in comparison.

bloqs 6y ago

It's like an abusive relationship, mediocrity with plenty of downsides seems like a treat. The SSD wear issue is not being discussed at all.