5 ms·

I didn’t buy the hype until I tested an actual M1. It exceeded the hype. It feels like when I was a kid and went from a 386SX to a Pentium at 4X the speed, exce

• ben7799 6y ago
  Excellent analogy, I'm old enough to remember those old generational jumps and the M1 feels like that to me. Last time it felt like there was a jump this big was around 2005-2006 when the Core 2 Duo started becoming common.
• onli 6y ago
  From what did you upgrade? Apple had no competitive product with modern processors. Where is the Zen3 macbook with which you compared that? Did the laptop you compared with had an equivalent fast SSD?
  • klelatti 6y ago
    Given Apple had/has competitive products with 2020/21 Intel CPUs this is patently not true.
    • onli 6y ago
      Hm, I'm surprised by that statement. The Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs were a lot faster than the Intel competition and I am pretty sure Apple does not have them in any laptop. And the very fast SSD is a new addition, isn't it? Did I miss something?
      • klelatti 6y ago
        You implied that they only saw a difference because Apple wasn't using "modern processors". You can't exclude everything but Zen 3 from any sensible definition of "modern processor".
        • onli 6y ago
          The parent comment talked about the implications he thought this had about the architecture. Like half of the thread seemingly ignoring that a) there are x86 processors that are more than competitive and b) that the big leap he described is more likely coming from the faster storage and from comparing it with the very much older and weaker processors most people that bought an upgrade now had in their old laptops. Heck, he might have used an old dual core with an HDD from all we know. Of course the new M1 models would make a big difference then. So would all other modern laptops. But in that context of x86 and ARM Zen3 is absolutely the only sound comparison.
          • klelatti 6y ago
            I know what you're trying to say is that you have to do a comparison of CPUs built on similar process nodes - and that maybe the parent has overstated the x86 vs Arm comparison. I would have some sympathy with that - but that's not the same as discounting the parent's perspective because Apple somehow weren't using "modern processors" previously - because that simply isn't true.
            • onli 6y ago
              Similar process nodes, or at least when making general statements of the architecture to compare the best modern candidates. Otherwise you just can't make statements about the architecture based on that. And Apple just does not have Zen 3 laptops (unsurprisingly), so there is that. And I still think it's very valid to not forget how old hardware used for subjective comparisons will be. E.g. the old Macbook air sold very well all that time.
          • api 6y ago
  • api 6y ago
    Top-end Ryzen chips may be as fast or faster. Are they also as low power? The impressive thing about the M1 isn't just raw performance but performance / watt. There are obviously faster high-end many-core x86 chips, but the power use difference is wider than the speed difference. The M1 destroys mid-range Intel and AMD offerings at a fraction of the power consumption. Check out this madness: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks The MacBook Air trounces the top-end Mac Pro on single core performance. No this is not the top-end Intel you can get, nor is it as fast as AMD, but it's a MacBook Air and consumes a small fraction of the power. Again... the power efficiency is the thing that really blows me away. 5nm accounts for only some of that. On multi-core the same MacBook Air is just below recent Mac Pro models on total computational throughput. To beat the MacBook Air you have to go up to newer-generation Xeon chips with 8 full-speed cores. The Xeon is branded as a server chip and uses as much power as probably eight to ten M1s. It's just insane. If Apple puts, say, 16 full-speed core in one of these chips it's absolutely over for all other vendors. Speculation is that the 16" Pro will end up getting 8 performance cores and 4 low-power cores. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up beating the top-end Intel Mac Pro.
    • klelatti 6y ago
      Feeling a bit sad now as I had to buy a 2020 MacBook Pro to get AVX512!
      • api 6y ago
        I currently use a MacBook Air with the same 10th generation Intel chip in it and it's not bad. The only difference between the Air and the Pro with this chip is that the Pro can sustain high clocks longer and has a Touch Bar. I expected the M1 to be like a much lower power and maybe a bit faster version of this chip, and was really blown away by it being far beyond that.
        • klelatti 6y ago
          I'll probably be in the queue for the M2!
    • 6y ago
• randomopining 6y ago
  What about it is so amazing? Did you test the 8gb or the 16gb version? Is it really a gamechanger for surfing, coding, videos, etc? Curious because I might grab the base mac mini 8gb for music production, surfing, Java coding etc.
  • officeplant 6y ago
    It's a game changer if you can wholly devote yourself to the ecosystem. I can tell you that even third party applications with M1 support (ie. Google Chrome) can be a mixed bag and still run kinda clunky. Also you said music production so verify before hand that your DAW, etc of choice will work fine. I use Reason and the visuals in the DAW itself are still laggy, but it isn't M1 native yet. Other things like the fact that World of Warcraft runs at medium settings on a 1440P monitor feel kinda magical given I can barely feel any heat leaving the M1 Mini. In the end I returned my M1 Mini (8gb/256gb) because my personal experience still felt half baked at this time. Once we hit the next generation a lot more software will have caught up.
  • api 6y ago
    I'd get 16gb. The memory options are disappointing. I am waiting for 32gb to switch my daily driver, and also giving the ecosystem a bit of time to catch up. I have an M1 Mini but that was for us to test our software on and make sure our Mac ARM builds were correct. Apple's memory and storage options tend to always be on the disappointing side.
• octorian 6y ago
  > It feels like when I was a kid and went from a 386SX to a Pentium at 4X the speed I remember the jump from the 486 chips to the Pentium being that dramatic. Heck, 486DX2-66 to P100 brought Linux kernel compile times from 45 minutes down to like 5 minutes. Back then, I think a big part of these jumps wasn't just CPU design. I think a lot of it was that those CPU design changes were often accompanied by massive improvements to overall system architecture. So the I/O buses, memory, peripherals, all of it got a lot faster as part of the same upgrade.
• jodrellblank 6y ago
  > "Apple didn’t do black magic. [...] Other ARM manufacturers could equal or exceed the M1 if they wanted." I see lots of people saying "If only $company had an ARM device", and I don't understand it. My experience of ARM device is slow laggy janky products - from competing smartphones, tablets, router and network device management interfaces, year on year, the pairing is always (arm + fucking slow). It's only Apple who have managed to get "desktop class" performance, and at this point I'm more willing to attribute that to Apple doing black magic than to ARM being inherently superior. Microsoft have piles of money, thousands of developers, they make hardware, they've been working with ARM since the likes of the Compaq IPAQ PDA and Windows CE 21 years ago, and the Surface RT in 2012, their ARM devices are nothing to speak of. Google, industry gorilla of tech with the finances to match - see the famous Gruber/DaringFireball about iPhones far ahead in single core JavaScript performance year after year after year. Tech giants like Samsung, Qualcomm, Sony, who have been designing and building chips for decades, with their own drivers, firmware, and customized Android builds, and building their own flagship products. Apple whomps in from "nowhere" with the fastest ARM device anyone has ever seen, and the critics response is "anyone could do that if they wanted to". Then why don't they want to? [Edit: Consider also that Apple spent $278M on acquiring PA Semi chip design company in 2008, and $600M on Dialog Semiconductor in 2018, and Microsoft spent $2.5BN on Minecraft. I say these companies "are tech giants with finances to match", but it's not like Apple had to lean hard into their hundreds of billions cash pile to do what they've done. Instead they had to do something that appears to be "black magic" (i.e. desire + leadership + execution + long term planning + ???)].
  • dgemm 6y ago
    Apple is pretty uniquely positioned to make the architecture change as smooth as it has been. If you look at competing smartphone SOCs it's not hard to believe that a technical M1 competitor could be put together, but getting it adopted would be much, much more difficult.
    • pxc 6y ago
      It seems so obvious to me that Apple's chief strategic strength here is that they can essentially force adoption that it's very strange to me that your comment is the only one I've seen on this whole post mentioning it. One of the ways we already know that beefy ARM processors can work well (and with better power efficiency than Intel CPUs) for heavier workloads/at higher scale than mobile or embedded devices is that it's already being done in the server space. Is scaling ARM processors up for the desktop radically different? (If so, I'd love to learn a bit about how ) The problem that remains for anyone who wants to sell PCs with something other than x86 is that desktop users want their apps, and for Windows users those apps are distributed as x86 binaries, and users aren't in control of that (especially for unmaintained or legacy software). Software publishers won't build or optimize for a new architecture if they suspect it's just going to be a flash in the pan, and this creates a chicken-and-egg problem. But Apple can just declare that their new architecture is the only option for you if you're buying a new Mac, and a ton of their users will come with them no matter what. App publishers will just deal with it, knowing that they have to play along if they want their application to have a first-class experience on Mac. This is a huge deal, and not a position any particular PC manufacturer could hope to be in! I'm sure Apple has done lots of technically impressive stuff that I'm not even competent to really appreciate in order to make this architecture change happen. But other vendors are more capable of technically impressive stuff than they are of forcing adoption for enough users to reach critical mass to get people who sell/distribute proprietary software to come along with them.