8 ms·

By what metric do you consider the M1 revolutionary? "Inch by inch" and "revolutionary" are a bit contradictory, no?

kzrdude 5y ago
It was developed gradually: The A series is already at number 15! Macs suddenly switched to these ARM processors. That's the revolution, and the number is M1, but it's based on the gradually developed A series.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
its the first ARM based PC that doesn't suck. Microsoft Windows ARM didn't move people to ARM based PC while Apple succeed.
- ghshephard 5y ago
  Not sure who downvoted you - I completely agree. People have been talking about Arm as the next generation for a long time. I would suggest that Amazon made it successful with Graviton in the cloud, and Apple made it successful on the laptop/desktop with the M1.
- fulafel 5y ago
  Early Acorn Archimedes users would like a word about that "first" claim, it misses by a few decades!
  - spacedcowboy 5y ago
    ARM was a company created by Acorn, Apple and VLSI. The ARM was the Acorn RISC Machine, and I owned one, but the first ARM chip was by Apple as much as Acorn. They didn’t decamp dozens of engineers to Cambridge for no reason…
solarkraft 5y ago
It’s not. The release was somewhat revolutionary (it’s not all it’s made out to be, but there are many remarkable things about it). Before releasing it though, they worked up to it (in secret), 2.54 centimeters by 2.54 centimeters.
jws 5y ago
The revolutionary aspect of the M1 is that the processor for a computer is once again under control of the computer designers. For thirty years it has been outsourced as a commodity and been optimized for the interests of the CPU producers. The centralization of CPU design had benefits of scale, but maybe at this time Apple’s scale is big enough that taking control of the design is more advantageous.
BoorishBears 5y ago
How so? If I build a house with a revolutionary blueprint, but I build that house brick by brick to make sure it's the best representation of that blueprint possible, is it still not a revolutionary home?
askonomm 5y ago
By the metric that I can have an entry level Macbook outperform maxed out Macbooks of a previous era. Oh and, do that with a ~20 hour battery life. And no fan.
s0ss 5y ago
I see no contradiction. M1 powers by far the best arm based laptop available today - all arm laptops hence forth will be compared to it. revolutionary. Apple iterations on arm have been regular and consistent for a long time.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Not just arm. The M1 is a point of reference for any portable computer.
  - nightski 5y ago
    Well that's not true. M1 is great for certain workloads, but I'd take my G14 any day of the week with it's Nvidia GTX 3060.
- mwint 5y ago
  And, I might add, all laptops of any architecture.
whiddershins 5y ago
Wouldn’t you imagine every revolution is really a catalyst moment that follows years of hardly-noticed incremental changes that set the stage for it?
Koshkin 5y ago
It is indeed revolutionary, because it is at the heart of the first widely popular fully-functional powerful general-purpose ARM-based laptop ever being produced on a massive, industrial scale. If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.
- latch 5y ago
  > If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is. Then you might want to look up the definition. A revolution is "radical" and makes "fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation". Life after the printing press / steam engine / transistor fundamentally changed. Even if tomorrow, all x86 chips were replaced with ARM chips, what radical and fundamental changes to society would take place?
- ChrisLTD 5y ago
  I love my M1 Air, but ultimately it's a moderately faster version of what I had before. The real benefit, so far, is that I have a fanless machine with the same kind of power as the previous pro level machines. Otherwise, it hasn't exactly changed what the computer is on a fundamental level.
  - cglace 5y ago
    The fact that I can forget my power cord and not care is a game changer.
- duped 5y ago
  Even if that were true, it would still just be an incremental improvement. We've been mass marketing laptops for decades. Switching to a different architecture while a big engineering task isn't revolutionary. But it's not true. ARM based Chromebooks have been on the market for years already and cornered educational markets and had massive consumer success overseas.
- The_Colonel 5y ago
  > If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is. Nothing changes in the way people use their computers. It's a performance leap, but there have been many such in the past. Back when PCs and laptops got 2 cores instead of 1, "real" multitasking was finally possible and performance doubled almost overnight. That was IMHO a bigger leap than M1, but I don't hear people calling Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 "revolutionary".
yoz-y 5y ago
One interesting thing about the M1 is that a single chip (currently) powers apple's tablet, entry level laptop, entry level desktop, and their most recent all-in-one desktop and high end pro laptop. The differentiation is done elsewhere. What is missing is the high end pro level hardware, but if the rumors are true those will have the same but "more of it". It's the first chip I know of that answers the "should we optimise for speed or for power consumption" by "yes".
r00fus 5y ago
Simply by application of existing cutting-edge technology (mobile chipset) to a different use-case (laptops/desktops). The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade, but the execution required to achieve it is definitely remarkable. My M1 MBA is better than my 2020 Intel MBP (which cost over 2x) in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery life, and incredible responsiveness. And x86 will never catch up. That's why it's revolutionary - it has destabilized the existing regime.
- okamiueru 5y ago
  In which particular area are you suggesting that the M1 is ahead for x86 to catch up?
  - dralley 5y ago
    The A15 performance cores seem to be equivalent in performance to AMD Ryzen 5950x desktop cores, at 1/5th of the power budget. True, AMD has a few tricks up their sleeve, and is a node behind Apple at TSMC, but on a purely technical level it's clear that Apple ahead of both AMD and Intel.
    - okamiueru 5y ago
      The power consumption is very impressive indeed. But, I think there are many compromises to be made when scaling up, so we'll see how the M2 performs in this regard. However, aside from power consumption, I find it interesting that people refer to it as such a revolution. Maybe I'm just imagining a unspoken "... for what is to come". Because as is, the only thing the M1 does better than it's competition is arguably the power consumption. The 5950x you mention, although an apples to oranges comparison will outperform highly parallelizable tasks by a factor of 4. Throw in a top end GPU and it becomes a factor of 14. Now, power consumption may be the end all be all for some people. If your work tasks actually don't require a lot of computational power, then I can see it being much more valuable to have the flexibility of a cool laptop with a long battery life. But, touting the M1 as revolutionary, because all that matters is power consumption, feels like a disconnect to me. I'm all for people liking stuff they like. But, I don't get what's revolutionary at all. I was interesting in hearing what people thought about it though.
cptskippy 5y ago
Do revolutions typically start over night or do they build up until there's a tipping point? Apple has been working towards a revolution, the M1 is the tipping point.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Tipping towards what? How will having this laptop change your life over having another laptop? What can you do now that you couldn't do before?
  - kgermino 5y ago
    Good question. It completely untethers me from my desk. The battery life is so good I can get through an entire work day without worrying about power at any point. This frees me up to leave (e.g. for a meeting, to work in the park or just on a couch, or simply being frazzled and in a hurry) without even considering a power brick or when I'll be able to plug in again. To have that freedom in a 3 lb laptop with virtually no performance compromises is incredible.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    I would take an M1 MacBook Pro over my intel MacBook Pro in a heart beat. It’s a heating battery dying piece of shit to put it lightly
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    ARM replacing X86 as the desktop computing processor of choice. A revolution doesn't have to benefit you. This benefits Apple financially, any benefits you receive are secondary.
matthew-wegner 5y ago
It is still the fastest single-threaded performance available on any chip you can buy today: Laptop, desktop, server. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html (Available in a fanless ~$1k laptop, no less!)
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  At passmark, anyway, in a chart that seems to have some rather questionable orderings to it. Like the Ryzen 5900 is according to that AMD's fastest single core performance CPU. But that's certainly not the case as it's just a power-restricted & clock-restricted version of the 5900X, and the 5950X has then an even higher clock ceiling. Similarly on the Intel side they have the 11900 ranked higher than the 11900K. Which again, there's no way that's true since the 11900K is literally an 11900 with a higher power limit & higher turbo frequency. And then the 11900KF, which is just an 11900K but with the iGPU disabled, is then somehow a lot faster than both? Actual binnings & achievable frequencies vary, of course, but these orderings aren't passing a sniff test, either. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673, https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637, and https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 are better comparison points here. The M1's single-core performance is of course very strong, but I'm not sure why you're surprised that it's "still" the fastest single-core CPU since these CPUs are all the same generation. There hasn't really been anything newer.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    In fairness though, that first link you posted had the M1 beating the 5950X in geekbench 5 single threaded, so that confirms the Passmark result under certain workloads. In any event, you'll notice M1 achieves an extremely competitive level of performance with a peak power of 22% of that used by the Ryzen 5950X and 10.5% of the 11900K. That's crazy! In terms of efficiency there really is no comparison the M1 is a remarkable product. We'll have to see how the M1X/M2 goes, but given what we've seen so far, we should see some stellar results from an M series chip designed for a workstation class laptop.
pdpi 5y ago
When you look at the history behind the M1, it's been an inch-by-inch progression, grinding away at that CPU architecture. The culmination of that work is having one single CPU power iPads, macbooks and iMacs, which I think can reasonably be called revolutionary.

It was developed gradually: The A series is already at number 15! Macs suddenly switched to these ARM processors. That's the revolution, and the number is M1, but it's based on the gradually developed A series.

MangoCoffee 5y ago

its the first ARM based PC that doesn't suck. Microsoft Windows ARM didn't move people to ARM based PC while Apple succeed.

ghshephard 5y ago
Not sure who downvoted you - I completely agree. People have been talking about Arm as the next generation for a long time. I would suggest that Amazon made it successful with Graviton in the cloud, and Apple made it successful on the laptop/desktop with the M1.
fulafel 5y ago
Early Acorn Archimedes users would like a word about that "first" claim, it misses by a few decades!
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  ARM was a company created by Acorn, Apple and VLSI. The ARM was the Acorn RISC Machine, and I owned one, but the first ARM chip was by Apple as much as Acorn. They didn’t decamp dozens of engineers to Cambridge for no reason…

solarkraft 5y ago

It’s not. The release was somewhat revolutionary (it’s not all it’s made out to be, but there are many remarkable things about it). Before releasing it though, they worked up to it (in secret), 2.54 centimeters by 2.54 centimeters.

jws 5y ago

The revolutionary aspect of the M1 is that the processor for a computer is once again under control of the computer designers. For thirty years it has been outsourced as a commodity and been optimized for the interests of the CPU producers. The centralization of CPU design had benefits of scale, but maybe at this time Apple’s scale is big enough that taking control of the design is more advantageous.

BoorishBears 5y ago

How so? If I build a house with a revolutionary blueprint, but I build that house brick by brick to make sure it's the best representation of that blueprint possible, is it still not a revolutionary home?

askonomm 5y ago

By the metric that I can have an entry level Macbook outperform maxed out Macbooks of a previous era. Oh and, do that with a ~20 hour battery life. And no fan.

s0ss 5y ago

I see no contradiction. M1 powers by far the best arm based laptop available today - all arm laptops hence forth will be compared to it. revolutionary. Apple iterations on arm have been regular and consistent for a long time.

solarkraft 5y ago
Not just arm. The M1 is a point of reference for any portable computer.
- nightski 5y ago
  Well that's not true. M1 is great for certain workloads, but I'd take my G14 any day of the week with it's Nvidia GTX 3060.
mwint 5y ago
And, I might add, all laptops of any architecture.

whiddershins 5y ago

Wouldn’t you imagine every revolution is really a catalyst moment that follows years of hardly-noticed incremental changes that set the stage for it?

Koshkin 5y ago

It is indeed revolutionary, because it is at the heart of the first widely popular fully-functional powerful general-purpose ARM-based laptop ever being produced on a massive, industrial scale. If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.

latch 5y ago
> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is. Then you might want to look up the definition. A revolution is "radical" and makes "fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation". Life after the printing press / steam engine / transistor fundamentally changed. Even if tomorrow, all x86 chips were replaced with ARM chips, what radical and fundamental changes to society would take place?
ChrisLTD 5y ago
I love my M1 Air, but ultimately it's a moderately faster version of what I had before. The real benefit, so far, is that I have a fanless machine with the same kind of power as the previous pro level machines. Otherwise, it hasn't exactly changed what the computer is on a fundamental level.
- cglace 5y ago
  The fact that I can forget my power cord and not care is a game changer.
duped 5y ago
Even if that were true, it would still just be an incremental improvement. We've been mass marketing laptops for decades. Switching to a different architecture while a big engineering task isn't revolutionary. But it's not true. ARM based Chromebooks have been on the market for years already and cornered educational markets and had massive consumer success overseas.
The_Colonel 5y ago
> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is. Nothing changes in the way people use their computers. It's a performance leap, but there have been many such in the past. Back when PCs and laptops got 2 cores instead of 1, "real" multitasking was finally possible and performance doubled almost overnight. That was IMHO a bigger leap than M1, but I don't hear people calling Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 "revolutionary".

yoz-y 5y ago

One interesting thing about the M1 is that a single chip (currently) powers apple's tablet, entry level laptop, entry level desktop, and their most recent all-in-one desktop and high end pro laptop. The differentiation is done elsewhere. What is missing is the high end pro level hardware, but if the rumors are true those will have the same but "more of it". It's the first chip I know of that answers the "should we optimise for speed or for power consumption" by "yes".

r00fus 5y ago

Simply by application of existing cutting-edge technology (mobile chipset) to a different use-case (laptops/desktops). The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade, but the execution required to achieve it is definitely remarkable. My M1 MBA is better than my 2020 Intel MBP (which cost over 2x) in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery life, and incredible responsiveness. And x86 will never catch up. That's why it's revolutionary - it has destabilized the existing regime.

okamiueru 5y ago
In which particular area are you suggesting that the M1 is ahead for x86 to catch up?
- dralley 5y ago
  The A15 performance cores seem to be equivalent in performance to AMD Ryzen 5950x desktop cores, at 1/5th of the power budget. True, AMD has a few tricks up their sleeve, and is a node behind Apple at TSMC, but on a purely technical level it's clear that Apple ahead of both AMD and Intel.
  - okamiueru 5y ago
    The power consumption is very impressive indeed. But, I think there are many compromises to be made when scaling up, so we'll see how the M2 performs in this regard. However, aside from power consumption, I find it interesting that people refer to it as such a revolution. Maybe I'm just imagining a unspoken "... for what is to come". Because as is, the only thing the M1 does better than it's competition is arguably the power consumption. The 5950x you mention, although an apples to oranges comparison will outperform highly parallelizable tasks by a factor of 4. Throw in a top end GPU and it becomes a factor of 14. Now, power consumption may be the end all be all for some people. If your work tasks actually don't require a lot of computational power, then I can see it being much more valuable to have the flexibility of a cool laptop with a long battery life. But, touting the M1 as revolutionary, because all that matters is power consumption, feels like a disconnect to me. I'm all for people liking stuff they like. But, I don't get what's revolutionary at all. I was interesting in hearing what people thought about it though.

cptskippy 5y ago

Do revolutions typically start over night or do they build up until there's a tipping point? Apple has been working towards a revolution, the M1 is the tipping point.

ant6n 5y ago
Tipping towards what? How will having this laptop change your life over having another laptop? What can you do now that you couldn't do before?
- kgermino 5y ago
  Good question. It completely untethers me from my desk. The battery life is so good I can get through an entire work day without worrying about power at any point. This frees me up to leave (e.g. for a meeting, to work in the park or just on a couch, or simply being frazzled and in a hurry) without even considering a power brick or when I'll be able to plug in again. To have that freedom in a 3 lb laptop with virtually no performance compromises is incredible.
- Jcowell 5y ago
  I would take an M1 MacBook Pro over my intel MacBook Pro in a heart beat. It’s a heating battery dying piece of shit to put it lightly
- cptskippy 5y ago
  ARM replacing X86 as the desktop computing processor of choice. A revolution doesn't have to benefit you. This benefits Apple financially, any benefits you receive are secondary.

matthew-wegner 5y ago

It is still the fastest single-threaded performance available on any chip you can buy today: Laptop, desktop, server. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html (Available in a fanless ~$1k laptop, no less!)

kllrnohj 5y ago
At passmark, anyway, in a chart that seems to have some rather questionable orderings to it. Like the Ryzen 5900 is according to that AMD's fastest single core performance CPU. But that's certainly not the case as it's just a power-restricted & clock-restricted version of the 5900X, and the 5950X has then an even higher clock ceiling. Similarly on the Intel side they have the 11900 ranked higher than the 11900K. Which again, there's no way that's true since the 11900K is literally an 11900 with a higher power limit & higher turbo frequency. And then the 11900KF, which is just an 11900K but with the iGPU disabled, is then somehow a lot faster than both? Actual binnings & achievable frequencies vary, of course, but these orderings aren't passing a sniff test, either. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673, https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637, and https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 are better comparison points here. The M1's single-core performance is of course very strong, but I'm not sure why you're surprised that it's "still" the fastest single-core CPU since these CPUs are all the same generation. There hasn't really been anything newer.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  In fairness though, that first link you posted had the M1 beating the 5950X in geekbench 5 single threaded, so that confirms the Passmark result under certain workloads. In any event, you'll notice M1 achieves an extremely competitive level of performance with a peak power of 22% of that used by the Ryzen 5950X and 10.5% of the 11900K. That's crazy! In terms of efficiency there really is no comparison the M1 is a remarkable product. We'll have to see how the M1X/M2 goes, but given what we've seen so far, we should see some stellar results from an M series chip designed for a workstation class laptop.

pdpi 5y ago

When you look at the history behind the M1, it's been an inch-by-inch progression, grinding away at that CPU architecture. The culmination of that work is having one single CPU power iPads, macbooks and iMacs, which I think can reasonably be called revolutionary.