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This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're the M1 design, just more of it. W
by bla3 5y ago
This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do for their desktops.
Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the efficiency cores on the M1 became performance cores. So CPU-bound things like compiling code will be "only" 20-50% faster than on the M1 MacBook. The big wins are for GPU-heavy and codec-heavy workloads.
That makes sense since that's where most users will need their performance. I'm still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end.
Nevertheless, impressive chips, I'm very curious where they'll take it for the Mac Pro, and (hopefully) the iMac Pro.
- fotta 5y agoI think the higher memory is also a huge win, with support for up to 64gb.
- ssijak 5y agoAnd NVMe with 7.5gbps are like, we are almost not even note worthy haha Impressive all around.
- jeswin 5y agoIt's not that noteworthy, given that affordable Samsung 980 Pro SSDs have been doing those speeds for well over a year now.
- nojito 5y ago980 pro maxes at 7.
- jeswin 5y agoBut it's also been around for at least a year. And upcoming pcie 5 SSDs will up that to 10-14GBps. I'm saying Apple might have wanted to emphasise their more standout achievements. Such as on the CPU front, where they're likely to be well ahead for a year - competition won't catch up until AMD starts shipping 5nm Zen4 CPUs in Q3/Q4 2022.
- christkv 5y agoAnd the much higher memory bandwidth
- PaulKeeble 5y ago400GB/s available to the CPU cores in a unified memory, that is going to really help certain workloads that are very memory dominant on modern architectures. Both Intel and AMD are solving this with ever increasing L3 cache sizes but just using attached memory in a SOC has vastly higher memory bandwidth potential and probably better latency too especially on work that doesn't fit in ~32MB of L3 cache.
- emsy 5y agoGood point. Especially since a lot of software these days is not all that cache friendly. Realistically this means we have 2 years or so till further abstractions eat up the performance gains.
- Unklejoe 5y agoThe M1 still uses DDR memory at the end of the day, it's just physically closer to the core. This is in contrast to L3 which is actual SRAM on the core. The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow the memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas the M1 uses 4266. The real advantage is the M1 Max uses 8 channels, which is impressive considering that's as many as an AMD EPYC, but operates at like twice the speed at the same time.
- GeekyBear 5y agoApple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the industry. They put a 32 megabyte system level cache in their latest phone chip. >at 32MB, the new A15 dwarfs the competition’s implementations, such as the 3MB SLC on the Snapdragon 888 or the estimated 6-8MB SLC on the Exynos 2100 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-performance-review-faster-more-efficient https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo... It will be interesting to see how big they go on these chips.
- rektide 5y ago> Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the industry. AMD's upcoming Ryzen are supposed to have 192MB L3 "v-cache" SRAM stacked above each chiplet. Current chiplets are 8-core. I'm not sure if this is a single chiplet but supposedly good for 2Tbps[1]. Slightly bigger chip than a iphone chip yes. :) But also wow a lot of cache. Having it stacked above rather than built in to the core is another game-changing move, since a) your core has more space b) you can 3D stack many layers of cache atop. This has already been used on their GPUs, where the 6800 & 6900 have 128MB of L3 "Infinity cache" providing 1.66TBps. It's also largely how these cards get by with "only" 512GBps worth of GDDR6 feeding them (256bit/quad-channel... at 16GT). AMD's R9 Fury from spring 2015 had 1TBps of HBM2, for compare, albeit via that slow 4096bit wide interface. Anyhow, I'm also in awe of the speed wins Apple got here from bringing RAM in close. Cache is a huge huge help. Plus 400GBps main memory is truly awesome, and it's neat that either the CPU or GPU can make use of it. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16725/amd-demonstrates-stacked-vcache-technology-2-tbsec-for-15-gaming https://www.anandtech.com/show/16725/amd-demonstrates-stacke...
- bla3 5y agoI thought the memory was one of the more interesting bits here. My 2-year-old Intel MBP has 64 GB, and 8 GB of additional memory on the GPU. True, on the M1 Max you don't have to copy back and forth between CPU and GPU thanks to integrated memory, but the new MBP still has less total memory than my 2-year-old Intel MBP. And it seems they just barely managed to get to 64 GiB. The whole processor chip is surrounded by memory chips. That's in part why I'm curious to see how they'll scale this. One idea would be to just have several M1 Max SoCs on a board, but that's going to be interesting to program. And getting to 1 TB of memory seems infeasible too.
- fotta 5y agoI'm interested to see how the GPU on these performs, I pretty much disable the dGPU on my i9 MBP because it bogs my machine down. So for me it's essentially the same amount of memory.
- gamacodre 5y agoWhy 1TB? 640GB ought to be enough for anything...
- gamacodre 5y agoHuh, I guess that was as bad an idea as the 640K one.
- saijanai 5y agoHow much per 8K x 10 bit color, video frame? Roughly 190GB per minute without sound. Trying to do special effects on more than a few seconds of 8K video would overwhelm a 64GB system, I suspect.
- jrk 5y agoVideo and VFX generally don't need to keep whole sequences in RAM persistently these days because: 1. The high-end SSDs in all Macs can keep up with that data rate (3GB/sec) 2. Real-time video work is virtually always performed on compressed (even losslessly compressed) streams, so the data rate to stream is less than that.
- lkbm 5y agoI'm guessing that's new for the 13" or for the M1, but my 16‑inch MacBook Pro purchased last year had 64GB of memory. (Looks like it's considered a 2019 model, despite being purchased in September 2020).
- fotta 5y agoRight the Intels supported 64gb, but the 16gb limitation on the M1 was literally the only thing holding me back from upgrading.
- jack_riminton 5y agoI don't think this is an apples to apples comparison because of how the new unified memory works
- neogodless 5y ago> "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1 Total cores, but going from 4 "high performance" and 4 "efficiency" to 8 "high performance" and 2 "efficiency. So should be more dramatic increase in performance than "20% more cores" would provide.
- skohan 5y agoIs there a tradeoff in terms of power consumption?
- hajile 5y agoIn A15, Anandtech claims the Efficiency cores are 1/3 the performance, but 1/10 the power. They should be looking at (effectively) doubling the power consumption over M1 with just the CPUs and assuming they don't increase clockspeeds. Going from 8 to 16 or 32 GPU cores is another massive power increase.
- barelysapient 5y agoI wonder if Apple will give us a 'long-haul' mode where the system is locked to only the energy efficient cores and settings. I us developer types would love a computer that survives 24 hours on battery.
- modulusshift 5y agomacOS Monterey coming out on the 25th has a new Low Power Mode feature that may do just that. That said, these Macs are incredibly efficient for light use, you may already get 24 hrs of battery life with your workload. Not counting screen off time.
- sulam 5y agoYes, it depends on what you're doing, but if you can watch 21 hours of video, many people will be able to do more than 24 hours of development.
- klelatti 5y agoIn this context the absence of the 27 inch iMac was interesting. If these SoC were not deemed to be 'right' for the bigger iMac then possibly a more CPU focused / developer focused SoC may be in the works for the iMac?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wmf 5y agoNah, it'll be the same M1 Max. Just wait a few months like with the 24" iMac.
- klelatti 5y agoYou're probably right. Maybe they have inventory to work through!
- sroussey 5y agoYeah, M1 Pro/Max on iMac 30” likely in 2022 H1. Mini also, I imagine.
- matthew_kuiash 5y agoYup. Once I saw the 24" iMac I knew the 27" had had it's chips. 30" won't actually be much bigger than the 27" if the bezels shrink to almost nothing - which seems to be the trend.
- meerita 5y agoI wish 34" iMac Pro M1 Max.
- nicoburns 5y agoThey might also have supply constraints on these new chips. I suspect they are going to sell a lot of these new MacBook Pros
- 5y ago
- baybal2 5y agoActually no "extra" chip area in comparison to x86 based solution. They just throw away so much of cruft from the die like PCIE PHYs, and x86 legacy I/O with large area analog circuitry. Redundant complex DMA, and memory controller IPs are also thrown away. Clock, and power rails on the SoC are also probably taking less space because of more shared circuitry. Same with self-test, debug, fusing blocks, and other small tidbits.
- azinman2 5y agoThis is very interesting and first time I’ve heard / thought about this. Wonder how much power efficiency comes from exactly these things?
- baybal2 5y agoPCI is quite power hungry when it works on full trottle. The seemed power efficiency when PCIE was going 1.0 2.0 3.0 ... was due to dynamic power control, and link sleep. On top of it, they simply don't haul memory nonstop over PCIE anymore, since data going to/from GPU is simply not moving anywhere.
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoReally curious if the memory bandwidth is entirely available to the CPU if the GPU is idle. An nvidia RTX3090 has nearly 1TB/s bandwidth, so the GPU is clearly going to use as much of the 400GB/s as possible. Other unified architectures have multiple channels or synchronization to memory, such that no one part of the system can access the full bandwidth. But if the CPU can access all 400GB/s, that is an absolute game changer for anything memory bound. Like 10x faster than an i9 I think?
- londons_explore 5y agoI suspect the GPU is never really idle. Even simple screen refresh blending say 5 layers and outputting it to a 4k screen is 190Gbits at 144 Hz.
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoDon't know much about the graphics on an M1. Does it not render to a framebuffer? Is that framebuffer spread over all 4 memory banks? Can't wait to read all about it.
- simonh 5y agoThe updates from the Asahi Linux team are fantastic for getting insights into the M1 architecture. They've not really dug deep into the GPU yet, but that's coming soon.
- snek_case 5y agoDon't Apple iPhones use an adaptive refresh rate nowadays?
- andy_ppp 5y agoIndeed ProMotion is coming to these new MacBooks too.
- modulusshift 5y agoApple put ProMotion in the built in display, so while it can ramp up to 120Hz, it'll idle at more like 24 Hz when showing static content. (the iPad Pro goes all the way down to 10Hz, but some early sources seem to say 24Hz for these MacBook Pros.) There may also be panel self refresh involved, in which case a static image won't even need that much. I bet the display coprocessors will expose the adaptive refresh functionality over the external display connectors as well.
- spicybright 5y agoI'm going to sound dumb for this, but how difficult do any of you think it would be to make a computer with 2 M1 chips? Or even 4?
- sys_64738 5y agoI think the issue is OS management of tasks to prevent cpu 1 from having to access memory of cpu 2.
- davrosthedalek 5y agoI think the problem would be how one chip can access the memory of the other one. The big advantage in the M1xxxx is the unified memory. I don't think the chips have any hardware to support cache coherency and so on spanning more than one chip.
- biggieshellz 5y agoThey're not meant to go together like that -- there's not really an interconnect for it, or any pins on the package to enable something like that. Apple would have to design a new Mx SoC with something like that as an explicit design goal.
- lemoncucumber 5y agoThe M1 is a system-on-a-chip so AIUI there's a bunch of stuff on there that you wouldn't want two of.
- marcan_42 5y agoThat's not a problem, you just turn off what's redundant. AMD did the same thing with their original Threadripper/EPYC models.
- fulafel 5y agoYou would have to implement single system image abstraction, if you wanted more than a networked cluster of M1s in a box, in the OS using just software plus virtual memory. You'd use the PCIe as the interconnect. Similar has been done by other vendors for server systems, but it has tradeoffs that would probably not make sense to Apple now. A more realistic question would be what good hw multisocket SMP support would look like in M1 Max or later chips, as that would be a more logical thing to build if Apple wanted this.
- sys_64738 5y agoThe way I interpreted it is that it's like lego so they can add more fast cores or more efficiency cores depending on the platform needs. The successor generations will be new lego building blocks.
- ed_elliott_asc 5y agoSurely the shared ram between cpu and gpu is the killer feature - zero copy and up to 64gb ram available for the gpu!
- RantyDave 5y agoYes, but it's a double edged sword. It means you're using relatively slow ram for the GPU, and that the GPU takes memory bandwidth away from the CPU as well. Traditionally we've ended up with something that looks like Intel's kinda crappy integrated video. The copying process was never that much of a big deal, but paying for 8GB of graphics ram really is.
- davedx 5y ago> The copying process was never that much of a big deal I don't know about that? Texture memory management in games can be quite painful. You have to consider different hardware setups and being able to keep the textures you need for a certain scene in memory (or not, in which case, texture thrashing).
- djmips 5y agoThe copying process was quite a barrier to using compute (general purpose GPU) to augment CPU processing and you had to ensure that the work farmed to the GPU was worth the cost of the to/from costs. Game consoles of late have generally had unified memory (UMA) and it's quite a nice advantage because moving data is a significant bottleneck. Using Intel's integrated video as a way to assess the benefits of unified memory is off target. Intel had a multitude of design goals for their integrated GPU and UMA was only one aspect so it's not so easy to single that out for any shortcomings that you seem to be alluding to.
- GeekyBear 5y agoIf you're looking at the SKU with the high GPU core count and 64 Gigs of LPDDR5, the total memory bandwidth (400 GBps) isn't that far off from the bandwidth a discrete GPU would have to it's local pool of memory. You also have an (estimated from die shots) 64 megabyte SRAM system level cache and large L2 and L1 CPU caches, but you are indeed sharing the memory bandwidth between the CPU and GPU. I'm looking forward to these getting into the hands of testers.
- the_arun 5y agoCould we use M1 chips on non-apple boards? If yes, I wish Apple releases these for non mac os consumption. Eg. Running linux servers in the cloud.
- priyanmuthu 5y agoWasn't there a rumor that AMD was creating ARM chips? It will be great if we have ARM versions of EPYC chips.
- chasil 5y agoAMD's equivalent of the Intel Management Engine (ME) is based on ARM, I think. Intel used to use "ARC" cores, but recently converted to and i486.
- chasil 5y agoThis is the ARM core that lives inside AMD Xen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Proces...
- monocasa 5y agoThey were, but have stopped talking about that for years. The project is probably canceled; I've heard Jim Keller talk about how that work was happening simultaneously with Zen 1.
- zik 5y agoI'd love to see someone do a serious desktop RISC-V processor.
- culpable_pickle 5y agoWhy? There are plenty of server oriented ARM platforms available for use (See AWS Graviton). What benefit do you feel Apple’s platform gives over existing ones?
- 5y ago
- cududa 5y agoEdit: I was wrong! Thanks for pointing it out Not exactly. M1 CPU, GPU, and RAM were all capped in the same package. New ones appear to be more a single board soldered onto mainboard, with a discrete CPU, GPU, and RAM package each capped individually if their "internals" promo video is to be believed (and it usually is an exact representation of the shipping product) https://twitter.com/cullend/status/1450203779148783616?s=20 https://twitter.com/cullend/status/1450203779148783616?s=20 Suspect this is a great way for them to manage demand and various yields by having 2 CPU's (or one, if the difference between pro/ max is yield on memory bandwidth) and discrete RAM/ GPU components
- modulusshift 5y agoCPU and GPU is one die, you're looking at RAM chips on each side of the package. The M1 also had the RAM separate but on package. M1: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn
- KMnO4 5y ago> I'm still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end. They’ll still do all workloads, but are optimized for certain workloads. How is that any different than say, a Xeon or EPYC cpu designed for highly threaded (server/scientific computing) applications?
- theshadowknows 5y agoI know nothing about hardware, basically. Do Apple’s new GPU cores come close to the capabilities of discrete GPUs like what are used for gaming/scientific applications? Or are those cards a whole different thing?
- dannyw 5y ago1. If you're a gamer, this seems comparable to a 3070 Laptop, which is comparable to a 3060 Desktop. 2. If you're a ML researcher you use CUDA (which only works on NVIDIA cards), they have basically a complete software lock unless you want to spend an undefined number of X hundreds of hours fixing and troubleshooting compatibility issues.
- domesmack 5y agoThere has been an M1 fork of Tensorflow almost since the chip launched last year. I believe Apple did the leg work. It’s a hoop to jump through, yes, and no ones training big image models or transformers with this, but I imagine students or someone sandboxing a problem offline would benefit from the increased performance over CPU only. https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-performance-on-mac.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-...
- ngcc_hk 5y agoSeem on the long term game here my dear all. Have amd sponsor that kind of activities. Or intel. …
- ashtonkem 5y ago> I'm still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end. You'd have to be extremely old to remember that era. Lots of stuff important to making computers work got split off into separate chips away from the CPU pretty early into mass computing, such as sound, graphics, and networking. We've also been sending a lot of compute from the CPU into the GPU as late for both graphics and ML purposes. Lately it seems like the trend has been taking these specialized peripheral chips and moving them back into SoC packages. Apple's approach here seems to be an evolutionary step on top of say, an Intel chip with integrated graphics, rather than a revolutionary step away from the era of general purpose computing.
- growt 5y agoDoes an Intel 286 without coprocessor count? C64? I remember those, but I wouldn't say I'm extremely old (just regular old).
- musicale 5y agoThe C64 was discontinued in 1994 but is technically still available in 2021 as the C64 Mini. ;-)
- growt 5y agoThe C64 mini runs on an ARM processor, so that doesn't count in this context. Also I just learned that the processor in the C64 had two coprocessors for sound and graphics (?). So maybe that also doesn't count.
- jinto36 5y agoThe C64 had the famous SID chip (MOS 6581) for sound. Famous in the chiptune scene at any rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6581 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6581
- WorldMaker 5y agoThe IBM PC that debuted with the 286 was the PC/AT ("Advanced Technology", hah) that is best known for introducing the AT bus later called the ISA bus that led to the proliferation of video cards, sound cards, and other expansion cards that made the PC what it is today. I'm actually not sure there ever was a "true CPU computer age" where all processing was CPU-bound/CPU-based. Even the deservedly beloved MOS 6502 processor that powered everything for a hot decade or so was considered merely a "micro-controller" rather than a "micro-processor" and nearly every use of the MOS 6502 involved a lot of machine-specific video chips, memory management chips. The NES design lasted so long in part because toward then end cartridges would sometimes have entirely custom processing chips pulling work off the MOS 6502. Even the mainframe era term itself "Central Processing Unit" has always sort of implied it always works in tandem with other "processing units", it's just the most central. (In some mainframe designs I think this was even quite literal in floorplan.) Of course too, when your CPU is a massive tower full of boards that make up individual operations and very the opposite of an Integrated Circuit, it's quite tough to call those a "general purpose CPU" as we imagine them today.
- ece 5y agoIf we're going to keep freedom in computing, let's hope "general purpose computing" is the distinction that remains for exactly that purpose. Accelerators/Memory are just being brought on die/package here, which has been happening for a while. Integrated memory controllers come to mind.
- firemelt 5y agoanyone know what is the most optimum performance/dollars setup for this m1pro?