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I think the higher memory is also a huge win, with support for up to 64gb.
by fotta 5y ago
I 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