7 ms·

It wouldn't be a surprise that a CPU that can't run most of the software out there (because that software is x86) and has ditched all compatibility and started

It wouldn't be a surprise that a CPU that can't run most of the software out there (because that software is x86) and has ditched all compatibility and started a design from scratch, can beat last-gen CPUs from competitors. For specific apps and workloads, for which it has accelerators. But here I am, with a pretty thin and very durable laptop that has a 6 core Xeon in it. It gets hot, it has huge fans, and it completely obliterates any M1 laptop. I don't mean it's twice as fast. I mean things run at 5x or faster vs an M1. Now, this is a new version of the M1, but it's an incremental 1-year improvement. It'll be very slightly faster than the old gen. By ditching Intel, what apple did is making sure their pro line - which is about power, not mobility, is no longer a competitor, and never will be. Because when you want a super fast chip, you don't design up from a freaking cell phone CPU. You design down from a server CPU. You know, to get actual work done, professionally. But yeah, I do see their pro battery is 11 hours while mine usually dies at 9. Interesting how I got my computer plugged in most of the time though...

imwillofficial 5y ago
I mean sure, compare your 25lbs Lenovo P52 with a 3lb MacBook Air. Not really apples to apples there bud.
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  I love how you read the first line, ignore the rest of the paragraph addressing your specific point, then proudly strut around like you called out a gotcha. "bud." Dell Precision. 6 core xeon, 128GB RAM, 9 hour battery life. Thin and under 7lb. Metal and solid, can run over it w/ a car just like the Lenovo you're talking about. Has had a 4k screen and keyboards that don't break or imprint on the display. 5 years ago. Apple makes shiny toys and calls them "pro." What they don't do, is compete in the actual pro market. Even when they had intel chips, they were a generation behind everyone else. This is because of the design-first mentality. And there's a market for that. Just not the pro market. Because we got shit to do, and the slower it's done, the less we get paid. My laptop is like 5x or more faster that the Air. Unless this new apple-pro is 5x faster than the air, they're not competing. And it won't even be twice as fast. But I already said that, and this paragraph is also long, so I don't think you have the mental capacity to have read this far down. After all, 1/16 of a page of text takes minutes. Now, since you appear to be an apple user, you're probably used to minutes. I just don't think you spend the time you wait for your script reading.
  - microtonal 5y ago
    Dell Precision. 6 core xeon, 128GB RAM, 9 hour battery life. [...] My laptop is like 5x or more faster that the Air. Very unlikely. You seem to go out of your way not to mention the Xeon's part number. So what Xeon is it?
    - aenis 5y ago
      Yup. I, too, call BS on that. I do own a precision laptop with a 8 core xeon and this thing is heavy, noisy and can't work on battery for more than 2hrs under normal workload.
      - microtonal 5y ago
        Just for fun, I looked up the most expensive Dell Precision Xeon laptop, which seems to be the Precision 7760 with a Xeon W-11955M. With a GeekBench score of 1647 ST/9650 MT, this $5377.88 machine is just a bit faster than the passively cooled $999 MacBook Air with 1744 ST/7600 MT. The MacBook Pro 14" 10 core is better than the Dell Xeon in about every way, performance, price, performance per watt, etc.
        soylentnewsorg 5y ago
        This is the xeon that's in the laptop. the geekbench score is base on running tests on the low power integrated graphics instead of the discreet NVIDIA RTX GPU. the numbers you idiots keep quoting are completely bogus. anywise losers, enjoy your apples, i got real work to do. I run about 50k worth of software licenses on the laptop and generate millions in revenue per quarter with it. That's why it's a pro laptop, and I'm sure my company paid about double your number after you add in dell's pro support plus. Pro laptop for pro work. You're a kid who wants toys, but wants to say you're using professional equipment. I got something that's like the pro mac laptop. work gave that to me too for secondary tasks. it's called a dell latitude. it runs the latest i7 and no ecc memory. great for chromecasting porn and playing games in the browser, 13 hours of battery unlike the precision's 9, and much lighter. they just don't call it a pro.
      - 5y ago
Entalpi 5y ago
Intel tried to ”design down” their uArch. Also, there is a TON of pro Mac users. If we define ’pro’ as getting paid for work done on Macs.. Not to mention M1 emulates x86 pretty darn well..
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  I do get it - you define pro as a guy at work running his backup application in a web browser, and the hipster at starbucks doing "graphic design." I define pro as "a workstation." The m1 does not emulate x86. You literally don't know what you're talking about. Which explains why you define a kid's toy as "pro." I get it - you're getting paid. So is the barista at the starbucks you work from. Kia might define their kia optima as a racing car too, because it's got some horsepower. Except we're at an indy500.
  - tarsinge 5y ago
    Just say it: using a laptop on battery power is for hipsters.
    - boopmaster 5y ago
      Right? I’m curious what pro’s do “at the indy 500”. Most devs where I work use 15” macs and probably a blend of apps from jetbrains toolbox. Mostly connected to power outlets to be fair. So we’re talking local installs of spring boot app Java servers, front end Webserver, an IDE to work on one of those, because opening a second one on a Intel mac will either run the dev out of RAM or the heat will cause a shutdown. The thing is, the corporate DELL windows machines available were largely unsuitable to dev work due to the trashy interfaces (low resolution screens, bad trackpads, battery life so bad you can’t make it through a 2 hour meeting undocked). The Windows laptops available really failed hard when they needed to be laptops.
      - KptMarchewa 5y ago
        It's fine to work sometime on battery. Except, after 5 hours, marginal utility decreases, and 8 hours it goes to zero. Why would I need more than one day?
alwillis 5y ago
But here I am, with a pretty thin and very durable laptop that has a 6 core Xeon in it. It gets hot, it has huge fans, and it completely obliterates any M1 laptop. I don't mean it's twice as fast. I mean things run at 5x or faster vs an M1. Probably not faster than an M1 Pro and definitely not faster than the M1 Max. Your machine doesn't have a 512-bit wide memory interface running at over 400GB/s. Does the Xeon processor in your laptop have 192KB of instruction cache and 24MB of L2 cache? Every ARM instruction is the same size, enabling many instructions to be in flight all at once, unlike the x86-64 architecture where instructions vary in size and you can't have nearly as many instructions in flight at once. Apples-to-apple: at the same chip frequency, an M1 has higher throughput than a Xeon and most any other x86 chip. This is basic RISC vs. CISC stuff that's been true forever. It's especially true now as increases in clock speeds has dramatically slowed and the only way to get significantly more performance is by adding more cores. On just raw performance, I'd take the 8 high-performance cores in an M1 Pro vs. the 6 cores in your Xeon any day of the week and twice on Sunday. And of course, when it comes to performance per watt, there's no comparison and that's really the story here. Now, this is a new version of the M1, but it's an incremental 1-year improvement. If you read AnandTech [1] on this, you'll see this is not the case—there have been huge jumps in several areas. Incremental would have resulted in the same memory bandwidth with faster cores. And 6 high-performance cores vs. the 4 in the original M1. Except Apple didn't do that—they doubled the number to 8 high-performance cores and doubled the memory width, etc. There were 8 GPU cores on the original M1 and how you can get up to 32! Apple stated the Pro and the Max have 1.7x of the CPU performance of Intel's 8-core Core i7-11800H with 70% lower power consumption. There's nothing incremental about that. By ditching Intel, what apple did is making sure their pro line - which is about power, not mobility, is no longer a competitor, and never will be. Pro can mean different things to different people. For professional content creators, these new laptops are super professional. Someone could take off from NYC and fly all the way to LA while working on 16-inch MacBook Pro with a 120 MHz mini LED 7.7 million pixel screen that can display a billion colors in 4k or 8k video—battery only. If you were on the same flight working on the same content, you'd be out of power long before you crossed the Mississippi while the Mac guy is still working. At half the weight of your laptop but a dramatically better display and performance when it comes to video editing and rendering multiple streams of HDR video. The 16-inch model has 21 hours of video playback which probably comes in handy in many use cases. Here's a video of a person using the first generation, 8 GB RAM M1 Mac to edit 8K video; the new machines are much more capable: https://youtu.be/HxH3RabNWfE https://youtu.be/HxH3RabNWfE. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-m1-max-giant-new-socs-with-allout-performance https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-...
iSnow 5y ago
>Because when you want a super fast chip, you don't design up from a freaking cell phone CPU. You design down from a server CPU. Is that really true? I don't have any intricate chip knowledge, but it rings false. Whether ARM is coming from a phone background or the Xeon from a server background, what matters in the end is the actual chip used. Maybe phone-derived chips even have an advantage because they are designed to conserve power whereas server chips are designed to harvest every little ounce of performance. IDK a lot about power states in server chips, but it would make sense if they aren't as adapted to rapidly step down power use as a phone chip. Now, you might be happy with a hot leaf-blower and that's fine. But I would say the market is elsewhere: silent, long-running, light notebooks that can throw around performance if need be, you strike me as an outlier. Pro laptops should have a beefy CPU, great screen, really fast SSD, long battery life, lots of RAM which (presumably) your notebook features, but the new M somethings seemingly as well. But in the end, people buy laptops so they can use them on their lap occasionally. And I know my HP is getting uncomfy hot, the same was said about the intel laptops from Apple I think. Apple doesn't need to have the one fastest laptop out there, they need a credible claim to punching in the upper performance echelon - and I think with their M* family, they are there.
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  You actually have it correct. When you start with an instruction set designed to conserve power, you don't get "max power." The server chips were designed with zero power considerations in mind - the solution to "too much power" is simply "slap a house-sized heatsink on it." >Apple doesn't need to have the one fastest laptop out there correct. My complaint, which I have reiterated about 50 times to shiny iphone idiots on here who don't do any real number crunching for work, is when the industry calls "mid tier" something that apple calls "pro" - apple is deceiving the consumer with marketing. The new laptops are a competition to Dell's Latitude and XPS lines. Not their pro lines. Those pro laptops weigh 7lb, and have a huge, loud fan exhaust on the back so they can clock at 5GHz for an hour. They have 128GB of RAM - ECC RAM, because if you have that much RAM w/o ECC, you have a high chance of bit errors. There are many things you can do to speed up your stuff, if you waste electricity. The issue is not that apple doesn't make a good laptop. It's that they're lying to the consumer. As always. Do you remember when they marketed their acrylic little cube mini-desktop? It was "a supercomputer." They do this as a permanent tactic - sell overpriced underperforming things, and lie with marketing. Like using industry standard terms to describe things not up to that standard.

imwillofficial 5y ago

I mean sure, compare your 25lbs Lenovo P52 with a 3lb MacBook Air. Not really apples to apples there bud.

soylentnewsorg 5y ago
I love how you read the first line, ignore the rest of the paragraph addressing your specific point, then proudly strut around like you called out a gotcha. "bud." Dell Precision. 6 core xeon, 128GB RAM, 9 hour battery life. Thin and under 7lb. Metal and solid, can run over it w/ a car just like the Lenovo you're talking about. Has had a 4k screen and keyboards that don't break or imprint on the display. 5 years ago. Apple makes shiny toys and calls them "pro." What they don't do, is compete in the actual pro market. Even when they had intel chips, they were a generation behind everyone else. This is because of the design-first mentality. And there's a market for that. Just not the pro market. Because we got shit to do, and the slower it's done, the less we get paid. My laptop is like 5x or more faster that the Air. Unless this new apple-pro is 5x faster than the air, they're not competing. And it won't even be twice as fast. But I already said that, and this paragraph is also long, so I don't think you have the mental capacity to have read this far down. After all, 1/16 of a page of text takes minutes. Now, since you appear to be an apple user, you're probably used to minutes. I just don't think you spend the time you wait for your script reading.
- microtonal 5y ago
  Dell Precision. 6 core xeon, 128GB RAM, 9 hour battery life. [...] My laptop is like 5x or more faster that the Air. Very unlikely. You seem to go out of your way not to mention the Xeon's part number. So what Xeon is it?
  - aenis 5y ago
    Yup. I, too, call BS on that. I do own a precision laptop with a 8 core xeon and this thing is heavy, noisy and can't work on battery for more than 2hrs under normal workload.
    - microtonal 5y ago
      Just for fun, I looked up the most expensive Dell Precision Xeon laptop, which seems to be the Precision 7760 with a Xeon W-11955M. With a GeekBench score of 1647 ST/9650 MT, this $5377.88 machine is just a bit faster than the passively cooled $999 MacBook Air with 1744 ST/7600 MT. The MacBook Pro 14" 10 core is better than the Dell Xeon in about every way, performance, price, performance per watt, etc.
      - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
        This is the xeon that's in the laptop. the geekbench score is base on running tests on the low power integrated graphics instead of the discreet NVIDIA RTX GPU. the numbers you idiots keep quoting are completely bogus. anywise losers, enjoy your apples, i got real work to do. I run about 50k worth of software licenses on the laptop and generate millions in revenue per quarter with it. That's why it's a pro laptop, and I'm sure my company paid about double your number after you add in dell's pro support plus. Pro laptop for pro work. You're a kid who wants toys, but wants to say you're using professional equipment. I got something that's like the pro mac laptop. work gave that to me too for secondary tasks. it's called a dell latitude. it runs the latest i7 and no ecc memory. great for chromecasting porn and playing games in the browser, 13 hours of battery unlike the precision's 9, and much lighter. they just don't call it a pro.
    - 5y ago

Entalpi 5y ago

Intel tried to ”design down” their uArch. Also, there is a TON of pro Mac users. If we define ’pro’ as getting paid for work done on Macs.. Not to mention M1 emulates x86 pretty darn well..

soylentnewsorg 5y ago
I do get it - you define pro as a guy at work running his backup application in a web browser, and the hipster at starbucks doing "graphic design." I define pro as "a workstation." The m1 does not emulate x86. You literally don't know what you're talking about. Which explains why you define a kid's toy as "pro." I get it - you're getting paid. So is the barista at the starbucks you work from. Kia might define their kia optima as a racing car too, because it's got some horsepower. Except we're at an indy500.
- tarsinge 5y ago
  Just say it: using a laptop on battery power is for hipsters.
  - boopmaster 5y ago
    Right? I’m curious what pro’s do “at the indy 500”. Most devs where I work use 15” macs and probably a blend of apps from jetbrains toolbox. Mostly connected to power outlets to be fair. So we’re talking local installs of spring boot app Java servers, front end Webserver, an IDE to work on one of those, because opening a second one on a Intel mac will either run the dev out of RAM or the heat will cause a shutdown. The thing is, the corporate DELL windows machines available were largely unsuitable to dev work due to the trashy interfaces (low resolution screens, bad trackpads, battery life so bad you can’t make it through a 2 hour meeting undocked). The Windows laptops available really failed hard when they needed to be laptops.
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      It's fine to work sometime on battery. Except, after 5 hours, marginal utility decreases, and 8 hours it goes to zero. Why would I need more than one day?

alwillis 5y ago

But here I am, with a pretty thin and very durable laptop that has a 6 core Xeon in it. It gets hot, it has huge fans, and it completely obliterates any M1 laptop. I don't mean it's twice as fast. I mean things run at 5x or faster vs an M1. Probably not faster than an M1 Pro and definitely not faster than the M1 Max. Your machine doesn't have a 512-bit wide memory interface running at over 400GB/s. Does the Xeon processor in your laptop have 192KB of instruction cache and 24MB of L2 cache? Every ARM instruction is the same size, enabling many instructions to be in flight all at once, unlike the x86-64 architecture where instructions vary in size and you can't have nearly as many instructions in flight at once. Apples-to-apple: at the same chip frequency, an M1 has higher throughput than a Xeon and most any other x86 chip. This is basic RISC vs. CISC stuff that's been true forever. It's especially true now as increases in clock speeds has dramatically slowed and the only way to get significantly more performance is by adding more cores. On just raw performance, I'd take the 8 high-performance cores in an M1 Pro vs. the 6 cores in your Xeon any day of the week and twice on Sunday. And of course, when it comes to performance per watt, there's no comparison and that's really the story here. Now, this is a new version of the M1, but it's an incremental 1-year improvement. If you read AnandTech [1] on this, you'll see this is not the case—there have been huge jumps in several areas. Incremental would have resulted in the same memory bandwidth with faster cores. And 6 high-performance cores vs. the 4 in the original M1. Except Apple didn't do that—they doubled the number to 8 high-performance cores and doubled the memory width, etc. There were 8 GPU cores on the original M1 and how you can get up to 32! Apple stated the Pro and the Max have 1.7x of the CPU performance of Intel's 8-core Core i7-11800H with 70% lower power consumption. There's nothing incremental about that. By ditching Intel, what apple did is making sure their pro line - which is about power, not mobility, is no longer a competitor, and never will be. Pro can mean different things to different people. For professional content creators, these new laptops are super professional. Someone could take off from NYC and fly all the way to LA while working on 16-inch MacBook Pro with a 120 MHz mini LED 7.7 million pixel screen that can display a billion colors in 4k or 8k video—battery only. If you were on the same flight working on the same content, you'd be out of power long before you crossed the Mississippi while the Mac guy is still working. At half the weight of your laptop but a dramatically better display and performance when it comes to video editing and rendering multiple streams of HDR video. The 16-inch model has 21 hours of video playback which probably comes in handy in many use cases. Here's a video of a person using the first generation, 8 GB RAM M1 Mac to edit 8K video; the new machines are much more capable: https://youtu.be/HxH3RabNWfE https://youtu.be/HxH3RabNWfE. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-m1-max-giant-new-socs-with-allout-performance https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-...

iSnow 5y ago

>Because when you want a super fast chip, you don't design up from a freaking cell phone CPU. You design down from a server CPU. Is that really true? I don't have any intricate chip knowledge, but it rings false. Whether ARM is coming from a phone background or the Xeon from a server background, what matters in the end is the actual chip used. Maybe phone-derived chips even have an advantage because they are designed to conserve power whereas server chips are designed to harvest every little ounce of performance. IDK a lot about power states in server chips, but it would make sense if they aren't as adapted to rapidly step down power use as a phone chip. Now, you might be happy with a hot leaf-blower and that's fine. But I would say the market is elsewhere: silent, long-running, light notebooks that can throw around performance if need be, you strike me as an outlier. Pro laptops should have a beefy CPU, great screen, really fast SSD, long battery life, lots of RAM which (presumably) your notebook features, but the new M somethings seemingly as well. But in the end, people buy laptops so they can use them on their lap occasionally. And I know my HP is getting uncomfy hot, the same was said about the intel laptops from Apple I think. Apple doesn't need to have the one fastest laptop out there, they need a credible claim to punching in the upper performance echelon - and I think with their M* family, they are there.

soylentnewsorg 5y ago
You actually have it correct. When you start with an instruction set designed to conserve power, you don't get "max power." The server chips were designed with zero power considerations in mind - the solution to "too much power" is simply "slap a house-sized heatsink on it." >Apple doesn't need to have the one fastest laptop out there correct. My complaint, which I have reiterated about 50 times to shiny iphone idiots on here who don't do any real number crunching for work, is when the industry calls "mid tier" something that apple calls "pro" - apple is deceiving the consumer with marketing. The new laptops are a competition to Dell's Latitude and XPS lines. Not their pro lines. Those pro laptops weigh 7lb, and have a huge, loud fan exhaust on the back so they can clock at 5GHz for an hour. They have 128GB of RAM - ECC RAM, because if you have that much RAM w/o ECC, you have a high chance of bit errors. There are many things you can do to speed up your stuff, if you waste electricity. The issue is not that apple doesn't make a good laptop. It's that they're lying to the consumer. As always. Do you remember when they marketed their acrylic little cube mini-desktop? It was "a supercomputer." They do this as a permanent tactic - sell overpriced underperforming things, and lie with marketing. Like using industry standard terms to describe things not up to that standard.