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Apple M1 Pro and Max Surprises
- Moosdijk 5y ago"Intel fans reacted predictably but a more reasoned, authoritative evaluation came from an unexpected source." Oh come on.
- pdpi 5y agoTo be fair, "guy who used to be President of the Windows division at Microsoft" is about as authoritative a source as you're going to get on this sort of stuff.
- macintux 5y agoIt’s been fascinating to see how often Sinofsky comes across like an Apple fanboy (and I say that as an unashamed fan of Apple). He seems like he genuinely appreciates the way Apple conducts business.
- doctor_eval 5y ago“Intel fans reacted predictably by turning on at full speed and waking up the rest of the house”.
- urthor 5y agoI do think we have to temper the level of surprise somewhat. The key thing in consumer silicon chip design is always individual core design (or designs, there's Firestorm and Icestorm in big little). That's what matters for single threaded workloads. Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are just exceedingly rare. Plus it's exceedingly pointless to do lengthy multi-threaded development on a laptop, it's going to overheat and under-clock. SSH into a cloud instance and develop in an identical environment to where you deploy. Apple vastly exceeded expectations by making enormous silicon dice, and tying in vastly more GPU, bandwidth, and parallelism than expected. To the joy of video editors everywhere (which cannot be done over ssh). But for people who watch closely, the M1 Max delivered exactly what was expected, plus a gargantuan GPU and memory bandwidth. The M1 Max is still ultimately the A14's Firestorm/Icestorm cores, in a MBP form factor, delivering amazing idle and low power consumption performance, and single threaded that matches Intel/AMD's desktop chips, at a far lower PPW because of the node shrink. Given that the A15 still features the Firestorm/Icestorm core design, it's almost guaranteed that we'll have to wait till 2023 to see a more than marginal uplift in single threaded workloads and low power performance.
- simonh 5y ago>Given that the A15 still features the Firestorm/Icestorm core design... The A15 uses Avalanche performance cores and Blizzard efficiency cores. I'm not sure how different they are, except that Blizzard in particular is a lot faster that Icestorm.
- urthor 5y agoAh that makes sense. The high performance cores are very similar iirc, accounting for binning and density. But if Apple has upgraded just the efficiency cores this time around that makes sense.
- vardump 5y ago"Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are just exceedingly rare." Really? I've observed these kind of consumer workloads getting more and more common in recent years. In any case I wouldn't call them exceedingly rare.
- Koiwai 5y ago"getting more and more common" and "exceedingly rare" does NOT actually contradict each other.
- rjknight 5y agoIf they're exceedingly rare now, despite having become more and more common, what were they before? Super-exceedingly rare?
- ggm 5y agoffmpeg to reduce/transcode off air digital TV would be my expected regular use case. If this design can do this faster I and a lot of other people will be delighted.
- iso1210 5y agoThat's a massively niche use case, and I say that as someone sat in a TV OB truck editing an ffmpeg video filter at this exact moment.
- NetOpWibby 5y agoI recognize the author’s avatar and name! Amazing he hasn’t changed it in all these years. Several years ago, Nilay Patel of the Verge reviewed an Apple product (think it was a phone) and lamented that it didn’t have style. That comment unleashed a wave of memes and ridicule towards him because he was known for wearing a spike bracelet with every outfit. Well, I found the hoopla hilarious and jumped in a back and forth Patel was having with the author of this article. I was promptly blocked and still am to this day. I forget but quickly remember when I follow a link via Slack. Totally off-topic ramble, carry on.
- ronyfadel 5y agoGassée made the comment: https://www.gawker.com/adult-website-editor-throws-twitter-tantrum-over-his-br-1697459743 https://www.gawker.com/adult-website-editor-throws-twitter-t...
- twic 5y ago> Patel [...] leaving home every day looking like GWAR's webmaster Amazing.
- underwater 5y agoThe guy has a point. He made a comment about a personal style preference, not a comment on the stylishness overall. And he wears something for sentimental reasons. The blog post was a cheap shot.
- meepmorp 5y agoWearing it for sentimental reasons doesn’t make it not tacky.
- underwater 5y agoSure, but he seems to know that it's tacky and not stylish.
- makeitdouble 5y agoIf the author doesn't ring a bell, he's an ex prominent Apple exec. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gassée https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gassée
- arcticbull 5y agoGassee also founded Be. BeOS was always a pretty remarkable piece of engineering. I seem to recall the future of Apple hung in the balance, and they were looking to acquire either NeXT (and Steve) as the foundation for the modern Mac - or Gassee and Be. Sort of a fun parallel universe of what could have been.
- nielsbot 5y agoGlad they went with NeXT though--Obj-C is a much better framework language than C++. I honestly think Objective-C is a big part of Apple's OS success. Edit: Building system APIs based on message passing provides a lot of flexibility and capability without having to worry about ABI compatibility or object layout. Message passing is good for hiding implementation details. Obj-C also provides what Swift now calls protocol-oriented programming. Define a protocol and any object no matter its type can implement that protocol and be, say, a delegate for a long running operation. Etc. This allowed Apple to innovate in their OS, providing increasingly more functionality more rapidly than what seemed to be happening elsewhere. I think there's even more to this, but I'm tired.
- nielsbot 5y agoNot sure why the downvotes--someone care to comment? FWIW I've written frameworks in both Obj-C and C++ (macOS kernel)
- ninedays 5y agoIf I had to guess, I would say that the HN crowd is not fond of unverified claims that are not backed by any source other than the person personal opinion. > "Obj-C is a much better framework language than C++. How and why is that true?" Anyone could throw these sort of claims about absolutely anything and doesn't elevate the debate at all. > "I honestly think Objective-C is a big part of Apple's OS success." How and why is that true? Same thing.
- moksly 5y agoI thought it was sort of common knowledge that Apple was going to update the MacBook Pro with a Msomething powerhouse following the other updates, but maybe I’m just completely out of the loop on hardware rumours? Anyway, I don’t think it’s surprising that the company which has one of the best global production and logistics operations in the world is capable of building good processors. It’s just another part of the puzzle after all. It’s just a shame that their design department still doesn’t seem to have learned it’s lesson from Jobs in that it once again has failed to build a product that is designed in a way that people want. Why they ever deviated from the MagSafe, why they added the weird screen Function bar and now why they’ve added a bezel to a ducking laptop is really beyond me? Like, do they not use computers? But improving upon the supply chain by creating new powerful hardware? Absolutely within what I would expect from modern Apple.
- sharikous 5y agoApple's risky behavior has brought both failures and huge successes. They were the first to remove serial ports, floppy disks, internal modems, optical drives... And it turned out good even if you could say that's not what the people wanted. The touch bar, magsafe removal, etc.. were failures alright, I bet the notch won't be a failure, however
- nottorp 5y agoCheck this out: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/samsung-tablet-leak-shows-notched-display-just-like-in-the-new-macbook-pro/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/samsung-tablet-leak-... The notch is already being copied. Perhaps the wrong way.
- moksly 5y ago> And it turned out good even if you could say that's not what the people wanted. The difference, and what I probably failed to explain well enough. Is that these removals might not have been what people thought they wanted, but what Apple knew they did. With the touchbar, new keyboard, removal of the MagSafe, removal of the charger from iPhone boxes Apple has made things people didn’t actually want. The notch on the phone may have seen wide adoption, but in my anecdotal experience nobody likes it.
- Koiwai 5y ago"An authoritative, well-worth-the-read AnandTech article provides a graphic that helpfully compares the three devices:" That image came straight from apple's keynote.
- smilespray 5y agoFair enough, but the AnandTech article _was_ good and well worth reading. The article suggests Apples graphs weren't lying.
- Koiwai 5y agoYes M1Max is nice, or great, but in a mostly useless place.
- perryizgr8 5y agoThis is similar to how I feel. The internal chips are irrelevant if nobody else can buy and use them. The product is the laptop. People who are used to Apple laptops and like using them, will love this new laptop. People who did not look favourably upon Macbooks, still have no reason to, except maybe battery life. But even there, AMD laptops are reaching 9-10 hours easily, which may be more than good enough for many users.
- stepbeek 5y agoWhy?
- christkv 5y agoI wonder if apple will start using their own silicon for their own cloud servers.
- runeks 5y agoI hope they will, and I hope their cloud servers run Linux.
- wokwokwok 5y agoWhile there’s plenty of “told you so” -> “no you didn’t” being flung around here quite childishly, my read on this is: Apple surprised people by what these actually turned out to be. They’re better than folk expected. We’ll have to wait and see how that plays out in the long run, but I don’t really think it’s something to get worked up over. Yay, new cpus that don’t suck on a laptop that doesn’t suck. I know it’s a low bar to clear, but it still makes me happy.
- genewitch 5y agoI have a 4800H with a 1070 mobile GPU, 32GB ram, 512 nvme and 1TB sshd. I paid about $1000 all in for that ($800 laptop plus ram and storage). The m1 stuff has "tensor" cores and allegedly a faster GPU - that is, it's faster at some things my GPU handles for me, such as h264/h265 encoding. Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead? Ignore the 140W PSU!
- perryizgr8 5y ago> Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead? You probably shouldn't. Your laptop is more than adequate for your tasks. It may even be better in some respects (you can play some AAA games if you want).
- qaq 5y agowell I would guess screen is way nicer on MBP which might be something one cares about having to stare at it all day (not saying you should switch)
- qayxc 5y agoIf the machine is used primarily with external monitors that point becomes much less important, though. Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag. You can get a nice portable monitor and a very good stationary monitor for just the price difference.
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- anentropic 5y ago> The first thing to say about the M1 Pro and M1 Max, Apple’s new homegrown processors, is that we misunderestimated them. trying to work out if this malapropism was used ironically...
- smilespray 5y agoOf course.
- klelatti 5y agoThe point that seems to have got less attention than it deserves is the balance of resources spent on CPU vs GPU - ie M1 Max is a big GPU with a CPU attached. Yes these machines are used by lots of video editors etc but it does seem to be symbolic of a general shift towards more compute being done on the GPU - now even on laptops - and not just for video. And having more GPU compute available at your fingertips will only reinforce that trend.
- throwawaywindev 5y agoHas to be for their mixed reality product rumored to launch next year that they’ll want native apps to be developed for. There are only so many ProRes video editors out there.
- zarzavat 5y agoIt's just reversion to the mean. M1 had a beefy CPU and lightweight GPU. M1 Pro/Max is a beefy CPU and a beefy GPU.
- klelatti 5y agoApple spent 100% of its 23 billion transistor budget Max vs Pro on GPU resources - that’s probably indicative that GPU compute is being prioritised.
- greendave 5y agoYep, just as they did with the 2013 Mac Pro. We all remember how well that worked out. There's a substantial subset of high-performance computing tasks that are limited by GPU performance. But that's far from the whole equation.
- kohlerm 5y agoHe mentions "containers". Anyone knows what he meant?
- lucsky 5y agoThe machines that contain the M1Pro and M1Max, aka the new MacBook Pros.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoAs someone who has wanted an ARM laptop for decades (and also thought an ARM tablet would be cool) I mostly see this as a return to what was always possible and that monopoly interests held us back from. It's like a government during an oil boom. They can get away with a lot of shady stuff as everyone is feeling the wealth. It's only much later that you can soberly analyse how much was stolen from the people and figure out if you are in Iraq, Venezuela or Norway in terms of the benefits of Moore's Law and how that got spread around the economy that made it possible. If there's Billionaires anywhere in the picture then something probably went wrong.
- klelatti 5y agoVery good point. I suppose it's natural to cheer on the technology leader - and Intel is and has been a serious company who has invested a lot to move fab technology forward. The efforts to build a consumer brand started by Andy Grove have probably also helped quite a bit. Nevertheless, its striking how little focus there has been on Intel's market share and the lack of real competition on the desktop and server. Good that that's changing.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI may just be old, but I remember them being busted for literally paying dell (and others) billions not to use their competitors. Which is big flashing arrow pointing at monopoly profits. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-with-1-45-billion-fine-in-europe-for-unfair-and-damaging-practices-against-amd https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-wit...
- JeremyNT 5y agoWhat's sad here is that a proprietary, "walled garden" style vendor like Apple is the one who decided to push TSMC/ARM like this. It's not like there's magic Apple smoke in there. It didn't have to be this way. We could have had a good AMD ARM platform instead. But they, like Intel, had become complacent (and this despite their position as fighting for Intel's table scraps in the x86-64 world). The failure to take risks leaves us all worse off. Intel needs to exist, if only to prevent a TSMC monopoly at this point, but what good is AMD if they can't even compete with Apple when outsourcing to TSMC?
- SantiagoElf 5y agoTo me its getting a bit surreal with Apple Silicon performance. Sure, it's great. I know it's shocking that the company that produced in-house ARM chips that are top performers in the mobile space for the last 10+ years - has made a bigger chip and shockingly(!!!) it's good. So, the biggest company in the world has created a semi-custom closed ARM design, running on their properiatery Operating Systems - iOS/iPAD OS/MacOS, that run only on their absolutely unable to repair/upgrade machines, that are essentially bricks of alliminium with a display. Me personally have a ASUS ROG STRIX G15 laptop with Ryzen 9 5900HX and 2 x 32GB DDR4 3200 of memory - I can run ot it Windows, Linux, MacOS, BSD, etc. 99% of the time it's connected to the power outlet and I can overclock it. I don't get the Apple Sillicon excitement, tbh.
- konart 5y ago>99% of the time it's connected to the power outlet This. Now go outside and try this laptop as a mobile device. What's the point of comparing what is basically a workstation to a relatively thin mobile device? >I don't get the Apple Silicon excitement, tbh. You get very power-efficient mobile device. If the mobile part is of no interest for you - than there is nothing to talk about really.
- SantiagoElf 5y agoI already have a very power-efficient mobile device - it's called iPhone. :)
- shepherdjerred 5y agonow try to replace your laptop with it because that’s what was being talked about
- SantiagoElf 5y agoI can join teams/zoom meetings, read emails, reply to emails with my iPhone :)
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- alek_m 5y agoHow come the new MacBook Pros are available for order all around the world, but in SG the website says ‘Check back later for availability’
- ThreeOne 5y agoIS this the beginning of the end of modular PC's? Is the future SOC?
- nebula8804 5y agoMaybe modular SOC? Have motherboards with a standardized pinout but the CPU has RAM/GPU soldered on. You could choose a CPU with productivity graphics performance, HTPC performance or high end gaming performance with associated different RAM sizes. Time to short Corsair/G.SKILL/etc.