8 ms·

Gotta say my M1 exceeds all expectations. Virtually no fan noise, I almost thought it was broken until I had a better look. Performance wise it compiles my cod

Gotta say my M1 exceeds all expectations. Virtually no fan noise, I almost thought it was broken until I had a better look. Performance wise it compiles my code much much faster than my 2019. In terms of battery I can take it for a full day's work in town doing the same coding work, and there's no need to start looking for a charging point. Not even "just in case". I don't even have to think about maybe closing one of the apps, I just run it with 5 IDEs and 15 projects open, though that's probably down to having plenty of RAM rather than the CPU. The new architecture also doesn't make much difference. Stuff just works, though homebrew needs to be told it's not on Intel anymore (terraform breaks weirdly if you don't do this). There seem to be plenty of M1 versions for your generic coder stuff.

listless 5y ago
I love it. I just got the M1 Pro and it screams. Designing your own chip is a ballsy thing to do. I think it might be one of the most underrated innovations Apple has ever done. Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. But he's still delivering on innovation where it's typically stalled.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  They bought a dev team with heritage on the Alpha and StrongARM and assigned them a new task. Not that ballsy.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    An expensive and risky move that large businesses are loathe to do. This is the definition of ballsy.
    - motoboi 5y ago
      Apple has too many cash on their hands. God knows how many hyper well funded projects they have. Not my definition of balsy project. Balsy would be risking the business level of funding. This is peanuts money level of risk. They didn’t told anyone about it either, so no reputation risk also (how many failed projects at this point on apple we don’t even hear about?). So, in my humble opinion, not risky nor balsy. But a smart and rewarding move? FUCK YES!
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        You interesting take, thank you for sharing.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Yeah, but how many companies have you seen buy a brilliant team like that and then do nothing with it?
  - scarface74 5y ago
    Apple was also one of the original founders of ARM…
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Ballsy? They are the richest company on the planet, and the biggest risk to their business is stagnation. They have enough cash on hand to buy the international space station 3 times over. Investors are roasting them for being entirely dependant on iPhone sales for revenue. Where else are they going to invest this money? Having your own components is the most obvious way to strengthen their moat. If they took a step outside consumer electronics and invested into a new market, or invented something never seen before, which they can do 3 times over, then yeah, that would be ballsy.
  - Closi 5y ago
    > Ballsy? They are the richest company on the planet, and the biggest risk to their business is stagnation. They have enough cash on hand to buy the international space station 3 times over. Investors are roasting them for being entirely dependant on iPhone sales for revenue. It’s absolutely ballsy when you look at what happened with PowerPC (where they made the opposite decision to great effect), and the failure of competing attempts to do this such as Windows on ARM. They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success despite their largest competitor attempting and failing to make the migration.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      > They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success They didn't - they obviously had tested performance of these CPUs and knew it was excellent before deciding to switch to them. They were only risking whatever amount they invested. PowerPC was unpopular and dying. ARM was the most popular instruction set on the planet before Apple developed M1. Apple has tight control over software on their platform, they say jump, everyone asks 'how high. Apple dropped 32 bit support overnight and everyone has to deal with it. Microsoft still has support for 16 bit software in Windows 10. Open Process manager on Windows, Discord, Steam and much of other software is still 32 bit. No-one is compiling for Windows for ARM, Noone is using their Store. Some corportaes are still on windows 7, the world took 15 years to get off windows XP and I have seen some ATMs still running on it. Very different market.
    - 5y ago
grishka 5y ago
The most mind-blowing thing about the M1 is that I've never seen the beachball cursor for the entire system ever since I got mine. Used to be a daily occurrence on my 2012 macbook pro and drove me nuts at times. This one is ridiculously responsive. On and I've only managed to get the fans to audibly spin after several minutes of compiling an Android app with a huge native library on an x86 NDK for 4 architectures.
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  Yeah no. Depends on how you use it. I see the beach ball on my M1 every time I try to compile rust or haskell. This M1 fanboyism is tiring
  - pschastain 5y ago
    Because only your experience matters
    - spacexsucks 5y ago
      Just like only the fanboys experience matters?
      - pschastain 5y ago
        Please point out where I said that
  - threeseed 5y ago
    That would imply you are trying to multi-task whilst compiling Rust/Haskell. Chances are it has nothing to do with M1 and everything to do with your SSD being overwhelmed.
    - supernovae 5y ago
      that’s the thing with computers, performance is always nuanced… Latest Intel’s are fast, latest AMDs are fast, latest Apple silicon are fast and we’ve never really had it better. I’m super happy to be back in desktop arena with user replaceable parts and capacity.. 32 core, 128gb ram, non soc systems for me at prices i could only dream of a few years ago.
pkulak 5y ago
We really need some X86 stuff to come out on that 5nm process already. Everyone keeps saying that the M1 chips are great, and they are right, but then they slip into implying it's because of the ARM design, which I don't think there's any evidence for. Yet. When AMD's Zen 4 stuff comes out we'll finally be able to compare architectures, and I can't wait.
- philistine 5y ago
  There's plenty of evidence, and the 5nm architecture is far from the only part of the story. Would an x86 on 5nm suddenly be able to run without a fan?
  - pkulak 5y ago
    My 2017 Pixelbook has no fan and it's 14nm x86. So yes. Feed a processor 10 watts and it can run fanless.
    - philistine 5y ago
      But at what cost? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-7Y75-vs-Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MHz/2880vs4104 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-7Y75-vs-Apple-...
      - jotm 5y ago
        Well, no, this is what you want to compare (15W, latest generation): https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1265U&id=4766 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1265U... Though it does use TurboBoost up to 55W apparently. I don't know about the M1. If anyone wants to try, you can lock TDP on some laptops to exactly 15W (or whatever the compared M1 runs at) and run Passmark or something.
- temac 5y ago
  ARM ISA has probably little to do with the efficiency, although: * the memory model is slightly more relaxed * instruction decoding is obviously simpler, and while the impact of x86 decoding was not that major at a point, I suspect it has increased with time What matters is mostly the microarchitecture of Apple, and, yes, the 5nm. IIRC at the beginning of the Zen projet, AMD wanted to do 2 versions: 1 with an x86 frontend, and one with an ARM one. They would probably have had very similar performance profiles, and I suspect at most a dozen percent of diff for energy consumption. Intel is currently very far from that to reach a core perf similar to the one of the M1.
traceroute66 5y ago
> In terms of battery I can take it for a full day's work in town doing the same coding work, and there's no need to start looking for a charging point. Not even "just in case". I agree. The M1 architecture is fabulous. But the fact they've managed to cram it into a laptop, without throttling performance and without killing battery life, infact quite the opposite on both fronts, i.e. amazing performance and amazing battery life. Its quite the tour de force. Hats off to all those at Apple. That's some hardcore engineering there.
coldcode 5y ago
My Mac Studio Ultra is completely quiet, even when I am using all 20 cores (my art generation tools sometimes maxes out the CPU). Compiling in release mode, and running, is often faster than my brain can realize it's already done. The last time I felt the machine was faster than I thought it to be was 1984 running Turbo Pascal on a PC/XT. No PC or Mac since then really felt insanely fast to develop on. Until this one. I run World Of Tanks, which runs in WINE emulator, which runs on Rosetta, and it's as fast as it was on my iMac. I have no clue how this works.
Ologn 5y ago
> The new architecture also doesn't make much difference. Stuff just works, though homebrew needs to be told it's not on Intel anymore (terraform breaks weirdly if you don't do this). There seem to be plenty of M1 versions for your generic coder stuff. I bought an MBP with M1 two months ago. The main reason was to run video conferencing software, which so far it has done well at. That it is a powerful machine yet small and lightweight was a plus for it as well - its easy portability. I bought it for some secondary reasons, but those have not panned out yet. In mid-February I tried to compile a program with the release version of Android Studio, the project had NDK (C language) components. Even with Rosetta it was not working ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). Google said they had M1 support coming down in Android Studio canary version and other fixes coming out as well in the future. I'm not in a rush, but it compiles on my Ubuntu box and on Intel-based Macs, but not M1 out of the box yet (not without having to fiddle around to do it any how). For my Android projects that were fully Java/Kotlin based, the M1 did compile fast though. Also, Fidelity said they have an application called Active Trader Pro that works on Macs. It's not something I ever used, or that I would probably use regularly, but I decided to check it out. It would not work for me either, and support forums made mention of difficulties it has on M1. One thing I haven't tried yet is loading Unity 3d and futzing around with it, hopefully when I have the time to do that it will be working. Still happy with my purchase as it's working for my primary need, and more Android Studio support seems to be coming, and it is not a big rush to me. It's probably good that Apple is pulling software into a world where it supports ARM (kind of weird Android code primarily targets ARM devices, yet has trouble compiling on ARM devices). I had heard about how fast things compile on it, but it was even faster than I expected. So all in all I like it, and hopefully more software will be supported as time goes on.
- Sakos 5y ago
  Unity's latest release has native support for M1. LTS doesn't though.

listless 5y ago

I love it. I just got the M1 Pro and it screams. Designing your own chip is a ballsy thing to do. I think it might be one of the most underrated innovations Apple has ever done. Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. But he's still delivering on innovation where it's typically stalled.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
They bought a dev team with heritage on the Alpha and StrongARM and assigned them a new task. Not that ballsy.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  An expensive and risky move that large businesses are loathe to do. This is the definition of ballsy.
  - motoboi 5y ago
    Apple has too many cash on their hands. God knows how many hyper well funded projects they have. Not my definition of balsy project. Balsy would be risking the business level of funding. This is peanuts money level of risk. They didn’t told anyone about it either, so no reputation risk also (how many failed projects at this point on apple we don’t even hear about?). So, in my humble opinion, not risky nor balsy. But a smart and rewarding move? FUCK YES!
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      You interesting take, thank you for sharing.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Yeah, but how many companies have you seen buy a brilliant team like that and then do nothing with it?
- scarface74 5y ago
  Apple was also one of the original founders of ARM…
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Ballsy? They are the richest company on the planet, and the biggest risk to their business is stagnation. They have enough cash on hand to buy the international space station 3 times over. Investors are roasting them for being entirely dependant on iPhone sales for revenue. Where else are they going to invest this money? Having your own components is the most obvious way to strengthen their moat. If they took a step outside consumer electronics and invested into a new market, or invented something never seen before, which they can do 3 times over, then yeah, that would be ballsy.
- Closi 5y ago
  > Ballsy? They are the richest company on the planet, and the biggest risk to their business is stagnation. They have enough cash on hand to buy the international space station 3 times over. Investors are roasting them for being entirely dependant on iPhone sales for revenue. It’s absolutely ballsy when you look at what happened with PowerPC (where they made the opposite decision to great effect), and the failure of competing attempts to do this such as Windows on ARM. They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success despite their largest competitor attempting and failing to make the migration.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    > They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success They didn't - they obviously had tested performance of these CPUs and knew it was excellent before deciding to switch to them. They were only risking whatever amount they invested. PowerPC was unpopular and dying. ARM was the most popular instruction set on the planet before Apple developed M1. Apple has tight control over software on their platform, they say jump, everyone asks 'how high. Apple dropped 32 bit support overnight and everyone has to deal with it. Microsoft still has support for 16 bit software in Windows 10. Open Process manager on Windows, Discord, Steam and much of other software is still 32 bit. No-one is compiling for Windows for ARM, Noone is using their Store. Some corportaes are still on windows 7, the world took 15 years to get off windows XP and I have seen some ATMs still running on it. Very different market.
  - 5y ago

grishka 5y ago

The most mind-blowing thing about the M1 is that I've never seen the beachball cursor for the entire system ever since I got mine. Used to be a daily occurrence on my 2012 macbook pro and drove me nuts at times. This one is ridiculously responsive. On and I've only managed to get the fans to audibly spin after several minutes of compiling an Android app with a huge native library on an x86 NDK for 4 architectures.

spacexsucks 5y ago
Yeah no. Depends on how you use it. I see the beach ball on my M1 every time I try to compile rust or haskell. This M1 fanboyism is tiring
- pschastain 5y ago
  Because only your experience matters
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    Just like only the fanboys experience matters?
    - pschastain 5y ago
      Please point out where I said that
- threeseed 5y ago
  That would imply you are trying to multi-task whilst compiling Rust/Haskell. Chances are it has nothing to do with M1 and everything to do with your SSD being overwhelmed.
  - supernovae 5y ago
    that’s the thing with computers, performance is always nuanced… Latest Intel’s are fast, latest AMDs are fast, latest Apple silicon are fast and we’ve never really had it better. I’m super happy to be back in desktop arena with user replaceable parts and capacity.. 32 core, 128gb ram, non soc systems for me at prices i could only dream of a few years ago.

pkulak 5y ago

We really need some X86 stuff to come out on that 5nm process already. Everyone keeps saying that the M1 chips are great, and they are right, but then they slip into implying it's because of the ARM design, which I don't think there's any evidence for. Yet. When AMD's Zen 4 stuff comes out we'll finally be able to compare architectures, and I can't wait.

philistine 5y ago
There's plenty of evidence, and the 5nm architecture is far from the only part of the story. Would an x86 on 5nm suddenly be able to run without a fan?
- pkulak 5y ago
  My 2017 Pixelbook has no fan and it's 14nm x86. So yes. Feed a processor 10 watts and it can run fanless.
  - philistine 5y ago
    But at what cost? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-7Y75-vs-Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MHz/2880vs4104 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-7Y75-vs-Apple-...
    - jotm 5y ago
      Well, no, this is what you want to compare (15W, latest generation): https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1265U&id=4766 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1265U... Though it does use TurboBoost up to 55W apparently. I don't know about the M1. If anyone wants to try, you can lock TDP on some laptops to exactly 15W (or whatever the compared M1 runs at) and run Passmark or something.
temac 5y ago
ARM ISA has probably little to do with the efficiency, although: * the memory model is slightly more relaxed * instruction decoding is obviously simpler, and while the impact of x86 decoding was not that major at a point, I suspect it has increased with time What matters is mostly the microarchitecture of Apple, and, yes, the 5nm. IIRC at the beginning of the Zen projet, AMD wanted to do 2 versions: 1 with an x86 frontend, and one with an ARM one. They would probably have had very similar performance profiles, and I suspect at most a dozen percent of diff for energy consumption. Intel is currently very far from that to reach a core perf similar to the one of the M1.

traceroute66 5y ago

> In terms of battery I can take it for a full day's work in town doing the same coding work, and there's no need to start looking for a charging point. Not even "just in case". I agree. The M1 architecture is fabulous. But the fact they've managed to cram it into a laptop, without throttling performance and without killing battery life, infact quite the opposite on both fronts, i.e. amazing performance and amazing battery life. Its quite the tour de force. Hats off to all those at Apple. That's some hardcore engineering there.

coldcode 5y ago

My Mac Studio Ultra is completely quiet, even when I am using all 20 cores (my art generation tools sometimes maxes out the CPU). Compiling in release mode, and running, is often faster than my brain can realize it's already done. The last time I felt the machine was faster than I thought it to be was 1984 running Turbo Pascal on a PC/XT. No PC or Mac since then really felt insanely fast to develop on. Until this one. I run World Of Tanks, which runs in WINE emulator, which runs on Rosetta, and it's as fast as it was on my iMac. I have no clue how this works.

Ologn 5y ago

> The new architecture also doesn't make much difference. Stuff just works, though homebrew needs to be told it's not on Intel anymore (terraform breaks weirdly if you don't do this). There seem to be plenty of M1 versions for your generic coder stuff. I bought an MBP with M1 two months ago. The main reason was to run video conferencing software, which so far it has done well at. That it is a powerful machine yet small and lightweight was a plus for it as well - its easy portability. I bought it for some secondary reasons, but those have not panned out yet. In mid-February I tried to compile a program with the release version of Android Studio, the project had NDK (C language) components. Even with Rosetta it was not working ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). Google said they had M1 support coming down in Android Studio canary version and other fixes coming out as well in the future. I'm not in a rush, but it compiles on my Ubuntu box and on Intel-based Macs, but not M1 out of the box yet (not without having to fiddle around to do it any how). For my Android projects that were fully Java/Kotlin based, the M1 did compile fast though. Also, Fidelity said they have an application called Active Trader Pro that works on Macs. It's not something I ever used, or that I would probably use regularly, but I decided to check it out. It would not work for me either, and support forums made mention of difficulties it has on M1. One thing I haven't tried yet is loading Unity 3d and futzing around with it, hopefully when I have the time to do that it will be working. Still happy with my purchase as it's working for my primary need, and more Android Studio support seems to be coming, and it is not a big rush to me. It's probably good that Apple is pulling software into a world where it supports ARM (kind of weird Android code primarily targets ARM devices, yet has trouble compiling on ARM devices). I had heard about how fast things compile on it, but it was even faster than I expected. So all in all I like it, and hopefully more software will be supported as time goes on.

Sakos 5y ago
Unity's latest release has native support for M1. LTS doesn't though.