4 ms·

Perhaps, Apple Silicon is the way to solve the dilemma... :-)

avhception 1y ago
If only the CPUs could be had outside of Macs! At least we're seeing _some_ ARM development, I'm currently typing this from a Lenovo x13s with a Qualcomm ARM CPU. It works with Fedora, but the firmware is less than ideal and requires you to feed the bootloader a devicetree file. Other than that, I'm really happy with the hardware.
spacebanana7 1y ago
It'll never be made available outside of the Apple ecosystem, but if ever was there'd be billions of dollars of orders on day one.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  They are not a particularly good desktop chips, though. Or rather the market niche for them is rather small (low-power and relatively high performance) and generally filled by laptops anyway. For desktop use cases like gaming or performance intense cases they are not that great (IIRC the 14900k which cost a few hundred $ by the end was considerably faster than the top end M3 chip). Of course high memory bandwidth + unified CPU/GPU memory is an advantage in certain cases but that also makes the system entirely unmodular.
  - 7speter 1y ago
    I don’t really think apple cares about gaming. AI is a big part of why their SOC’s matter (coupled with the potential to have 128-512gb of unified memory coupled with these SOCs. These chips are all about running llms locally pretty well at under 100w. Also great for creatives as well.
    - sagarm 1y ago
      This market of people willing to spend thousands to run large LLMs locally -- and still slowly -- has to be tiny. Plus, there's competitors using AMD CPUs that provide 128GB with 500GB/s of bandwidth (8xDDR5-8000) for just $2K now.[1] A Mac Studio with an M4 Max has similar bandwidth but costs $4k for similar specs; the M3 Pro has ~800GB/s of bandwidth but 256GB of RAM (there's no 128GB option) and 2TB of SSD will set you back $6k! [1] https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-ai-max-39...
      - wqaatwt 1y ago
        Also the 48GB B60 for $1000. Of course it might be massively overhyped like some Intel things but if you don’t care about power usage, noise and heat a PC with 4 of those might blow the equivalent priced Mac out of the water.
  - johnb231 1y ago
    Apple is faster at single core and can match or exceed the 14900k at multi core in some applications. They are not for gaming. They are much faster than Intel for video editing due to hardware codecs. The Mac Mini / iMac / Apple Studio / Mac Pro are more than enough for most desktop users and provide high performance without obnoxious fan noise. The high end Intel chips draw ~300 watts. I need a silent desktop.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      > Apple is faster at single core and can match or exceed the 14900k Well yeah, if price is not a factor and you don’t care about gaming and such. That’s a perfectly reasonable use case. The original premise was that Apple’s M series chips would be extremely successful if Apple started selling them directly (and presumably provided Windows/Linux drivers. Which obviously can’t and won’t happen due to clear reasons but even if it did they probably wouldn’t be very popular as desktop chips (of course that also comes down to pricing). There aren’t that many people who’d want or need a desktop with a chip like that (instead of just getting a laptop ).
      - johnb231 1y ago
        If Apple released x86 desktop processors with the same performance as the M series of course they would be popular. M3 Ultra https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10919322 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10919322 M4 Pro https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8786129 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8786129 AMD 9950X https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/12194580 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/12194580 Intel Ultra 9 285K https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/7609759 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/7609759
        wqaatwt 1y ago
        Well sure, it comes down to price. If they continued charging $200 for 12GB of memory then I’m doubtful.

If only the CPUs could be had outside of Macs! At least we're seeing _some_ ARM development, I'm currently typing this from a Lenovo x13s with a Qualcomm ARM CPU. It works with Fedora, but the firmware is less than ideal and requires you to feed the bootloader a devicetree file. Other than that, I'm really happy with the hardware.

spacebanana7 1y ago

It'll never be made available outside of the Apple ecosystem, but if ever was there'd be billions of dollars of orders on day one.

wqaatwt 1y ago
They are not a particularly good desktop chips, though. Or rather the market niche for them is rather small (low-power and relatively high performance) and generally filled by laptops anyway. For desktop use cases like gaming or performance intense cases they are not that great (IIRC the 14900k which cost a few hundred $ by the end was considerably faster than the top end M3 chip). Of course high memory bandwidth + unified CPU/GPU memory is an advantage in certain cases but that also makes the system entirely unmodular.
- 7speter 1y ago
  I don’t really think apple cares about gaming. AI is a big part of why their SOC’s matter (coupled with the potential to have 128-512gb of unified memory coupled with these SOCs. These chips are all about running llms locally pretty well at under 100w. Also great for creatives as well.
  - sagarm 1y ago
    This market of people willing to spend thousands to run large LLMs locally -- and still slowly -- has to be tiny. Plus, there's competitors using AMD CPUs that provide 128GB with 500GB/s of bandwidth (8xDDR5-8000) for just $2K now.[1] A Mac Studio with an M4 Max has similar bandwidth but costs $4k for similar specs; the M3 Pro has ~800GB/s of bandwidth but 256GB of RAM (there's no 128GB option) and 2TB of SSD will set you back $6k! [1] https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-ai-max-39...
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      Also the 48GB B60 for $1000. Of course it might be massively overhyped like some Intel things but if you don’t care about power usage, noise and heat a PC with 4 of those might blow the equivalent priced Mac out of the water.
- johnb231 1y ago
  Apple is faster at single core and can match or exceed the 14900k at multi core in some applications. They are not for gaming. They are much faster than Intel for video editing due to hardware codecs. The Mac Mini / iMac / Apple Studio / Mac Pro are more than enough for most desktop users and provide high performance without obnoxious fan noise. The high end Intel chips draw ~300 watts. I need a silent desktop.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    > Apple is faster at single core and can match or exceed the 14900k Well yeah, if price is not a factor and you don’t care about gaming and such. That’s a perfectly reasonable use case. The original premise was that Apple’s M series chips would be extremely successful if Apple started selling them directly (and presumably provided Windows/Linux drivers. Which obviously can’t and won’t happen due to clear reasons but even if it did they probably wouldn’t be very popular as desktop chips (of course that also comes down to pricing). There aren’t that many people who’d want or need a desktop with a chip like that (instead of just getting a laptop ).
    - johnb231 1y ago
      If Apple released x86 desktop processors with the same performance as the M series of course they would be popular. M3 Ultra https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10919322 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10919322 M4 Pro https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8786129 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8786129 AMD 9950X https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/12194580 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/12194580 Intel Ultra 9 285K https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/7609759 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/7609759
      - wqaatwt 1y ago
        Well sure, it comes down to price. If they continued charging $200 for 12GB of memory then I’m doubtful.