Apple M1 SOC platform discussion

AltTabbins

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Apple announced the M1 chip today along with a refreshed Macbook Air, Mac Mini, and Macbook Pro 13". Lots of big claims and loaded phrases like "Up to 5x faster than the best selling computer in its price range" have me a little worried. I'm also split since I like Macs for enterprise and personal use. I cannot use it for enterprise anymore since I run my work environment virtualized on top of Mac OS. Rosetta doesn't support x86 emulation for virtualization so my Linux VM's are safe, but my Windows VM's won't work. From a personal computer standpoint, it's exciting since 18-20 hours claimed battery life would be great. At this point in my life, my laptop needs are somewhere between a nice Chromebook and a midrange x86 Windows or Linux laptop. Most workloads I would need serious horsepower for would be done on my desktop anyway, so I tend to value battery life, screen quality, fit-and-finish, and physical form factor over horsepower. I'm pretty invested in the Apple ecosystem mobile-wise with an iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, and Ipad, so having a Macbook is a nice addition since it plays so nice with my other hardware.
 
I'm thinking of switching to one of these from an Intel Mac for much the same reason - much better power-efficiency and battery life.

I also use Linux for work, but I don't need virtualization, since I can do everything remotely via ssh. The main sacrifice for me would be that I'd lose the ability to run certain software locally before deploying it remotely, but with the right development environment, I think this isn't particularly bad.

I'll probably wait a generation or two before making the switch, since it'll take some time for everyone to start compiling their binaries for both platforms, and it probably isn't in my interest to be an early adopter for this one. That means I might be upgrading my late 2016 MacBook Pro as late as 2022 or 2023.
 
I have a 2013 MBP 15 and 2018 MBA. Considered upgrading the 2018 but I only use it for office and browsing on the go. It is definitely limited in its performance (it really hates running external monitor and 4k videos) but considering the upgrade cost, it doesn't seem worth it. For first Mac purchases though the base MBA seems like a no-brainer to try out the new platform.
 
I was quite interested in the virtualization capabilities of the M1 chip as well. The first place I looked was Parallels' website, where I saw the following blog post snippet:

Parallels is excited to see the performance, power efficiency, and virtualization features that are brought to the Mac with Apple M1 chip. The transition to Mac with Apple M1 chip should be smooth for most Mac applications, thanks to Rosetta technology. Fortunately, our Parallels Access™, Parallels® Toolbox, and Parallels® Client software worked smoothly even before Parallels rebuilt them as universal binaries. However, virtual machines are an exception. It is important to note that currently available versions of Parallels® Desktop for Mac cannot run virtual machines on Mac with Apple M1 chip. Good news: A new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac that can run on Mac with Apple M1 chip is already in active development.

So I'm still somewhat confused on what type of virtualization may/may not be available on the M1 processor. What type of virtualization would the Parallels team be talking about here? I see specifically mentioned in the Rosetta article linked in the quote above that Apple says Rosetta doesn't allow x86 virtualization.

That being said, I'll be interested to see what their new memory architecture means for desktop class performance when the benchmarks come out. The battery life is compelling but the performance will be the deal maker/breaker for me.
 
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I'm lucky as I work for a company that buys a lot of Macs, and I also have the sway to get demo units first. I already have a 13" MBP on order. That and Big Sur are going to be the double attack of compatibility with our mandatory software (most of which, *today*, don't have Big Sur-ready versions). If I like it, I plan to refresh my actual work laptop, a 15" MBP, with a 16" M[x] version when those are available.
 
A lot of vague claims regarding performance and marketing speak. I feel like Apple is tightening their grip on their entire ecosystem and will get to the point that you can only install applications via their App Store. Not sure how this would work with enterprises, MDM, and custom proprietary applications.
 
A lot of vague claims regarding performance and marketing speak. I feel like Apple is tightening their grip on their entire ecosystem and will get to the point that you can only install applications via their App Store. Not sure how this would work with enterprises, MDM, and custom proprietary applications.
If Apple had wanted to do that, it could have done so a long time ago. I think it realizes that history and the nature of computers makes that kind of App Store limitation unlikely. Unless there's some massive security incident that makes everyone rethink app distribution, you're likely fine.

Apple's really doing this because of a guiding mantra: it will never let an outside company hold it back. That's why it started designing its own CPUs, why it skipped Flash on mobile in favor of HTML5, even why it rolled its own DRM instead of sharing a format with others. I suspect Apple would have gone with x86 for longer if Intel hadn't been lagging, but this 14nm+++++++++ mess was clearly the impetus it needed to do what it always wanted to do and avoid depending on outside CPU designers for its entire lineup.
 
This is all very compelling but the complete lack of a particular word and that entire apple presentation has me scared. That word is....

Bootcamp

I have to have it.

I am also very curious how well PC games are going to play under Boot Camp with the new GPU configurations.

Gaming performance under parallels positively sucks even with Radion on board. Under Boot Camp, it's actually not too bad on my MacBook Pro with the Radion 455 I think it is or something like that.
 
I was quite interested in the virtualization capabilities of the M1 chip as well. The first place I looked was Parallels' website, where I saw the following blog post snippet:



So I'm still somewhat confused on what type of virtualization may/may not be available on the M1 processor. What type of virtualization would the Parallels team be talking about here? I see specifically mentioned in the Rosetta article linked in the quote above that Apple says Rosetta doesn't allow x86 virtualization.

That being said, I'll be interested to see what their new memory architecture means for desktop class performance when the benchmarks come out. The battery life is compelling but the performance will be the deal maker/breaker for me.
Well that's just put the fucking brakes on my work VM :(

Thank you for posting that Critical info
 
This is all very compelling but the complete lack of a particular word and that entire apple presentation has me scared. That word is....

Bootcamp

I have to have it.

I am also very curious how well PC games are going to play under Boot Camp with the new GPU configurations.

Gaming performance under parallels positively sucks even with Radion on board. Under Boot Camp, it's actually not too bad on my MacBook Pro with the Radion 455 I think it is or something like that.
There will be no boot camp on this SOC from what I read due to apples new locked boot loader. Parallels will be your only option and it’s not even done yet.
 
There will be no boot camp on this SOC from what I read due to apples new locked boot loader. Parallels will be your only option and it’s not even done yet.
I’m 99% sure parallels will only emulate arm capable OS’ too. So the arm windows 10, or Linux. This is what I understood from reading about it.
 
I’m 99% sure parallels will only emulate arm capable OS’ too. So the arm windows 10, or Linux. This is what I understood from reading about it.
I would imagine trying to emulate x86_64 for an entire OS would make this chip cry. Its ARM OS's or molasses. I remember emulating x86 on PPC back in the day, barley functional. I doubt you will be able to virtualize much beyond instances of ARM BigSur or very light x86 linux hosts. Maybe I will be wrong, but emulating architectures is heavy lifting. Ill believe it when I see it.

I just picked up a 13" Intel 10th Gen MBP cause I wanted a mac but need the native x86 virtualization.
 
Initial GeekBench benchmarks (which are albeit a poor overall indicator of real world performance) for the Air and MBP are showing results faster than all previous Mac laptops (including the i9 16 inch MBP):

3E740C2F-44B0-43E3-80F7-6D3C11D44925.jpeg


In comparison to Macs, the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac, and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870.

Interesting... can’t wait to see more real world results, gpu performance, etc.
 
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Initial GeekBench benchmarks (which are albeit a poor overall indicator of real world performance) for the Air and MBP are showing results faster than all previous Mac laptops (including the i9 16 inch MBP):

View attachment 298363



Interesting... can’t wait to see more real world results, gpu performance, etc.

We'll need real-world tests, and I suspect those will be more sobering. Still, it would be outstanding if a MacBook Air outran even high-end laptops. And yes, this could have Macs outperforming higher-specced Windows machines.
 
We'll need real-world tests, and I suspect those will be more sobering. Still, it would be outstanding if a MacBook Air outran even high-end laptops. And yes, this could have Macs outperforming higher-specced Windows machines.
Possibly. They had some pretty good wins in the PowerPC era IIRC... fuzzy on the details all these years later. Not so much since they switched to Intel. Since then it's either been same thing the Windows machines are using or lose to AMD. For now I'm taking their 2.5x or 3x or whatever performance claims with a spoonfull of salt though. First they compared the M1 to something on the slow side used in lower spec Mac models, plus they have a whole lot of fine print at the bottom of their new model pages.

I'm just going to wait for real world tests before passing judgement on it. It's quite possible that M1 has vastly different performance characteristics compared to x86 depending on the workload. It could easily be much better at some things and much worse at others. We've seen that with x86 CPUs in the past and the differences between an Intel chip and an Apple ARM chip could be much larger. I would not be a bit surprised if it was as much faster on some tasks as Apple is claiming and much slower on other tasks that they don't talk about.

The battery life increase does seem believable given their test conditions. It's probably better in general since they're using TSMC's good stuff rather than being stuck on 14nm+++++, but how much? The test was playing movies and web browsing. The M1 is a big-little design like a phone processor. It has 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. I bet the performance cores sleep the entire time a movie is playing and only wake up occasionally when browsing. I have no idea how it will fare if you make it work hard while running on battery. So... wait for reviews.
 
Laptops nothing. Those scores are damned near on par with my 2019 Mac Pro. That's bloody impressive no matter how you cut it.

It's impressive if you only ever need to run MacOS, unfortunately for those of us who bought into the Apple ecosystem with the promise of getting the best of both worlds, it doesn't help. VDI helps me work around it, but that's not an option for a lot of users.
 
Possibly. They had some pretty good wins in the PowerPC era IIRC... fuzzy on the details all these years later. Not so much since they switched to Intel. Since then it's either been same thing the Windows machines are using or lose to AMD. For now I'm taking their 2.5x or 3x or whatever performance claims with a spoonfull of salt though. First they compared the M1 to something on the slow side used in lower spec Mac models, plus they have a whole lot of fine print at the bottom of their new model pages.

I'm just going to wait for real world tests before passing judgement on it. It's quite possible that M1 has vastly different performance characteristics compared to x86 depending on the workload. It could easily be much better at some things and much worse at others. We've seen that with x86 CPUs in the past and the differences between an Intel chip and an Apple ARM chip could be much larger. I would not be a bit surprised if it was as much faster on some tasks as Apple is claiming and much slower on other tasks that they don't talk about.

The battery life increase does seem believable given their test conditions. It's probably better in general since they're using TSMC's good stuff rather than being stuck on 14nm+++++, but how much? The test was playing movies and web browsing. The M1 is a big-little design like a phone processor. It has 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. I bet the performance cores sleep the entire time a movie is playing and only wake up occasionally when browsing. I have no idea how it will fare if you make it work hard while running on battery. So... wait for reviews.
As I recall, Apple was comparing the high-efficiency cores to the MacBook Air's Core i3 chip, not the overall package. That's actually a very good sign as it suggests the high-performance cores are in another league. I figure they're at least faster than the quad Core i5 from the Air, and probably the i5 from the entry Pro as well. It could make the $999 Air a much better value.

I certainly wouldn't rule out some gotchas for testing, although I think we're a long way from the days when Apple had to get 'creative' with tests to put PowerPC chips ahead of x86. It has a giant process advantage and lots of know-how in custom chips under its belt.

I'm sure battery life under a heavy load is considerably shorter, but still... if you can last 8 or 10 hours for real work? That would be huge. I use my laptop partly as a backup during power outages, so it's a strong selling point to know I could finish a work day on battery.
 
Either way, it s exciting and a welcome push to intel, nvidia, amd and samsung. More competition is better for us.
 
This is all very compelling but the complete lack of a particular word and that entire apple presentation has me scared. That word is....

Bootcamp

I have to have it.

I am also very curious how well PC games are going to play under Boot Camp with the new GPU configurations.

Gaming performance under parallels positively sucks even with Radion on board. Under Boot Camp, it's actually not too bad on my MacBook Pro with the Radion 455 I think it is or something like that.
Bootcamp is dead.

For you as a matter of practical purposes is does this mean you jump ship now or later? Because obviously it's not going to come back.

In tech the mantra is: don't buy things with a promise of future performance, only buy what performs the way you need now (or in its current state). That said about gaming I think that there is the possibility that Apple becomes a premiere gaming platform. I realize that some will just argue you'll get more "cell phone games" but the truth is there are a lot of devs now that have been making games for the past 10 years on ARM architecture that could desire making the leap to desktop.

This also links up with how many devs are used to working with the metal API in general and how it maps farily closely to Vulkan. Games on Metal on these SOC's will scream. It's just a matter of which game devs will want to support it. It may cause some level of fracturing in the market. There might be some Metal only devs and there definitely will continue to be PC only devs. The number of devs willing to work on metal will probably come down to how many ARM Macs are in the wild. In the meantime we'll likely just have x86 ports (Rosetta) and iOS ports.

Apple Arcade is also designed to help position them in the gaming world. There is a very real possibility that the next generation of gamers are people that played CoD Mobile and want a similar experience on the desktop or DOTA mobile and then on the desktop while avoiding traditional desktop PC titles.
 
I really like the idea of getting the Mini M1 as entry drug and play around, Xcode, development, some crunching.
 
So my wife has a 2015 MBP she loves. We have to make a choice - either replace her battery (as mentioned in macos - the battery life is crap) or get something new. The M1 battery life looks great, but what about our 3 printers (which all have drivers) that she uses? Is that going to "just work" on her mac with the M1 or will she be unable to print? Printers are an Brother (MFC7280N), Samsung (CLP325W) and Epson WF-7720.
 
Bootcamp is dead.

For you as a matter of practical purposes is does this mean you jump ship now or later? Because obviously it's not going to come back.

In tech the mantra is: don't buy things with a promise of future performance, only buy what performs the way you need now (or in its current state). That said about gaming I think that there is the possibility that Apple becomes a premiere gaming platform. I realize that some will just argue you'll get more "cell phone games" but the truth is there are a lot of devs now that have been making games for the past 10 years on ARM architecture that could desire making the leap to desktop.

This also links up with how many devs are used to working with the metal API in general and how it maps farily closely to Vulkan. Games on Metal on these SOC's will scream. It's just a matter of which game devs will want to support it. It may cause some level of fracturing in the market. There might be some Metal only devs and there definitely will continue to be PC only devs. The number of devs willing to work on metal will probably come down to how many ARM Macs are in the wild. In the meantime we'll likely just have x86 ports (Rosetta) and iOS ports.

Apple Arcade is also designed to help position them in the gaming world. There is a very real possibility that the next generation of gamers are people that played CoD Mobile and want a similar experience on the desktop or DOTA mobile and then on the desktop while avoiding traditional desktop PC titles.
Doubtful its dead. Windows/Microsoft is working on ARM support, and its possible it will come to the MAC.
 
Doubtful its dead. Windows/Microsoft is working on ARM support, and its possible it will come to the MAC.
If they wanted to support other ARM OS’s they already could have. Linux basically has compiles on every platform. Apple more or less stated that VM is the way forward.

“ Apple later confirmed it’s not planning to support Boot Camp on ARM-based Macs in a Daring Fireball podcast. “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.” "

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewansp...-camp-removed-virtualization/?sh=5ffea85043ce
 
If they wanted to support other ARM OS’s they already could have. Linux basically has compiles on every platform. Apple more or less stated that VM is the way forward.

“ Apple later confirmed it’s not planning to support Boot Camp on ARM-based Macs in a Daring Fireball podcast. “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.” "

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewansp...-camp-removed-virtualization/?sh=5ffea85043ce
Welcome to the Apple Control-freakdom. They only pretended to be Open during the Intel transition (so they could boost previously-lagging Mac numbers, and lock-in as many suckers as they can.)

They are also intent on killing 3rd-party app stores (like Steam) - WITH THEIR CURRENT LOCK-DOWN, it could happen in the near future.

Every Macintosh in the first decade of the platform was Proprietary BootROM + System, and now that Macs can ride the wave of "you must develop Ios apps on this," it's not going to stop.

ARM is just their latest excuse for returning to this (but this has been normal operating procedures since they convinced Idiots that they were the cure for IBM Bigbrother Domination :rolleyes:). In two years, Steve Jobs took Apple from being the most open computer company to being the most closed (and that will likely never change, now that they enjoy a double-lock-in with the second most-popular mobile OS).
 
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If they wanted to support other ARM OS’s they already could have. Linux basically has compiles on every platform. Apple more or less stated that VM is the way forward.

“ Apple later confirmed it’s not planning to support Boot Camp on ARM-based Macs in a Daring Fireball podcast. “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.” "

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewansp...-camp-removed-virtualization/?sh=5ffea85043ce
There was never a need for it till Apple did it. Many schools need it, so now Microsoft has a reason to make it compatible. And they already said at the conference I went too, they are looking into it.
 
There was never a need for it till Apple did it. Many schools need it, so now Microsoft has a reason to make it compatible. And they already said at the conference I went too, they are looking into it.
There is a lot of lexical ambiguity in your post. Not sure “they” are multiple times. But at this point I’ll take official word from Craig over very... not solid answers.

If boot camp was coming Apple would and could just say that - rather than definitely state that people should expect to use VM’s. Apple could of even left room for future statements by saying: “We believe that VM’s are the future for other operating systems on Mac but if there is a need for boot camp we’ll look into that in the future.” But Craig didn’t.

Believe whatever you want. But I think it’s very foolish to buy an arm Mac with the expectation that you’ll receive a feature that Apple hasn’t stated that there is even the possibility in the future of.
 
There is a lot of lexical ambiguity in your post. Not sure “they” are multiple times. But at this point I’ll take official word from Craig over very... not solid answers.

If boot camp was coming Apple would and could just say that - rather than definitely state that people should expect to use VM’s. Apple could of even left room for future statements by saying: “We believe that VM’s are the future for other operating systems on Mac but if there is a need for boot camp we’ll look into that in the future.” But Craig didn’t.

Believe whatever you want. But I think it’s very foolish to buy an arm Mac with the expectation that you’ll receive a feature that Apple hasn’t stated that there is even the possibility in the future of.
You can believe what you want, but when I am on Microsoft Campus in Bellevue, WA, I am going to trust the people who actually do the work at Microsoft over Craig.
 
You can believe what you want, but when I am on Microsoft Campus in Bellevue, WA, I am going to trust the people who actually do the work at Microsoft over Craig.
Getting Windows to work on ARM is different than getting Windows to work on a Mac. If there is no support structure to do so, then it is at least not coming from Apple's end. If you're saying that Microsoft intends to hack Apple's bootloaders in order to load up Windows, fine, they obviously have the time and capability to do whatever they want - but that is far different than stating that this is something that is sanctioned by Apple. Microsoft isn't Apple.

Craig isn't "some guy" doing a presentation. He's the VP of Software Development directly reporting to Tim Cook. His direct pervue is macOS and iOS - he's chief engineer. Again, I'll take his word over some rumblings he heard at some point from somewhere that are completely unverifiable in any capacity. https://www.apple.com/leadership/craig-federighi/

Time will prove one of us right. I expect to see nothing coming. If it's Microsoft's objective to get this initiative out and it's critical to them for whatever reason to drive their software sales it would be wise of them to make announcements on their end. But they haven't done that either. It's obvious that boot camp on Mac ARM would be valuable to a lot of people. There are a lot of folks complaining about this all over the place (this forum amonst many a comment section). So if this is their intention then they're doing a terrible job at managing it and letting people know about it. Either way if Microsoft can't get boot camp on Arm Mac in the next two years during the transition, then they've already failed.
 
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Getting Windows to work on ARM is different than getting Windows to work on a Mac. If there is no support structure to do so, then it is at least not coming from Apple's end. If you're saying that Microsoft intends to hack Apple's bootloaders in order to load up Windows, fine, they obviously have the time and capability to do whatever they want - but that is far different than stating that this is something that is sanctioned by Apple. Microsoft isn't Apple.

Craig isn't "some guy" doing a presentation. He's the VP of Software Development directly reporting to Tim Cook. His direct pervue is macOS and iOS - he's chief engineer. Again, I'll take his word over some rumblings he heard at some point from somewhere that are completely unverifiable in any capacity. https://www.apple.com/leadership/craig-federighi/

Time will prove one of us right. I expect to see nothing coming. If it's Microsoft's objective to get this initiative out and it's critical to them for whatever reason to drive their software sales it would be wise of them to make announcements on their end. But they haven't done that either. It's obvious that boot camp on Mac ARM would be valuable to a lot of people. There are a lot of folks complaining about this all over the place (this forum amonst many a comment section). So if this is their intention then they're doing a terrible job at managing it and letting people know about it. Either way if Microsoft can't get boot camp on Arm Mac in the next two years during the transition, then they've already failed.

No, they are already working with Apple. That is what he said. Craig is NOT going to say till they release the info at a conference.
 
Reviews hitting today; my first take is all the promises were delivered.
Yea they run great.



Compilation benchmarks:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/y...its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/

Battery life is crazy, x86 seems to run just as fast or faster than native

Drawbacks right now are support for only two displays (so built in laptop screen plus one external), no native support for Homebrew, and limited to only 16GB but since x86 virtualization isn’t a thing yet either, it might not be that big of a deal.
 
16GB and only one external display kills it as a work machine for me, but other than that I'm impressed. I just might pick up an Air next time I need a new personal laptop. These things are seriously fast especially considering how much power they consume. Imagine a desktop version with more cores, higher clock speed and a significantly higher TDP. Now they just need more powerful laptops and desktop versions. Hopefully they'll add discreet GPUs and implement switchable graphics on the higher end laptops. The integrated graphics look like they easily beat Intel integrated but that's about it.

Maybe this will get Intel and AMD to cooperate on a replacement for x64... maybe. It looks like they're about to get their asses kicked. 40+ years of x86 baggage has to be holding them back. Intel tried to kill x86 with Itanium, but it hit an iceberg and then AMD torpedoed it.
 
16GB and only one external display kills it as a work machine for me, but other than that I'm impressed.
Having "only" 16GB of RAM matters if and only if you can do something that will actually use it. And with Apple's optimizations I'm guessing that will be pretty hard to do. I think for x86, 32GB is my own personal floor, but on ARM it doesn't seem like its the case at all.

For a demonstration of that, here is a short vid:

This guy is editing multiple 4k and 8k h.265 and RAW streams in Final Cut and Da Vinci Resolve while having 100MP GFX100 files open and screen capturing the whole thing. If I was doing the same things in x86 I would be crushed. Arm, not so much.

He directly addresses "only 16GB of RAM" at 3:47. Obviously this will depend a lot on what you do. Can you exceed 16GB of RAM usage still on ARM? I'm certainly sure you can. But I think it's going to be a lot harder without pushing some really massive data sets or incredibly large renders.
I just might pick up an Air next time I need a new personal laptop. These things are seriously fast especially considering how much power they consume. Imagine a desktop version with more cores, higher clock speed and a significantly higher TDP. Now they just need more powerful laptops and desktop versions. Hopefully they'll add discreet GPUs and implement switchable graphics on the higher end laptops. The integrated graphics look like they easily beat Intel integrated but that's about it.
Again, depends on what you need. But the graphics definitely aren't a slouch. They're definitely better than all of the AMD options up to this point such as 560x and Vega 20. Maybe the 5500M is faster but if it is, it's very close.

I do think that this is the end of the AMD partnership though. Perhaps not immediately but by the end of the transition. The big reason why I think this is because of the elimination of eGPU support from ARM based Macs. We'll have to see how Apple scales their GPUs. Which I think they will have a lot of success in doing. They could obviously make their GPU's more performative simply by adding more GPU cores if nothing else. But I certainly think that they'll have much better optimizations and possibly deeper pipelines than that for their full desktop chips (in addition to brute force more cores).
Maybe this will get Intel and AMD to cooperate on a replacement for x64... maybe. It looks like they're about to get their asses kicked. 40+ years of x86 baggage has to be holding them back. Intel tried to kill x86 with Itanium, but it hit an iceberg and then AMD torpedoed it.
It's definitely a huge problem for sure. There is so much crap on x86 that isn't even run anymore but is still baked onto all of these chips for legacy reasons. A lot of people, including those on the [H], complain about backwards compatibility or are in love with the fact that they can run every game and every app for the past 40 years and that's why they never will switch. But it's precisely that mentality and those people that hold back computing. By forcing legacy we can't make things as fast as they can be.

Certainly there is no way to integrate everything in x86 into an SOC like Apple has done with M1. And as a result they now have a machine that competes with $2000+ dollar Zen 2 + 2080Ti machines for about half the price (which is Lee's main computer, the guy from the video above, in case you didn't know).
 
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m1 destroys everything in single thread. Damn.

and i was just thinking about building a cheap ryzen pc
 
man i just bought a xps 9500 a couple of months ago its been great so far but i just ordered the mba to see how better the battery life is on it and that it should stay cool without a fan sounds like the mba would be great for travel and replace my 12.9 ipad pro with the magic keyboard.
 
m1 destroys everything in single thread. Damn.

and i was just thinking about building a cheap ryzen pc
If you need to run Windows or you’re a gamer etc then there is no reason to not. If you’re not plugged into the macOS ecosystem and you’re not planning on getting into it, then I see no conflict.
 
yeah but now the m1 single thread performance makes ryzen look like shit

and that's a letdown for amd. even more so for intel.

i wonder what would happen if m1 were a 45w tdp

Apple-M1-Mac-Mini.R23-multi-1440x1080.png
 
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