Apple M1

It's no secret around here that I produce video. We have multiple instructors for multiple projects that take multiple weeks to get done and multiple tasks required to get raw unedited video to a final publishable product. I'd be absolutely useless to anyone if I had to wait for one of these projects to be complete before working on another.


On the contrary. It's very much on topic. Other than gaming, what consumes all the resources of fast, multi-core machines with gobs of memory if it's not multiple tasks running simultaneously if not the desire or need to do more than one thing at a time? If not, why else would we need hardware that can accomplish so much if we can only do so little? The relentless march of technology is only possible because there is a need for it.


That said, life has taught me to always be on the side of "always assume it is going to crash", obsessively save everything, and keep as few things open simultaneously as possible. Despite having a 24C48T Threadripper, I always make sure all background tasks are thoroughly killed off before - for instance - launching a game.
 
That said, life has taught me to always be on the side of "always assume it is going to crash", obsessively save everything, and keep as few things open simultaneously as possible.
My laptop uptime is currently 14 days and that's about to end tomorrow or the next as there's a security update. My workstation is at 48 days and that will end when I apply another security update (it's two OS versions behind due to age and Apple not supporting it beyond High Sierra). Crashing is not something that usually happens on these two Macs. I haven't even had a kernel panic in years.
 
I suspect, this is what I might do in Apple's place, they are focusing on performance per watt. Kind of how NVIDIA is found of saying 50% faster with the per watt in a really small font. I dont agree that all M1 systems will be passive cooled. Once Apple starts to build workstation/HEDT systems (with more cores/sockets?) they will have to use active cooling. Likely an AIO.

With the M1 being custom silicone I wonder if there is an asic built into the SOC just for x86/64 emulation. It would certainly speed up the emulation.

It's already using active cooling in the MacBook Pro and Mac mini. The Air is the only finless model, in fact!
 
My laptop uptime is currently 14 days and that's about to end tomorrow or the next as there's a security update. My workstation is at 48 days and that will end when I apply another security update (it's two OS versions behind due to age and Apple not supporting it beyond High Sierra). Crashing is not something that usually happens on these two Macs. I haven't even had a kernel panic in years.
I haven't had much in the way of crashes in years either, but the lessons learned in the 90's stick with your for life I guess. I don't want to tempt fate.

My servers stay up 24/7 and get pretty craZy uptimes sometimes when there are no patches or power outages longer than the batteries last, but all of my laptops and desktops get fully powered off whenever not in use, at least every night, unless I am purposefully leaving them on in order to crunch something overnight.
 
I haven't had much in the way of crashes in years either, but the lessons learned in the 90's stick with your for life I guess. I don't want to tempt fate.

My servers stay up 24/7 and get pretty craZy uptimes sometimes when there are no patches or power outages longer than the batteries last, but all of my laptops and desktops get fully powered off whenever not in use, at least every night, unless I am purposefully leaving them on in order to crunch something overnight.
I wish my power outages were shorter than my battery span but they aren’t and because of stupidity government green initiatives I’m not allowed to have a gen set on site. But my last outage lasted 36 hours. Batteries last 4 for the server rack, but they tend to go a month between reboots. Individual VM’s may get updates weekly but the host itself gets them far less frequently, but it’s on a separate VLAN from the rest of the network and it’s blocked off so we’re not too worried about it being directly attacked.
 
MacBook Pro

Em-dE2lUUAE641E?format=jpg.jpg
 
Is that running x86 in emulation or is cinebench already available for ARM / Mac OS 11?

Good score either way. Puts it right in line with the other high end mobile procs.
 
The hostility the M1 launch is getting shows that Apple is on the right track. :)

No one is saying it's bad, it's clearly a fantastic chip for the power envelope. Some of the benchmarks just don't appear to be accurately portraying real world performance.
 
No one is saying it's bad, it's clearly a fantastic chip for the power envelope. Some of the benchmarks just don't appear to be accurately portraying real world performance.


And now, we're at the meat of the problem

Luckily, Anandtech has the solution:

119145.png

It's vastly better than Intel's poor Skylake mobile efficiency, but it can't unseat Zen 3 (and likely Zen 3 APU).

But as I suspected, Apple is MOSTLY here to rape AMD with their IGP:

119360.png

Whole review

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested

They seem to only be making a justification for existing mac owners here (who werre already getting screwed by running Polaris)
 
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And now, we're at the meat of the problem

Luckily, Anandtech has the solution:

View attachment 300210

It's vastly better than Intel's poor Skylake mobile efficiency, but it can't unseat Zen 2 (and likely Zen 3 APU).

But as I suspected, Apple is MOSTLY here to rape AMD with their IGP:

View attachment 300211

Whole review

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested

Except we do not yet have the RDNA or RDNA2 AMD iGPU's yet, so they are only doing so against the older generation. All I see is something that will drive competition even further and give AMD even more reason to.......
 

"The performance of the new M1 in this “maximum performance” design with a small fan is outstandingly good. The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets."

117493.png

"While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power."

Cannot wait to see the desktop-class Apple silicon chips.
 
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It's a swell chip. If it suits your needs, that's good. I don't feel like paying a huge premium to only run macOS and be effectively captive to what Apple wants to do, but go for it if you want to.
 
And now, we're at the meat of the problem

Luckily, Anandtech has the solution:



It's vastly better than Intel's poor Skylake mobile efficiency, but it can't unseat Zen 3 (and likely Zen 3 APU).

But as I suspected, Apple is MOSTLY here to rape AMD with their IGP:



Whole review

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested

They seem to only be making a justification for existing mac owners here (who werre already getting screwed by running Polaris)
Definitely super impressive. Were zen 3 just not launched it would look even more impressive. The fact that it's posting these numbers with ~30 watts of system power is eye opening. I'd love to see more TDP for GPU and windows 10 for ARM but likely won't happen ever :<
 
Definitely super impressive. Were zen 3 just not launched it would look even more impressive. The fact that it's posting these numbers with ~30 watts of system power is eye opening. I'd love to see more TDP for GPU and windows 10 for ARM but likely won't happen ever :<

Yeah, this does not interest me one bit as a Windows user, because the early word from Apple says no BootCamp support.

Apple already competes with Qualcomm on Phones (so I doubt this will change anything for their Windows Laptop chips performance improvements).. Apple would need BootCamp support in order for more than just Apple fanatics to take the M1 seriously.
 
Apple would need BootCamp support in order for more than just Apple fanatics to take the M1 seriously.
Anyone with a workflow that match what will be available to do on it in 2021 will probably take it seriously, specially if they need it on the road.
 
Blizzard just announced that World of Warcraft now has native support for ARM64 on Apple. Not bad, considering that WoW continues to remain the most popular MMO. This was not totally unexpected, as Blizzard has a long history of making their games compatible with Apple desktops/laptops, regardless of architecture. World of Warcraft had also supported PowerPC based Macs in the past. This is significant IMO because for many who play WoW, it's pretty much the only game they play. That would make a transition to an ARM64 Apple computer very easy - assuming that the included GPU is decent.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/mac-support-update-november-16/722775
With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta.

We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon.

While our testing has been successful, we’re highly aware of the nature of day one support with updates like this. Please let us know if you run into any issues that may be related to Apple Silicon in our Mac Technical Support forum 238.

Thank you very much.
 
Microarchitectural details, and 50% higher IPC than the highest-IPC x86 chip refute your claim.
Care to share the microarchitectural details? There are quite a few of microarchitectural details of x86, power, or most chips that make them quite advanced. And judging by the product apple is pushing it is not really more advanced it is optimized for a trimmed down os that they can force devs too use. That is them making a tradeoff from some of the goodness x86 offers.
 
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Apple-M1-Mac-Mini.pigz-p4-1440x1080.png

Pretty respectable compression results.

My other takeaway... Rosetta 2 actually seems to work. Apple doesn't seem to be dealing with MS level crap x86->arm translation.
The funny thing: if you've been through the PowerPC to Intel transition, you could see this coming.

Apple spends a lot of energy on chip transitions. It tests the architecture years in advance "just in case" and spends ages on universal binary and code translation. It's not really satisfied until the experience is as elegant as it can be (it can't account for every single app, of course). Not that you'll never encounter a problem, but they're so rare that you can assume apps will work. I hardly had any issues with my apps when I got my first Intel Mac, and I'd expect similar with ARM.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Microsoft could be in trouble if it doesn't get its act together with ARM. It might never happen, but you can imagine a nightmare scenario for Microsoft a few years from now where its vendors are stuck on modestly improved x86 chips and Apple is running rings around most of them with ARM. "If you want the fastest mainstream laptop, you have to get a Mac" is the sort of thing that would keep Satya Nadella awake at night.
 
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Care to share the microarchitectural details? There are quite a few of microarchitectural details of x86, power, or most chips that make them quite advanced. And judging by the product apple is pushing it is not really more advanced it is optimized for a trimmed down os that they can force devs too use. That is them making a tradeoff from some of the goodness x86 offers.

It seems the m1 is running big sur which is a desktop OS is it not? Benchmarks in software other than geekbench seem to place it at near parity with zen 3 in single threaded performance and that's at 3.2GHz and significantly lower power consumptions.
 
At a quick glance that looks pretty spectacular, especially for a debut chip. I'm not an analysis and don't pay that much attention, but if Apple keeps pushing this hard what might this mean for the landscape in 5-10 years?

I'm also not a Mac guy but I wish I could get this in a 17" Laptop running Linux.
 
Honestly looks way better than I was expecting. For a first gen desktop part it's pretty impressive.

Not enough to make me want to buy a Mac, but it will be interesting to see what happens with other OSes.
 
Blizzard just announced that World of Warcraft now has native support for ARM64 on Apple. Not bad, considering that WoW continues to remain the most popular MMO. This was not totally unexpected, as Blizzard has a long history of making their games compatible with Apple desktops/laptops, regardless of architecture. World of Warcraft had also supported PowerPC based Macs in the past. This is significant IMO because for many who play WoW, it's pretty much the only game they play. That would make a transition to an ARM64 Apple computer very easy - assuming that the included GPU is decent.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/mac-support-update-november-16/722775


It's faster than the Polaris 560 units they've been shipping in the MacBook "not so pro" 15 inch models. When all you have to beat is yourself, then you make it an easy job :rolleyes:

But they are 2x the IGP performance of Zen 2 `15w APUs, so there is still that.

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With this good a performance-scaling, it's probably enough performance to play Wow at 1080p med?

119360.png
 
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Looking at what apple is doing in the mobile space with walled gardens, I wouldnt be surprised if they eventually wall off macOS as well. Feels like they are pushing it that way already in the name of "security."

I would like to see how well this hardware would do with other OSes. (e.g. Linux)
 
Only downside I’ve seen so far is the external monitor support is limited to 1. Not sure if that’s 100% verified, but that would definitely be disappointing.
 
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