Apple Announces the M1 Processor Powering Next-Gen Macs

[Vya Domus]

Wait. For. The. Microsoft. Announcement. About. ARM. And. Windows.

I hope that's plain enough.

Yeah dude sure, whatever the hell that means, you're right.

 

[Searing]

Excellent. I've bought a Mac Mini and am looking forward to testing the world's most advanced CPU.

 

[Steevo]

The faster we move to ARM, the better. Just waiting for someone to do the same thing on the Windows side because Apple sure as hell ain't gonna sell their chips to anyone else.

ARM is only faster at the items it has the customer hardware for.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I agree its very asshole marketing , touting "more powerful than 98% of laptops... etc". That said, their claims of the fastest CPU cores and iGPU are not wrong... Last year Anandtech covered the A13 Bionic, and concluded that the A13 performance core was as fast as Skylake and zen2, albiet the latter are clocked much faster (~4.7 - 5 GHZ) vs 2.66 GHz from A13. This year A14 improves that by about ~20%, but is also facing Zen3 and Willow Cove with roughly 20 ~ 25% increases each. Do keep in mind that that is A14, not M1. M1 does not have the same thermal confines as A14, so higher clocks are possible.

In terms of iGPU, the M1 does NOT have the fastest iGPU... Those go to the Xbox Series X... That said, comparing to Intel Iris Xe MAX, it is roughly 3% faster in pixel and texture fill rate, and wipes the floor with vega 11. overall it is faster than an RX 560. (I compared the texture fill rates and pixel fill rates, using their claims of 82 GTexels/s and 41GPixels/s for comparison)

Overall, is it impressive? yes.
Am I disappointed in the marketing? YES!
Is it a game changer? We will leave it to the developers and see what they say.

Developer's, that's not the biggest user category, teenage girls , it'll be fine.

 

[Deleted member 185088]

How about Boot Camp, the only reason that makes MacBooks useful, the main problem of Macs is the OS, it's just inferior to Windows and has a lot of stupid limitations unlike Linux, lack of software support.
Performance claims against what on what, I'd love to see them running TPU's bench suite, issue is they can't. The issue is it depends on how you test, a Phenom is faster than an 8th gen i7 is some tests does it make faster in everything?

 

[windwhirl]

How about Boot Camp, the only reason that makes MacBooks useful, the main problem of Macs is the OS, it's just inferior to Windows and has a lot of stupid limitations unlike Linux, lack of software support.
Performance claims against what on what, I'd love to see them running TPU's bench suite, issue is they can't. The issue is it depends on how you test, a Phenom is faster than an 8th gen i7 is some tests does it make faster in everything?

I'm not a Mac user, but I find hard to believe that Mac users would buy those devices just for Boot Camp. For one, I'm pretty sure that one of my clients that has a Mac doesn't use Windows in that system.

Besides, you should consider that Apple doesn't sell devices, they sell you the Mac experience.

 

[TechLurker]

Idly speaking, it would be interesting to see what AMD could cook up on the ARM end of things, given they have a license and some experience with it even if they did shelve it to double-down on what would become Ryzen. They also are working with Samsung to better improve and integrate their RDNA tech into the mobile space, so AMD effectively has the CPU and GPU sides covered, should they need to dive into the ARMs Race for whatever reason. That being said, AMD's pursuit of efficiency and performance between their two internal Ryzen teams could see them never really needing to dive into ARM if they can continue pushing Ryzen into becoming the true scalable x86-64 design they said they were aiming for (tablets and ultra-thins all the way to enterprise/server).

Same goes for Intel to a lesser extent; they also have an ARM license, and are now getting into the GPU/accelerator competition, so they too could theoretically join the ARMs Race should they ever need to and have their own competitive SoC. The only real limiting factor seems to be fab and design inefficiencies in their case.

NVIDIA will be the green elephant in the room; they would likely want to compete in the ARM space and try to preempt AMD's RDNA compatibility with ARM-based devices and offer their own instead. Not to mention, maybe push ARM a bit more just to try and pull customers away from the two x86 license holders (3 if the rumors about VIA are true, and rejoining the x86 game).

At any rate, it'll be quite interesting to see what plays out in the long run. Tech has really become exciting again.

 

[Deleted member 185088]

I'm not a Mac user, but I find hard to believe that Mac users would buy those devices just for Boot Camp. For one, I'm pretty sure that one of my clients that has a Mac doesn't use Windows in that system.

Besides, you should consider that Apple doesn't sell devices, they sell you the Mac experience.

The Mac experience is awful, I'm stuck with one of those overpriced MacBook "Pros", it's awful to work with with a lot of limitations and software issues, one thing though they have the best trackpad I've ever used, though you can use it on Windows with a custom driver and you get everything from Mac.
And both suffer from instability to similar way.
I do agree with you, Apple doesn't sell computers, but the whole experience, from you enter the store till you use on their products, they don't even push you to get the most expensive stuff if you don't need it.
While I maintain that Windows PCs are superior to Macs, the experience you get from Apple as a whole is way better than HP, Dell or DYI.

 

[Vya Domus]

How about Boot Camp

That option is likely gone or has become unusable. The reason Apple can get away with x86 emulation within macos is because a lot of these apps make system calls which are actually native code but with boot camp the whole OS would have to go through an emulation layer which probably makes it horrendously slow.

 

[deu]

Faster than what? (A tailored juridictional safety point of performance.)

 

[Fourstaff]

So conflicted. On one hand, I am super excited to see how this chip performs against AMD/Intel offerings across a whole range of benchmarks. On the other hand, I am not the target audience. Should I give them a try?

 

[windwhirl]

The Mac experience is awful, I'm stuck with one of those overpriced MacBook "Pros", it's awful to work with with a lot of limitations and software issues, one thing though they have the best trackpad I've ever used, though you can use it on Windows with a custom driver and you get everything from Mac.
And both suffer from instability to similar way.
I do agree with you, Apple doesn't sell computers, but the whole experience, from you enter the store till you use on their products, they don't even push you to get the most expensive stuff if you don't need it.
While I maintain that Windows PCs are superior to Macs, the experience you get from Apple as a whole is way better than HP, Dell or DYI.

I take it you use one because of work, not out of the joy of your heart. And if you come from Linux/Windows, then it probably takes quite a while to get used to macOS...

So conflicted. On one hand, I am super excited to see how this chip performs against AMD/Intel offerings across a whole range of benchmarks. On the other hand, I am not the target audience. Should I give them a try?

You just want one to have a field day benchmarking it, don't you?

Seriously, though, I'd let the fervent followers of Apple go to town with it and wait for issues to show up and be solved through whatever hardware revision/upgrade may come next, if you're not a Mac user...

 

[Fourstaff]

You just want one to have a field day benchmarking it, don't you?

Seriously, though, I'd let the fervent followers of Apple go to town with it and wait for issues to show up and be solved through whatever hardware revision/upgrade may come next, if you're not a Mac user...

So sensible advice, unlike all the people foaming at the mouth.

 

[Aquinus]

Seriously, though, I'd let the fervent followers of Apple go to town with it and wait for issues to show up and be solved through whatever hardware revision/upgrade may come next, if you're not a Mac user...

I have a saying, "Never buy the first generation of a product." With that said though, I am tempted to get one of those new Mac Minis just to play around with it. Maybe I'll wait until some benchmarks come out.

 

[Deleted member 185088]

I take it you use one because of work, not out of the joy of your heart. And if you come from Linux/Windows, then it probably takes quite a while to get used to macOS...

You just want one to have a field day benchmarking it, don't you?

Seriously, though, I'd let the fervent followers of Apple go to town with it and wait for issues to show up and be solved through whatever hardware revision/upgrade may come next, if you're not a Mac user...

I take it you use one because of work, not out of the joy of your heart. And if you come from Linux/Windows, then it probably takes quite a while to get used to macOS...

You just want one to have a field day benchmarking it, don't you?

Seriously, though, I'd let the fervent followers of Apple go to town with it and wait for issues to show up and be solved through whatever hardware revision/upgrade may come next, if you're not a Mac user...

Exactly, I mainly use Windows, it is by no means perfect Microsoft tend to ruin perfect parts of their OS, but there is almost always a way around MD stupidity, MACOS is broken and you can't do anything about it.

That option is likely gone or has become unusable. The reason Apple can get away with x86 emulation within macos is because a lot of these apps make system calls which are actually native code but with boot camp the whole OS would have to go through an emulation layer which probably makes it horrendously slow.

Running on x86 they could just let windows run natively, now they can't given that they have to emulate x86, which slow and filled with problems, so probably it's the end of boot camp.

 

[Zach_01]

Am I wrong if I say that Windows already use RISC instructions on emulator?
Isn't RISC V going to be a thing, if not "the" thing of the future in computing?

And make sense to think that braking large CISC instructions into smaller RISC ones could make things more efficient. Making all chip(SOC) parts doing something and not wait for large chunks to be processed.
I think this can be the thing of future along with FPGAs...




What Xilinx? I never said anything about Xilinx....

 

[windwhirl]

Am I wrong if I say that Windows already use RISC instructions on emulator?

What emulator?

Isn't RISC V going to be a thing, if not "the" thing of the future in computing?

RISC V has the advantage of being open source, but they still have to make something capable of matching ARM's IP. Besides, there are other factors that decide whether a ISA is successful or not.

And make sense to think that braking large CISC instructions into smaller RISC ones could make things more efficient.

Last I heard, breaking down CISC into RISC instructions is already done in current x86 processors.

Making all chip(SOC) parts doing something and not wait for large chunks to be processed.

That's why out-of-order execution, instruction pipelines, speculative execution and superscalar multi-core CPUs exist.

 

[pat-roner]

I mean the target audience just need to hear apple and they will automatically open their wallet up, so why would they need to back up their claim?

Just like you need to hear "Nvidia"?

Developer's, that's not the biggest user category, teenage girls , it'll be fine.

You do realize the sheer amount of developers that use Macbooks right? Xcode only runs on MacOS.
Almost all of our developers/designers choose MacBooks when they start (Frontend, backend, Data Science, Android, iOS) as their personal machines.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Just like you need to hear "Nvidia"?


You do realize the sheer amount of developers that use Macbooks right? Xcode only runs on MacOS.
Almost all of our developers/designers choose MacBooks when they start (Frontend, backend, Data Science, Android, iOS) as their personal machines.

You do realise that the majority of buyers still just watch Netflix on them.

 

[claes]

You do realize that the same could be said of the Windows market