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Another ARM(1) - Apple event introduces new low-end Macs as well as updated OS

williamcll
By williamcll
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Go to solution Solved by LAwLz,

Apple's first silicon for PCs will be named "M1".

 

 

CPU:

  • 4 big cores that are, according to Apple, "the fastest core in the world", and I actually believe them. I would not be surprised if this CPU core performs better than Zen 3.
  • 4 small cores that are meant for power efficiency. Didn't quite hear what Apple said about performance but I do believe they said the quad core low power cores would offer performance better than the dual core Intel Mac. I am far more skeptical of that claim though, and they might be measuring at some specific power level that is optimal for the M1's small cores but not for whichever Intel CPU they are comparing it against.
  • At 10 watts of power limit (the MacBook Air limit) the M1 offers twice the performance of Intel's latest CPU.
  • 3 times higher performance per watt compared to Intel at other power budgets.

 

GPU:

  • 8 cores.
  • 128 execution units.
  • 2.6 TFLOPs of performance.
  • 82 gigatexels per second
  • 41 gigapixels per second.
  • Twice the performance per watt at 10 watts power envelop, but we have no idea which chip they are comparing against (probably the Intel chip in the latest Macbook).
  • "World's fastest integrated graphics".

 

 

Other:

  • 16-core Neural Engine with 11 trillion operations per second.
  • It's an SoC, so it as a lot of stuff built in. Basically everything is on a single chip just like in the iPhone and iPads.
  • It has a "unified memory architecture" which lets all SoC components (CPU, GPU and I presume NPU) access the same memory directly. So no need for the GPU to request resources from the CPU.
  • 16 billion 5nm transistors.
  • Secure enclave built in.
  • Very low power video playback.
  • Neural Engine.
  • PCIe 4.0 support
  • Thunderbolt and USB 4 support.
  • Very good image processing (probably the same as in the iPhone).
  • Crypt accelerator (although a lot of CPUs has this these days).
  • NVMe support
  • "Always-on processor" which probably refers to some very deep sleep state.

 

 

Software:

  • MacOS using M1 processors can directly run iPhone and iPad apps!
  • MacOS Big Sur has been optimized for the M1.
  • "iPhone-style instant-on" which to me mean you never really turn the computer off, you just lock it and it goes into sleep. This is really nice.
  • Safari is 1.9x as responsive on the M1 compared to some other Mac configuration. They don't specify what they are comparing against really.
  • "Universal apps" is Apple's name for packaging both ARM and x86 compatible apps into one program. So developers only have to release one version of their apps and it will be able to run on both ARM and x86. None of this "which version do you want to download ARM|x86" we have seen on Windows.
  • Rosetta 2 allows x86-only programs to run on Apple's ARM processor. According to Apple some programs even perform better on Rosetta 2 than on an x86 Mac. But that might just be some handful of apps and because the M1 is faster than the x86 processor. Performance remains to be seen.
Posted
13 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Those do not make up 98% uf the market. Not even close!

I'd bet that 98% of the market is laptops are not even worth 400 dollars today. 

Most people don't upgrade their laptops more than like once every 4 years or so, and that's in "rich" countries like the EU and us. For other countries I would by be surprised if the average age of a laptop is like 5-6 years. 

But even if we look at most laptops sold today, they are pretty shit. 5 out of the 10 best selling laptops on Amazon are below 500 dollars. 

 

I would not be surprised if the "faster than 98%" number is true. 

You also have to remember that per core performance of this is probably higher than what Amd and Intel offers. So unless you're looking at 6 core laptops or better, this M1 is probably faster. 

The number of people who has 6+ cores in their laptop is probably even less than 2%.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I'd bet that 98% of the market is laptops are not even worth 400 dollars today. 

Most people don't upgrade their laptops more than like once every 4 years or so, and that's in "rich" countries like the EU and us. For other countries I would by be surprised if the average age of a laptop is like 5-6 years. 

But even if we look at most laptops sold today, they are pretty shit. 5 out of the 10 best selling laptops on Amazon are below 500 dollars. 

 

I would not be surprised if the "faster than 98%" number is true. 

You also have to remember that per core performance of this is probably higher than what Amd and Intel offers. So unless you're looking at 6 core laptops or better, this M1 is probably faster. 

The number of people who has 6+ cores in their laptop is probably even less than 2%.

We do not know how Apple arrived at that number, but even the amount of mid- to high-tier laptops that was sold in the last two years should by far exceed 2% of whatever market.

If you still think this is a 8-core machine that must be compared to 6- and 8-core x86 cores you failed to understand the fundamentals of the M1 architecture (and most recent phone/table SoCs).

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Posted
24 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Those do not make up 98% uf the market. Not even close!

I'd have to guess the $400-600 laptops make up most of the market, $1,000 laptops are more of a luxury class item to most people.

I would personally rather have a $400 crap laptop if it means I can actually repair it, soldered RAM and SSD's are a terrible trend and it's wasteful to throw away an entire motherboard for failed RAM or SSD.

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Posted

Apple is pulling their numbers out of their asses just to look good. That's called marketing. I think they are comparing price-to-price equivalent computers. I.e. If a mac Mini costs 699$, they will find a PC that costs 699$ and they "beat that record", the same goes for Macbooks and whatnot.

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Posted
2 hours ago, Kisces said:

People don't buy 13-inch macbooks for productivity.....They just need something "macbook" to show off.

How do you arrive at this absurd conclusion? This is simply not true. Both the air and especially the Pro-13" are bread-and-butter daily-driver models for many people in IT, engineering and academia (not only students at all).

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

I'd have to guess the $400-600 laptops make up most of the market, $1,000 laptops are more of a luxury class item to most people.

I would personally rather have a $400 crap laptop if it means I can actually repair it, soldered RAM and SSD's are a terrible trend and it's wasteful to throw away an entire motherboard for failed RAM or SSD.

How the hell is a 1000$ laptop luxury? Antything below is a matter of months before it breaks or the battery dies. Most of the market? Maybe over 50%, but by no means 98%.

 

Especially the crap laptops tend to have everything soldered, because it saves sockets in the BOM - and those are actually not cheap.

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Posted
6 minutes ago, PeterBocan said:

Apple is pulling their numbers out of their asses just to look good. That's called marketing. I think they are comparing price-to-price equivalent computers. I.e. If a mac Mini costs 699$, they will find a PC that costs 699$ and they "beat that record", the same goes for Macbooks and whatnot.

If they can beat 98% of price-equivalent products, that would actually be a very big achievement - given that usually you are charged the hefty Apple tax compared to competitor models with equivalent performance.

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

I'd have to guess the $400-600 laptops make up most of the market, $1,000 laptops are more of a luxury class item to most people.

I would personally rather have a $400 crap laptop if it means I can actually repair it, soldered RAM and SSD's are a terrible trend and it's wasteful to throw away an entire motherboard for failed RAM or SSD.

I don't think that would even be worth it....

 

Like you'd buy a Pentium or Ryzen 3 laptop and add 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD? That's overkill, and especially at that point they're either using soldered small SSDs or eMMC.

 

RAM and SSDs aren't something that fail overnight, I have never had a RAM stick, SSD, or CPU fail me so far. Apple's boards usually die do to a shitty converter or transistor, if I'm correct.

 

At that point why are you even buying new? Just get something used...

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

If they can beat 98% of price-equivalent products, that would actually be a very big achievement - given that usually you are charged the hefty Apple tax compared to competitor models with equivalent performance.

I don't trust that number. How do they know who has what? What are the Intel and AMD sales? I really don't think that the 98% is accurate.

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Posted
9 minutes ago, PeterBocan said:

Apple is pulling their numbers out of their asses just to look good. That's called marketing. I think they are comparing price-to-price equivalent computers. I.e. If a mac Mini costs 699$, they will find a PC that costs 699$ and they "beat that record", the same goes for Macbooks and whatnot.

No offence, but what do you expect? Did you expect them to get a $10,000 PC and compare it to that? It's called "performance per dollar" for a reason.

 

It looks like this HP ENVY Desktop - TE01-0150xt (7BB48AV_1) is the computer they showed off on the Keynote. MSRP $50 less than the Mac Mini, but 5x faster. I assume that 5x is with video editing, where an M1 chip will shine because of all the built in decoders Apple built that they wanted Intel to build but never did. I wouldn't be surprised if that number wasn't too far from the truth, considering that's a 9th-Gen i5 Processor.

 

But yes, a marketing team is going to pick the most favorable benchmark, on the most favorable settings for them, on the most favorable specifications. Nothing's new.

5 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Which still baffles me. Overpriced, overheated and with ever increasing levels of trouble for cross-platform software developers/users.

Wouldn't a pre-Apple Silicon Mac be best for development since you can develop for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android all on just one device?

 

Overheating yes, but the M1 should solve it.

 

Overpriced? The XPS 13 had the same specs as a MacBook Air for the same price. The lower-end of their Laptop strategy isn't even too overpriced. Only the addons get ridiculous.

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Posted
2 minutes ago, PeterBocan said:

I don't trust that number. How do they know who has what? What are the Intel and AMD sales? I really don't think that the 98% is accurate.

It's a marketing number it's half real/half fluff...

 

They probably just benchmarked it and saw that it beat 98% of laptop CPUs (I'm assuming everything else except like the Ryzen 9 4900HS and other really beefy and weird systems). Not the laptop itself. Remember, half real/half fluff.

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Posted
14 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Which still baffles me. Overpriced, overheated and with ever increasing levels of trouble for cross-platform software developers/users.

The only alternatives that can really compete are Dell XPS and Lenovo X1 - all others are sub-par on all or most non-spec related characteristics/aspects. And those cost just as much, for very good reason. Someone that buys those machines does not primarily pay for raw performance, reactivity and snappiness are essential. Just because they offer less perf/$ does not mean at all that they are overpriced.

 

The fact that Unix-based tools like gcc can natively be used on Mac is actually one of the biggest plus for the user groups mentioned. Just because some Windows-only tools do not work on MacOS does not mean there is any cross-platform trouble. Most of the work is done with basic and universal tools like text editors, the shell, browsers or Mail clients or cross-compliant suites like MS Office or Adobe CS.

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Posted
4 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

 NVidia cards are not a thing; you can use those tools but there's no real reason to do that as they run better on Linux and even Windows with WSLv1/WSLv2.

The 13" models do not even have dedicated GPUs. You still miss the main purpose of those machines for its users. Producitivity =/= high-perf stuff for most people. And I am quite sure that gcc will not perform better on Windows - it does not even run out of the box.

 

I do not understand why you bring up the unrelated discussion about virtualization.

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Posted
42 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

How the hell is a 1000$ laptop luxury? Antything below is a matter of months before it breaks or the battery dies. Most of the market? Maybe over 50%, but by no means 98%.

 

Especially the crap laptops tend to have everything soldered, because it saves sockets in the BOM - and those are actually not cheap.

A $1000 laptop probably isn't luxury for enthusiasts, idk about 50% but most aren't spending $1000 on a laptop.

Some cheap laptops have everything soldered in, but not all of them.

39 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

I don't think that would even be worth it....

 

Like you'd buy a Pentium or Ryzen 3 laptop and add 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD? That's overkill, and especially at that point they're either using soldered small SSDs or eMMC.

No i'd probably go for some i5 or Ryzen 5 laptop with 8GB of ram, it's cheaper to upgrade the RAM than pay extra to get 16GB. Having the option to upgrade the SSD is nice IMO as it makes the laptop useful much longer rather than needing to replace it.

39 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

RAM and SSDs aren't something that fail overnight, I have never had a RAM stick, SSD, or CPU fail me so far. Apple's boards usually die do to a shitty converter or transistor, if I'm correct.

 

At that point why are you even buying new? Just get something used..

I'm not saying RAM or SSD's will fail often, i'm saying it's a possibility and having RAM or SSD go bad isn't something that should make a person have to go to a store and have to pay for a whole new motherboard, having the option to fix it yourself is the whole point of right to repair. Apple's boards usually fail and can kill the SSD as well.

But I'd rather get a used Thinkpad than spend $1,000 on a laptop with everything soldered into the motherboard.

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Posted
3 hours ago, PeterBocan said:

Octo*-core. It's 4 perf and 4 low-perf cores. It's not comparable to Intel's offering, though it's 14 nm vs 5.

No. It is a true 8-core.

No big and little anymore. Basically, this architecture was actually designed for laptops, not mobile.

Qualcomm tried to do this with its cx series, but they were really the same mobile chip but boosted clocks, and changed power saving behaviors (as it expects a heatsink of some kind), while it helped, it was not an actual core change to really make an impact

 

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Posted

"Studio quality microphones"

 

Eek.

 

 

That sounds like some marketing BS right there. I highly doubt a laptop could fit "studio quality" microphones into it's chassis without being atleast an inch or two thick.

LTT's Resident Porsche fanboy and nutjob Audiophile.

 

Main speaker setup is now;

 

Mini DSP SHD Studio -> 2x Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC's (fed by AES/EBU, one feeds the left sub and main, the other feeds the right side) -> 2x Neumann KH420 + 2x Neumann KH870

 

(Having a totally seperate DAC for each channel is game changing for sound quality)

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Posted
8 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

No. It is a true 8-core.

No big and little anymore. Basically, this architecture was actually designed for laptops, not mobile.

Qualcomm tried to do this with its cx series, but they were really the same mobile chip but boosted clocks, and changed power saving behaviors (as it expects a heatsink of some kind), while it helped, it was not an actual core change to really make an impact

 

It is big/little (or "Performance" and "Efficiency") cores.  4 of each.

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Posted
25 minutes ago, Derkoli said:

"Studio quality microphones"

 

Eek.

 

 

That sounds like some marketing BS right there. I highly doubt a laptop could fit "studio quality" microphones into it's chassis without being atleast an inch or two thick.

I think it's the same as the 16-inch MBP.

 

This video was recorded with just the 16-inch MBP's microphone. You can judge for yourself. For a laptop it's good, but if you're actually serious you'd buy an external microphone anyways.

 

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Posted
4 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

I think it's the same as the 16-inch MBP.

 

This video was recorded with just the 16-inch MBP's microphone. You can judge for yourself. For a laptop it's good, but if you're actually serious you'd buy an external microphone anyways.

 

Idk if it's just the audio engineer/audiophile part of me, but god that is bad sounding lol.

 

Way too much 325-1khz and then whatever the hell that rumble is in the background.

LTT's Resident Porsche fanboy and nutjob Audiophile.

 

Main speaker setup is now;

 

Mini DSP SHD Studio -> 2x Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC's (fed by AES/EBU, one feeds the left sub and main, the other feeds the right side) -> 2x Neumann KH420 + 2x Neumann KH870

 

(Having a totally seperate DAC for each channel is game changing for sound quality)

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Derkoli said:

Idk if it's just the audio engineer/audiophile part of me, but god that is bad sounding lol.

 

Way too much 325-1khz and then whatever the hell that rumble is in the background.

audiophile. 

 

sounds great and 99% of the people out there would love it.

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Posted

Now I'm just waiting for an iMac configuration with Apple silicon. 2nd gen version of it, of course.

Currently focusing on my video game collection.

It doesn't matter what you play games on, just play good games you enjoy.

 

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Posted
7 hours ago, Commodus said:

What fascinated me: that Apple claimed the low-power cores by themselves are as powerful as the Core i3 from the earlier MacBook Air. That suggests you might be dealing with at least Core i5-level power even in the $999 Air, and that's not including the much faster graphics.

I, honestly wouldn't buy this first-gen ARM laptop. I might buy a first-gen MacMini based on this, but not a laptop. I'm very interested in how the mini would perform by not being hobbled by Intel's pathetic iGPU part.

 

That said, I'm skeptical about synthetic benchmarks, because we've only really seen CPU numbers to date, there is no point of reference for the GPU, and simply going "it's better than the Intel iGPU" is a very low hurdle. Like I very doubt an iMac, MacMini and a MacBook are using the same chip.

 

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Posted

Welp, color me interested in the MacBook Air...for once.

 

Seems to hit the exact right notes I want out of my laptop, but I'm gonna have to wait for reviews.

The Workhorse (AMD-powered custom desktop)

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X | GPU: MSI X Trio GeForce RTX 2070S | RAM: XPG Spectrix D60G 32GB DDR4-3200 | Storage: 512GB XPG SX8200P + 2TB 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda Compute | OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

 

The Portable Workstation (Apple MacBook Pro 16" 2021)

SoC: Apple M1 Max (8+2 core CPU w/ 32-core GPU) | RAM: 32GB unified LPDDR5 | Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD | OS: macOS Monterey

 

The Communicator (Apple iPhone 13 Pro)

SoC: Apple A15 Bionic | RAM: 6GB LPDDR4X | Storage: 128GB internal w/ NVMe controller | Display: 6.1" 2532x1170 "Super Retina XDR" OLED with VRR at up to 120Hz | OS: iOS 15.1

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