m1 Apple M1 = the rest of us are living in the stone age!?

[Spindel]

21 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

M1 macs are great....but can it run Crysis?

 

 What a computer does for you is it solves the problem. It makes your work easier. If it doesn't run the software you need it doesn't matter how powerful it is.

 

x86 runs everything, ARM does not.

x86 does not run AmigaOS (neither does ARM tho) so no x86 does not run everything...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... just messing with you  

[Laborant]

From my work experience, I only know that writing custom instructions in the ARM environment is quite well known in the industry. 

Meaning... it is way easier to find qualified and experienced personnel. You already have the tools available. You already have development boards for rapid prototyping. The compilation-toolchain is well known and well optimized. The AXI-Bus by ARM is a well known interconnect to attach subsystems to a CPU on a chip. I do not know if there is some sort of equivalent in x86. 

In x86, you basically have two companies, regularly dealing with those chips. Then you have some "close to metal" developers at Microsoft and some Linux-Professionals (and Linus Torvalds himself) and that's basically it. 

But why are those systems that well known? Because around the globe, engineers are dealing with embedded systems running ARM. Do you need to create a remote for your TV? ARM Cortex M0 is the key. Do you need to create a communication node for your RGB-Lightbulb system? ARM Cortex M4 maybe? Do you need to create a smartphone? ARM A-Series chips will do the magic. Do you need your RED-Camera to actually be fast? Take a Xilinx FPGA with an ARM-hardcore within. 
ARM is basically everywhere. We even had to program in ARM-Assembly during our bachelor's at my university. 

 

For the future, I only see two possibilities.

1. Apple manages to massively boost the performance and pulls ahead of Intel and AMD.
2. Apple remains "only" competetive to Intel and AMD.

In the first case, Microsoft might lose on the "non-enthusiast-non-gamer"-consumer market. If their GPUs also step up, also the game developers will improve their Apple support. The big losers might be the "independent PC market" cosisting of enthusiasts and linux nerds. Either buy server hardware, or go bust.

 

In the second case, Apple might lose all the "I need windows software"-people, because Bootcamp is basically gone. But I guess, that's only a small percentage of their customers.

 

Maybe Qualcomm steps up the game and Microsoft manages to cooperate enough to make WoA useful... otherwise... I don't know.The future for WoA really depends on these two companies. (or Broadcom... or Mediatek... or Samsung).
They also need to convince other software companies, that developing and optimizing for the ARM platform will pay off. Apple can show what ARM is capable of - but as long as these companies do not adapt, it will not have any significance in the "PC"-Market.

[spartaman64]

i dont really see whats all the hype is about. most of the m1 chip's advantage is from it being on tsmc's 5nm and the ipc improvements that comes from that. amd is going on tsmc 5nm for their next gen also

[whm1974]

Don't know where this ARM uses the RISC-V ISA come from, but RISC-V is far newer then the ARM ISA.

 

No x86-64 is not even remotely done for. And neither it stand still while ARM advances.

[Jeppes]

Best thing about this is that clueless people after fast pc:s (they have no need for) will buy an efficient mac mini. Worst thing is that some people who do editing and rendering are now going for these because of the hype. Something like a 2060 absolutely destroys m1 in rendering.

 

Put a modified 8 fast core only version in a box with an rx 6900xt and price it 2000€ under the current mac pro, and you have yourself a winner.

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, Jeppes said:

Best thing about this is that clueless people after fast pc:s (they have no need for) will buy an efficient mac mini. Worst thing is that some people who do editing and rendering are now going for these because of the hype. Something like a 2060 absolutely destroys m1 in rendering.

 

Put a modified 8 fast core only version in a box with an rx 6900xt and price it 2000€ under the current mac pro, and you have yourself a winner.

People who do Editing and Rendering on a Professional Level do know or should know what hardware they need. 

 

I doubt that they even using Mac Pro Workstations since HEDT Hardware can be had a lot cheaper from other Vendors or even DIY builds.

[Amias]

On 11/26/2020 at 2:13 PM, Ankh Tech said:

no matter what, arm will not, never, replace x86. Arm is optimised for low end efficient systems. High end will never be achieved by arm. Whatever the case. x86 however. Does both. Get a new windows system. If arm gets more advanced than now. x86 would've probably reached the to good to be true stage

I don't understand this point. I've yet to see modern software that cannot run on ARM.

 

 

 

 

[Ankh Tech]

11 hours ago, Amias said:

I don't understand this point. I've yet to see modern software that cannot run on ARM.

 

 

 

 

It's just how arm works. Usual day to day software took a long time to get optimised to x86-64, it would take some more for it to run on max capacity and efficiency. The different architecture makes it harder. They get hyped about something new for no reason. Apple is on tsmc 5nm and  ryzen is on 7nm, and intel are on 14nm++++++++++++++++++++++. This just shows that zen 4 will obliterate everything in it's path.

[Laborant]

3 hours ago, Ankh Tech said:

It's just how arm works

That's a bit too simplified. Both, ARM and x86 are "Turing complete" - so they can be used for any computational task. The only differences are...
1. x86 is CISC while ARM is RISC - meaning x86 packs more "microcode"-Instructions into one Instructions, while ARM does not need this "unpack"-phase for an instruction.
Both approaches have their pros and cons...

2. You will find more trained personnel to have experience in designing ARM-SoCs, you have standardized on-chip communication protocols, you can grab graduates of several universities having coded in ARM-Assembly, having designed custom-instructions on an FPGA-SoC, being experienced in attaching AXI-conformant IPs to an ARM-Core and so on. Try to find those for x86 - they work at intel or AMD. 

 

ARM also brings this "bigLITTLE"-Architecture, that is now adapted by Intel. They will have a steep learing curve. ARM on the other hand already has years in experience. Just open your task-manager and count the processes just wasting your "high performance cores" on OS-Services like time, network or antivirus. 

[NeuesTestament]

The Apple M1 gets outperformed by a lot of x86 chips. It's a good design for sure, but people are really overhyping it when they try to sell you that it will wipe out everything else. X86 will remain competitive for the forseeable future.

[saltycaramel]

1 hour ago, NeuesTestament said:

The Apple M1 gets outperformed by a lot of x86 chips. It's a good design for sure, but people are really overhyping it when they try to sell you that it will wipe out everything else. X86 will remain competitive for the forseeable future.

If a car could do 200km with 1L of fuel but the initial models had a limited tank but you know cars with bigger tanks are coming in a matter of months, would it be overhyping to be extremely impressed and ask oneself “what about every other car manufacturer now?”?

 

That’s the performance per watt that is impressive and that outperforms x86 alternatives..

[Spindel]

1 hour ago, NeuesTestament said:

The Apple M1 gets outperformed by a lot of x86 chips. It's a good design for sure, but people are really overhyping it when they try to sell you that it will wipe out everything else. X86 will remain competitive for the forseeable future.

Yes, but the M1 is also a low end SoC that draws 25 W when both CPU and GPU goes full blast and is compared to desktop x86 with a power draw much higher than that on only the CPU. It also goes toe to toe with desktop class CPUs in single threaded where only the CPU costs about as much as the entire base M1 Mini.  

 

That is what the hype is about.

[NeuesTestament]

1 hour ago, saltycaramel said:

If a car could do 200km with 1L of fuel but the initial models had a limited tank but you know cars with bigger tanks are coming in a matter of months, would it be overhyping to be extremely impressed and ask oneself “what about every other car manufacturer now?”?

 

That’s the performance per watt that is impressive and that outperforms x86 alternatives..

ARM has always outperformed x86 in performance per watt. This is nothing new. By the way, I am not saying that this new chip isn't nice. It's actually pretty nice. But it is far from pushing ever other chip into the stone age. It's a really good product that gets overhyped by some.

[saltycaramel]

20 minutes ago, NeuesTestament said:

ARM has always outperformed x86 in performance per watt. This is nothing new. By the way, I am not saying that this new chip isn't nice. It's actually pretty nice. But it is far from pushing ever other chip into the stone age. It's a really good product that gets overhyped by some.

 

For sure this is nothing new for whoever followed the ARM CPU scene on iPhones and iPads (which, even within the ARM camp, outperformed the ARM CPUs on android phones/tablets and Windows ARM laptops) in the last few years.

 

But now we’re seeing that kind of performance-per-watt (and again, this is on another level compared to previous ARM laptops by Windows OEMs and by MS) brought over to the classic computer formats we have known and loved for 40 years. In new thermal envelopes too. Hence the commotion.  

[Lord Vile]

On 11/29/2020 at 3:01 PM, RejZoR said:

People make too much drama around it. Apple M1 is a bit of a revolution, but only within Apple's ecosystem. Because they made sure everything works together to perfection. Outside of that, it's just another ARM based chip. Nothing special. Anyone could achieve that if they had the control over ecosystem the way Apple has. Which is why Microsoft is struggling with Windows for ARM, because they don't have the same control as Apple has.

 

It's also funny how people say "uh oh x86 is old" and "ARM is new". Uuuum, have you all woken up from cryo sleep? ARM has been around since 1983. I'd say 25+ years counts as old too. Not to mention x86 in its beginnings has very little to do with what it is now. And same applies to ARM. People have this fixated idea that if it's x86 it's the same as it was 30 years ago. Not only it got 64bit registers support, its acceleration function extensions have been added and removed through decades and the whole compute logic of CPU's has dramatically changed since its beginnings. People don't seem to know how to distinguish x86 as logical part from the CPU structure as the physical part. They are not the same thing. It's the physical part that has evolved so dramatically since its early days and it's not just raw transistor count, clock speed or whatever. It's also multi tier caching, branch prediction, multiple cores or how AMD approached the problem with CCX complexes. It's ultimately all still x86, but it's unlike anything anyone even imagined when x86 was created in the beginning. Just look what leaps we've made in just few years of Ryzen CPU's. Has anyone imagined back in 2005 that in 2020 we'll have 32 cores and 64 threads in CPU's which are approaching clocks past 4GHz on ALL cores, that while very expensive are perfectly accessible to regular mortals (Threadripper 3970X for example). x86 is not outdated or problematic and neither CPU's based on them are something to be dismissed as pointless or useless. As evident by AMD how much winning you can do by thinking out of the box without breaking the compatibility.

To be fair for most people MacOS is the better OS to be on. The cost of entry is the issue where you can get a desktop for under £400 with 8GB of RAM and an SSD and the cheapest mac is around double the cost at £700. Mac has been gaining market share recently though and combined with Microsoft being retarded with windows leaving it a buggy mess I can see MacOS pushing for 40% marketshare in the next decade in markets like the US and UK. ARM might help with that due to insane battery and performance in the Air plus using mobile apps. Ultimately for the vast majority of people the stuff that matters isn't the fact that you have 16 cores and 60 PCIE lanes. What matters is does it run a browser, an office suite and email, is it reliable and in a laptops case how long does it last on battery.

[RejZoR]

39 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

To be fair for most people MacOS is the better OS to be on. The cost of entry is the issue where you can get a desktop for under £400 with 8GB of RAM and an SSD and the cheapest mac is around double the cost at £700. Mac has been gaining market share recently though and combined with Microsoft being retarded with windows leaving it a buggy mess I can see MacOS pushing for 40% marketshare in the next decade in markets like the US and UK. ARM might help with that due to insane battery and performance in the Air plus using mobile apps. Ultimately for the vast majority of people the stuff that matters isn't the fact that you have 16 cores and 60 PCIE lanes. What matters is does it run a browser, an office suite and email, is it reliable and in a laptops case how long does it last on battery.

It's the same argument as with iPhones. But ultimately, iPhone with iOS is just so much better device to use than any Android phone. It's because Apple makes both, hardware and OS. No Android, even most customized ones will never be as integrated as iOS is. Plus iOS just looks so damn nice where Android feels like it escaped from 2010. Everything flat just makes it look so boring.

[Jeppes]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

It's the same argument as with iPhones. But ultimately, iPhone with iOS is just so much better device to use than any Android phone. It's because Apple makes both, hardware and OS. No Android, even most customized ones will never be as integrated as iOS is. Plus iOS just looks so damn nice where Android feels like it escaped from 2010. Everything flat just makes it look so boring.

No its not. What you are talking about is personal preference.

[RejZoR]

11 hours ago, Jeppes said:

No its not. What you are talking about is personal preference.

I see your Android fanboyism seeping out...

[Lord Vile]

18 hours ago, Jeppes said:

No its not. What you are talking about is personal preference.

From a purely objective standpoint iOS is better optimised, has more apps, has a better app store, has longer support for devices and has features like iMessage that flat out isn't available on android. Plus you have integration with other devices and not just apple specific hardware, carplay destroys whatever Android Auto is called now. 

[tech.guru]

On 11/26/2020 at 9:07 AM, gal-m said:

I've really been impressed with the Apple M1 chip, though it seemed too good to be true at first, but after researching it extensively it looks like the claims actually do hold up.

 

My question is, what's next? Can Apple Silicon wipe everything else out? I've recently been thinking about building a new high end gaming system, but now it just seems like Apple might speed past anything in the years to come (in reference to single thread performance at least). The whole thing is making me extremely discouraged to invest in any type of Windows machine at the moment... - Yes I DO know that Windows and Macs, don't compare directly depending on a persons specific workload, but I think you get what I'm trying to say.. it's just making x86 CPUs feel a bit old ...

 

EDIT: I am NOT saying I want to play games on a Mac. I am just simply stating that the potential of Apple's new chips to wipe every other Intel or AMD off the face of the planet might move manufacturers like Intel or AMD to start looking at developing an ARM based chip as well and the potential that would have in a Windows machine..

 

Anyways, what do you guys think?

Next thing you know people will be asking if a smart fridge can replace there computer

[tech.guru]

On 12/1/2020 at 6:03 AM, Spindel said:

Yes, but the M1 is also a low end SoC that draws 25 W when both CPU and GPU goes full blast and is compared to desktop x86 with a power draw much higher than that on only the CPU. It also goes toe to toe with desktop class CPUs in single threaded where only the CPU costs about as much as the entire base M1 Mini.  

 

That is what the hype is about.

Except this isnt the 90s anymore and single threaded performance is the least important metric in the era of multi core processing.

 

Like cmon, can people just be a little real about what this processor can and can not do in its current form.

 

Its okay for everyday tasks and can satisfy main stream market. But the core count and lack of io expansion isnt going to work for serious professional users.

 

its fine for students and light office use.

 

 

 

 

[Vishera]

On 11/26/2020 at 2:20 PM, Den-Fi said:

So ARM will replace x86, got it.

Nice,two negatives cancel each other,for example:

"I will never not do that"

[tech.guru]

ARM wont replace x86 entirely.

 

However, its no doubt majority of users dont even need a pc anymore with tablets and smartphones improving so much over the years.

 

The question is deeper than ARM is how people use computers and interact.

 

We beein using keyboard and mouse for so long, i see this as a bridge by apple to unify there different platforms more than anything.

 

Less development cycles for maintaining seperate branches and getting common application across all devices.

 

At some point though,  be interesting to see the professional user how they are handled. Those that have mac pros with dual xeons the user base that really sustains and have been loyal to apple in the past

 

They better be careful

 

[Spindel]

13 minutes ago, tech.guru said:

Except this isnt the 90s anymore and single threaded performance is the least important metric in the era of multi core processing.

 

Like cmon, can people just be a little real about what this processor can and can not do in its current form.

 

Its okay for everyday tasks and can satisfy main stream market. But the core count and lack of io expansion isnt going to work for serious professional users.

 

its fine for students and light office use.

 

 

 

 

What is the definition of "serious professional" work?

 

I make a living of what I currently do on my computer, and I benefit a lot from the ST performance and more cores has a very small impact on my workflow. 

[tech.guru]

Serious professional work such as game,movie and music studios that have traditionally stuck with apple.

 

The ones that buy the higher tier devices that are currently left out of this launch and must be scratching there head wondering if apple still committed to them as a user group