New Apple M1 range

Whitecat

Well...

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/amp/

Imagine where we’ll be in a couple years...

RaymondLin

Whitecat said:

Well...

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/amp/

Imagine where we’ll be in a couple years...

Linus' video will be interesting, his head might explode. 

monquixote

Benchmarks don't always map to real world performance, but damn that's impressive!

WiresDreamDisasters

John_A

monquixote said:

Benchmarks don't always map to real world performance, but damn that's impressive!

Very.  For someone that’s just bough a new iMac it’s depressing 

spark240

See the Production expert review....Im staying clear for the time being...

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/production-expert-1/want-a-new-apple-mac-for-audio-read-this-first?mc_cid=4a1ab5668c&mc_eid=79d504e3cb

octatonic

spark240 said:

See the Production expert review....Im staying clear for the time being...

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/production-expert-1/want-a-new-apple-mac-for-audio-read-this-first?mc_cid=4a1ab5668c&mc_eid=79d504e3cb

AFAIK none of us have one in the hand yet, so not exactly a review.
Russ has one incoming, I am waiting for that before deciding what to do.

RaymondLin

Linus' orders are due to arrive in and around 22nd-24th so I guess we will see his review (and everyone elses) and benchmarks before end of the month.

Stuckfast

I was talking to someone recently who has had a development machine for a while. He says the Rosetta functionality is very impressive and will even run complex apps like Logic pretty well.

John_A

Stuckfast said:

I was talking to someone recently who has had a development machine for a while. He says the Rosetta functionality is very impressive and will even run complex apps like Logic pretty well.

'pretty well'. would be nice to know just how good that is.  I would expect Logic would be all set to work on the new chip-set, don't know about 3rd party plugins though.  

mcsdan

Cancelled my M1 mac mini earlier today! The RAM limitations don't sit well with longevity of the machine. I'm a stickler for making old PCs last with some upgrades and since these aren't upgradeable I'd rather buy with an eye on future requirements. Our current mac minis are 8 years old and going strong but 12-16GB RAM is required now for what we do at work and specing that for a machine I'd expect to last 3-5 years (or 8!) I'd expect to move to 32GB or be upgradeable . I'm going to wait for the next revision where I can at least get some improvement on memory capacity.

TimmyO

guitarcookie1 said:

Bridgehouse said:

For someone who uses a Mac for business purposes and needs it out and about a lot, the battery life figures are jaw dropping. 

For me, that’s worth the entry price alone

Same here. My 2015 MBP will now only last on its battery for about 1/2 a day. A right pita if I have to visit clients to work.

My battery is fecked on my 2015 MBP - I just take the power supply with me everywhere 

TimmyO

mcsdan said:

Cancelled my M1 mac mini earlier today! The RAM limitations don't sit well with longevity of the machine. I'm a stickler for making old PCs last with some upgrades and since these aren't upgradeable I'd rather buy with an eye on future requirements. Our current mac minis are 8 years old and going strong but 12-16GB RAM is required now for what we do at work and specing that for a machine I'd expect to last 3-5 years (or 8!) I'd expect to move to 32GB or be upgradeable . I'm going to wait for the next revision where I can at least get some improvement on memory capacity.

Will the ram being almost integrated with the CPU in the M1 make it more able to perform with less memory? 

digitalscream

TimmyO said:

mcsdan said:

Cancelled my M1 mac mini earlier today! The RAM limitations don't sit well with longevity of the machine. I'm a stickler for making old PCs last with some upgrades and since these aren't upgradeable I'd rather buy with an eye on future requirements. Our current mac minis are 8 years old and going strong but 12-16GB RAM is required now for what we do at work and specing that for a machine I'd expect to last 3-5 years (or 8!) I'd expect to move to 32GB or be upgradeable . I'm going to wait for the next revision where I can at least get some improvement on memory capacity.

Will the ram being almost integrated with the CPU in the M1 make it more able to perform with less memory? 

No.

Incidentally, one reason for the unusually high Geekbench scores is that Geekbench favours high memory bandwidth, rather than pure CPU computational power. In actual CPU-bound tasks, it's fairly likely it won't be anywhere near as high up the table.

Gulliver

mcsdan said:

Cancelled my M1 mac mini earlier today! The RAM limitations don't sit well with longevity of the machine. 

That's my only reluctance in looking at one as an upgrade for my 2014 MBP.  It's got 16Gb of RAM and it's fine for now, but assuming I get another 6 years out of a new machine, I think it may be problematic in the long-run.  Part of me is thinking of getting a fully-spec'd 16" Intel machine just to be on the safe side by way of future-proofing.

EDIT - although I massively resent the £800 upgrade cost for 64GB of RAM    Frigging Apple Tax...  That's almost 4x the cost of some Corsair Vengeance!

monquixote

digitalscream said:

TimmyO said:

mcsdan said:

Cancelled my M1 mac mini earlier today! The RAM limitations don't sit well with longevity of the machine. I'm a stickler for making old PCs last with some upgrades and since these aren't upgradeable I'd rather buy with an eye on future requirements. Our current mac minis are 8 years old and going strong but 12-16GB RAM is required now for what we do at work and specing that for a machine I'd expect to last 3-5 years (or 8!) I'd expect to move to 32GB or be upgradeable . I'm going to wait for the next revision where I can at least get some improvement on memory capacity.

Will the ram being almost integrated with the CPU in the M1 make it more able to perform with less memory? 

No.

Incidentally, one reason for the unusually high Geekbench scores is that Geekbench favours high memory bandwidth, rather than pure CPU computational power. In actual CPU-bound tasks, it's fairly likely it won't be anywhere near as high up the table.

That's not quite true.

Higher memory bandwidth and sharing memory between components does allow you to do more with less in terms of performance. They also have things like hardware accelerated memory compression.

Although it's also worth noting it's shared memory so the video ram and anything being used by the AI chip comes from the same pool.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

digitalscream said:

TimmyO said:

mcsdan said:

Cancelled my M1 mac mini earlier today! The RAM limitations don't sit well with longevity of the machine. I'm a stickler for making old PCs last with some upgrades and since these aren't upgradeable I'd rather buy with an eye on future requirements. Our current mac minis are 8 years old and going strong but 12-16GB RAM is required now for what we do at work and specing that for a machine I'd expect to last 3-5 years (or 8!) I'd expect to move to 32GB or be upgradeable . I'm going to wait for the next revision where I can at least get some improvement on memory capacity.

Will the ram being almost integrated with the CPU in the M1 make it more able to perform with less memory? 

No.

Incidentally, one reason for the unusually high Geekbench scores is that Geekbench favours high memory bandwidth, rather than pure CPU computational power. In actual CPU-bound tasks, it's fairly likely it won't be anywhere near as high up the table.

That's not quite true.

Higher memory bandwidth and sharing memory between components does allow you to do more with less in terms of performance. They also have things like hardware accelerated memory compression.

Although it's also worth noting it's shared memory so the video ram and anything being used by the AI chip comes from the same pool.

No, it's absolutely true - stuff that's CPU-bound, ie stuff that almost completely relies on the CPU's computational speed, will expose any limitations of the CPU itself.

It's LPDDR4X, which is slightly faster than standard DDR4, but that advantage won't last long.

Also, in terms of GPU-accelerated tasks, LPDDR4X is significantly slower than the RAM used by GPUs these days by a factor of 10, so things like video rendering are going to suck balls regardless of how fast the on-die GPU is...in comparison to, say, a MBP with a discrete GPU.

An on-package shared RAM pool is a great way to cover for lower CPU performance in some real-world workloads, but it has significant implications outside of those specific circumstances. And, in the real world, there are very few CPU-based workloads that are constrained by memory bandwidth in a way that this particular approach could solve the problem.

I guess what I'm saying is...if you were going to design a CPU to do really well in Geekbench, this is how you'd do it - drop all the features that it doesn't need, like enough PCI Express lanes to run 10Gb/s networking, extra Thunderbolt ports and external GPUs, stick the RAM in the package and increase the thermal envelope relative to its previous incarnations. As a few people have said, though, these new products are basically iPads with better thermal dissipation.

In other news, the Windows machine they used for comparison in the graphs where the M1 eclipsed the Intel CPU was...an unspecified i3, according to the product page. Not really the sort of thing you'd expect to compare a premium product to.

On the bright side, I guess they can finally justify charging whatever the hell they want for Mac RAM

monquixote

digitalscream said:

monquixote said:

digitalscream said:

TimmyO said:

mcsdan said:

Cancelled my M1 mac mini earlier today! The RAM limitations don't sit well with longevity of the machine. I'm a stickler for making old PCs last with some upgrades and since these aren't upgradeable I'd rather buy with an eye on future requirements. Our current mac minis are 8 years old and going strong but 12-16GB RAM is required now for what we do at work and specing that for a machine I'd expect to last 3-5 years (or 8!) I'd expect to move to 32GB or be upgradeable . I'm going to wait for the next revision where I can at least get some improvement on memory capacity.

Will the ram being almost integrated with the CPU in the M1 make it more able to perform with less memory? 

No.

Incidentally, one reason for the unusually high Geekbench scores is that Geekbench favours high memory bandwidth, rather than pure CPU computational power. In actual CPU-bound tasks, it's fairly likely it won't be anywhere near as high up the table.

That's not quite true.

Higher memory bandwidth and sharing memory between components does allow you to do more with less in terms of performance. They also have things like hardware accelerated memory compression.

Although it's also worth noting it's shared memory so the video ram and anything being used by the AI chip comes from the same pool.

No, it's absolutely true - stuff that's CPU-bound, ie stuff that almost completely relies on the CPU's computational speed, will expose any limitations of the CPU itself.

It's LPDDR4X, which is slightly faster than standard DDR4, but that advantage won't last long.

Also, in terms of GPU-accelerated tasks, LPDDR4X is significantly slower than the RAM used by GPUs these days by a factor of 10, so things like video rendering are going to suck balls regardless of how fast the on-die GPU is...in comparison to, say, a MBP with a discrete GPU.

An on-package shared RAM pool is a great way to cover for lower CPU performance in some real-world workloads, but it has significant implications outside of those specific circumstances. And, in the real world, there are very few CPU-based workloads that are constrained by memory bandwidth in a way that this particular approach could solve the problem.

In other news, the Windows machine they used for comparison in the graphs where the M1 eclipsed the Intel CPU was...an unspecified i3, according to the product page. Not really the sort of thing you'd expect to compare a premium product to.

On the bright side, I guess they can finally justify charging whatever the hell they want for Mac RAM

It's not a simple equation that really comes down to better or worse. It's very dependent on the application so we will need to see the real world performance to judge.

I did quite a bit of work in my previous job about offloading work from the CPU to the GPU and often it ends up not worth it because the time taken to shuffle data around is more than the speedup. Unified memory would make a huge difference in that application.

octatonic

I've decided to hold off on anything involving M1.

Bought myself an i9 MBP 16 yesterday and it is flying.

I'll drop back into it in a couple of years- but an Air might be a potential machine at some stage.

Danny1969

I think the first M1 models are going to be superseded quite quickly, like the first intel Macbook Pro was. It's a 2 year transition period and I would expect models to come to have 5G .... you can't just swap cards out on the latest Macbooks even for exactly the same Apple type so upgrading later to 5G might not be an option internally.