New Apple M1 range

mcsdan

TimmyO said:

mcsdan said:

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

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

I'd have thought that RAM requirements would be similar for the same workload.  I also realised that the unified memory is also shared with the GPU which will take some RAM away too.

After considering upgrades for the last couple of years and eeking through with some ssd and ram upgrades to existing mac minis I rather jumped onto the M1 mac mini - then realised the implications and thankfully was able to cancel. Had they offered 32GB or been user upgradeable as before I wouldn't have been so concerned. I'm going to sit on the fence for a bit longer and see.

octatonic

octatonic said:

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.

The i9 MBP is going back.
I am deeply unimpressed with the thermals for this machine, which basically is a choice between huge fan noise or crazy heat from the underside of the unit.

monquixote

Apparently its only 6 months until the ARM 16 inch comes out.

I've been deeply unimpressed with the 15 inch MBP I have for work. It's one of the worst laptops I've ever had.

octatonic

monquixote said:

Apparently its only 6 months until the ARM 16 inch comes out.

I've been deeply unimpressed with the 15 inch MBP I have for work. It's one of the worst laptops I've ever had.

I've got a 2017 model (made in 2018) 15".
It is a joy to use compared to the 16".

Same Logic session running on both right now.
I've had to disable turbo boost and the 16" is still pushing 80 degrees.
The 15" is running at 50 degrees.

monquixote

I use mine as a desktop because of lockdown which it's ok at other that that the fans go on hurricane at the drop of a hat.

As an actual laptop it's unusable. The keyboard is the worst I've ever used and the screen flips out and glitches unless you tell it to always use the graphics accelerator all the time in which case it obliterates it's batteries.

Danny1969

I'm not a  fan of any of the MBP's made after 2015. There's a lot of design issues, some were fixed under recall but a lot wasn't. The LCD cable on the touchbars, the butterfly keyboard, really bad thermal control caused mainly by trying to make a laptop designed for creative content too thin and stylish. 

Those 2012 to 2015 ish 15" Retina's really are good laptops though, much quicker than the 13" models. 

monquixote

I'd swap it for the 2014 MBP I used to have in a heartbeat.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

digitalscream said:

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.

It's actually relatively simple, though. The fact that most tasks aren't constrained by memory bandwidth and latency is already known and very well-understood. One of the biggest - certain games - doesn't even apply here, because nobody's going to be gaming on these machines; any Mac gaming used to happen via Bootcamp, not least because Mac OS doesn't even fully support the latest OpenGL spec, and that can't happen with the M1 Macs.

For content creation like Photoshop and video editing/rendering - which are arguably the main reasons people get Macs, rightly or wrongly - memory bandwidth and latency are way down the list of system features that affect performance.

monquixote

Given they will now run iPad games natively I think they've become quite an interesting gaming platform.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

Given they will now run iPad games natively I think they've become quite an interesting gaming platform.

I was talking about AAA titles - the big games that run on all the serious gaming platforms (ie Windows and consoles), and require serious GPU grunt. The kind of games that need as much GPU RAM as these systems have in total, where GPU memory bandwidth matters because the amount of data required by the GPU is actually significant (in which case, the bandwidth required is of the order of 25GB/s+ in order to maintain reasonable frame rates, as compared with 3-4GB/s with the LPDDR4X in the M1). The M1 SoCs will never be useful for that - at least not these ones, because the GPU is limited, there's not enough memory, the memory bandwidth is too low and they don't have enough PCI Express lanes to run external GPUs. Memory compression tech doesn't give the M1 an advantage here, because S3TC is equivalent and has been the de-facto standard in graphics cards since about 1998.

iPad games can get away with reduced-detail textures and effects because the screen is so small. Bring that up to 13-17", or 24"+ in the case of the Mac Mini, and you're looking at game detail from 2012. Gamer expectations these days are far, far higher than that.

digitalscream

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is...far too much is being made of the Geekbench score, because no matter where you look in the detail of this (and when you look at the deliberate smoke-and-mirrors of the Apple presentation), the M1 comes up short compared to almost all of its competitors.

My conclusion is that the overwhelming likelihood is these are going to be premium-priced products with mid-range performance at best, and that's disappointing - because the ARM architecture deserves so much better than that for its mainstream-computing debut.

It's unfortunate that Apple made the decision when they did, because AMD basically solved all of the Intel-related problems they were trying to solve (the commercials of using their own silicon aside) with Zen2 and Zen3, without compromises in performance or flexibility.

monquixote

The question is how the performance stacks up against a £999 Ultrabook.

Enthusiast gaming PCs are a vanishingly small part of the gaming market.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

The question is how the performance stacks up against a £999 Ultrabook.

Enthusiast gaming PCs are a vanishingly small part of the gaming market.

And that's fine, but...here's the thing: it's a premium product, which is also a vanishingly-small part of every market, but all I'm hearing is "it's not designed to do that".

GPU-accelerated video and image rendering: it's not designed to do that
Gaming beyond phone and tablet level: it's not designed to do that
Computationally-intensive tasks: it's not designed to do that
Audio recording/creation: it's not designed to do that
Future-proofing through expansion: it's not designed to do that

If you're talking about small parts of the market, that's Apple's entire market positioning! Content creation is their raison d'etre, or at least it has been for many years, and these machines simply aren't going to do that as well as their previous generations (even if you're willing to wait for the software to become available).

The average £999 ultra-portable these days has a Ryzen 4700U or i7-1065 in it, with 4-8 full-speed cores and surprisingly capable GPUs, some even with Optane acceleration, and more connectivity than the M1s are capable of. Literally the only aspect of these machines that's going to beat them is battery life, where you're talking 20hrs vs 13-14hrs. Some of them actually come with a GTX 1050 or 1060 GPU, too.

That's cool, if that's what you're after, but at that point you might as well just get a keyboard for your iPad and have done with it.

monquixote

digitalscream said:

monquixote said:

The question is how the performance stacks up against a £999 Ultrabook.

Enthusiast gaming PCs are a vanishingly small part of the gaming market.

And that's fine, but...here's the thing: it's a premium product, which is also a vanishingly-small part of every market, but all I'm hearing is "it's not designed to do that".

GPU-accelerated video and image rendering: it's not designed to do that
Gaming beyond phone and tablet level: it's not designed to do that
Computationally-intensive tasks: it's not designed to do that
Audio recording/creation: it's not designed to do that
Future-proofing through expansion: it's not designed to do that

If you're talking about small parts of the market, that's Apple's entire market positioning! Content creation is their raison d'etre, or at least it has been for many years, and these machines simply aren't going to do that as well as their previous generations (even if you're willing to wait for the software to become available).

The average £999 ultra-portable these days has a Ryzen 4700U or i7-1065 in it, with 4-8 full-speed cores and surprisingly capable GPUs, some even with Optane acceleration, and more connectivity than the M1s are capable of. Literally the only aspect of these machines that's going to beat them is battery life, where you're talking 20hrs vs 13-14hrs. Some of them actually come with a GTX 1050 or 1060 GPU, too.

That's cool, if that's what you're after, but at that point you might as well just get a keyboard for your iPad and have done with it.

I don't think that Macs are the specialist content creation machines that they were maybe 10-20 years ago. They are just the default "fancy laptops". I think the major "Pro" market for them is web and mobile developers where they seem to be fairly standard these days. 

For pro level video editing ( mean TV shows rather than You tubers) people gave up on FCP quite some years ago. And from attending broadcast trade shows over the years I was in that industry they seem to give progressively less and less of a toss about it.
 
If you look at the changes in iPad OS and Big Sur they are clearly gradually migrating the platforms together so Macs will eventually become iPads with a keyboard, but actually useful for doing productivity work..

In terms of what the Air offers I think it is a proposition that you don't get in anything else on the market.

At £999 it's not stupidly expensive for a premium quality laptop. Yes you can get some plastic Acer PoS with an i7 in it for that sort of money, but not something equivalent like a Surface book.

In that package you are getting something:

• Premium aluminium construction
• Very thin and light
• Fanless and silent (This is huge)
• With a very high quality retina screen
• Really excellent battery life  
• Excellent graphics performance for something with Integrated graphics 

It's essentially a reasonably priced premium ultrabook which is surprisingly good at things like gaming and video editing given the form factor.

I that respect I think it's like a better Ford Focus. Yes you can point to a specialised device that will outperform it in some specific metric, but as an overall package it does seem quite impressive. 

That said I'm reserving judgement until the reviews actually some in given that my experience of Apple hardware is that it's been getting progressively worse over the last 5 years.

Jez6345789

As someone who appreciates Apple I think these are going to be a great step forward.


Not sure you are being a beta tester for Apple has had OSX running on ARM for many years, developing in parallel and has been slowly bringing the two systems together these are really Ipad Pro Pro devices but in a laptop format. 


Of course the marketing is hyped its Apple but then nobody writes a pitch telling people our new machine is 70% as fast as the best performing PC laptop.

Again the 16gb memory limit argument seems a  moot point in my view we will need 32gb in 5 years at work. What 1000 dollar machine is doing real tech work in 5 years. Commercially this kind of gear is done in 2/3 years.


I think like most new Apple products these will be superceeded in 12 months with much improved chips. Apple is always very conservative out of the gate likes to bed stuff in quickly kill it’s first born and then wow you to the next great thing. These three drop into their core sales pockets with enough additional performance to warrant being there.

I don’t think Apple would of finally made the jump to ARM if it could not get some serious advantage  from the MAC Air to the big beast MAC pro.

is the AAA games market even a valid target in terms of dollars Microsoft and Sony have been slogging it out for years. Casual gaming done well is a much bigger market I would guess.

As for timing Apple started this project something like 8 years ago. Long before AMD solved the world problems.

Kittyfrisk

^ I agree with several of your observations, except for this one  "I don’t think Apple would of finally made the jump to ARM if it could not get some serious advantage  from the MAC Air to the big beast MAC pro."
Apple has steadily & massively reduced its commitment to & investment into what historically was 'real computing', toward more attractive consumer devices such as iPhones, iPads etc.
Apple are no longer a computer manufacturing firm, they are a imagineering (sic/vomit), futurology, personal lifestyle based device provider.
The innovative technology big computing beast has long since had its day in the Apple ecosystem, unless the marketing department can find a niche that they can exploit.

RaymondLin

I think it’s clear that the current MBP chassis design was designed for a more low power, lower thermal chips that was expected from Intel that never came.  I got a 2018 MBP and whilst on idle or web surfing it’s fine and have around 45-50c, if I try to do anything else it will quickly spike to 75c and the fans kicks in.

I am curious when they started their roadmap for making this M1 chip, if they had this in the pipe works around the time the current chassis came out then that would make sense, or perhaps sooner? I would expect the chassis to compliment the M1 chip well without the thermal problems for Intel chips.

all in all I’m looking forward to how it fare in the wild.

monquixote

RaymondLin said:

I think it’s clear that the current MBP chassis design was designed for a more low power, lower thermal chips that was expected from Intel that never came.  I got a 2018 MBP and whilst on idle or web surfing it’s fine and have around 45-50c, if I try to do anything else it will quickly spike to 75c and the fans kicks in.

I am curious when they started their roadmap for making this M1 chip, if they had this in the pipe works around the time the current chassis came out then that would make sense, or perhaps sooner? I would expect the chassis to compliment the M1 chip well without the thermal problems for Intel chips.

all in all I’m looking forward to how it fare in the wild.

The rumours are that they will be releasing a 14" MBP next year which makes me slightly suspicious that this years MBP will just be an M1 shoehorned into the old style chasis and next years will be the one that's been ground up designed for the ARM chips.

It will be interesting if they follow the lead of the phones and bump the processors every year now they are working on in house silicon.

Axe_meister

The thing is they came out with the Mac Pro last year. With support up to 1.5TB of memory. I can't see that moving to M1/M2, unless they have not told us that the onboard memory can act as a fast L4 Cache when expanded with standard memory. Likewise the architecture has the ability to connect to PCie devices such as GPUs. Making iMac pros and Mac Pro's possible.

Jez6345789

I don’t think the current physical design of the Apple range was built with Apple Silicon in mind I think the industrial design has evolved as it does but Intel has consistently fallen short of meeting its own power and thermal roadmap. Much the same way as Power PC failed to deliver the thermal performance Apple needed. 

I expect to see major industrial design changes and iMacs that are a true sheet of glass style of design as the story evolves.

As for the big beast machine is there really any reason why it can’t be designed with some sort of large ARM multi core that has the required hardware to access PCie hardware and the needs of the more advanced user. it won’t be an M1 but I have a gut feeling Apple once it has its bread and butter portable mobile devices up and running which is where it’s main revenue is will look to make the Flagship machine.

One of the things I think is also interesting is that in some ways Apple now has what it wanted all of its business life control over the whole machine from soup to nuts the ever closer integration and control of the whole system.

So maybe interesting times ahead