Apple Releases M1-Powered Apple Silicon Macs, macOS Big Sur Releasing This Week

[drakonas777]

M1 is a supercharged ordinary ARM SoC - nothing more. There were high performance ARM cores before, Apple has improved them a bit. There were SoCs with custom accelerators before, Apple have put more of them. There were SoCs with integrated RAM before, Apple have put more (and faster) of it. Even all this "HSA philosophy" is nothing new. Basically, there is nothing fundamentally new or revolutionary regarding this chip.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's an impressive piece of hardware and I'd appreciate something like this in my linux mini-PC very much. Also, I respect Apple for returning to the original hardware. No intentions to downplay M1's capabilities here. I just don't see this chip in the same way, as Apple cultists do, who apparently think that M1 is some sort of alien tech never seen before, which really isn't. That's all.

Personally I think M1 is the first example of truly next-gen consumer SoC. There will be more of them, from multiple vendors. N5/N3 will provide good density boost, but the performance won't change that much. All major CPU/SoC vendors will go accelerator-integration during the next few years - trust me.

[Cotyso]

Too bad it can't run Linux, or even Windows. I dislike the apple ecosystem because of the huge number of restrictions. I have an iPad and it's a shame it can't be used to its full potential because of apple's strict policies (lack of sideloading being the worst). Given this, buying an apple laptop that can run only macos seems like a risk, because they could start locking it down during the next couple of years.

[Tom B]

Regardless of the performance of these chips, this makes sense from Apple's perspective. I'm guessing Apple have looked at their sales, seen that the majority of devices they sell are tablets, laptops and phones with a small number of desktops by comparison, compared that with the cost of providing software for the different architectures and realised they would be better to unify architecture across their product range. Apple Laptops also run incredibly hot so this should resolve that issue as well.

Most people using laptops want better battery life and don't really use the performance that an i7 offers. The people I know who have apple lapops don't do anything that a Chromebook can't do just as well.

Whether the performance sucks or not is irrelevant, people who buy macs don't generally do performance intensive tasks. Those that do a bit of video editing will be fine as long as there's a semi-decent hardware x264 encoder. And what other high performance tasks do mac users actually do? Apple knows their audience.... and they know their audience don't really care about computing performance.

[timofonic]

Please ban Jumbotron. ASAP. He's a troll.

It's not because of his opinions, that's irrelevant.

It's because he spams articles from other sites all time and repeat them at nearly each reply.

And because he abuses of upper case letters. He also uses altright style of writing, to say it very lightly and not feed the troll so much.

I don't care of fanboy or nonsense opinions as long as they are respectful and not considered spam.

Michael, please consider it a lot.

[R41N3R]

The only thing I understood from this thread is that Apple released Jumbotron... was there anything else? Guess not

[garegin]

I don’t have a horse in the race either way. From a psychology/sociology angle it’s very interesting how the furious resentment of Apple’s company culture can drive people to hate the switch to ARM, even though it’s clearly a sensible move (energy efficiency).
if you don’t like their products don’t buy them. It seems though some people are gnashing their teeth that somebody so obnoxious could be so commercially successful. It’s like a feminist getting pissed that Afghans make nice scarfs.

[chuckula]

The only thing I understood from this thread is that Apple released Jumbotron... was there anything else? Guess not

At least they didn't release the Kraken!

[Weasel]

Jumbotron you are a moron. We all know what face you'll make when a real benchmark is posted, gonna start with those watts excuse.

[benis]

I actually created an account just to reply to this thread. So here we go:

I cannot really understand how people can have so strong feelings about this - and with these strong feeling just see black and white. I mean, I used to be a Mac user for many years, but switched over to Linux because I wanted more freedom. I prefer not to be locked in any eco-system, but I can still follow with interest what Apple is doing here. If it's good IRL - hopefully it can inspire other companies to create interesting ARM based laptops (non-Apple).

Also, I have a suggestion - instead of saying "This is shit", "Ryzen is so much better", etc etc. Let's agree that the tech is interesting, even you would never buy an Apple product, and that the benchmark results will be interesting.

[AdrianBc]

However for those who want to get a pristine MacOS X experience and ultimate performance (Intel Tiger Lake and AMD Zen 3 CPUs are nowhere near close in performance as M1) Mac books and Mac Mini are an absolute joy to use (barring costly upgrades and serviceability).

Actually Intel Tiger Lake, AMD Zen 3 and Apple M1 are quite close in single-thread performance, see the benchmarks published at Anandtech.

While the published benchmarks are for A14, not for M1, M1 is not much better in single-thread than A14. The much better cooling provided for M1 will greatly increase the multi-threaded performance compared to A14, but it will increase the single-thread performance much less.

What is true is that the Apple M1 will have similar single-thread performance with the best Intel and AMD, but at a much lower power consumption, because M1 is a much wider CPU made in the superior 5-nm manufacturing process, which only Apple can afford this year.

In multi-threaded performance however, even the older AMD Renoir will have a similar performance with M1, probably slightly higher in a well designed laptop.

Of course, Apple could have chosen to easily beat both Intel and AMD in multi-threaded performance, by including more cores in M1, but that would have greatly increased their costs without increasing sales much, because the Apple customers are content anyway with a lower performance as long as they can use the Apple software, otherwise they would not have bought Apple computers.

As expected the performance claims made during the show are misleading. Apple M1 is fast, but not that fast.

For example they claimed that in the new MacBook Pro, the M1 CPU is almost 3 times faster than Intel (actually 2.8 times).

After reading the fine print, the comparison was actually with a Coffee Lake from 2018, an i7-8557U.

That means that compared to the 2018 Coffee Lake i7-8559U from an Intel NUC that I am using, the M1 is only 80% faster.

Compared to a Tiger Lake from now, the speed advantage should deflate to something between 30% and 40%.

Of course, even a 30% higher speed than Tiger Lake is a great achievement for Apple.

While in single-thread benchmarks M1 should beat easily any of the older AMD Renoir models, which are much slower than the new Zen 3, in multi-thread benchmarks the competition should be much more balanced.

A well designed laptop with an 8-core AMD Renoir should have approximately a double performance compared to my Intel NUC, which should have about 55% of the M1 performance, so the AMD Renoir should keep a small advantage over Apple M1 in multi-threaded applications.



However, as others have already said, nobody had any doubt about Apple being able to design excellent processors. The problem is that these great processors are put only in products that cannot satisfy the needs of most professionals other than those whose job is to make products directed towards other Apple customers and that cannot satisfy even the needs of many "amateurs" who do not match the profile intended by Apple for their customers. Many years ago I had also been a content Apple customer, but I had to abandon them after they changed their direction so that their products could no longer fulfill my needs.


For example, the new Apple Mini resembles something that I might want to have, but it is quickly disqualified by having half of the peripheral ports that I am using and only up to a quarter of the memory that I am using in Intel NUCs or similar computers, some of which allow me to use 2 DisplayPort monitors while still having 2 Thunderbolt connectors available for external SSDs and also 2 Ethernet connectors. The 2 Ethernet connectors are less important, because USB adapters are available, but that is true for other computers, not for the Mac Mini, whose only 2 USB A ports will be occupied by the keyboard and the mouse.

So already the hardware is not good for anything more demanding than developing iOS applications, but the lack of software choices would have also been enough to disqualify the product.

Any so-called "security" feature, where the owner does not have the full control to install his/her own keys and to delete any keys belonging to the manufacturer, that is not a security feature, but only a backdoor, i.e. an insecurity feature.