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

[vladpetric]

And yet most reviewers agree that in actual usage it's pretty close, with Qualcomm generally considered the better chipset. You already didn't believe me and wouldn't believe me anyway. Keep going don't stop at just the first result. Don't let your bias stop you from self education. The only way you're gonna learn the -actual- reality is if you look it up for yourself.

I learn when someone contradicts me with real data, and well-constructed arguments.

As for my education - I have my research work in microarchitecture cited, among others, by two patents (one of them Intel, one IBM). There's definitely something to be said about continuous education, but it typically doesn't come from people screaming "bias". My observation in the political scene is that those who scream "bias" loudest are the most biased.

I'd suggest you study some microarchitecture. Start with the most recent Hennessy and Patterson. Don't fill a knowledge gap with your own bias.

With respect to laptop mobile processors, they can consume roughly 10x more peak power than their mobile counterparts. That doesn't typically mean many more cores (there will be more cores, but not 10x - because software still doesn't scale that great), but rather much larger microarchitectural resources (such as caches, branch prediction resources, instruction window, and execution width as well).

[undefined]

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.

Well, Apple has a very-very rich history of anti-consumer practices and their marketing statements regarding this CPU are... well... let's say, fuzzy.

I wouldn't personally buy apple hardware because they are actively doing everything to prevent independent repair shops from repairing their hardware and making it almost impossible to buy spare parts. That is given that their official repair shops known to basically just recommend replacing motherboard without even bothering to check what is wrong. Plus many (intentional?) hardware design flaws that persisted in their devices for years and cause failures. I care very deeply about my money and our ecology to buy anything from them ever again hardware-wise (software-wise I don't even want to start).

That being said, they probably did good work on this CPU though, I think I can agree with you. We will see how good it works in real life, but so far looks nice. Many people don't really need much computational power, so for them having a nice laptop with small power consumption is a good thing. And competition is definitely a good thing, it is just a question of time now when we will see nice laptops with powerful and energy-efficient ARM CPUs. Maybe even without Intel ME and this AMD alternative.

[intelfx]

You keep forgetting along with most folks. Heavy metal CPUs and GPUs are worthless without software. That software has to be TIGHTLY tuned to the hardware to get the most bang out of it.

Your fanboyism got it all backwards, bud. You even contradict yourself later down the post.

It's exactly the custom silicon that's worthless without software; the software that must be tightly coupled to the apple silicon and purpose-built to utilize all of those fancy accelerators to actually deliver. Without purpose-built software, the M1 is useless. Unlike the heavy metal.

[tildearrow]

err no. The chip itself is not an issue here.

Wrong. The chip most likely runs a bootloader which can only run stuff signed by Apple (and no exploits known so far), just like on iOS devices.
And this is ROM, like burned in the chip.

If I can run Python on it or maybe some sort of compiler I'm not locked in and the machine is just as useful as any other I own.

Well you can't run Windows or Linux on bare metal hardware, so you're locked in.

As for standards, especially the ones you reference, convince me that Linux is any better.

So you're saying Android (based on Linux) is worse. Apple fanboy, huh?

With Vulkan and OpenGL you can target 100% of the current device market (macOS and iOS included via MoltenVK), whereas with Metal you can only target 15% of the market (even less on developing countries, which are a majority).

At least Apple went with Metal which is in the same family as Vulkan.

But is exclusive to Apple devices. That's the problem.

[creoflux]

I am probably not the target audience for these products. But, I am interested to know more about what the 16-core Neural Engine is and how this could be bench marked.

[lyamc]

I think that this is the opportunity we’ve all been waiting for: Windows isn’t going anywhere and they’ve failed to move onto anything other than X86 which tells me something: It’s an impossible task.

This means there should be an opportunity for an operating system that has enterprise and developer support that runs on ARM, RISC-V, or whatever.

[duby229]

I think that this is the opportunity we’ve all been waiting for: Windows isn’t going anywhere and they’ve failed to move onto anything other than X86 which tells me something: It’s an impossible task.

This means there should be an opportunity for an operating system that has enterprise and developer support that runs on ARM, RISC-V, or whatever.

You seem to be indicating that this operating system might run on Apples hardware, but no....

[lyamc]

You seem to be indicating that this operating system might run on Apples hardware, but no....

What are you talking about?

[duby229]

What are you talking about?

Read the title of the thread you're posting on... Oh, but wait, you're incapable of understanding anything....

I guess I should have known better than to expect you to read the -TITLE-...

[WorBlux]

It's LPDDR4X. The SLOWEST LPDDR4X is as fast as regular DDR4. At its fastest it is around 40% faster than DDR4.

And has half the bus width, so even at 40% faster, you aren't winning on raw bandwidth.