Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up

Apple today announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max as their mostp owerful SoCs ever built by the company. The new chips feature up to a 10-core processor, 32-core GPU, and up to 64GB of unified memory...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-M1-Pro-M1-Max

[perpetually high]

Typo:

> as their mostp owerful SoCs ever

This is really exciting stuff. Hey, we can dislike Apple for many reasons, but this is impressive. And the fact that Alyssa and Asahi Linux will be allowing us to run Linux on this bad boy? I'm considering it. Let's just leave it at that.

[tildearrow]

It's very sad that Apple is the only company with a high-performance low-power ARM design.

[sophisticles]

While I haven't used an M1, based on the reviews I have seen on YouTube, M1 Max should be a beast, if it brings 70% faster GPU and 4x faster GPU performance and all that bandwidth.

As for Asahi, it's nice that Alyssa has the dough to buy both a Pro and a Max, but I say let her, and anyone working with her, first get Linux fully working on the M1 and then she can worry about the Pro and Max.

Here's my prediction: Linux will never truly run 100% on the M1 but it will get close. By the time this happens Apple will be out with the M2 and Pro/Max variants and so on.

[discordian]

Here's my prediction: Linux will never truly run 100% on the M1 but it will get close. By the time this happens Apple will be out with the M2 and Pro/Max variants and so on.

.. and at that time their last and Lastlast generation chips will still utterly shame everything else.

Let's hope Qualcomm/nuvia proves me wrong.

[spykes]

I believe a big part (not the only one) of Apple technical advance is due to their exclusive access to the best manufacturing node at TSMC.
I really hope Intel will manage to catchup on TSMC at some point, otherwise X86 PC will never catchup on Apple ARM.

[oleid]

My biggest concern about this device is: how good will the GPU be supported?
Has anybody experience with that?

[foobaz]

how good will the GPU be supported?

Not well at all. You don't get 3D acceleration or hardware video decoding in Linux, only a framebuffer.

[Danielsan]

I really missed the point on working for free to make selling more Apple computers...

[uid313]

.. and at that time their last and Lastlast generation chips will still utterly shame everything else.

Let's hope Qualcomm/nuvia proves me wrong.

I agree. I think even Apples previous generation SoC will beat the competition.

I believe a big part (not the only one) of Apple technical advance is due to their exclusive access to the best manufacturing node at TSMC.
I really hope Intel will manage to catchup on TSMC at some point, otherwise X86 PC will never catchup on Apple ARM.

Yeah, sure that plays part in it, but I heard that the ARMv8 (AArch64) ISA is a fantastic one. I heard ARM really nailed it with that ISA, that it very well designed, better than anything else. That it is so effective, and have so high instructions per clock cycle (IPC), that x86 being a old, legacy architecture can never reach that high IPC.