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

[coder]

Wasn't one of the selling points of the Apple M1 the "one processor for everyone"

Volks-CPU?

Apple doesn't make anything for "everyone". They only make products for people with money.

[nranger]

I think Apple just focus on key areas, and they aren’t trying to make profit on the SoC alone, so things like die size and manufacturing process is not as important. But if you are Intel and AMD and your business is only to sell chips then you need to keep the costs down.

This exactly. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are chipmakers. For them, wafer starts in the fab directly correlate to revenue and profits based on how much performance and how much profit they can squeeze from each square millimeter of silicon. That means they have different forces on their design criteria than Apple. Their designs push right to the tippy-top of the volt-frequency efficiency curve for each manufacturing node to get the highest clock speeds. They add pipeline stages and use just enough cache to feed logic units at those high clock speeds. They leave much platform engineering to ODMs and OEMs, and as a result don't push SoC integration as hard with things like accelerators and super-wide on-package DRAM.

Apple meanwhile is looking at the whole system to turn a profit. For them, they can jump to the latest manufacturing node, expend a larger transistor budget, and settle down in the efficiency curve and maximize perf/watt.

All that said, don't count Intel/AMD out. Alder Lake single thread performance looks to be impressive, and is realistically an entire manufacturing node BEHIND Apple on TSMC 5nm.

[sedsearch]

Apple M1 related posts invite a long trail of retarded comments

Why are people so massively surprised at M1/Max/Pro and why are they even comparing it ti Intel/AMD/Arm CPUs which by definition are different devices? For every configuration of RAM/CPU, Apple have to fabricate it from scratch. All three M1 are different in size. Makes for an even greater pile of electronic waste.

One could debate whether building CPU+GPU+RAM+Encode/Decoder on a single chip is the right computing device, but it is not the same device as a lone CPU. AMD has been building better integrated GPU as APU which already performs quite well. Perhaps for smartphones such an architecture will be shortly seen in market from Qualcomm/Samsung/Huawei. But such a device makes no sense for anything configurable.

A logical extension of such a device is building everything on a single chip - including storage, Wifi controller, Bluetooth controller, Audio/Video stuff, DSP, and all that which can be made on a single chip(I don't know the details of all electronics that is needed in a motherboard). It will be a truly single chip computer, with storage read/write at probably 100 Gb/s. Is it possible to make it today - probably yes. But it makes sense only for a specific kind of market - smartphones and ultrabooks, which happens to be a huge market.

The fact that Intel/AMD will still beat the new M1 chips on traditional motherboards in a few months is a testament to a fact that they are still quite good in tech. If they decide to make such a unified chip computer, it might be totally insane. Apple isin't doing anything that is over the top, or is something totally innovative in industry. They just have a pre-existing ecosystem to sell their disposable chips with. Google have made their own chips and it is possible that we might see a true "single chip computer" in Android land.

[tildearrow]

Apple M1 related posts invite a long trail of retarded comments

Why are people so massively surprised at M1/Max/Pro and why are they even comparing it ti Intel/AMD/Arm CPUs which by definition are different devices? For every configuration of RAM/CPU, Apple have to fabricate it from scratch. All three M1 are different in size. Makes for an even greater pile of electronic waste.

One could debate whether building CPU+GPU+RAM+Encode/Decoder on a single chip is the right computing device, but it is not the same device as a lone CPU. AMD has been building better integrated GPU as APU which already performs quite well. Perhaps for smartphones such an architecture will be shortly seen in market from Qualcomm/Samsung/Huawei. But such a device makes no sense for anything configurable.

A logical extension of such a device is building everything on a single chip - including storage, Wifi controller, Bluetooth controller, Audio/Video stuff, DSP, and all that which can be made on a single chip(I don't know the details of all electronics that is needed in a motherboard). It will be a truly single chip computer, with storage read/write at probably 100 Gb/s. Is it possible to make it today - probably yes. But it makes sense only for a specific kind of market - smartphones and ultrabooks, which happens to be a huge market.

The fact that Intel/AMD will still beat the new M1 chips on traditional motherboards in a few months is a testament to a fact that they are still quite good in tech. If they decide to make such a unified chip computer, it might be totally insane. Apple isin't doing anything that is over the top, or is something totally innovative in industry. They just have a pre-existing ecosystem to sell their disposable chips with. Google have made their own chips and it is possible that we might see a true "single chip computer" in Android land.

The innovation here is roughly similar performance to x86 with energy consumption levels much lower than it.

[spykes]

It will be interesting to compare the power efficiency of the new Zen4 chip in 5nm to the M1.

[theriddick]

Whats the power consumption of these APU's?

[lucrus]

And consumes half or one third of energy...

So how much is it making you save on your electricity bills? Let's say 5 bucks a month? Hardly more than that. But a full M1 based Apple computer costs you some 700-800 bucks more than a Ryzen based one (optimistically speaking), allowing a return on investment in just... 12 years? By that time your shining M1 system will be programmatically obsoleted by Apple for sure.

I don't think watts per dollar is a selling point for this kind of hardware. It's good for many other reasons, it's good because it's Apple (just in case you like status symbols), but it's not something to compare to any Ryzen out there when you take into account money. Apples to oranges (wow, it fits, Ryzen logo is orange and the M1 is ... well... Apple! )

[GruenSein]

So how much is it making you save on your electricity bills? Let's say 5 bucks a month? Hardly more than that. But a full M1 based Apple computer costs you some 700-800 bucks more than a Ryzen based one (optimistically speaking), allowing a return on investment in just... 12 years? By that time your shining M1 system will be programmatically obsoleted by Apple for sure.

I don't think watts per dollar is a selling point for this kind of hardware. It's good for many other reasons, it's good because it's Apple (just in case you like status symbols), but it's not something to compare to any Ryzen out there when you take into account money. Apples to oranges (wow, it fits, Ryzen logo is orange and the M1 is ... well... Apple! )

Sorry to say it but this kind of perspective is purely ignorant. While you might never recoup the extra price of an Apple device by saving on your electricity bill, there are plenty of good reasons for the power consumption to be important beyond that. First and foremost, a device like the new MBPs would simply not be possible with a much higher power draw. It basically gives you workstation performance on the go while still offering a long battery life, relatively silent operation and a lightweight device since it does not need huge chunks of copper to keep it cool.

[mdedetrich]

But, for some reason, I suspect it costs like twice or three times...

Well considering its a small form factor that fits in a laptop and is more power efficient than Ryzen, it should.

[discordian]

So how much is it making you save on your electricity bills? Let's say 5 bucks a month? Hardly more than that. But a full M1 based Apple computer costs you some 700-800 bucks more than a Ryzen based one (optimistically speaking), allowing a return on investment in just... 12 years? By that time your shining M1 system will be programmatically obsoleted by Apple for sure.

Triples the runtime of your laptop, less heat aswell.

I don't think watts per dollar is a selling point for this kind of hardware. It's good for many other reasons, it's good because it's Apple (just in case you like status symbols), but it's not something to compare to any Ryzen out there when you take into account money. Apples to oranges (wow, it fits, Ryzen logo is orange and the M1 is ... well... Apple! )

You can push more performance at any given power budget. If neither power nor performance are important to you, hey just use a chromebook with an ARM Cpu.
Ryzen and Co just look dated compared to it, performance and efficiency are one thing, and I dont get why a midrange desktop still needs a southbridge (and ~4 PCIe lanes to connect to it) - Just add a pair of Sata and i2c lanes and be done with that cruft.


TBH, this kinda chip in a handheld console would be insane. Nintendo and co are incredibly lucky that Apple would offer such a thing at a ridiculous price.