anonconformist

a hawkins said:

People are arguing about number, technical, history, etc would miss the most important point: Apple just make it works.
Most users don't care wether it uses ARMs, Intel, AMD, that architecture, this technology, etc. They care only that they can actually use it.
It does not matter that Apple made any technological advancement or anything. If people can buy it at reasonable price and use in everyday life. It's the end of story. The rest are just nerd chat.

I have 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro and 2018 iMac for work use.
I also just built a custom PC with Core i7 Gen10, 64GB 3200 RAM, NVMe Drive, and a 3080.
That PC blue screened me twice in a month - unrecoverable and need to reformat drive. I've never seen my Mac crash at that level in my 10 years in this platform.

If I can play a game at 4K 144Hz in my iMac I would not even bother touch a PC again. I bought that because Apple cannot do that. I don't care if I have integrated Intel graphic or Apple Silicon or nVidia 9090 or whatever inside that I would not even see it.

Quite likely the BSOD was due to unstable hardware and/or its drivers, but sometimes actual Windows bugs cause them as well, though they’re a relatively small % of them. That’s the advantage you can have with a single vendor of all the innards for hardware and software, though, as long as they properly support it.  If your machine could still boot up and go online after that, it most likely informed Microsoft of the issue, I know how this works, my day job is developer support there.

The interesting thing Apple has done by developing the M1 (and future chips) is they’ve very much achieved Steve Jobs’ desire of making the computer very much that of an appliance: most users can’t be bothered to know details of their microwave, they just want it to do their bidding in a very repeatable manner to where they use it on autopilot. It’s just a means to an end. That’s something a lot of us computer geeks need to keep in mind: it’s a mind appliance, and all is great if it doesn’t get in the way of achieving an end.  People think more about things that cause them issues in achieving their goals than those that don’t.

The ideal Apple product for someone using that as a guide is something that requires minimal concern about feeding the beast: the computer should be something that gets out of their way, it just works.  Once they start having to think too much about getting their goals accomplished, that’s a failure in hardware and/or software for that user.

Thus, we have the curious contrast that’s the ideal user buying/using experience: initial excitement to be able to do new things (or old things better in some way) and desirable boredom regarding how the device works.  What’s inside? If it does what they want, that’s a moot point, until their needs change.

chadbag said:

Why would a unified memory system be a detriment to memory intensive operations?

GPU cores needs to contend with CPU cores for memory cycles. Unless there’s fast enough memory to fulfill all CPU requests and GPU requests at the same time, something will need to get memory access at a lower priority. If the CPU cores have a lower priority, the CPU cores are stalled and doing no computation while waiting for the GPU cores.

Note also that main memory requests haven’t been for a single byte or even 8 bytes at a time for a very long time: all main memory access is done at chunks the size at least of CPU cache lines. I don’t know what the M1 uses, but for at least the last 20 years the smallest cache line has been 32 bytes.  It’s done this way because the electrical signaling overhead takes a meaningful amount of time, and RAM (dynamic) also has other costs, but the net result is a sequential chunk is usually going to be far more efficient to access than 8 bytes or less.  The latency between main memory access and getting/setting data is many many CPU cycles as main memory is a fraction of the speed of CPU L1 data and instruction caches, which tend to be slower than CPU register accesses.

By combining GPU cores, CPU cores and huge L1/L2 caches along with L3, and minimizing protocol overhead between CPU and GPU along with minimal wire time, at least (assuming they’re not using buses between them like PCIE) they can make this negotiation between the various SoC function areas very fast, far faster than if it were spread out on a motherboard.  Despite all that, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s unlikely that all parts that need memory access can have as much memory access at the same time as it’d take to keep them all running at maximum performance.

hammeroftruth said:

spock1234 said:

“ a gen1 foible” ??!!

Any creative pro who expects a MacBook Air to meet his needs, including multi-display support, is just delusional. It’s hard to imagine any ‘Pro’ doing creative work on a MacBook Air also ‘needing’ multi-monitor support. 

A real pro knows that time is money and will continue on Intel Macs until Apple upgrades their Pro machines to Apple Si. A pro would probably wait until the creative tools and plug-ins they need become native on Apple Silicon before making such a big change to their mission-critical hardware. 

I thought the same about the Air until I saw in the presentation they were running FCP and other apps that you don’t really want to run on an Air. The only thing that makes me concerned is that since the Air doesn’t have a fan, I’m suspicious that they have it locked to a certain speed to prevent it from overheating, while the pro has a fan. So my theory is that while both computers have M1 chips, the one in the pro will have a faster clock speed because of the cooling the fan provides. Otherwise what is the purpose of it?

It’s been years since any CPUs have been made and sold that don’t throttle down when they get too hot, regardless of their top possible speed.  Thus, it is a different question entirely as to whether Apple tied down the max speed or not: expect it to slow down regardless, once hot enough for long enough under load, Having a small case and no fan just means you can expect it to throttle sooner than if it had a fan.

The interesting observation is Apple has the 7/8 GPU core options, but that’s the only stated choice in that regard: likely that’s a chip where a core didn’t pass internal testing.

For that matter, it’d be logical if the cheap MacBook Air got the lower-binned chips and the MacMini and 13” MacBook Pro get higher-binned chips. But, Apple doesn’t say anything about their clock speeds, in the same way they’ve never mentioned that for iDevices. Let’s face it: is it effectively faster or slower than something else or not? Knowing the clock speed only matters for comparisons against another chip of the same design anyway. As a result, it has meaning for Intel-based Macs because then, for a given CPU speed, cooling system design/management is the determining factor.

tzeshan said:

Apple will be able to eat Windows OS shares this time. Two things. Apple Silicon Macs are rumored to last up to twenty hours on battery. And Pages, Numbers, and Keynote free applications are mature enough to be able to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoints applications from Microsoft which are very expensive to own. 

1. Incredibly few people need 20 hours of battery life for a computer, because very few people are working away from a power source that long. 20 hours battery life is a nice thing, in theory, but in practice, something else has to give to get it. Note Apple has kept iPads at about 10 hours battery life from the start, with * as to “10 hours” where most people that need heavier computation needs are likely plugged into an outlet anyway.
2. For home use, Apple’s office suite is sufficient: with what’s expected at a lot of businesses, there are huge Numbers of spreadsheet functions used daily in Excel not provided by Apple’s software, and Pages of word processor functionality in MS Office is the same way.
3. All that being said, Silicon Macs will inherit a huge library of iOS/iPadOS software, even if suboptimal to use on other than a touchscreen, and for very stupidly-cheap prices for functionality, in fast hardware. If Apple announces touchscreen Macs (they’ve been known to say “we won’t do this! Then go and add it: Apple Pencil, anyone?) then things get really interesting,
4. SwiftUI (at 2.0 with a lot more functionality, but still needs work) makes it far easier to have cross-Apple-platform applications with amazingly little added work that look/feel native, because they are in the GUI frameworks they’re using, to a large extent. With Apple Silicon Macs testing is capable of being done on the same hardware quirks to enough certainty that it greatly eases the burden of supporting multiple types of Apple devices, and increases the potential sales opportunities.
5. An issue regarding platform viability for making a living via Apple platform apps are customers believing all software needs to be cheap or free, and how DARE developers try to make a profit!

robaba said:

Wow did I screw up!  Completely misread the selections at the Apple store, so I skipped over the 13” Pro entirely.

Please Disregard.  

respect!