jdb8167

pulseimages said:

Have they worked out the bugs for Big Sur yet? I haven’t downloaded it as of yet. 

There are bugs with installing on external drives and running Big Sur on an external boot drive. I can't get it to work at all on my M1 MacBook Air. But Big Sur seems pretty solid for day to day use. Better than Catalina in my opinion. 

ednl said:

Ok, the teardowns have been done! And, apparently, the Thunderbolt controller *is* part of the SoC, so my suspicion was wrong. Sorry. The part they found on the motherboard is an "Intel JHL8040R Thunderbolt 4 Retimer". That is a dumb extender, not a controller. Intel calls it Thunderbolt 4 but the part was already available in Q3'19 at which point Thunderbolt 4 hadn't even been mentioned. TB3/4 are simply compatible enough electrically for the extender to be the same.

Why Apple hasn't integrated a TB4 controller, or why they can't call it that, is probably because of the development time of the new chip. Full TB4 specs weren't available until the summer.

I think TB4 mandates some things that the M1 doesn't supply. I haven't researched this but I think it requires dual 4K monitor support for example. The M1 only can do a single 4K-6K display.

mjtomlin said:

dysamoria said:

What I want to know is what they plan to do with WINE when Rosetta 2 is inevitably removed from Mac OS.

This is basically a temporary solution. By the time Rosetta 2 is removed we’ll have many other options.

Apparently Parallels is working on a solution and there’s the QEMU (qemu.org) project, which is cross platform already. And there’s an iOS an app called UTM (getutm.app) that could probably be moved to M1 Macs fairly easily.

The assumption is that Apple will remove Rosetta 2 in a future OS update. I don’t think that necessarily holds true. Unlike the original Rosetta, Rosetta 2 was written in house by Apple as far as we know. The original Rosetta was licensed and at some point IBM bought the company. I think this forced Apple’s hand.

I’ve been using Rosetta 2 for a couple of days now and it is spectacularly good. Outside of the initial launch of an application you can’t tell whether you are running a native Arm binary or a Rosetta 2 translation. It looks like Apple spent a lot of time on Rosetta 2 and might want to keep it around indefinitely. It’s only going to get better with future updates to Apple Silicon.

OctoMonkey said:

Pascalxx said:

OctoMonkey said:

Perhaps I have missed it...  but  there been any information on the relative speed of Rosetta 2 applications?  Intel on Intel vs. Intel on M1 vs M1 on M1?

I ask since the post mentions using the Mac with Intel chip running with Rosetta 2.  It would be interesting to see browser speed test results for the various permutations.

Anandtech has posted some benchmarks on this, with performance drops in the range of 5 to 50 percent, depending on the complexity of the code. (even with the performance drops, M1 performed better than many of the Intel Macs) I don’t recall that they looked at browsers specifically.

Took a gander...  Quite interesting and looks surprisingly good, but still not real-world stuff.  That said, benchmarks are a reasonable starting point.  Given the extremely limited memory, I wonder how this will fare in memory hog applications.  CPU and system I/O bandwidth has increased to a degree where paging in/out has less noticeable impact than it used to so perhaps it will still perform well.

I haven't run any Rosetta 2 benchmarks but I'm running all the same software as I did on my 2108 13" MacBook Pro and haven't noticed any problems or slowdowns. Many of the apps I use are already updated for the M1 but certainly not all. Generally, I haven't even found the need to check. Everything just seems to work.

mjtomlin said:

jdb8167 said:

CheeseFreeze said:

My guess is that the MacBook Pro 16” and the iMac that are likely up next for a transition to ARM, are probably not going to be much faster CPU wise, but probably mostly differentiate in GPU specs.
Perhaps we’ll see a 2X difference there in GPU speed, with perhaps only a CPU of 12 cores vs 8 or so.

More PCIe lanes/IO. More CPU cores perhaps clocked a little higher. More GPU cores. Seems pretty obvious that some of these are going to happen. More PCIe lanes is almost a given. I can’t imagine Apple shipping a 16” with less than 4 TB3/USB4 ports. 

I would guess, just as with the A-series, the number is generational. So, the M2 would be the next generation of the M-series. Variant in each generation will continue to use a single letter suffix. I believe they'll release the M1A next and it will increase core counts, 6/4 CPU, 12 GPU, and double DRAM. This will be offered as an upgrade option for 13" PowerBook and Mac mini and will also be used in the low-end 16" MacBook Pro and 21.5" iMac.

The M2 will feature new cores and increase the number of PCI lanes (to support 4 Thunderbolt ports and eGPUs). This generation will have multiple variants; M2, M2X, M2Z. The M2 and M2X will be similar as previous generation, the M2Z will have even more cores and more DRAM and will be used in high-end 16" MacBook Pro and 27" iMac.

Do you really think they’ll release a MBP 16“ that only supports a single external monitor?