This is hyperbole. Apple has released a CPU that has very good perf/watt compared to it's current competition. That's it. This isn't revolutionary, it's just another incremental step in CPU improvements.
Can we please give Apple praise for competing well in the hardware market without fully drinking the kool aid and parroting their marketing.
Suddenly $700 mac mini's can do crazy things like edit 4k video and the m1 laptops can handle being plugged in to wall power much less often than the i9 systems.
Likely within 12 months there's likely to be systems with twice as many cores bringing unheard of levels of performance to reasonable price points.
Keep in mind Intel hasn't shipped something significantly faster than the previous generation in 5 years.
Full credit to Apple for incrementally improving their A-series processors over the last decade until they're good enough for laptops. But I'm not seeing that this makes anything fundamentally different. Just compare the A14 with the M1, for example: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m1-1804-vs-a...
For one, it's the first PC chip with these kind of thermals and power combo.
Second, it brings many new design decisions, from unified memory, to the SoC design, various coprocessors, etc, that have not been available in the form of laptop/desktop PCs. The last of this kind in the mass market would be something like the Amiga, which is still a very different design.
Third, it's hella fast and many different things, both given its power draw, but also irrespective of it.
Fourth, it makes ARM for PC computing mainstream suddenly, after decades where it was relegated to the mobile and hobbyist/specialist (rapsberry, etc) space.
If that's not a revolutionary change, I don't know what you expected. A CPU made from flour with alien technology that's 1000 times faster and uses quantum bits?
Yeah, they didn't make that.
M1 Macs will be used basically like the previous Macs, but somewhat faster and somewhat longer without plugging in. So I don't think this qualifies as a revolutionary change.
What's the revolution you are hoping for with future generations of the processor?
For very light loads, it does have a slightly better power performance than existing low power PC processors, but not by that much. A Ryzen LPP core is somewhere between the big and the small cores of the M1 in power performance in such cases.
It's not the first PC chip to be an SOC, or to have unified memory, or to have many coprocessors. Literally all of those were done simultaneously, in chips of comparable performance, at the same power.
It's also been a decade that we know that instruction sets don't matter. All modern PC processors use a different instruction set and translate from x86. To switch them to ARM would be a matter of adding a few extensions to expose all the functionality, and change the instruction translation stage a bit.
Being a process node ahead is already "much better", and IS a feat. Where are the process node ahead chips from the competitors?
On top of that, it's Apple's own SoC design, it has its own GPU design and co-processors, tons of work into making speed optimizations all around (from the buses to memory handling), and came with a new OS release, a port to the new architecture, a bridge layer for iOS apps, and a perfectly capable x86 translation layer.
Rosetta2 alone would be difficult to pull all for most of the industry (Microsoft failed at the same, and their ARM laptops are completely subpar to the M1 machines as well in many levels, despite costing the same or more).
>It's not the first PC chip to be an SOC, or to have unified memory, or to have many coprocessors.
Which mainstream PC chip in actual laptops/desktops people use has unified memory and doesn't use sockets/DIMMS?
>It's also been a decade that we know that instruction sets don't matter. All modern PC processors use a different instruction set and translate from x86.
That's a moot point, since they still carry all the x86 baggage in microcode, since tons of bad decisions leading to things like Spectra. ARM doesn't.
Am I missing something?
PS5, Xbox X/S, and Apple have been preferring AMD lately. Even Tesla seems excited by the RNDA2 cards.
Not if you still don't beat them cleanly. The end result is what matters. Also, being able to pay more than other people isn't a technical feat.
>On top of that, it's Apple's own SoC design, it has its own GPU design and co-processors, tons of work into making speed optimizations all around (from the buses to memory handling), and came with a new OS release, a port to the new architecture, a bridge layer for iOS apps, and a perfectly capable x86 translation layer.
Half of that is software, which I didn't mention, and the rest is par for the course. The buses and interconnects in a Zen chip are far superior, which you notice as better I/O.
>Which mainstream PC chip in actual laptops/desktops people use has unified memory and doesn't use sockets/DIMMS?
You didn't mention Sockets/DIMMS, but literally any AMD APU has unified memory, and use memory DIMMs. Seems like the best of both worlds to me. Just as good memory performance, and it's upgradeable.
>That's a moot point, since they still carry all the x86 baggage in microcode, since tons of bad decisions leading to things like Spectra. ARM doesn't.
AMD is not affected by Spectre. ARM also uses speculative execution.
> AMD is not affected by Spectre
This is not true. AMD, ARM, Intel, and IBM are all affected by Spectre (Bounds Check Bypass) and that particular variant has not been fixed in hardware, and short of disabling speculative execution or radical changes to ISA or microarchitecture, is likely to never be fixed purely in hardware.
Ok. Where can I buy a laptop with similar performance, battery life and cooling then?
Same arguments came out with the first iPhone. “It’s just a big screen! Other phones have a big screen!”
Similar battery life? A good part of it is down to the software, sadly.
For the trade-off of 8 instead of 12 hours of battery life, you'll have a repairable and open computer. Seems competitive. You also get upgradeable RAM, a GPU that is actually useful because it has drivers for a useful API, and much more I/O.
2) M1 is up to 20 hours of battery life.
3) Not the software since the existing Intel based Macs share the same OS.
Importantly, you're comparing the M1 in a Mac Mini, to the 4800U in a laptop. Comparing the M1 in the Air, for example, the 4800U is quite a bit faster in multicore and the single core performance advantage shrinks.
As for 2 and 3, you're comparing to AMD, not to Intel. AMD CPUs have significantly better power efficiency than Intel.
If you want to compare battery life without taking into account software, compare power consumption. The Zen chip uses slightly more power than the M1 on a laptop.
Still nowhere near as the same battery life has been seen in any AMD laptop. Not even in ones with less perf.
Seems that you're grasping at straws at this moment :-)
Those Macs have both much better software for power management, and much more battery. You can't compare chip power consumption by comparing total endurance of the system.
When you do compare the two, they're within 30% of one another.
Since both are SoCs, external buses and so are done in the chip.
I expect revolutionary changes to overturn an existing order. E.g., the Mac was revolutionary. Smartphones were revolutionary. This is a solid and impressive evolutionary change. Kudos to them, of course. But when actual revolutions happen, I would like to have a word handy to acknowledge that.
I think it is wrong to say there is a clear difference between these kind of changes. We won't really know how "revolutionary" M1 was until we see the landscape of the market in the future, but I think the simple fact of dropping x86 alone is enough to enable some major new ways of looking at desktop computing.
If you really believe that non-x86 laptops are what makes for a revolution, then the credit here doesn't belong to Apple. For example: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/6/21050758/lenovo-yoga-5g-sn...
or: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/09/cnn-underscored/galaxy-book-s...
But personally, I'd say that those are an interesting step, but not particularly revolutionary.
But here, there's nothing radically different about M1 Macs that will open up vast new markets or notably change the daily lives of a purchaser.
The combination of the performance increase with the power and thermal efficiency in the first release for a laptop is the sort of improvement we haven't seen in a very long time.
> I'm not seeing that this makes anything fundamentally different
I guess we'll see. $1000 dollars buys a lot more laptop utility than it did a month ago, and the abrupt availability of a laptop with higher performance with far better battery life than anything else on the market has certainly gotten a lot of people's attention.
I'm not buying one[1], but I'm really curious to see the M2.
[1] I'm really torn, the atrophy of the Unix side of the OS and the increasing lockdown has frustrated me a lot. But the option of just running MacOS as a hypervisor that happens to run Photoshop may be just fine for me... I'll decide when the current machine dies.
I'd call the original Mac revolutionary, in that it totally changed how people interacted with computers. Laptops were revolutionary. Smartphones were revolutionary.
A new generation of laptop that runs somewhat longer without plugging in is not revolutionary. People will be doing the same things.
Same deal here. I can go (in a !2020 world) to a customer, go from meeting to meeting, etc and it will just work.
edit: Also, it feels like we're transitioning from a world in which laptops are mostly / often used while being plugged in, to a world more like a phone. The default mode of operation is disconnected from a power source.