I usually avoid hype. But the M1 is just unreal. I was back in the office for the first time in months, and since getting my M1 MBP...my overclocked i5 hackintosh with 4x RAM just disappointed. It didn’t feel slow, but it stopped feeling fast.
The thing was unusable on my lap. After 30 minutes or so just coding, it would get so hot I had to put something between it and my legs. My partner could hear the fans from the next room. And to cap it off, since Big Sur I've been unable to get more than 4 hours off the battery—usually more like 3.
Compare that to the Air: I'm losing two USB ports which is annoying, the speakers are nowhere near as good, I miss the bigger screen, and I'm down 16GB RAM (although in retrospect, I never needed 32GB for my workloads anyway). But in return, I get almost no heat, zero noise, nuts performance (my test suites run 2x faster on average, despite running on two fewer cores), and so far 10-12 hours off a charge easy. And I get real function keys instead of the Touch Bar.
Happiest I've been with a computer in a long long time.
(It does get hot when watching the highest resolutions youtube has to offer these days, though.)
I had a newer MBP for work at a recent job. I liked it well enough, and it was faster (just thanks to newer processors).
The 16" gets toasty, but those first two could get scalding hot. And I was concerned about that as I only had 13" in the intervening years, but the 16" is nothing like those at all. Never once had a situation where it was so hot that I had to remove it from my lap but regularly had those situations with the others.
And I'm pushing it super hard, it rarely gets better than 3-4 hours on a charge. I don't think people are remembering just how bad those earlier MBPs were.
Throw in some horribly unoptimised crap like Teams and it was like sitting next to a tiny little aeroplane all day long.
Just out of curiosity, why do so many people use them on their lap?
I know "lap" is in the name, but damn, that posture is just terrible for your spine, neck and shoulders.
Do you not have a table or some flat surface around the house/office to place it on?
Outside of a few crowded meetings that lacked table space for everyone, I never in my life used my laptop in my lap.
I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation to be able to comfortably use a laptop on your lap for short periods.
I replaced a 2017 i7 mbp with a m1 MBA, and see the same results running my java test suites. I ran them a bunch of times thinking there had to be some error.
Wow, I need to go listen to 16 inch, when I listened to new Air for the first time, I thought 'wow, those are surprisingly capable speakers for such a lightweight machine'
Apple has consistently provided good audio iterations on its laptops, so I’d assume the same will be true on the inevitable M-series 16” replacement.
All along, half of the headquarters must have been secretly working on the M1...
It will be a teraflop.
More seriously, by the way, do we have comparison between the black iMac Pros and the M1? It would be ironic if iMac Pros were surpassed by the 1/4th-prices M1...
Changing the processor architecture over for the first time was going to be a massive undertaking (I'm sure there are still folks there who have nightmares about universal binaries from '06). They had no way to run a wide public beta of the hardware before releasing, so had to play it as safe as possible.
The only sane way to migrate something so fundamental is to change absolutely nothing besides the processor, so that you have a side-by-side comparison between the previous generation and the new one out in the wild to debug problems that come up. If they had added [Face ID / a touchscreen / new mechanics for the keyboard] they'd need to debug whether those changes were causing the bugs rather than the M1 changes.
That's why I've fought myself to hold of - I'd expect the next MBP to be a fundamental redesign.
I can live without a touchscreen, but please just give me a Face ID laptop Apple.
Why is that so much more convenient than eg the fingerprint scanner?
(Even entering my password is pretty quick for me.)
I haven't use any form of Face ID on any device so far. So I am genuinely curious. I do see the appeal of finger print auth over having to type a password or a code on the phone.
With FaceID I don’t have to “do” anything to unlock it. When I sit down in front of the iPad, it is just unlocked. I don’t have to think or act to make it happen.
With the laptop with touchID, I need to press a key to wake it and then press the right finger on the touchID key to unlock. It is a more deliberate and complex action.
I can see on phones that the differences are less, but even in the time of masks, I tend to prefer FaceID. If I’m using my phone, I’m also looking at it. The mask gets in the way but that is only a few times a day when I’m at the grocer or something like that. I know that with touchID I could pull my phone out of my pocket and unlock with my finger in one movement, but that doesn’t save much for me. You may use your phone differently that that’s fine. I think there would be value in a phone with both systems as people have different needs and preferences.
More than that - masks are an issue currently if you’re trying to unlock your phone indoors in a public place with Face ID, but I just don’t find myself in a situation where I’m wearing a mask when I need my laptop.
(I’m not going to Starbucks or sitting in an office right now, and very likely won’t be until widespread vaccination has taken place).
The convenience of Face ID is transformative to my workflow. It really does essentially take you back to when your passwords would just automatically auto-fill without any kind of checks that it’s still you, without your passwords being stolen if someone swipes your unlocked laptop and runs off.
You can disable the requiring of looking at the phone and unlocking via FaceID in settings, I regularly unlock my phone without holding it so I am "dead on looking at it".
That said, I also prefer TouchID.
This is straight up not true. It works fine in the dark, but unlocking an iPhone in direct sunlight can often take a couple of tries.
I was more thinking lack of light not being a issue, I didn't take into account that mass amounts of light can blow out the image for the sensors.
Using it docked in the keyboard makes it feel like a laptop. FaceID for filling in forms, authenticating with SSO, it’s all basically instant and requires almost no thought from me, not even a single cycle of brain power needed.
I will say it’s not like, amazingly more convenient than the TouchID sensor on my MBA, but it’s nice to have.
It more or less reverts to the same experience of being on Chrome on any other platform where your passwords just automatically are input, without the obvious security compromises.
I don't know how in hell they did it, but I'm impressed so far.
Does anyone have experience of Pro vs Air as a dev machine. I’m assuming the pro is an around better machine, but that touchbar....
The touchpad is slightly too big on the Pro and the palm rejection is insufficient, leading to unexpected mouse movements and occasionally unintended selection and mass-overwriting of text. This issue is magnified further with the 15" devices on which the touchpad is comically oversized.
The touchbar leads to unintended behaviors like sending half-written emails because you unconsciously brushed against it while entering a number, and only make it more difficult to do basic things like adjust brightness and volume.
The Air, on the other hand, is a well-engineered little machine that is just as usable as a 2015 Pro or Air. Pity about the limited ports. You've seen the rumors that the next Air will ship with more ports?
The Pro is like a Plus version, with some bonuses for a higher price -- no thermal throttling whatsoever, a brighter screen, the TouchBar, a bit more battery, better microphones, stuff like that. Get it only if you want those and don't mind a little heavier machine.
As others mentioned, the performance of the new MBA vs new Pro is similar. I think the MBA really highlights what's great about the first iteration of the m1. So, if you're ok with the smaller screen, I would go with the MBA. If you feel yourself leaning towards the pro, I would wait for the actual pro's coming later this year.
Only thing is the ports but i'm optimistic of https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-thunderbolt-dock when I can get my hands on it.
But the fact that we have anything to look forward to at all is awesome. These are super exciting times in the computing space. Processors have been boring for way too long.
I’d also expect the first release was relatively conservative and restrained to ensure a low risk debut. I’m optimistic for the next few generations.
I’m excited for a 16” MacBook Pro but hoping Microsoft brings a production version of Windows 10 arm to the market. I need it for various aspects of the work I do. I can keep a spare windows box around but it’d be great to have one system.
Instead of 4 cores shared between 8 apps, you could have the same 8 apps each with a dedicated core (or two, even.)
I think the M1X - or whatever they call the chip line with a much larger thermal envelope - will blow our socks off.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m1x-benchmarks-ju...
Quite a healthy bump.
Next year, we should see an M2 on TSMC 3nm with it's ~40% die shrink and either a ~25% power reduction or ~15% performance increase.
I would personally expect them to take the power/heat cut like they did at 5nm and bump up the core count once again.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
So while the M1x is using the same CPU and GPU cores as the M1, the M2 will get an additional performance boost from having a newer generation of core designs.
lol
The performance gain from doing so in CPU<->core memory and core memory<->GPU transfers is huge, and the manufacturer can match RAM timing and performance precisely to their processor or even implement non standard ram types as they like. There are other benefits too like simplified motherboard design.
Now that Apple has taken the risk, other manufacturers will look at doing the same. Not all computers will use the SoC model, but for laptops and many desktops this will be a big win.
The M1 has pretty high memory latency at around 100 ns [1], which is significantly higher than either AMD or Intel for typical systems. Note that physical distance between CPU and memory is rather less important for latency, as DRAM is high latency in itself, so adding a few ns at most due to wiring is not going to matter.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
Not the most scientific, but userbenchmark is useful because it has latency graphs available for millions of systems.
Latest gen Intel with LPDDR4x chips is well over 100ns https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/40531587 While the same CPU is almost 40ns faster with SODIMMS of DDR4. https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/40527352
But sometimes we are just lazy to provide the context or to spell out everything. These information is so readily available with a simple Google. And yet the past dozens of M1 thread this "memory" advantage thing keeps popping up.
Taking a quick look at an i9 9900 ($382 for chip alone) it supports DDR4-2666. i9-10900T runs at 2933 - $400 for chip alone.
Apple is running their stuff at 4100 or something. So that looks faster. And the mac mini costs $700 including the insane apple margins?
Can you spec out the $700 machine on pc parts picker that shows that the M1 is nothing special? One with faster or equivalent memory.
Calling the M1 and $700 machine a HEDT?? Huh? Apple is going to sell these things by the truckload.
This may have changed since then (Mid-2020). Gamers Nexus have done an undercover sting where they found it was possible for a support agent to reject a warranty request on the basis of XMP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2gQ_bOnDx8&t=1155
The M1 is a great chip, but that has nothing to do with the location of the memory. LPDDR4x-4267 is a standard memory type. Kudos to Apple for using the highest commonly available speed bin, but it’s a standard speed bin for that type of memory.
exactly the same as the Apple M1. It's just the most common high-end memory speed currently nothing special about it.
Also note frequency is only part of the whole picture. CAS latency is important as well, which is much higher with Apple.
>On the cache hierarchy side of things, we’ve known for a long time that Apple’s designs are monstrous, and the A14 Firestorm cores continue this trend. Last year we had speculated that the A13 had 128KB L1 Instruction cache, similar to the 128KB L1 Data cache for which we can test for, however following Darwin kernel source dumps Apple has confirmed that it’s actually a massive 192KB instruction cache.
That’s absolutely enormous and is 3x larger than the competing Arm designs, and 6x larger than current x86 designs, which yet again might explain why Apple does extremely well in very high instruction pressure workloads, such as the popular JavaScript benchmarks.
The huge caches also appear to be extremely fast – the L1D lands in at a 3-cycle load-use latency. AMD has a 32KB 4-cycle cache, whilst Intel’s latest Sunny Cove saw a regression to 5 cycles when they grew the size to 48KB.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
x86 needs to find a way to scale decoders without blowing the power budget. Given that the decoders are already bigger than the integer units, I suspect that will be a hard thing to do.
For whatever reason, the overall memory system on the M1 systems just seems better than intel. I really wish I could follow more details from on-die cache to how memory is actually loaded / unloaded to speeds, but every time I've looked at it a little it just seems the M1 / Apple are doing it better across the whole stack.
Yes it has been spreading like plague. And I had to post something similar [1] not long ago. And many more before that.
The M1 could have an Off package Quad Channel DDR4 Memory and still be as fast. The performance improvement ( from a memory perspective ) is coming from Same Memory Address Space and other similar optimisation.
The same memory address space choice is of course important, but its performance and power envelope is impacted by the SOC vs. separate package choice.
The combination of M1 performance and low power has happened due to a series of choices made by Apple. Forgoing user configurability and fixing memory choices at manufacture while using SOC tech made mainstream by the phone industry is one of those impactful choices. There are of course several other important choices, but it is incorrect to discard this choice as non-impactful.
In M1, the GPU reads directly from memory written by the CPU.
In Intel/AMD, the data has to be copied from the CPU's address space to the GPU's. "Shared" only means there aren't separate main and graphics memory chips/banks. But said shared memory is segregated.
https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/db/88...
Uhm, as a games developer working on consoles.....no it isn't. You can do it like this if you wish, but generally the entire address space is accessible from either CPU or GPU. Maybe it's implemented like this on PC, but at least the architecture design on X1/XBS/PS4/PS5 allows both reads and writes from any area of memory by either cpu or gpu.
If that's not "soldered separately", then we might as well zoom out and apply that statement for the whole PC ("all components are in the same package, only the charger is separate")
[1] https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn
I am SO TEMPTED by the M1 upgrade, especially given the trade-in valuation on my machine right now. However, it would be inconvenient to give up ports, and right NOW I still do some Windows virtualization, so I'm holding off.
But it's still SUPER TEMPTING.
It depends upon your use profile, but for me it leaves both available ports for peripherals not just the one that you might expect.
I'm not really interested in juggling plugs during the day.