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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Really not, no. The design of the M1 laptops precludes the use of discrete GPUs. They replace laptops that have discrete GPUs (Macbook Pro).

Also note that it is not correct to compare CPU+GPU power draw in other systems, as in M1 macbooks the power budget is shared between CPU and GPU which leads to throttling.

Also, if you really want to get pedantic, the most powerful integrated graphics are much more powerful than the M1. They are just not ported to laptops, because it makes no sense since you can get much more performance at better power consumptions with dual integrated/discrete GPUs and switching.

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I think this has devolved to the point of no longer being constructive but I'll just summarize quickly the point I am making.

The M1 performance is incredibly impressive in relation to the power it takes to do it. This is relevant and meaningful to a user of this type of device and allows fantastic battery life even under heavy load which is unmatched by other devices in its class.

Yes it isn't the most performant, but it is the most efficient and it also isn't a slouch. I think that is impressive. That is all.

There are GPUs that use the same amount of power for more performance.

There are laptops with discrete GPUs that have similar battery life in those workloads where the M1 gets 20h.

There is no improvement to user experience. This is trying to spin a closed platform that is not compatible with discrete GPUs as somehow a good thing.

Just FYI. The M1 GPU consumes 0-30% less than the Xavier NX series GPUs, which are the next comparable thing, and delivers a third of the performance. It's way behind in every way to Volta or rDNA. A spade should be called a spade - it's a sub-par product due to Apple making closed, non-standard systems, with worse performance than it could have had.

Unfortunately none of those things are currently available in a consumer device even remotely resembling an M1 Mac.

It really sounds like you have an axe to grind against Apple. It's okay to both criticize Apple for certain aspects of it's products at the same time as respecting/praising others.

I think Apple makes great mobile hardware but they also sell aluminum caster wheels for the mac pro that costs $200 more than the price I paid for my iPhone SE 2. This is stupid and makes no rational sense. I have 0 desire to own a traditional mac because the price is absurd compared to more capable products and I don't care about paying the Apple tax to look cool. The M1 Macs are actually a compelling hardware offering.

You can buy Volta GPUs on laptops. There are just none that are as weak as the GPU in an M1, because it's an awful niche where you're neither fast enough to really start using the GPU, nor slow enough to do away with it entirely. There are GPUs with that amount of performance/watt available. There are even some in really thin laptops. Go looking, PCs have evolved since 2012, Thinkpads and Macbooks aren't the only thing that exist anymore.

They are much better than what Macs used to be. That makes them middling. There is no real performance advantage of M1 Macs - least of all in GPU performance - over the current AMD/NVidia standard, and quite a few disadvantages.

What it really is, is Apple making their own processors to be able to lock down their Mac platform really harshly and have total control over it, without offering any performance advantage over their competition, and people spinning it as actually a good thing because Apple had the good sense of making their previous generation of laptops worse than it had to be to make modern hardware feel revolutionary.

>The design of the M1 laptops precludes the use of discrete GPUs.

Which means they're integrated graphics.

> Also note that it is not correct to compare CPU+GPU power draw in other systems, as in M1 macbooks the power budget is shared between CPU and GPU which leads to throttling.

Just like integrated GPUs?

> it makes no sense since you can get much more performance at better power consumptions with dual integrated/discrete GPUs and switching.

This has not been my experience with hybrid graphics in the slightest.

No M1 Mac has replaced any Mac with a discrete GPU. Not yet anyway. The Mini, 13" MacBook Pro and MacBook Air never have had discrete GPUs.

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