It doesn't matter. Sure, that might mean that an Apple system is not for you.
But the crux of the matter is: Apple did something truly revolutionary. How is the rest of the market going to respond? Specifically, how are Intel, AMD and Microsoft going to respond? Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta. Intel and AMD have nothing remotely comparable.
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.
Sounds revolutionary to me. The new M1 is faster and MUCH lower power than an i9 based system that would ramp up fans at even the most minor of workloads like say upgrading iterm2 from version n to version n+1.
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.
I would like the people downvoting you to explain why they think it's truly revolutionary. I just went back to reread the Tom's Hardware article on the chip, thinking I must have missed something, and I'm not seeing it.
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...
>I would like the people downvoting you to explain why they think it's truly revolutionary.
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?
Like the iPhone and iPod, it's a revolutionary entrant from the consumer point of view in terms of user experience. And like the iPhone and iPod, from a technical point of view, it's merely a very competent iteration down a natural evolutionary pathway, in a preexisting product type.
And like the iPhone and iPod it has very real innovations (in engineering) that people always underplay because "No wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame!", or "we had smartphones before, I had some Ericsson/Nokia/MS gizmo, so what's evolutionary about the iPhone?".
You're right. At the end of the day, they're technically evolutionary, not revolutionary, which was the central conceit of this subthread. And there's nothing wrong with that. Technical evolution can lead to consumer revolutions.
I disagree. The iPhone was revolutionary in that it made smartphones and phone apps accessible to the mass market, unleashing a wave of change in how people live, work, and play.
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.
I think the M1 Macs are a precursor for a truly revolutionary (for consumers) Apple ARM computer. Whether that will be realized with the M1X/M2 next year or further on, it remains to be seen.
These all strike me as evolutionary changes. People will be doing about the same things as before. They will do them a bit faster, and not have to plug in as often.
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.
Smartphones can be just as easily trivialized into being something which lets us "do the same things as before, but faster and with less plugs".
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.
I think that's incorrect. As a user of a pre-iPhone smartphone, I don't think Apple should get credit for inventing the smartphone, but I do think the iPhone was revolutionary. They didn't just popularize it; they created a true consumer-grade device via relentless user-focused polish. It's the same deal with the original Mac, which was also 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.
I'm glad we both agree that revolution is not the right word. I think precision in language is something that is generally valued at HN, especially when the lack of precision is marketing hype.
Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead.
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.
>Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead.
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.
In terms of GPU cores it seems evident that Nvidia is clearly number one—disregarding any thermal limits—and AMD is clearly number two. It seems Apple is a solid contender for third place now. I don't think Intel or the smaller embedded players (Mali, PowerVR etc) have anything quite so good.
Dunno, do you want a GTX 3070 for $499 or a AMD 6800 for $580? The benchmarks come out at about the same per $ (AMD wins by 10-15%). Sure you could get the 3080 ... or the 6800XT. Pick your price point and AMD and Nvidia will have something close. Sure AMD has nothing to compete at the $1500 price point, but the reviews I've seen claim that the $1500 nvidia is just a big waste not close to justifying the price.
PS5, Xbox X/S, and Apple have been preferring AMD lately. Even Tesla seems excited by the RNDA2 cards.
>Being a process node ahead is already "much better", and IS a feat. Where are the process node ahead chips from the competitors?
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.
> 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
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.
AMD's new CPUs, post FX, are not affected by the majority of Spectre vulnerability. The ones that do affect them are fixed in software with essentially no performance penalty. Less than even ARM CPUs.
* Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead.*
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 performance and cooling? Buy a Ryzen 4800U laptop.
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.
M1 is somewhat slower in multicore, and has a fifth of the I/O performance. They are comparable.
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.
No I'm not. I'm specifically considering two chips.
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.
Read the anandtech article again. 15-25w is the power consumption of the whole Mac mini measured at the wall plug. I.e it includes power supply, ssd, gpu comparable to RX560, external buses etc etc. If you want an x86 chip that beats its performance by a significant margin you have to pay more for just the chip than for the whole Mac mini.
I would like people arguing the opposite to define "revolutionary".
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.
Sure. To me evolutionary generally means quantitative improvements in expected dimensions. Revolutionary requires overturning some existing order. E.g., the American Revolution replaced the existing government.
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.
all day on-battery real-world heavy usage without significant compromises. In fact, not just without significant compromises, but about as fast as a laptop can go.
For me, a lack of constantly thinking about the battery is a big deal. I had the same thing happen w/ my phone: mine got large enough a couple years ago that it was a full 2 day battery life. So I could assume it would work all day.
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.
I agree that's an excellent step forward, but again, I'm not seeing it as a revolution. All-day batteries were always available in the Android world, so I don't think there was any revolution there. Similarly, there are plenty of laptops with all-day batteries. That list includes, but is not topped by, both M1 and previous Macs: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/all-day-strong-longest-la...
Ah. I found my macs to have all day battery as long as I didn't actually really use it. So it could kind of happen, but only if I paid a lot of attention. I totally recognize this may not make a diff for everyone, but for me, it's moving to assuming the battery lasts all day w/o me managing it. :shrug:
> "Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta"
I thought that Microsoft's emulation efforts were hampered by Intel making threats, e.g. "Intel recently made an unprecedented public challenge to Microsoft and Qualcomm that basically told the latter two companies: if you ship an x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) emulator, we’re coming after you.", from https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel...
If so, the blame for that really lies at Intel's doorstep as well.
Intel has patents in things like some of the newer vector instructions still - Apple AFAIK will not translate those, and will not report them as available.
Microsoft has a performance disadvantage in that the memory consistency model of ARM is much weaker than x86 sequential ordering or x86_64s total store ordering. Apple’s chips (at least back to the A12Z) support enabling TSO per thread on the performance cores, so the translated code does not need as much fencing.
Did Intel similarly threaten Apple? If not, why not? Even if they didn't know for sure exactly what Apple was up to with the M1, they surely could have speculated, as so many others did.
Rosetta 2 is running on an Apple chip which they’ve designed to have an X86 strong memory model mode. Microsoft has to run on off the shelf ARMv8 chips.
What is revolutionary about it? We still haven't seen Zen in the same node as the M1. Zen still scores higher in absolute terms (albeit at higher power).
It's evolutionary. The power efficiency is great, and the core design is great (wouldn't expect less from those who were Intel's and Qualcomms most talented staff), but calling it revolutionary is an overstatement.
Using an M1 Air, coming from a 16" Pro, here's the diff:
- Cost: $1400 vs $4000 (nearly 1/3)
- Speed: Air feels significantly faster, and more apps move to native, will be even moreso
- Battery: At least double, if not 3x
- Size: Less than 1/2 the weight
The revolutionary thing is doing all of those at once. Nearly tripling battery life while making a huge leap in performance, at 1/3 the cost and half the weight is simply incredible.
Comparing it to previous gen Apple devices doesn't really tell the whole story. You can get a machine from a different manufacturer with similar hardware for muchmuch less than $4000, and it wont have totally broken cooling[0].
Bear in mind that I'm not arguing that the m1 macbooks aren't a really compelling option. I'm just saying this is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
(Making other laptop/desktop manufacturers and OS devs wake up to non x86 architectures could be revolutionary for competition and pricing though, we'll see.)
For years we've been evolving. I've owned ~6 laptops over the last 10 years, all Intel Macs. Each year you get about ~20% ~performance increase for the same "costs" (weight, battery, price).
This year you get about 100% performance increase and the costs are all halved. Ok, so... we'll call it a "huge" evolution. All I know is I've been waiting since the air came out for this laptop to exist: fast enough to handle all my work, with decent battery life. It's been almost a decade of waiting, and not only did it finally come, but it somehow is much faster than even the biggest of last generation and super cheap.
If you made a graph showing (price * perf * battery-life * weight) you'd see a nice evolutionary curve over the last decade, and then this generation you'd see a huge jump - way more than double. You're ignoring the fact this is a 10W CPU doing more than 28W, fanless! And the diff in subjective performance isn't small, it feels bigger than any previous generation jump by quite a lot...
AMD laptops are also crushing this generation of Intel laptops. AnandTech's comparison shows that M1 vs AMD is mostly a power/performance trade-off at the moment.
Not that the M1 isn't exciting especially in the ultrabook segment.
Why are you using Apple’s discontinued 15” model as a benchmark here?
The 16” MacBook Pro most certainly does not have those same cooling issues.
But that’s the thing: Apple had to make their flagship performance laptop bigger including a larger battery than its original design in 2016 because Intel was never able to hit their roadmap goals.
That doesn’t sound like progress to me, it kind of sounds backwards.
In other words, Apple couldn’t give you a reason to buy their performance laptop four years later without making it physically larger. Because if they didn’t do that their customers would only have minimal incremental improvement to compel them to consider a newer system after four years.
In contrast, a four year old iPhone is over twice as slow from a raw performance perspective than the current model.
So yeah, I could buy a much cheaper PC laptop with proper thermals and cooling for much cheaper than a 16” MacBook Pro to get that fantastic performance. Maybe it’d even be a lot better than the M1 Macs.
But I can’t buy a Windows laptop, for any price, that has no fans at all and manages performance and battery life of the MacBook Air.
Apple’s throwing a CPU into their *cheapest laptop that is marketed for basic usage (students, home users) that benches faster than basically all but AMD’s most performant chip, a chip that would probably get you pretty terrible thermals and battery life in a 16” MacBook Pro.
A lot of evolutionary products were, in retrospect, revolutionary. Was the guts of an iPod or Walkman or iPhone or IBM PC or Honda Civic all that different from conventionally available parts? No, consumer electronics almost never have anything particularly exotic going on.
But it’s the whole package that can be revolutionary. The Civic was a dirt cheap car with excellent fuel economy and reliability. Is it all that different from other cars? No, not really, but the entire Japanese auto industry was a disruptive product in the 1980s.
The rumor mill is already telling us that the 16” MacBook Pro may ship with a 12 core (8 big, 4 little) “M1X” or “M2” chip. If the tech media landscape is head over heels for the M1, this new chip is going to make serious waves, because if you double the performance cores in the M1 it’s basically going to be untouchable by anything that can remotely be considered a laptop.
If Apple doesn’t touch the form factor of the 16” MacBook Pro it’s going to have similar results: it’s going to run quieter, cooler, and longer.
In short, it’s just my own opinion that calling this bit of incremental improvement evolutionary rather than revolutionary is something of an understatement.
> Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system
...
> Apple did something truly revolutionary
While I don't deny they deserve a lot of credit for this, I think it's important to keep in mind that in many cases Apple does this by exploiting its lack of openness. ie: these things are not unlinked.
So where some people see Apple innovating and achieving breakthroughs, I also see them exploiting and leaching off an ecosystem in a toxic way. It's like a chemical plant that dumps its waste into the local river - they get a free ride (not complying with interoperable / openness) which is fine if they are a small part of the ecosystem. But if every company was like that we would be living in technology hell. There would be no internet, no ecosystem of reliable affordable server infrastructure, there wouldn't be a single phone you could write an app for if it wasn't in the corporate interest of a mammoth entity, etc etc.
Microsoft does have their own Rosetta, which has been able to run x86 apps for a long time and will be able to run x64 apps within the next few months in preview builds
Microsoft’s solution is emulation, not binary translation. This is a much slower approach than Rosetta. Hopefully this gives MS the kick in the pants it needs to step up their game though.
Their response was probably more along the line of previous "advertising campaigns" [1] (ie, payola) for the big PC manufacturers to avoid using AMD for their high margin items.
Depends on the price point. Largely Ryzen is winning at the moment but Intel has some compelling options at the low end. E.g. the 10100f looks pretty good if you're not wanting to spend much.
Of course AMD haven't released the 5000 series options on the low end yet, so you can only choose between it and a ryzen 3000 series CPU.
Tiger Lake laptop processors have been released and they are competetive with ryzen 4000 mobile processors. All these comparisons of the M1 to 10th-gen intel cpus are quite unfair when the 11th gen 10nm chips are on the market now and have perf characteristics much closer to the M1
Disclosure: I just chose a Ryzen 4500 budget machine, and the 1135G7 is comparable.
It doesn't matter. Sure, that might mean that an Apple system is not for you.
But the crux of the matter is: Apple did something truly revolutionary. How is the rest of the market going to respond? Specifically, how are Intel, AMD and Microsoft going to respond? Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta. Intel and AMD have nothing remotely comparable.