Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: The end of x86?

[flyinghaggis]

Interesting to see Apple making moves away from Intel/AMD/X86 and towards it's own chips for both CPU and GPU.

 

Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86

 

Apple are making bold claims of 2-3 times the performance but haven't indicated how they measured this or what they compared it against!

 

 

 

I wonder if this is the start of a wider move in the industry away from x86 based chips. Previous ARM based versions of Windows have been pretty much a disaster but maybe now the performance of ARM and similar SOC mobile chips has reached the point where they can compete?

 

I'm keen to see independent benchmarks/reviews and see how they compare with previous Intel X86 and AMD GPU based Macs in terms of performance/compatibility?

Edited November 11, 2020 by flyinghaggis

[sted]

my guess is that if you pick specific tasks they will perform well because they will be highly optimised for them pick something they arnt geared towards the performance will probably be much lower. I bet they have on silicon instructions for say media encoding making that very fast but that wouldnt help if you need to just needed raw power to say render a 3d scene (though there may be specific instructions for that as well i just can't think of a good example)

[synaesthesia]

Usual apple marketing. No frames of reference, no details. "Latest PC laptop CPU" probably means the newest Atom on the market. It's like marketing your new electric car and comparing it to "Fiat's car" - which could be anything from your neighbours 30 year old Fiat 500 or a Ferrari Enzo. And you know damned well it won't be the Enzo...

[sted]

Usual apple marketing. No frames of reference, no details. "Latest PC laptop CPU" probably means the newest Atom on the market. It's like marketing your new electric car and comparing it to "Fiat's car" - which could be anything from your neighbours 30 year old Fiat 500 or a Ferrari Enzo. And you know damned well it won't be the Enzo...

 

yes graphs are useless without labelled axis

[flyinghaggis]

Absolutely, I'd take the 2-3 times performance they claim with a massive spoon of salt. However, even if Apple can simply match the performance of their current x86 based Mac's whilst using half the power that's a real paradigm shift. Especially if they can continue to make the kind of year on year performance gains we've come to expect from their iphone/ipad chips. If you look at those kind of gains versus ~20% generational increments we've come to expect from Intel it's hard not to wonder where they'll be in a few years time versus x86. Edited November 11, 2020 by flyinghaggis

[synaesthesia]

Well if AMD can wake Intel up on the x86 market with bang, buck and indeed power consumption as they have, I'm sure they won't be the only ones able to do it. In fact I'd be a little annoyed if this M1 architecture isn't compared directly to Ryzen as Intel's offerings just are not there any more.

[Arthur]

I'd take the 2-3 times performance they claim with a massive spoon of salt. However, even if Apple can simply match the performance of their current x86 based Mac's whilst using half the power that's a real paradigm shift.

AnandTech estimate the A14-based M1 will be almost as fast as a Ryzen 9 5950X.

 

We'll find out if that's true soon.

 

www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4

 

Even in SPECfp which is even more dominated by memory heavy workloads, the A14 not only keeps up, but generally beats the Intel CPU design more often than not. AMD also wouldn’t be looking good if not for the recently released Zen3 design.

 

In the overall SPEC2006 chart, the A14 is performing absolutely fantastic, taking the lead in absolute performance only falling short of AMD’s recent Ryzen 5000 series.

 

The fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including the SoC, DRAM, and regulators, versus +21W (1185G7) and 49W (5950X) package power figures, without DRAM or regulation, is absolutely mind-blowing.

 

There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.

 

The fact that Apple does well in both workloads is evidence that they have an extremely well-balanced microarchitecture, and that Apple Silicon will be able to scale up to “desktop workloads” in terms of performance without much issue.

 

 

[DalekSec]

Biggest disappointment is that the Air, Pro and Mini all have the same M1 chip. The only difference of the 3 comes down to battery, screen or other little bits no major power gain over each.

 

imo Apple are setting up for the MacBooks to fail, so they can market more iPad Pros. They'll keep the Desktop line-ups for those who need a fixed machine, but the portable Macs to be replaced by iPads within 5 years

[flyinghaggis]

AnandTech estimate the A14-based M1 will be almost as fast as a Ryzen 9 5950X.

 

We'll find out if that's true soon.

 

www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4

 

 

Yeah, I've seen those projected benchmarks! Imagine what that would mean for the Intel/AMD PC x86 market if it turns out to be true

 

I struggle to believe that can be the case, especially across a varierty of benchmarks, but time will tell though....

Edited November 11, 2020 by flyinghaggis

[localzuk]

I think the terminology is being a little confusing. Apple are saying they get more performance vs power usage. That doesn't mean more performance overall.

 

But yes, I do think x86 is slowly going to die unless Intel and AMD innovate significantly in the power/performance game soon.

[synaesthesia]

I'm setting myself up for a "Well, that statement didn't age well" comment in a couple of years from now but, and another analogy incoming - A manufacturer touts their electric vehicle has twice the range of the long range Tesla 3, 90% more efficient at it's top speed than Tesla's equivelent and a battery life warranted for twice as long.

 

Sounds good.

Vehicle is a golf cart.

[DalekSec]

I'm setting myself up for a "Well, that statement didn't age well" comment in a couple of years from now but, and another analogy incoming - A manufacturer touts their electric vehicle has twice the range of the long range Tesla 3, 90% more efficient at it's top speed than Tesla's equivelent and a battery life warranted for twice as long.

 

Sounds good.

Vehicle is a golf cart.

 

-Makes a note to come back to this after the LTT review-

[synaesthesia]

I have as much faith in anything Apple claim as Donald Trump has in ballot counters Besides, I'm dreading the day Apple actually does something good (not by proxy) and we end up turning into an Apple world - frankly, that's a nightmare.

[Norphy]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-apple-m1-a-seriously-fast-x86-competitor/

 

Preliminary benchmarks of a real life Apple M1 based system. It's impressive.

[Arthur]

 

 

 

The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test (AnandTech)

Edited November 17, 2020 by Arthur

[Arthur]

[synaesthesia]

So, it's impressive for it's power consumption and that's about it - otherwise it's not breaking records for performance. Still, it's setting the bar of possibility for them if they open up the doors to multiple SKU's rather than sticking the same thing in every device. I wonder if that will come, or if there was a barrier preventing that.

[2ilent8cho]

So, it's impressive for it's power consumption and that's about it - otherwise it's not breaking records for performance. Still, it's setting the bar of possibility for them if they open up the doors to multiple SKU's rather than sticking the same thing in every device. I wonder if that will come, or if there was a barrier preventing that.

It is the first in a family of Apple Silicon processors, it's the slowest processor Apple will ever make and the M1 is for the base/entry level devices. A higher performance version will come for the 16" MacBook Pro and higher end 13' Pro (Likely the M1X) but the amusing thing is, the entry level chip can already beat the 16" Intel MacBook Pro with an i9 and that's not the product this processor is aimed at. There will be one even faster than those too eventually for use in the Mac Pro, and then once the whole family is running Apple Silicon, out will come the M2 and be 30% faster again.

[Jawloms]

Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: The end of x86

 

I read something once which said any article that has a title which is a question, the question can usually be answered "No".

[Arthur]

Developer Successfully Virtualizes Windows for ARM on M1 Mac

 

Currently, Macs with the M1 chip do not support Windows and there is no Boot Camp feature as there is on Intel Macs, but support for Windows is a feature that many users would like to see.

 

Using the open-source QEMU virtualizer, Graf was able to virtualize the ARM version of Windows on Apple's M1 chip, with no emulation. Since the M1 chip is a custom ARM SoC, it is no longer possible to install the x86 version of Windows or x86 Windows apps using Boot Camp, as was the case with previous Intel-based Macs. However, he said in a Tweet that when virtualized on an M1 Mac, "Windows ARM64 can run x86 applications really well. It's not as fast as Rosetta 2, but close."

 

Graf was able to run the Windows ARM64 Insider Preview by virtualizing it through the Hypervisor.framework. Apple says this allows users to interact with virtualization technologies without having to write kernel extensions (KEXTs).

 

Graf applied a custom patch to the QEMU virtualizer, which is said to be known for "achieving near-native performance" by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. This means that the Arm version of Windows can be virtualized on M1 Macs with excellent performance.

 

Although Graf's experiment is still at an early stage, he believes others could reproduce his results. "It's early days for this. It's definitely possible to reproduce my results - all patches are on the mailing list - but don't expect a stable, fully functional system yet," he said. Above all, Graf has demonstrated that Windows is able to run on M1 Macs.

 

Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi recently said that Windows coming to M1 Macs is "up to Microsoft." The M1 chip contains the core technologies needed to run Windows, but Microsoft has to decide whether to license its ARM version of Windows to Mac users.

[FN-GM]

You can only attach 1 external display in the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro! Massive show stopper.

 

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/11/how-apple-silicon-on-a-m1-mac-changes-monitor-support-and-what-you-can-connect

 

[Arthur]

You can only attach 1 external display in the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro! Massive show stopper.

For the new M1 MacBooks it is possible to use DisplayLink adapter(s) as a workaround for the external display limitation.

 

I expect the higher-end M1X/M2 MacBooks released next year will support at least two displays however.

 

 

[synaesthesia]

Ah, the usual "You want to do WHAT???? Here's an expensive peripheral to do something even the most basic of Android mobile phones can do let alone a laptop costing 4 figures..."

[Brimstone]

Ah, the usual "You want to do WHAT???? Here's an expensive peripheral to do something even the most basic of Android mobile phones can do let alone a laptop costing 4 figures..."

 

If you going to want to run that many displays I doubt many will worry about buying adaptors to do this...

[synaesthesia]

what, 2?