Apple Announces M1 Chip for the Mac

They didn't mention performance for Windows emulation, did they? What's going to happen to Parallels and VMware? Is the M1 able to run Autodesk Revit with good speed under emulated Windows?
 
Constable Odo said:
Why would Intel care or cry about Apple Silicon? Intel has AMD to worry about. Only Apple will be using Apple Silicon while the rest of the world will be using hundreds of millions of Intel and AMD processors. Apple has a relatively small market share and those MacBook prices will not do much to increase its market share. The world is full of consumers who want cheap X86 laptops and Chromebooks. Apple still has nothing to compete with those cheap laptops that consumers desire.

Apple Silicon will be mostly dismissed by the tech industry pundits as being an expensive oddity that runs macOS and doesn't support Windows. The computer tech industry always laughs at what Apple does as being stupid. Absolutely no one believes Apple Silicon will replace X86 processors. Old habits die hard for most people. I'm ready to make the Apple Silicon switch as soon as possible. I don't need any more X86 processor computers as I already have four working X86 Macs.
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If Apple’s benchmarks hold true in practice, Intel has some quite serious problems.

All notebook and pad manufacturers need to have fast and power efficient processors. Microsoft cannot afford just wait and see what happens if Macs are much more power efficient.

The superior efficiency is not because Apple would be a better chip maker than Intel. It is because the processor core itself is more efficient. There is no way around that without changing the architecture.

Of course, along with the change comes binary incompatibility. But is it a problem for Microsoft? They have already had Windows running on ARM, and all the Office stuff runs on ARM, as well. After all, recompiling the applications is not that difficult. (Yes, there is more to that. But nothing impossibly difficult for MS.)

Oh, and one more thing... Cloud servers run Intel + Linux at the moment as the de facto standard (even Microsoft Azure). Changing that to ARM + Linux is trivial in most cases. I have a small team developing and running cloud services, and their answer was “We need to rebuild our dockers, and that will take many minutes”.

So, if our cloud provider offered ARM based servers for lower cost than equivalent Intel based servers, we kiss goodbye to Intel. From the cloud provider’s point of view more efficient processors are cheaper because they need less energy and equally importantly less cooling capacity.

I don’t think Apple will be a major player on the CPU/GPU market, but if their claims are reasonably true, Intel is in trouble because it’s architecture is rotting.
 
asiga said:
They didn't mention performance for Windows emulation, did they? What's going to happen to Parallels and VMware? Is the M1 able to run Autodesk Revit with good speed under emulated Windows?
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Parallels and VMWare are not processor emulators. They cannot run binary code compiled for one architecture (x64/x86) on another architecture (ARMv8).

Microsoft, on the other hand, is busy working with Windows 10 ARM version able to emulate x64. So, you could have a virtual ARM machine running Windows 10 with x64/x86 emulation. This way it should be possible to run real Windows and all Windows programs on an ARM Mac. (The story with Wine is much more grim. There is not much hope.)

But as the software is not here with us today, it is much too early to say if and how this happens, and if it happens what the performance will be.
 
MJaP said:
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It was the graphs that bugged me... "Latest PC laptop chip"... well that could mean anything i3, i5, i7, i9, ultra low voltage... way to be utterly ambiguous Apple. I'll wait for some real world application benchmarks.
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I scrolled through the presentation. This will be a really really good laptop chip, if all you do is safari, pages and facetime. Optimization for everything else though.....IDK. They compared it to the dual core intel in the macbook air, I know this new one is fanless, but the thermal design of that macbook air was pretty bad to start with.

So this all new 8-core seems to be on par with the 4-core offerings of last gen when it comes to raw performance (they kept everything above with Intel) while offering a much much much better performance per watt, to be expected 2 full nodes ahead of intel....

I am interested to see how this performs vs AMDs latest offerings on TSMC, both in raw performance as well as performance per watt.
 
DrV said:
The superior efficiency is not because Apple would be a better chip maker than Intel. It is because the processor core itself is more efficient. There is no way around that without changing the architecture.
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Nah, it’s mostly down to TSMC’s superior process... They are two nodes ahead. What makes it possible is obviously that the M1 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Intel’s offerings.
 
All in all, very suspicious. The benchmarks were quite extraordinarily vague. If they'd had something more concrete to boast about, you can be sure they'd have done so. I'm not in the market for a 16GB machine in any case, but curious to see the real-world benchmarks when they become available. Perhaps they've done something MS couldn't do with their Surface Pro X. Perhaps not.
 
Coconut Bean said:
Nah, it’s mostly down to TSMC’s superior process... They are two nodes ahead. What makes it possible is obviously that the M1 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Intel’s offerings.
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You are right, the process is an important part of the puzzle.

However, even in that case Intel has a problem if either its processes (dozens of billions in investment) are outdated or its processors cannot be manufactured with the newest processes.

But I still maintain that ARMv8 big.LITTLE is significantly more power efficient than x64 even when the same manufacturing process is used. ARM is the most experienced power efficient core designer in the world, and the asymmetric architecture avoids unnecessary consumption near idle with the smaller cores (most of the time).

This is not to say Intel wouldn’t be among the best chip designers. Unfortunately, it needs to carry a lot of legacy stuff with it in the architecture. The playing field is not even.

Actually, the HPC (Hi-Perf Computing) community has been very interested in ARM cores for the last ten years. The shift seems to be happening right now; a couple of years ago everything was Xeon-based, now the number one supercomputer (Japanese Fukagu) is ARM-based and much more power efficient than its rivals.
 
Signed on for the mini - I've been a part of every apple transition they ever made. Really looking forward to seeing how this well the M1 really works. Thought hard about a MacBook Air (just to experience instant on and no fan) but the mini fits my needs better at the moment.
 
asiga said:
They didn't mention performance for Windows emulation, did they? What's going to happen to Parallels and VMware? Is the M1 able to run Autodesk Revit with good speed under emulated Windows?
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Windows emulation is not part of the future for M1 powered machines. If you want Intel you have to stick to current Intel Macs or buy a Windows PC. Not sure this is a smart stratergy, but Apple has always gone its own way.
 
The M1 chip has an eight-core CPU, with four high-performance cores, in what Apple calls "the world's fastest CPU core."
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I feel this line may draw Apple the same problem they had when they called the PowerMac G5 "The World's Fastest Computer".
 
Announcing the Apple new M1T, M1X for a bigger Pro model will be over 50% faster.
 
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DrV said:
You are right, the process is an important part of the puzzle.

However, even in that case Intel has a problem if either its processes (dozens of billions in investment) are outdated or its processors cannot be manufactured with the newest processes.

But I still maintain that ARMv8 big.LITTLE is significantly more power efficient than x64 even when the same manufacturing process is used. ARM is the most experienced power efficient core designer in the world, and the asymmetric architecture avoids unnecessary consumption near idle with the smaller cores (most of the time).

This is not to say Intel wouldn’t be among the best chip designers. Unfortunately, it needs to carry a lot of legacy stuff with it in the architecture. The playing field is not even.

Actually, the HPC (Hi-Perf Computing) community has been very interested in ARM cores for the last ten years. The shift seems to be happening right now; a couple of years ago everything was Xeon-based, now the number one supercomputer (Japanese Fukagu) is ARM-based and much more power efficient than its rivals.
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I totally agree that ARM is the performance per watt champions and will remain that for long time.

Apple is doing a good job to cater to their customers, no MacBook Air user cares whether it's Intel or arm as long as it's fast and that massive battery life will be pretty damn compelling. Performance will never be an important question as long as it hits an acceptable level.

When it comes to professional workloads i expect Apple to go all in ASICs like Afterburner. For us not doing iOS development plugging in to Apple APIs but other programming in high level languages it will be interesting to see how compatibility works out. Mac support has in general been good whatever open source server or wants to use, but that might be slowly fading away.

Performance/compatibility will be an other question as there is a lot of code not working on or not being optimized for ARM, even if it can be recompiled with some good compilers provided by Apple. A lot of the advantages Apple silicon has is down to hardware acceleration of specific task, such as what the neural engine provides. Great if your program does utilize it. The same code on Intel will be super-slow and power hungry making the Apple silicon look really good.
 
Axemantitan said:
What will this do for Bootcamp? Will Microsoft make Windows 10 available for ARM-type processors?
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If Apple are smart (and they are!) they'll have Bootcamp at launch. Given the timelines I wouldn't be surprised if Apple have been working with and probably funding the Windows on Arm work. The Surface Pro X launch last year would be in line with this, and even the original Arm based Surface years ago would align with Apple starting to experiment (they'll have been working on this for many years). Apple will be terrified of monopoly charges on many fronts, and ensuring Windows runs well on these devices will tick a nice box to demonstrate they play well with others. For Microsoft, this could finally make enough Arm devices available to make it a viable direction away from Intel architectures. For developers that would also give enough reason to put the effort in.
All conjecture of course, but MS And Apple have collaborated for many years.

As for will MS release Windows on Arm....welcome to 2011, I guess ;)
 
apple is killing me. Redesigned smaller macpro? They just made the macpro that came out. If you hung your hat on osx for work. real work. I just dont know. This is way too much change. I have software that wont get upgraded and I have no idea if it will get the transfer. Sad.
 
WildstarBR2020 said:
Bob Swan is a nice fella. Bad for him, but way too far to commit suicide for this...
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Intel is really under the guillotine here, I don't know how they are doing business wise, but they are extremely critisized for being behind the market. They just lost Apple as a customer, they failed with their cellphone modems, they don't build GPUs, and AMD is pushing forward with their "better" CPUs. The future does not look bright for them.
 
DownUnderDan said:
Windows emulation is not part of the future for M1 powered machines. If you want Intel you have to stick to current Intel Macs or buy a Windows PC. Not sure this is a smart stratergy, but Apple has always gone its own way.
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Um, Apple went it's own way. It didn't work and no one wanted to develop two versions of their software. Steve fixed this by taking the Mac to X86. Now Tim is taking it back the other way. I'm not at all looking forward to nothing being available again. But, I've also been on PC since the great failure of 2013...
 
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