when you have been building CPU's for 10 years + trying to make them small and powerful and low power consumption - I would say Apple knows a bit on the engineering aspects - Plus Intel have been stuck on it's throne for years.
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Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro
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That sounds a lot like innovation to me.
How unified memory blows the SoCs off the M1 Macs
In an M1 Mac, all its main components are tightly integrated and interdependent. To achieve performance with versatility, they come ready-built, not kits.eclecticlight.co
There are two versions of the chip, all have the 8-core CPU but the pro's get standard an 8-core GPU while the base air has a 7-core GPU. Not a big difference between the two from the benchmarks.
I don’t work in the industry anymore, but I did work at Exponential, Sun and AMD for a decade. And my Ph.D dissertation was on CPU memory hierarchies. So ...
Cost? Hard to say. Depends on how complicated the package is. But generally I would expect it to be cheaper, because connectors, boards, etc. cost money, soldering costs money, slots cost money, etc.
Repair? Harder. You have to replace the entire CPU package. Though apple likes to solder RAM in a lot of machines, anyway, so it’s not like it’s that easy to repair either way.
Physical limitations? Good question. Apple appears to be putting all the RAM on the same plane as the CPU. This means the more memory you have, the further it is from the CPU, which increases latency (And/or increases driver power). Of course, when it’s not in the socket, it may be stacked, but it’s even farther from the CPU. So overall, for now, it makes more sense to keep it in the CPU package (also reduces impedance, making it more efficient).
There are also ways to stack them - i have an example in my PhD dissertation using a well filled with thermally-conductive goop, with RAM chips on interposers separated by diamond sheets that transmit the heat into the goop. Apple isn’t doing that
Performance: this is a different issue than where you put the memory. You can share memory even if it’s external. Or you can have partitioned memory even if the memory is in the same package as the CPU.
As for the performance impact, apple says it is better. I can’t answer either way. You obviously have to worry about contention - it’s difficult for the CPU and GPU to write to the same memory area at the same times. But Apple knows a lot more about how it’s GPU and CPU work in concert than I do.
Resale value of Intel Macs just fell off a cliff. 😂😂😂
And the 7 core GPU is probably an 8 core GPU where one of the cores didn’t work right, so they blew a fuse to disable it.
For Windows, it will be up to Microsoft if they are willing to license their non x86 Windows for consumers. Knowing Satya, it will come, but probably will take time to work together with Apple. I mean this also means that Apple has to develop drivers of their SoC for Windows, which they might not deem important at this point.
The two big “catches” are that 1) this chip is still very much a “sports car” and not a “dump truck” it’s very fast, light, and efficient, the architecture benchmarks are still only compared to 6 core Intel processors and not the massive beast Xeons and a path to get there is more difficult engineering.
2) this is probably the first truly “blank page” Consumer CPU built in decades. This processor got to be designed after the 2017 iOS 32-bit purge and the Mac 32-bit purge. It gets to run off APIs and libraries that are brand spanking new with almost no historical compatibility overhead. (Yes, there’s a X64 compatibility mode, but that’s in software.) it’s an amazing feat to pull off getting so many apps moved to align with the new hardware, but of course the drawback is that legacy software is left in the dust as this chip speeds away.
Pretty sure the Space Shuttle used 8086 processors. Like the original 16bit flavor. I’d be willing to guess that the white balance calculation in the ISP uses more computation than landing the space shuttle...
Also, if 5 years from now they don’t need anything faster than what was available 5 years from then, they’ll be really happy Apple put this out when they did.
It's good to know that at least some of the $16 billion Apple spent on R&D in 2019 (and the ten of billions since Tim took over) haven’t all been focussed on creating ever-more exotic and vexing iPhone shell screws or laptops thinner than a human hair.
Which has always been the Apple drawback. They jettison old technologies (hardware and software) as necessary to move the platforms forward. So that drawback pays its dividends.
Don’t think that;’s true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/4_Pi
8086 wasn’t radiation-hardened. Bad idea in space.
I'm just so puzzled by how much surprise I'm seeing about this result. We already knew the Geekbench results of the A14 chip, and the A12Z DTK should've put an end to the old argument of the Ax chip not being able to process macOS workloads well enough.
Speaking of processors doing processor stuff, I still see a shockingly large amount of claims floating around online that ARM processors somehow cannot do "real world" workloads as well as x86, despite both Geekbench and SPEC telling us otherwise.
More quizzically often these are the same people who enthusiastically talk about how great it is to see AMD is doing well against Intel and praise AMD for the IPC improvement of Zen3. Yet they cannot accept Apple's chips being "real". A lot of it is obvious tribalism and hatred against Apple products for various reasons but it's just fascinating to see so much resistance against what's so plainly displayed in front of them.
OK... now I am intrigued! I'm hoping the software works though with the diversity of apps out there.
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I’ve never complained about the CPU speed of any of the 2019-20 MacBook’s. My biggest issue is that the front facing 720p camera sucks. And it still sucks.
I applaud Apple for dominating the chip market but I’d like to see a more modern design for the 13” MacBook Pro.
I applaud Apple for dominating the chip market but I’d like to see a more modern design for the 13” MacBook Pro.
Yes - and they'd be right to point that out.
This is exciting stuff, but it'll be much better to switch over (for many people) in several months time.
It’s difficult to understand when the paradigm shifts.
”Up until now, the only electric cars are radio controlled toys, so no way an electric car can carry four people and go 0-60 in 3 seconds.”
It’s not like Macs will suddenly start selling millions more than PCs & dramatically increase market share, with suddenly more Windows-only software becoming available on these machines, is it?
Well - I don't know - that's pretty sound reasoning.
What is your plan longer term for your Windows side usage (since Bootcamp is gone)?
I'm excited about Apple chips, but I'm bummed that I'm now likely going to have run multiple machines to maintain the Windows gaming side.