Serverside Swift is a thing. I would like to see it get a lot more support. I would also love to see Apple release a stripped down headless version of MacOS.
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Apple Silicon M1 Compiles Code as Fast as 2019 Mac Pro and With Minimal Battery Life Impact
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I want to get a Mac Mini but kind of waffling on the ram. I have an instinctual issue with spending $200 for an extra 8gb of ram. I recently bought 32gb of 3200mhz ram for my windows machine for under $130.
I realize that hardware profits make the Apple train run so the unified ram may make the difference for my fairly light use or maybe I'll over ride my instincts and spend the extra $200 anyway.
There is a tiny challenge with this right now. No Docker for M1, yet. It is coming, but it seems the complete rewrite for Apple hypervisor takes some time.
After that almost all Dockers will run on M1. Except...
TF will probably compile and run on M1, as it runs on any ARMv8 CPU. However, what you really would like to have is TF using CPUs, GPUs and Apple Neural Engine. That requires creating a lot of backend code possibly for APIs which are not documented.
I do not claim to understand too much of what might be involved, but Apple may not help here, as they want people to use their coreML instead. Also, it is not obvious whether ANE is any good in typical TF applications. (OTOH, Apple has used terms Tensorflow and M1 in the same sentence.)
Even the GPU road is a bumpy one, as there is no CUDA and Metal API seems to be ill-suited for ML tasks. But CPU, yes. Probably soon.
in addition to what others have said, the M1 appears to have some limitations in terms of I/O capabilities that would likely be deal-breakers for most buyers in the market for a 16” MBP. M1 machines are limited to 16GB of RAM, two TB ports, and can only support one external monitor (for MacBooks at least). I’ve no doubt Apple has an M1X or M2 in the works that will address these deficiencies and likely include even beefier graphics.
Where are all those people talking about “real world performance”, “thermal throttling”, “not enough ram for pro’s”? 😂
We just tested a 50 RAW 42MP Photo export test using the M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of memory. Lightroom classic running under Rosetta. Finished faster than the $1800 13" MacBook Pro 2020 with 16GB of RAM. UNDER ROSETTA! (no optimizations at all)
WHOA. Now I want to see the performance of an Ampere 128-Core Altra ARM-based server CPU with a discrete GPU.
They’re probably avoiding direct comparison with Intel Mac models for the time being because, well, they’re still for sale.
Is that an actual limitation though or a design decision for product separation and cost efficiency? Apple may well have done this on purpose because a) their research shows the vast majority of customers at this price point don’t use >16Gb RAM on a base level CPU b) the majority of customers at this price point don’t use significant I/O. So, there’s money to be saved here which can be passed onto the customer.
Those customers who have a need for more RAM, generally need a beefier processor and more I/O as well, and generally pay more for those machines with greater thermals. I think now that Apple control everything, we’ll see more of this type of product separation and efficiency savings.
Edit: “And though the M1 machines currently occupy the lower-end of Apple's Mac spectrum, the three devices that were refreshed with Apple Silicon made up about 91% of Mac shipments in the past twelve months, Morgan Stanley estimates.”
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In my work, a complete recompile takes three minutes at the minute, which would go down to 1 minute 20 seconds. Another task I do rarely is 80% multithreaded and 20% single threaded, which unfortunately means the same amount of time is spent running multithreaded and singlethreaded. That part runs in 25 minutes, which would go down to 10 minutes, but for 5 minutes only one CPU would be running. So in neither case would I expect much heat throttling.
The M1 processor is the _low end_ processor. It has replaced low end and mid level Intel CPUs. A mid level CPU will be out soon.
What makes you think there will be a "complete rewrite"? 99.9% of the code won't be touched.
I think they were in a little bit of a tough spot because they are still selling those high end Intel macs at full price. Might not help their sales to show them getting embarrassed by sub-$1,000 macs. Apple definitely has to walk a line for a little while.
I wouldn't buy a Mac with 8GB. But that's just me. Depends on what apps you use.
Businesses and creation professionals will still need that power. They will still be buying.
When the AS versions of the heavy iron are ready, they'll judge and review that then.
Too bad the new laptops can't run Word for Mac 2011 and Excel for Mac 2011!
Seriously... I’m not kidding.
The last time I played around with a recent version of Word or Pages, or even the two leading Open Office suites, I was underwhelmed. Key features, extensive customizing, etc. were missing. Screwed up my writing and data analysis workflows.
Clearly, I’m going to have to give them another whirl — or, remain content with older hardware that still works amazingly well, and speedily!
Seriously... I’m not kidding.
The last time I played around with a recent version of Word or Pages, or even the two leading Open Office suites, I was underwhelmed. Key features, extensive customizing, etc. were missing. Screwed up my writing and data analysis workflows.
Clearly, I’m going to have to give them another whirl — or, remain content with older hardware that still works amazingly well, and speedily!
I'm operating on a 2018 MBP 13 with only 8GB and its serviceable, but I do wish I'd gotten 16GB. I would say 16 should be the baseline for anyone who wants to use this machine for the next 5 years, and users should consider 32 if you're a power user or use any pro-level apps.
I am very curious about the higher end processors. More cores? What configuration? 4 ice + 8 fire? GPU with more cores? More cache?
Higher clock frequency is unlikely, as it already is very high. The memory bus is already very fast.
I guess Apple can still do something more — but what? Keeping thermal limitations in mind.
The fact that Apple replaced just the lower end 2-port MPB and not the 4-port model as well implies to me that it might be a hardware constraint, especially since the M1 can clean the clock of any U-series 10th gen Intel chip in the MBP 13 right now. It just doesn't make sense that Apple wouldn't have updated the entire 13" line with more ports or RAM options (which would have also benefited the Mini) if the chips were capable of it. The M1 itself seems like it might simply be a rebranded A14X in disguise so maybe the limitations make sense given that an iPad doesn't need that level of I/O.
I wouldn’t buy a computer with less than 16 GB RAM, but...
My previous MBP had 16 GiB, and the current one 32 GiB. I was almost certain the difference would be huge, but to be honest, I have not noticed any difference with my workloads. I handle some rather large datasets and occasionally edit videos in 4k.
I think part of the story is the very fast SSD we have nowadays. Of course, fast SSD is 2 GB/s, whereas fast RAM moves the decimal point by at least one digit. Still, unless your algorithms require random access to the data, many things including video editing are acceptably fast even with some of the data on the disk.
I have never had a computer with too much RAM. However, 16 GiB may actually be a bit more than it used to be a few years back. (YMMV, of course; a billion point FFT screams for 32 GiB RAM.)