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MacBook Air and MacBook Pro M1 Chips Have Same 8-Core CPUs, No Upgrades Available

Will the new AIR M1 with 8GB Ram be fast enough for games like wow and dota 2? I am not shure how good the Apple notebook with 8GB Ram is.
 
snakes- said:
Will the new AIR M1 with 8GB Ram be fast enough for games like wow and dota 2? I am not shure how good the Apple notebook with 8GB Ram is.
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Keep in mind that the 8GB is also used as video memory for the GPU. Don't expect good results with high resolutions on external displays.
 
I use low resolution monitor 1080p only.i am not a high detail freak. I think with high temperatures the air will throttle a bit. and 7 cores make less heat maybe this is the reason for only 7 gpu cores.
 
So im extremely curious what the real world performance differences are between the 7-core GPU and the 8-core GPU variants of the Air?

Lots of computational tasks now are offloaded onto GPU, but how significant is it really?
 
thettareddast said:
So im extremely curious what the real world performance differences are between the 7-core GPU and the 8-core GPU variants of the Air?

Lots of computational tasks now are offloaded onto GPU, but how significant is it really?
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If we draw a correlation between the GPU performance of the 2018 vs 2020 iPad Pros (one additional GPU core, 7 vs. 8), the real-world results manifested as higher frame rates on games.
 
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dannys1 said:
Because was relevance does ghz have when you can't compare it with anything else? It's a meaningless stat. It makes sense in the Intel world where you can compare it to other Intel processors, but even then it tells you nothing as they've been stuck around 3ghz for about 15 years or more now.

If someone tells you the processor is running at 1.2ghz but the Intel one that it's replacing is running at 1.4ghz - what are you going to do with that information? The average member of the general public will thing "oh it's slower than Intel then" but in benchmarks its 3x faster. See how that's stats are suddenly meaningless.

In this case cores are sort of meaningless too - but for a PR and marketing aspects you can at least say "it's got more cores than an Intel processor at this level" - again it's irrelevant to customers but it's on the spec sheet.

The only thing that tells us anything about these machines is actual bench marks - numbers on a page mean nothing - no one cares what ghz their iOS devices run at either. We get told how much higher the iPads are clocked than the iPhone and then totally forget and don't care 5 minutes later.

I'm sure in real world usage and benchmarks it'll roast the Intel chips in some things and not be as fast at others - such is the real world scenario of an actual processor. Until then knowing its 1ghz or 5ghz with no direct comparison to match it to, means nothing.
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To compare the Air vs Pro. They are both available with the M1 in 8/8 flavours, but are both the M1 8/8 in the Air and the Pro running the same clock speeds? That would be interesting to see.

Apple has always been very weak on disclosing true tech specs though.
 
Fomalhaut said:
I think the M1 Mini will probably be a good choice for developers, but maybe as an additional machine for MacOS/iOS development. 16GB is fine for most local development if you are not running local VMs or running heavyweight app servers or DBs on the local machine. Bear in mind that a lot of development pushes builds to cloud infrastructure these days; I haven't run a local VM for several years.

What are you running that uses up your 96GB RAM?
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I am usually editing 4k wedding videos but most RAM is used up editing large images in Photoshop. Many a times a single image would go upwards of 4-6GB. I will have to get more RAM soon.
 
Fomalhaut said:
Fomalhaut said:
No way to use unified memory with an AMD dGPU, so that won’t be happening. It will use an Apple GPU.




I'm not sure if you understood my comment, which was in response to someone suggesting that Apple should continue to use an AMD dGPU with Apple Silicon. My response was that Apple Silicon uses shared memory, so the GPU has to be provided by Apple.

It's well known that AMD has APUs that use shared memory with GPU and CPU - both located within the AMD SoC package.

What I'm saying is that I can't see how Apple Silicon could share its on-package memory (on the M1) with a "memory-less" third party GPU from AMD. Such a device may be possible, but I doubt very much that either Apple or AMD are planning of making one.

I'll rephrase my comment: "No way to share the Apple M1 memory with an AMD dGPU on a separate chip".
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Like I said - you didn't see the Ryzen 3 reveal.

Users with a Ryzen 5000 series GPU, 500 series motherboard (available for over a year now), and a 6000 series GPU can share system memory.
 
BeatCrazy said:
If we draw a correlation between the GPU performance of the 2018 vs 2020 iPad Pros (one additional GPU core, 7 vs. 8), the real-world results manifested as higher frame rates on games.
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nice thanks
anyone have experience running other workflows like encoding videos, doing lightroom/photoshop stacking and such?
 
anonymous888 said:
Same. But I would like better performance while watching 4K YouTube or using Plex Mac app. I have 2015 13 inch i5 pro, it starts lagging and heats up when I do the above things. Even opening 2-3 chrome tabs all with different video playing makes it lag.
Is 999 MBA enough for me?
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The base M1 MBA is enough for you and will do more than that without lag or getting hot.
 
coredev said:
Comparing apple and oranges. Development cycles for combustion engines are not at all comparable to memory needs of modern operating systems and apps.

When I configured that machine back then I did not need that much memory at all. Today with all the services that run in the background in macOS and memory hungry apps, increasing media size and all, you can easily make use of 16GB. For some pro uses, that's not even enough.
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I've never seen a steady need in memory over the years, if anything I've seen the opposite, with the introduction of memory compression and slimming of apps. I have 64GB in my iMac, and sure it will use it, but it doesn't need to be using it. Memory pressure is non existent unless I am utilizing multiple VM's. Unused memory is wasted memory. I run 32GB in my home server too, and a good 90% of it is just being used as cache most of the time.

Kind of like how turbocharging and VVT has largely replaced large displacement engines.

Would you look at that, they do compare.
 
ssgbryan said:
Like I said - you didn't see the Ryzen 3 reveal.

Users with a Ryzen 5000 series GPU, 500 series motherboard (available for over a year now), and a 6000 series GPU can share system memory.
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Ok. That’s interesting; thanks! So the AMD 6000 can reference system memory (via PCIe or some other bus?) in addition to its own VRAM?

But it’s still an AMD to AMD integration. It would take a lot of work for this to work between Apple and AMD. Maybe in a future Mac Pro?
 
rtrutter said:
Apple claims the M1 chip is faster than PC chips! Which ones, the i3, i5, i7, or i9. Maybe the Xeons??? This is another Apple marketing scam to influence Apple zealots. I am not impressed with the technology because all these machines are glorified iPads/iPhones! I will not purchase an Apple Silicon Mac until real benchmarks are provided not Apple marketing propaganda! This is a typical Tim Cook tactic!
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We only have to wait a couple of week until benchmarks will appear, so it’s not a big deal.
 
Fomalhaut said:
Ok. That’s interesting; thanks! So the AMD 6000 can reference system memory (via PCIe or some other bus?) in addition to its own VRAM?

But it’s still an AMD to AMD integration. It would take a lot of work for this to work between Apple and AMD. Maybe in a future Mac Pro?
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Infinity Cache or something. They are testing it out with Zen 3; it may have been one of the things that they borrowed from the Zen 4 team (AMD has 2 design teams working at the same time) - this is why we will see Zen 4 in about 15 months - hopefully with 4 way SMT; from what I understand, that was bumped from Zen 3 because the software isn't there yet.

I really like the idea of a 12c/48t CPU on a 5nm process - we should see yet another 15 - 20% IPC increase. AMD has been delivering that on a 15 month cadence since 2017 - that won't be changing any time soon.

There are a LOT of exciting things happening in the computing world. Then there is apple.

My next graphics card will have the same amount of vram as a maxed out ARM mac.
 
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