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News Arm-based Apple M1 SoC is at the heart of the latest Macs

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by bit-tech, 11 Nov 2020.

  1. bit-tech

    bit-tech Supreme Overlord Lover of bit-tech Administrator

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  2. andrew8200m

    andrew8200m Multimodder

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    Pricing on these vs the Intel units is incredible on the pro models! If the chip runs as quickly as they claim it to against the i7 9750h or what ever it is they currently use in the mac with graphics performance of 6x that of the onboard (which is usually UHD630) then gaming on a mac may actually be viable again to an extent. The GPU in the IPad pro A12Z is 8 core so I can only presume its a similar unit to that and that in its self would pose to be a very capable and intriguing proposition all things considered. What gets me is how much cheaper the laptop is vs the intel based options and how this may reflect on home computing moving forwards.

    Will we start to see 16/32 core Chips of this nature destroying the likes of the 5950x in the next year or two? I hope we do!! The a14 from a single core perspective is apparently faster than any x86 chip on the market in many use situations, I hope the m1 performs similarly or better again with the available cooling at hand in a far larger enclosure vs a phone.

    Exciting times!
     
  3. wolfticket

    wolfticket Downwind from the bloodhounds

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    Or it will kill conventional AAA gaming on Mac (again) because of the lack of native x86-64 support...
     
  4. sandys

    sandys Multimodder

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    All their slide were a bit wooly with respect to what it compares against, fastest at what and fastest iGPU doing what, 6x GPU increase then stating 2.6 Tflops, is that FP16/FP32 etc, an AMD APU is already in that ball park, knowing apple it will all be Geekbench, but they look like nice machines, like Apples Chromebook, good web machine.

    I would wait for the third generation of this product whilst the trailblazers iron out all the issues.

    Seeing as they are transitioning to iPad hardware with Ipad app compatibility you'd think they would do a 2 in 1 with a touch screen but I guess they want you to have both.
     
    Last edited: 11 Nov 2020
  5. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    According to the small print they used a 1.2GHz i7 macbook air [i7 1060NG7] and 3.6GHz i3 [i3 8100B] mac mini for the comparisons

    ARK link for the MacBook is to the closest listing i could find to the the mac-specific model, so i think it's the right cpu, but it might not be.


    EDIT: '3x faster than the best-selling windows laptop in its class..', '5x faster than the top selling windows desktop'

    ...for all we know that could be [and probably is] some £300 dell office fodder, in which case I should bloody hope a £1200 laptop is faster.
     
    Last edited: 11 Nov 2020
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  6. Spraduke

    Spraduke Lurker

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    If they even manage to broadly match (rather than beat) the performance of Intels/AMDs laptop ranges at a similar or lower power draw then they've done a great job. The big question (as always) will be software support. Moving from X86/64 is a big gamble on either the emulation being very efficient or software developers heavily investing in porting across to the new platform.

    Now if you develop Mac software then I can see it being worth the effort but for most companies who support windows primarily are they going to bother to make a 'mac' version. Doubtful.
     
  7. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    There's also the not-zero possibility of apple locking everything inside the app store walled garden once the move to ARM is complete and they're not reliant on Rosetta-II/x86 virtualisation.
     
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  8. andrew8200m

    andrew8200m Multimodder

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    Theres small numbers in the specs to small print. The small print shows gaming performance relative to an Iris Pro 645 so Tombraider at 3.5x better for example at medium settings 1440x900 puts it in a ball park around a base 1050.. cant complain with that at all!!!
     
  9. jinq-sea

    jinq-sea 'write that down in your copy book' Super Moderator

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    I wonder how quickly pro audio will make the move. Whilst I see Logic running on M1, I don't see all of the plugins that people use being M1 only any time soon, let alone M1 compliant :eek:
     
  10. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    Lets not forget Thunderbolt, which is tempermental af at the best of times...
     
  11. jinq-sea

    jinq-sea 'write that down in your copy book' Super Moderator

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    Indeed. Better now than it was, mind.
     
  12. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    anandtech and other sites have shown what the A14 currently does vs latest and greatest intel chips, M1 will surely be faster than that by some distance, Pity it will never be saw outside of a mac
     
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