Apple is an existential threat to the PC

[PSman1700]

People can get pretty much what they want on the PC side and they will live their lives not knowing any different. I always find it mildly humorous that PC people continuously keep engaging the Mac community and brigading why their PC is better suited for their task of choice, be it gaming or something else.

To clarify some things, these new apple machines are as much 'pc' to me personally as any windows laptop/machine is. The differentiator for me is the OS/software the hardwares running, i dont care what architecture powers my boxes, the same for it being Ampere, RDNA etc. Im going for what offers me the best performance, and for me that is Windows and the hardware its usually running on (primary gaming, hence why im on these forums).
For a content creator obviously the mac is going to offer better value.

As I've said before the potential is certainly there and the M1 Pro / Max can battle it out with the best from AMD and Intel as well as graphic cards like the AMD Radeon 6800M or nVDIA 3060 / 3080 mobile.

That potentional is there at a much, much higher price-tag, its just not there atm and usually you shouldnt buy a product based on whats 'potentionally there' but what you are getting right now.

It's a great SoC that delivers amazing performance per watt.

Absolutely.

Benchmarks that started out as smartphone software on iOS is very well optimised for Apple Silicon thanks to iPhone and iPad. I feel like GFXBench 5 proves that much.

And that reflects on the benchmarks indeed. Other benchmarks that are better optimized for x86 would favor that architecture.

You look at the screen every time you turn the device on, so it should get a bit more credit than saying you can get screen with bad colour science that outputs 24Hz more.

Gamers usually care more for higher refresh rates than colour accuracy (i think), i do atleast.

Just because the M1 does well on Geekbench, doesn't mean it only does well on Geekbench.

True, what i ment is that like the HUB analysis/comparison one should look at real world performance and gauge from there what fits their needs.
And again, im all for it to Apple powering my next personal computer, and im sure they will take over the entire MS/windows industry and then games will automatically be optimized for that architecture.

 

[PSman1700]

Performance review. Never seen this youtuber before but seems quite good of a review.

Maybe M1 products deserve their thread btw?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Never seen this youtuber before

But posting because pitting a desktop with cubic foot space of cooling and no power budget is comparable to to 14" and 16" laptops running off battery with cubic inches of cooling is comparable, right?

 

[MfA]

M1 is a complete rethink of how you build a high performance CPU core, it is much wider than the competition and clocks lower.

Selling it for much more so you can buy a node and area advantage isn't really rethinking how you build a high performance computer, it's rethinking how to market a high performance computer.

Technologically it's all just so fucking boring for the moment, node, area and finally a decent tiler getting some first party support (not an innovative tiler either). That's all there is to this.

If Apple wins, more of this boring bullshit is all we're going to get. The ecosystem lockin and vertical integration will entrench their monopoly far more thoroughly than Microsoft or Intel ever were.

 

[DavidGraham]

M1 is a complete rethink of how you build a high performance CPU core, it is much wider than the competition and clocks lower. The performance is on par or exceeds the competition, at much lower power consumption. Per core, its performance is roughly on par with an Alder Lake performance core, but at 10-12% the power consumption.

Can we have some insight on how on earth exactly did Apple achieve this? I mean Intel/AMD could go wider as well, but they would be nowhere close to what Apple is doing.

 

[PSman1700]

But posting because pitting a desktop with cubic foot space of cooling and no power budget is comparable to to 14" and 16" laptops running off battery with cubic inches of cooling is comparable, right?

Nothing wrong with that, the reviewer clearly says how expensive, big and power hungry that system is, aswell as much faster. Its not a fair comparison, desktop vs laptop, but he doesnt pretend its a fair one either. On the contrary he even says its a unfair match.

WoW seems to perform very well on the mac, though from that list its also the lightest of the tested games i think.

 

[Gubbi]

Can we have some insight on how on earth exactly did Apple achieve this? I mean Intel/AMD could go wider as well, but they would be nowhere close to what Apple is doing.

Anandtech already covered it (mostly).

In my best estimation, Apple made a choice of going very wide and very deep at the expense of a lower maximum operating frequency. The higher cycle times allows them to build all central structures wider and deeper. You can have longer buses, larger SRAM arrays, etc with the longer cycle time; 8 wide decode, 630+ entry ROB, 16 execution units (each with its own scheduler), 192Kb I-cache and a 128KB D-cache with 3 cycles load-to-use latency is all made possible by the longer cycle time.

There is no way you can build a 128KB cache with three cycle load-to-use latency running at 5Hz without exuberant power consumption; Intel's caches has 5 cycles load-to use in comparison, AMD has 4 cycles at 5GHz for a quarter sized D-cache.

I expect the others to follow suit eventually. Apple's approach nets them much lower power consumption which is obviously a boon for mobile devices, but I think it will be as important in the datacenter market in the future too. With 1024 core 2-unit servers making their way. The power density of a 42 unit rack will be insane, a microarchitecture which improves efficiency by a factor four, without sacrificing performance, looks very attractive, IMHO,

Cheers

 

[Laurent06]

WoW seems to perform very well on the mac, though from that list its also the lightest of the tested games i think.

Perhaps is it because WoW is the only game that was properly ported to Mac M1?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I like that he indicates how much battery was used in the benchmarks.

 

[Jawed]

I expect the others to follow suit eventually.

Apple seems to be spending a lot of transistors to make these "wide and slow" cores.

But, what else are you going to spend transistors on?...

Intel has started with P+E and AMD looks like it's doing the same as Intel, eventually.

 

[Gubbi]

Apple seems to be spending a lot of transistors to make these "wide and slow" cores.

Indeed. On a process normalized die size comparison (using public scaling figures for TSMC's processes), M1 is 30-50% larger than AMD/Intel's counterpart.

But, what else are you going to spend transistors on?...

The CPU cores are still a fraction of the entire SOC (big EPYC/Xeon SKUs not withstanding).

Intel has started with P+E and AMD looks like it's doing the same as Intel, eventually.

They have started, but I think they need to be much more aggressive. Intel's E core has M1 power consumption (and lower performance), Intel's P cores are .... insane.

Cheers

 

[Jawed]

I wonder if the fact that Apple has landed upon ~3-3.4GHz is a clue to where GPUs are going to end up at, and perhaps, remain.

It seems likely that Apple has chosen this with an eye on what 3nm will do too.

After the M1 series of SOCs, will Apple go wider still at the same clocks?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

It seems likely that Apple has chosen this with an eye on what 3nm will do too.

If you look at both Macs and iDevices, Apple has never really been wedded to fixing specifications to anything. Clock rates, cores, resolutions , ports. These change product to product with the software adapting dynamically.

 

[MfA]

As always, I'd rather see more transistors spend on the GPU than chasing diminishing returns in IPC for the CPU. Game developers are finally starting to get the CPU out of the bottlenecks of the rendering pipeline completely (you were late Sweeney).

 

[PSman1700]

Why Apple is neither a real threat to consoles either.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Anything I’ve read from AAA devs commenting on the metal api has been very positive. Now that they’re aligning the hardware between iOS and Mac OS devices it should be a lot easier to to support gaming going forward. I don’t think they’ll ever seriously try to enter the console market exactly but I can easily see Apple TV becoming a reasonable device for gaming. It just might not run Call of Duty. If they make it so gaming binaries can run on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac OS without rebuilding then it should lead to more games on Mac OS. I just think the types of games will be different than the typical console AAA games. But who knows. Pubg and cod mobile are pretty big.

 

[PSman1700]

As the youtuber says, Apple can do it if they want to. They could enter the console market with a seriously powerfull (much more so then ps5/xsx) little box consuming very little power, aswell as having a very good api with metal for developers to use. With the resources Apple has, they could support for AAA and 3rd party games aswell as IOS style apps/games. Their console would be supporting Apple's own controllers and other devices and seamlessly integrate into the Apple ecosystem.

 

[Lurkmass]

I think Apple is missing a couple of HW features to become a truly compelling option for AAA game developers. Alongside ray tracing, they're missing support for 64-bit atomic operations or let alone atomic operations on textures at all. 64-bit atomic operations on textures (even last gen consoles were capable of this) is paramount for enabling compute shader rasterization in UE5's Nanite because it's needed to perform depth testing so Apple GPUs currently can't run next generation geometry pipelines at all ...

Metal would be a decent API if it were not for the fact that it was streamlined to have the least amount of features exposed available and the most amount of restrictions compared to the other more explicit alternatives ...

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I think Apple is missing a couple of HW features to become a truly compelling option for AAA game developers. Alongside ray tracing, they're missing support for 64-bit atomic operations or let alone atomic operations on textures at all. 64-bit atomic operations on textures (even last gen consoles were capable of this) is paramount for enabling compute shader rasterization in UE5's Nanite because it's needed to perform depth testing so Apple GPUs currently can't run next generation geometry pipelines at all ...

Apple really only care about the parts of the industry who will pay, i.e. creators. Apple do not care about gamers. If gamers were even in the same ballpark proportionately in terms of spending relative to the size of the PC user base, then Apple may well look in that direction and consider targeting their R&D to running games better.

I've now had a week with a 14" MBP with 32Gb M1MAX and it's pretty good at running games but only a nutjob would spend that much for hardware for playing games. However, our fluid dynamics simulations are through the roof in terms of runtimes. This hardware will save us so much time.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I've now had a week with a 14" MBP with 32Gb M1MAX and it's pretty good at running games but only a nutjob would spend that much for hardware for playing games.

Like someone who would pay retail for a 3080?