Apple is an existential threat to the PC

With that high memory bandwidth, Potentially miners will grab them, thus diversifying the products they chomp?

 

57B transistors, that is one dense chip. Apart from strictly gaming or niche software support I don't see why anyone would buy a high-end windows laptop instead of this.

 

Any repetitive task that is accelerated by the chip will benefit. If you do this type of work all-day every day then this is a minor investment. It's a bit like the Mac Pro and people questioned who is going to spend 30k on a computer and 7k on a colour-calibrated monitor? Hollywood. Because these numbers are drops in the ocean relative to the overall costs of doing business.

 

It feels like people not already in an Apple ecosystem is in denial or refuse to believe in the performance offered by these notebooks.

These are an substantial upgrade over their Intel counterparts at a much better performance per watt advantage.

I was really hoping for these SoCs in the Mac Mini form factor though.

 

Its disappointing that they bothered to bring HDMI port, yet they are not supporting the latest 2.1. Kinda defeats the purpose if you still have to rely on dongles if you need to connect displays supporting beyond 4k/60.

 

Yeah I'm not the biggest apple fan but anyone today who buys an expensive non apple laptop needs their head examined
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...k-pros-with-display-notches-m1-pro-and-m1-max

If I was valve I'ld be doing anything to try and convince apple to put one of these in the steam deck

 

LOL, the pure silicon costs of the M1Max is waaaaay more than whats going into the steamdeck. the biggest ones like 430mm, on the absolute best process going.
Thats before you add memory too. but probably $400 just for the cpu/gpu core

 

I was thinking more of an updated base M1, the M1 max power draw is far too much for a handheld

 

TB4 / DisplayPort / USB-C supports that. It can drive three 6K displays and one 4K.

 

I'm pretty sure, there will be a TB3/USB-C (DP alternate mode) to HDMI 2.1 adapter. With Apple logo for 70 bucks or so.

 

It's basically an RX 6600XT going by the specs. Same TFLOPS, texture rate, fillrate.

AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Specs | TechPowerUp GPU Database

I can't imagine AMD will be making any more cards for Apple in any new machines Apple launches.

 

* - In their selected productivity benchmarks.

I'm sure the iGPU is still very power efficient and will still perform great on the dozen games that get a native port (for crossover or many rosetta 2 ports the 32core GPU still isn't going to perform any miracles), but apple is definitely not looking at gaming for this GPU. There's no word on any feature useful for gaming like VR capability, mesh shaders, RT acceleration, VRS, etc.
They're promoting the new iGPUs it as co-processors for their productivity apps. Gaming isn't anywhere in their message so far.

Lack of RT acceleration is actually odd because I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of professional productivity apps that could make use of it.

 

Isnt it the other way around though? seems these new M1 pro/max devices are more for the professional market (niche compared to the avarage joe?). A high-end windows laptop offers about the same performance at the same prices i think.

Hows that? I mean ye if everyone's going apple devices and abandon AMD/NV/intel etc then we could see a future where everything will be apple-powered. That new M1Max is basically the same die size as the XSX/PS5 while offering much more cpu power and about the same GPU raw power at a fraction of the power draw.
Still the thought of the next pcs and consoles being Apple seems nice but also scary at the same time.

 

With worse battery life, power consumption, noise, size, screen quality etc.

All these are key strengths for laptops imo, and nothing compares to these MacBooks when it comes to these, especially battery life.

 

Absolutely true, and theres where AMD/Intel/nv, sony and MS need to improve because the energy these apple chips require to obtain the same performance levels is just too large of a gap. But still even with that, these new apple devices are intresting to pro consumers etc, not so much to the average joe. It'd be different if Apple would start selling apple sillicon hardware like intel/nv, amd etc does.
The gaming market is huge, probably accounting the most for windows devices (?), apple would need to make sure we can run windows on them natively, and i'd consider apple hardware for a laptop, its just amazing how much performance they deliver for the amount of wattage given.

Wattage aside, you'd be getting ballpark 32core apple gpu performance for 1500 dollars in a windows laptop gpu, with the CPU's not being that far behind apples either. Dunno whats stupid then

Anyway this is only for the good, puts some pressure on AMD and intel (and others) to drive for more competition. Gotta say, Apple's smartphones dont impress me so much, but their laptops certainly do on many levels.

 

I'm not necessarily sure they can do as much here as they are entirely bound to x86/x64 given their legacy.

CISC instruction sets tend to perform badly with parallelism; IIRC they had to introduce micro-ops or something to improve this.

IIRC reading, they also round trip to memory significantly more than RISC. A general lack of registers used in the ISA or something along the lines of that. Perhaps @3dilettante can add better flavour here.

imo, this is partly why you're seeing ARM outperform Intel and AMD here at performance per watt. You can obtain a high amount of performance with a low power footprint through parallelism.

 

Well, im all for it (an apple world). Aslong as their prices come down, it wont matter whats powering our boxes. Thats one barrier for now. But then, if AMD/NV and intel dont exist like they do today (or at all), apple has a monopoly to keep those high prices or even drive them up, which could mean that the entry level chips stays high too.
Having a XSX sized chip/die with more performance running at 40 to 50 watts in a laptop cant be beat.

Edit: was sony going the right route with the PS2 back in the day? Looking back, seems quite forward looking.

 

edit: apparently my argument is very dated. Apparently decoding x86 to risc is only 3-5% more power draw. Perhaps not that efficient if we're just looking at node size advantages listed below.

It's just a difference in technology. I'm not actually sure how stagnant Intel has actually been, vs it being a debate of RISC vs CISC here. I think there is a fair argument that Intel has been complacent. AMD has been moving as fast as they can go imo, I'm quite impressed with them, but it's still a challenge for them to obtain the performance per watt of a RISC chip (and I may be entirely wrong here).

The issue here is that, the world is moving further into a mobile space and ARM is increasingly becoming a better fit for mobile than CISC is. CISC will likely stick around because of performance, but they're going to be stuck in desktop workstations and server racks (even though technically IIRC all modern Intel and AMD CPUS are RISC), ARM will be the future to power those mobile devices, IOT, VR headsets, laptops, tablets, TVs, etc.

I dunno, worth a thread to discuss power efficiency between the 3.

 

What about Apple's history suggests to you they will ever bring down prices? Their M.O. is adding percieved value and charging through the nose for it.