New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

[nicksoph]

It had something to do with power leakage

The first ARM RISC chip worked without power? There was a fault in the first board and the power to the chip was not connected, yet it worked. The chip designer Sophie Wilson tells the story on you tube somewhere. - Power leakage from the signal pins was enough to drive the chip.

 

[scottkendall]

The first ARM RISC chip worked without power? There was a fault in the first board and the power to the chip was not connected, yet it worked. The chip designer Sophie Wilson tells the story on you tube somewhere. - Power leakage from the signal pins was enough to drive the chip.

Thats cool, but no that is not what I am talking about.

 

[Armoured]

They must have solved it or disabled the switching, because I for sure read a few articles about the A12 chips and how they only allowed the big cores or the baby cores active at the same time. It had something to do with power leakage and how the baby cores did not scale up well with more power and the big cores did not scale down well with less power thus providing better performance if it was one or the other. I wish I could locate the article.

I don't know the context of these details but one possible answer is simply that priorities/constraints quite different in ipad/iphone context than laptop e.g. ability to dissipate heat high enough to allow for all cores to run at same time.

(Other potential explanations possible like power/battery provision as well)

 

[Armoured]

That's what I was afraid of. Need to replace an old Mini that's still running some 32-bit apps

Simplest way would be to keep your old mini just to run those old apps and move on. Or if critical apps for your workflow, get a newer intel-based machine. Keep in mind eventually mojave will stop getting support. Time to start culling those older apps, or at least planning for it.

And very sympathetic, I'm struggling to move on from Aperture; too much comfort and muscle memory to make that easy. I'll probably have to keep one computer with mojave capability just in case.

 

[Sofronis]

But when m2/m3 comes, with higher core counts and increased IPC (on 3 nm or below) I’m moving on, unless intel pulls a rabbit out of a hat. PCIe5 and DDR5 seem very interesting on z690 or AMD Am5, but will it even be enough? Apple has been increasing IPC by 20 percent or more for 7+ years straight. Can intel or AMD match or exceed that level of yearly innovation on x86? Is x86 the constraint??

In all likelihood, at the end of 2022 Apple will move to 3nm, where I believe we'll see significant improvements. Also, ARM's new Armv9 ISA should be announced soon. Exponential growth though is, by its very nature, unsustainable. Eventually performance improvements will start tapering off. It might happen in 1 or in 5 years, but eventually it will happen.

As to x86, there are power efficient x86 CPUs (the Intel Atom line has improved significantly over the years) and I think that Intel can and will do much better. Especially now that AMD is back into the game and there's finally competition. Also don't forget that in terms of manufacturing, they are currently ~2 generations behind (14nm vs 5nm). I expect Intel's Alder Lake CPUs on their 10 nm SuperFin process to reach or surpass Apple's current single-thread performance and close the gap in terms of power efficiency, but these are a year or so away, if all goes to plan.

The thing is, that if you're not fussy about your computer and you can focus on your work, regardless of what OS it runs, then I envy you. You can freely choose whatever best suits your needs at any given time. On the other hand, if you've become attached to -or need- macOS, then even if Intel/AMD do pull a rabbit out of their hats, you'll have no choice but to buy into Apple's proprietary ecosystem, with whatever good or bad that entails.

 

[nicksoph]

Thats cool, but no that is not what I am talking about.

Maybe you are talking about the the older A10(?), which couldn't use all its cores at once - I think since then, all the Apple chips have been able to use the fast/efficient cores simultaneously. But if you can find the info I'm be interested in finding out about the power leaks you mentioned.

 

[nicksoph]

Chrome on M1 released and then not

Chrome experiences unexpected crashes on some macOS devices - Google Chrome Community

support.google.com

 

[scottkendall]

Maybe you are talking about the the older A10(?), which couldn't use all its cores at once - I think since then, all the Apple chips have been able to use the fast/efficient cores simultaneously. But if you can find the info I'm be interested in finding out about the power leaks you mentioned.

Maybe it was the A10 I really do not know/remember that chip it was, though I seem to remember that the article said bionic. It is possible that I miss understood what they were saying. I have spent a bit of time trying to find the article but so far no luck. I am not even sure how I came across it the first time. :-/

 

[trs96]

Looks like MBA users with the 16GB of ram upgrade can keep many chrome tabs open while doing other work. Good news for devs that multi-task. The MBA looks like it's worth buying again. Just as fast or faster than most of the high end Intel Ultrabooks. Good job Apple.

 

[trs96]

What I'm interested to know is how did Apple get the single core performance to higher levels (430+ points) more than even the latest Intel Core i9 CPUs ? Has anyone read or seen anything about this ? I know that the M1 clock speeds are 400 MHz lower so what is different about M1 that produces these results ? My guess is that it's the SoC arrangement / layout with the ram in close proximity as well as the faster L2/L3 cache that makes data move faster at the lower clock speeds.

Geekbench 5