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October 18th 2021 Apple Event: M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros

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"Justify"? Three words: "Because I can!"
Do I win a 14" MBP with a full M1 Max and 8 TB storage? :p
 
Btw I've just come across this surprising post by Sonnet on their new eGPU enclosures. I think it shows there's still plenty of life in Intel Macs. The GPU Compute performance alone on a RX6900XT compared to the M1 Pro and M1 Max shown says something else...

View attachment 531500

So there's plenty of life still for a hackintosh or real Intel Mac. At least for now.
That’s an eGPU, so it begs the question: Do the new MacBooks Pro finally support eGPUs? Because they are advertised as supporting Thunderbolt 4, it implies that eGPUs would be supported.

However, I haven’t seen any specific mention of eGPU support on these machines.

So if we can attach the same eGPU to the new MBPs, then the equation changes again.

Update: Probably no eGPU support on Apple Silicon.
 
Btw I've just come across this surprising post by Sonnet on their new eGPU enclosures. I think it shows there's still plenty of life in Intel Macs. The GPU Compute performance alone on a RX6900XT compared to the M1 Pro and M1 Max shown says something else...

View attachment 531500

So there's plenty of life still for a hackintosh or real Intel Mac. At least for now.

Remember, those are desktop GPUs vs. mobile Apple Silicon SoCs... I feel that makes the M1 Pro/Max even more impressive.

The size of the RX 6900 XT heatsink can probably cool several M1 Maxes.
 
That’s an eGPU, so it begs the question: Do the new MacBooks Pro finally support eGPUs? Because they are advertised as supporting Thunderbolt 4, it implies that eGPUs would be supported.

However, I haven’t seen any specific mention of eGPU support on these machines.

So if we can attach the same eGPU to the new MBPs, then the equation changes again.

Update: Probably no eGPU support on Apple Silicon.
You are probably right on that account. They probably can but possibly Apple hasn't implemented it yet. As to why no one knows. I'm guessing it could come up as a firmware update (at a later date perhaps?).

Other than that I don't there's any real reason why it shouldn't work with an ARM chip. Just look at Samsung's Exynos chip with the AMD RDNA2 which shows it is technically possible.
 
This benchmark places the M1 Max as 25% geekb multicore compute abvantage over an i9-11900 plus GPU equal to the Radeon Pro W5700 included other Apple offerings.

This shows Apple is more than ready to step out on its own compared to the pack of the PC industry.

Again, this is in a laptop. Unless Intel is keeping a big secret, there's nothing in Intel lineup that portends of Apple getting stuck in the mud of its own garden. It can live totally on its own now and owns the entire stack top to bottom. That's a supremely advantageous position if you have a strong take on what the market wants.

It's impossible to eclipse Apple's designs within the era of Alder Lake, and that has to carry the Intel pack for the next couple years. Microsoft and Linux appear to be in disarray on how to advance applications performance, because neither one has any idea at all about what would make their regular Joes happier. The creative workflows that Apple can excel at are a niche within a niche for the PC market. Apple is maintaining its luxury caché.

There's a counter initiative conclusion I draw for the big picture: Apple is doing an excellent job refining its lineup, and creative pros in the Apple stack will not want for anything performance-wise, but the game isn't changing.

There's no real innovation going on because PC are just a way to pass the cost of maintaining a content distribution channel on to the content consumers. People do what they're told and some of us make the instruction manuals for the others, which makes us feel somewhat liberated.

But the truth is the industry that makes this stuff doesn't want ordinary people to be in control of their own data, by the reasoning that ordinary people don't actually own any data (so to speak regarding "ownership" content is not the information you need to have an active civic life, content is something you are rented which keeps you busy).

The next revolution is something none of the makers of this tech want, and the compute power to accomplish the work people are hungry to do already exists.The design of these system actually hides from people what they would prefer.

What we want is to be our own publishing houses, repping the content we like, in a scalable service distribution network maintained at commodities prices, with no one having the power to censor our views.

Basically to fully realize the promise of the desktop-publishing revolution.

Content mediators hate this idea! Nothing would be worse to them than people in personal arbitrage over their preferences of content with a disconnection between the device used to control the publishing service and the devices that host the service network and full control over their own data, because by definition you don't actually own any data.

De-mediating content would be like freeing slaves. Apple knew this back when Steve Jobs was pushing "Rip, Mix, Burn" He knew the midgame was to seem to give something away: the power of users to curate their own music library, which Apple would get to take back on behalf of the distribution conglomerates with iCloud and the Music store.

Apple has been working as hard as it can to create a fortress wall around its plantation and to control all ingress/egress from the compound. And this fortress is close to being done.

And strangely, today there's not much overt concern among users about being stuck in the plantation. Our infotainment needs are being comfortably satisfied to the limited extent that we have any idea what constitutes our freedom. Basically this stuff is delicious so keep eating. Disney and NYT will make your reality and the reality you are given will incur no other needs for reality outside of the given reality.

It's horrifying actually but it works really well.

The problem is that it's killing art, and leaving us intoxicated and incapacitated from taking on the solutions to very pressing civic problems, and it's making us crazy.

Apple thinks it's strategy makes society very governable. But they could not be heading any more directly away from the intellectual ideals they praised with the marketing of Einstein, Picaso, and Dylan.

We have to come around to seeing that at this juncture, the Apple idea of the PC has run its course. There simply is no innovation outside of a streamlined plantation and its almost impossible to use these devices in a way that suits your own creative drives.

In all seriousness, your iPhone wants to tell you when to go to bed.

The justification for this incredibly restrictive and paternalistic modality is the bugaboo of computer crime, but if you investigate the idea of crime, 99% of the opportunities come from crappy SW engineering in a get rich quick post-dotcom culture of greed by which all of todays most successful companies are survivors of lawless industry internecine warfare.

We are on the technological brink of a new more democratic direction, but to get there we will have to reinvent the PC to forget about most of what we know about "the desktop" and apps and a end-user device centric interface.

Where is are the new phreakers when we need them?

The door is wide open over in Linux land.

Over and out for now.

I have not seen Apple try to lock down macOS like they have with iOS and iPadOS App Stores.

Watch the "Unleashed" event. It was all targeted towards creators.

Macs are not Apple TVs.
 
About graphic cards' power on these Macbooks.
Metal benchmark of 32 core Apple Silicon GPU (new macbook pro) is 68000 (Geekbench 5)
For comparison, my desktop RX580 with 8GB of memory on Intel i9-10850(my new build) machine gets 41000 in Metal. 68000 corresponds to Pro Vega 56 class cards. These cards retails up to 1649 dollars alone https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0788BTQKQ/?tag=tonymacx86com-20
This means that we got modern desktop class graphic cards in the notebooks with Apple Silicon, which is just amazing. Cards mentioned by Sonnet such as RX6800 alone cost same or more than Macbook Pro itself.
 
Other than that I don't there's any real reason why it shouldn't work with an ARM chip. Just look at Samsung's Exynos chip with the AMD RDNA2 which shows it is technically possible.

It's all about drivers. You can connect any GPU to any CPU. As long as there are PCI-e lanes, you can connect any GPU. Some guy has even connected AMD and Nvidia GPUs to a Raspberry Pi but with out drivers, it was useless.

 
Some corrections and updates:
  • M1 Pro memory bandwidth is nearly 3 times greater than standard M1 according to verbal statement in Johny Srouji's keynote presentation.
    • So if M1 Pro has 200GB/sec max memory bandwidth, then standard M1 is -- let's say -- about 67GB/s.
  • Additional differences between M1 Pro and M1 Max concern the Media Engine:
    • M1 Pro: 1 Video Encode Engine, 1 ProRes encode/decode engine
    • M1 Max: 2 Video Encode Engines, 2 ProRes encode/decode engines
More updates. The M1 Max SoC has 32 channel memory and the Pro has 16 channel. In comparison the 2019 Mac Pro has a 6 channel memory bus. The 16 and 32 numbers do not change with the amount of ram on the SoC. If you buy the M1 Pro and 16GB of ram, you still get 16 channels. If you buy the Max you'll get 32 channels even if you opt for the lower 32GB version. Amazing. Here is Vadim's (MaxTech) chart. He of course, doesn't site any references to where he found the memory channel info. He does call it "insane." ;)

Screen Shot 13.jpg


This may be part of what enables the iGPU to perform so well with such a small power draw. The GPU cores can use a large amount of the available DRAM as their VRAM. Theoretically giving them more VRAM than even the highest end Nvidia Quadro graphics card. All this is according to Vadim of the MaxTech YT channel. Not sure how to verify this with other sources to confirm it is accurate. Even Anandtech doesn't mention anything regarding the number of memory channels.

 
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If correct, that would mean that the M1 Pro/Max still get maximal bandwidth with the lower RAM option. As for verification, let's just wait for Dr. Ian Cutress to receive his new MacBook Pro to test and write about, I'm confident he has at least one coming, and quite possibly several with different CPU+RAM configurations.
 
let's just wait for Dr. Ian Cutress
Good point, I'll be looking at his in depth analysis some time next week. Also the Ifixit teardowns will be quite interesting to see how Apple has refined the cooling system to provide better airflow amongst other things.
 
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