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A comment on Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers. Parent comment

Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by grecy on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:12PM (#25050155)
I noticed the slides kept saying "Up to" 8 GPU cores.

That left me wondering if there are different variants of the M1 with different core counts.

(Note: It always said 8 CPU cores)

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Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by kevindong on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:14PM (#25050204)
Looks like there's two variations of the Air: one with 7 GPU cores and one with 8 GPU cores.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

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Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by etempleton on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:17PM (#25050274)
According to Apple's website the Macbook Air appears to only have 7 active GPU cores. I suspect that chips in the Air may be binned separately and may or may not support the higher clock speeds even with the active cooling of the Mac Mini and Macbook Pro.
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Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by duskwuff on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @03:57PM (#25051806)
7 on the base model, 8 on the upgrade. You're probably correct that this is a binning thing.
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Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by _ph_ on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:15PM (#25050227)
According to the tech specs on the Apple site, the Air is available with 7 or 8 GPU cores. All other new Macs have 8.
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Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by jagger27 on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @03:17PM (#25051282)
They did the exact same thing with the A12X and the A12Z. 7-core vs 8-core GPU is the only real difference between them.
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Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by wincy on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:17PM (#25050262)
My guess is maybe this is a yields thing for Apple Silicon? They use the same chips for Air and Pro, but shut off a faulty gpu core that didn't pass QA? Or a temperature thing.
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