Re:2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by bscphil on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @01:20PM
(#25127435)
It's really kind of tragic that so much incredible research and engineering work goes into creating new hardware like this only for it to be locked into one particular company with very tight constraints on target audience, income bracket, and technical limitations. Think how incredible it would be if everyone could use this new silicon.
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Re:2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by jmagoon on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @02:35PM
(#25128548)
It is, in fact, already used by everyone, because it's an evolution of the chipset in basically every smartphone in the world with widely divergent target audiences, income brackets, and technical limitations.
Re:2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by bscphil on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @02:51PM
(#25128756)
I don't know that that's a fair comparison. Just because it's an ARMv8 chip doesn't mean it's directly comparable to what's in smartphones. (I assume you aren't comparing it to Apple made chips for iPhone specifically, since then it wouldn't be true that it's in "basically every smartphone in the world".)
In particular, this is the first 5nm chip to be widely available, and by most accounts on performance it competes with top of the line hardware at a small fraction of the power use. Most existing ARM chips are designed for the very-low-power market, e.g. in phones, not to be used in a high performance laptop.
If there's a Dell or Thinkpad laptop with an ARM chip that's comparable, by all means, let me know.
Re:2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
by tachyonbeam on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @03:19PM
(#25129221)
AFAIK you are correct. Apple has completely redesigned their own ARM chip. It has the same instruction set (or a superset of the instruction set) as what runs in a cellphone, but the design is completely different from say, Qualcomm chips.