I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.
I knew back in 2011 I was buying something that was going to be pretty future proof, but 10 years... I would have laughed at you.
The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind.
My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only gave Windows four (of my 16) cores. Literally 3/4 of the processor was unused for months, and I didn’t notice any slow performance the entire time.
Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.
Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.
The unfortunate part is, when it freezes, it does the beachball for a full minute before I successfully execute a “switch to activity monitor / s click topmost process / force quit / confirm” sequence. Each step takes around 45 seconds to complete. I assume Apple QA never tested the extreme edges of workloads.
One poor guy on Twitter is already up to 18% of his SSD lifetime, in the first three months of having an M1. We had a heart to heart about how silly it was that the drive will die within a year, that Apple better replace it under warranty, and so on. But it’s a coin toss whether he’ll just have to eat the cost and buy a new one: https://twitter.com/_wli/status/1364934834229977090?s=21
> I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.
When I'm in development mode with all cylinders firing, I have a single Eclipse window in CDT perspective, a couple of terminal tabs, Zeal (or Dash) for documentation and a couple of firefox tabs for documentation not available in Zeal.
Music is either supplied by a single YouTube tab or Spotify, and that's it.
The most unfortunate component is CPU in my case. I try to ooze every single bit of performance from it while running the application. Memory controller comes the second due to transfer operations but, I neither max out the RAM or cause system to do heavy swapping.
I'm always kind of conscious about the hardware resources of the system and minimize my resource usage habitually, without killing productivity.
The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
Unfortunately, and somewhat sadly, and melanchololy, I must report that I've been at OS version 11.2.3 (the latest) and run almost zero Rosetta apps: KeepassX, Beyond Compare, and Optimal Layout; of those, Optimal Layout has read 100GB, which is almost nothing.
In comparison, my kernel_task process is at 43TB bytes written, and WindowServer is at 8TB read.
So, as with cancer, there are multiple contributing factors, and hopefully Apple will ship an update to fix it... someday.
> around 35 macvim windows
You do you, but I'd wager you could probably trim some of that low hanging fat
How many eyes do you have?
(If you haven’t looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check your smartmon to see whether you’re affected.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I
The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
Safari is best, but Firefox is also pretty decent nowadays.
And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mode. Maybe it's time to give it yet another shot. :)
Maybe an hour into testing Safari and I look at Activity Monitor and see that https://calendar.google.com is consuming 1 GB of RAM and https://docs.google.com 865 MB. :o
Don't know if the numbers are comparable but in Chrome's Task Manager the numbers are 224 MB and 121 MB respectively.
Edit: This might be an old (unfixed) issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6640430 ... This sucks because I have a specific doc and the calendar that I always keep open in pinned tabs. There are some other sites with seemingly quite high RAM usage as well. Well at least nothing is lagging so I guess I'll just chug on and see what happens.
Edit2: This behavior is just insane. I closed those two tabs and suddenly Gmail shoots up from out of the blue to 1.22 GB?! Then I reopen the two previous tabs (doc/calendar) again and Gmail stays the same while Calendar goes on a diet and sits at 187 MB (doc at 983). This is super weird. I'll just keep them open and see how it behaves overall, might just be wonky numbers?
Nice that they've got built-in tracking protection now, I guess, but I left Twitter running in a tab overnight and when I woke up Safari was reporting over a gb of memory use for that tab alone. Something in how they cache or handle JS for some of these long-running services, or maybe having to do with service workers ?, Safari just seems to consume a lot of memory. It's not a huge issue I guess, with the way the M1 never seems to have any memory pressure issues, but it's part of why I remember switching off Safari in the first place.
If anyone knows why Safari seems to consume more memory with these long-running processes, I'd be real curious to know why...
And yeah I mean even though Activity Monitor is reporting high RAM usage I don't seem to have any memory pressure issues so it might not be that big of a deal (MBP 2015 w/ 8 GB RAM).
I'm actually considering getting an M1 myself next week. Have been waiting for the initial kinks to get sorted out and most apps ported to it and I think it's time now. :) SSD wear seems to have been resolved with the latest Big Sur versions and fewer Rosetta apps and now even ST4 beta has an M1 build.
My justifications are that I'll get an excuse to upgrade to 16 GB RAM and I'll get touch ID so I can have a more secure password and not have to type it all the time. And with the stellar performance and battery life of the M1 I can just keep using Chrome (Brave). :P
New tabs are opening in weird places, really faaaar to the right skipping between 6-7 (unrelated) tabs. Really cumbersome to navigate.
Horrible selection of extensions still. Really missing searching for any tab with Cmd+Shift+K (I often have ~100 tabs open across multiple windows) that I get with the Tab Switcher extension.
There's a Noscript equivalent extension but it costs $3...
And I can't initiate a search with "url bar -> you[tab]<searchterm>[enter]" (for a Youtube search).
Meh. Safari just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I sat down for a week or two and wrote a bunch of extensions myself but I don't see the value in that.
On the plus side Safari does seem snappy but then again I only have ~30 tabs open (across 6 windows) currently. So I might give it a win on speed but it definitely loses in overall usability.
Will try again in a year or so.
Edit: OH SHIT this is a definite dealbraker - apparently I can't select multiple tabs by Shift-clicking to pull them out into a new window. That completely kills my workflow of separating topics into different windows, and/or closing tabs in bulk.
Edit2: Wtf, how didn't I notice this earlier - I cannot see the URL when hovering over a link. How does anyone consider this within the realm of good UX?
But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a majority of the time. There’s no value to this at all.
That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through.
One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.
I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no reason to upgrade.
The best part is that it was a drop in replacement for my 2700X. I already had a great Noctua air cooler so I was all set.
I want to work with Rust more and when I get to that point I'll likely start gathering money for a TR Pro but until then, and me mostly working with dynamical languages, even old-ish i7 CPUs are more than adequate.
Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away from happening.
As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.
But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a very low prio.
It's funny how today's computers could theoretically handle a user's workload for decades yet Apple builds them to fall apart after four years. There was a Hackernews story recently about a guy faffing around with old 68k Macs from the late 80s, he said that those old Macs were rated by Apple to last for fifteen years. And yet they come from an era of much more rapid utility decay for computer hardware, when a computer would be utterly obsolete after just a few years.
It's true that a lot of people are just fine with a a 10-year old i5 or an i7. Hell, a lot of store owners and front-end offices grumble at an i3 CPU because it's still too powerful for the daily activities of the staff.
But when it comes to routinely compiling C / C++ / Rust then you need all the power and hardware innovation you can get.
Still, I am impressed by how much I have gotten out of my machine.
CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.
You're desperately moving the goal post to ridiculous places. It's like claiming that walking on the moon is supposed to be considered normal just because the technology has been ready for a long time.
That claim is irrelevant, isn't it? I mean, what good does a "technically it's possible" claim do if a) no, it's clearly not possible outside exceptionally rare circumstances b) the average consumer device is way behind any of those outlandish claims.
The fact alone that you're talking about using/adding a nonstandard and exceptional battery is more than enough to throw out that claim.
I have considered replacing it with something smaller, now that all of my files are on a NAS and I don't need room for 5-6 drives in this machine. But I just don't feel like I would be getting enough of an improvement over what I already have, even with hefty new parts.
My laptop is a 2011 vintage X220i, and that is starting to feel a little bit behind, mostly thanks to the i3 inside. But it connects to 5GHz WiFi and is fast enough for browsing and video playback, so for now it keeps on truckin'.
Actually the best upgrade would be a decently powerful 12-14" laptop paired with an eGPU dock. That setup would handily replace both machines, but eGPUs just aren't a mature configuration yet, especially combined with Linux. Maybe in a few years.
I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.
Aside from gaming it can last another 10 years.
For longevity, I keep it on its side and replaced the bottom lid with an aluminum mesh lid. This has made it near silent for 80% of my tasks (programmer centric). I also regularly clean out the fan.
Turns out that the old desktop won by a solid 10% margin! A whole decade of new Intel generations still can't make up for the disadvantage of using a mobile CPU.
P.S. The e590 barely survived 2 years and is dead now (broken USB-C charging port).
It'll be replaced come August-ish with a 32-core Zen 3 Threadripper (with 256GB of ECC). Though in a few years I'll likely put an M3 Mac Mini alongside it to figure out when I'll feel comfortable going to ARM full time, as all my customers (and their applications) are still native x86 only... for now.
Isn't this essentially what Apple's observation was (and hence their spec choices)?
Ah yes, the exaggerated funny phrase. On a serious note, the performance difference from an i7 7th generation (7700k) to an i7 10th generation (10700k) felt quite impressive.
[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...
The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.
You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
If I have an M1 and they're selling M5's, I'm continually reminded that my rig is out of date.
Samsung quickly learned to play the same trick with their yearly Galaxy S and Galaxy Note releases. That decision probably contributed to the market share they've been enjoying.
6400 6500 6600 6600k random assortment of numbers and letters!
It hardly works! The consumer still has to do just as much work!
We consumers have it easy, though. Go find some Xeon or EPYC model numbers and try to figure out which digit means what. They make absolutely no sense.
You can probably get pretty far by adding the 3/5/7 to the generation number and sorting by the sum.
That's why we have iPhone 7/8/9...13 and similarly for Samsung etc.
If your i3/i5/i7 designation gives no clues then that's not helpful.
iX-YYZZZ[Suffix]
X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better
Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops
ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better, more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing.
Suffixes:
H = "High Performance" - laptop CPUs with higher perf and higher energy usage. The fastest laptop chips in a given gen previously got branded "HQ" (originally the Q meant quad core), but otherwise HQ = H.
U = "Ultra portable" - laptop CPUs with lower perf and energy usage. Usually can boost well for short tasks, so you might not notice if the most intensive thing you do is compiling code but fall flat for longer workloads such as gaming.
Y = Lowest power usage - These are all garbage, to be honest. You might have one in your windows tablet or netbook.
M = "Mobile" - dead these days, as the H chips replaced them, there were a couple of gens where H and M co-existed with H > M > U.
G_N_ - Integrated graphics rating. All G3 cpus in the same gen will have the same igpu. This only exists on tenth gen/eleventh gen 10nm chips. These chips are more efficient than H/U series chips at the same perf, but don't yet reach the performance peaks of the H series due to lower clock speeds.
K - Unlocked overclockable CPUs, mostly desktop chips, but HK chips for laptops exist too.
F - No integrated GPU. Mostly desktop only.
T - Power efficient desktop CPU (thanks mehlmao)
These suffixes can be combined, e.g. HK for overclockable laptop cpus or KF for desktop cpus with overclocking and no IGPU.
---
So the rule of thumb version for a laptop buyer is H = high power, U/Gx = better battery life, within that, pick highest perf ranking number (ZZZ) within your budget. Deduct 1-2 positions per generation out of date. If you need to compare cross-gen or vs AMD, you need to go look at reviews.
The G numbers in particular are pretty meaningless to consumers. Basically all Intel iGPUs fall into a bucket that is "Good enough for windows or esports titles, not good enough for new or recent AAA games".
Other features are more of interest to DIY builders, nobody is going to sell you a laptop with no igpu and no dgpu, and if you're not interested enough to read up on this, you certainly don't care about overclocking.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/69114/i...
- At one point everyone upgraded their PC every few years anyway.
- Just having Intel on the box was sufficiently impressive to make the sale.
Now they really need to push their latest CPUs as the latest and greatest.
I like the Lake names but I've never understood from a marketing perspective (what have chips got to do with lakes - were they designed near these lakes?) they feel more like code names that accidentally got leaked.
Even ARM, if it wants to displace Intel, it will be selling cloud pizza boxes or phones to replace those that get stolen/broken.
>The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.
there are i7s that are terrible
there are i5s that are terrible
there are decent i3s
"i3" "i5" "i7" doesn't tell you anything itself about perf
That was me trying to play games on laptops with 'i7' about a dozen years ago.
Comparing the performance of laptop and desktop is a niche case. Most people know whether they want a laptop or a desktop and then choose among those categories.
I think you will find many people thinking that is a very useful thing to compare.
But if you're thinking "Should I upgrade my 6 year old i7 system?" or "Will I notice the difference from spending an extra $200 on my CPU?" these days it isn't easy to come up with a sure answer.
That's over a 4x performance difference in 10 years, it's not quite the good old days of Moore's law, but it's still an exponential improvement.
If looking at all the points shows the time it takes to double is way longer than it used to be you're probably on the top of the S.
Which, ok, we know we're headed to an S-curve instead. There are limitations on what we can do on silicon, right?
It's just that the CISC/Intel S-curve is way lower than the ARM/M1 S-curve. Intel got used to leaving a margin of performance sitting on the table because it'll be faster next year. They got lazy. As chip gains have slowed those margins have started to add up.
I still do C++, .NET and Java programming on it just fine, use Office, Adobe software, and it is docker free.
Now to be fair, the M1 is an impressive iteration on the A* chip line.
But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field.
Not look too bad best to say.
Even if we add a one node advantage, we still have a ~15 watt chip making 20W-30W chips sweat.
If you downclock Zen 3 to match 15W TDP, you may well get M1 beating it by double digit margin.
M1 is simply a way more efficient chip than any X86 chip can be because of 40 years of architectural advantage.
- latest x86 chips have patently gigantic decoders metastasising into backend. They are very tightly coupled to pretty much every other piece of logic.
- x86 memory model, and blockage behaviour costing huge transistor count to work around
- better SMP efficiency because of laxer memory model, and SMP logic being deeper integrated into cores, rather than being an afterthought
- generally better register utilisation, at lower transistor count, and the upstream software ecosystem historically having better understanding how to work with large register count
- X86 cores prefetch from both main memory, and in between caches is more expensive, and less efficient because it has to rely on more complex logic, and do more guesswork than in ARM.
The list can go on for a few more screens.
Remember. Even if M1 is a SoC, it still manages to beat Ryzen which barely have much besides cores, memory controller, PCIE, and USB. If you give a 1 node handycap to Ryzen, and only compare cores, you will still get M1 having almost 3 to 4 times advantage at performance per square mm.
It's really sad to see X86 development digging itself into a ditch with "40 years binary compatibility at any cost."
With all regards to Su Lisa, I believe they very much understand all that, but nevertheless still signed under the idea that X86 market will never go anywhere.
I believe it's trivial for both AMD, and Intel to easily slash X86 transistor counts, while increasing the performance by double digits if they can go in err of the X86 ISA convention on just the few most egregious anachronisms.
Nah, people have done that experiment and it is competitive
40 years of architectural advantage is X86 electing to forego results of 40 years of advances, and improvements that every other sane ISA had, and instead trying to add them by increasingly complex "workarounds."
Giant transistors counts go to allow X86 cores to not to break ISA compatibility with a 40 years old chip, while trying make new ISA features to live along with it.
Their commercial demise had nothing to do with their hardware.
Oh come on. You’re making it sound like a toy computer that’s nice for little Debbie who can now watch YouTube videos a little faster.
While my MacBook Air is unplugged, I can edit 4K video in full frame rate for hours and it doesn’t even get warm, let alone hot.
In multicore workloads Zen 3 slaps the M1 even per watt.
5800U (Zen 3 mobile) and M1 are actually very close multithread perf wise despite one being a 8 core part and the other a 4+4 part. And with more power use for Zen 3 too.
What hurts Zen 3 there is while the M1 maintains the full clock with all cores busy, Zen 3 has to downclock away from its max turbo clocks.
The 5800u is a 15w part, you might be confusing the normal part with some overclocked implementation.
But the 5800u at 15w is still faster than the M1 in multicore.
Yes, Zen has to downclock, but it has more cores.
Trying to find with one of the best 5800U scores: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/7449909?baselin...
It's for 5800H which is at 45W where Ryzen can get a tiny edge.
On Cinebench, the 5800U gets much more than the M1 in multicore and slightly more in single core. It even edges out the M1 on Geekbench, though Gb is a poor benchmark.
Cinema 4D, the program that Cinebench benchmarks, normally does the renders on NVIDIA GPUs, not CPUs. As such, it’s a very poor benchmark.
And those 5800U results are at probably much higher than 15W. (Because that’s the base config, OEMs are free to ship with higher TDPs)
Geekbench in general has very heavily biased for ARM as it does not run the same code on both. Cinebench doesn't have this issue. And while yes nowadays a lot of rendering is done on GPUs for C4D the class of programs is path-tracers and they are often ran on CPUs for many scenes.
> The M1 is also ran at much more than 15W in some models.
Nope, it's the same M1 for both, same voltage/frequency curves and top clocks. It's the whole point of having a chip that's named the same. '
No modern laptop CPU has a headline power use number. They all try to use the headroom that they've been given.
Cinebench is very far from being the end-all of benchmarking that you say it is here. And there are far more optimised renderers around if you want to benchmark that. (RTX makes the matter moot nowadays anyway)
It does not use AVX-512, or older AVX levels much for that matter, for a workload that is SIMD-friendly. For Arm, they leave lots of perf on the table too. (Cinebench uses Intel's Embree renderer, with AVX-512 disabled)
Geekbench 5 is designed to be a composite index of multiple benchmarks to be more realistic to some extent than using just one. You can also access to the scores of the subtests too.
Probably some of that is because they did try to do something different once - and Itanium was an unmitigated disaster.
400%? Do you have any sources to back up this somewhat extraordinary claim?
And 119 mm² total die area claim
For Zen 3 I used https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AMD-Ryze...
0.5mm² per core on M1 vs 2.2mm² on Zen 3 sans caches
If you add caches, it gets much worse
17.5mm² vs 65mm²
And I may have had inadvertently included non-core parts into M1 calculation because of no official die floor map
What does this mean?
"Didn't look, too bad" might be a mode of "buyer beware" -- if you are not careful at the market, nyou might come home with trash.
It's still a tiny percentage of the area. The caches are the biggest.
[1] Well, mostly. There is such a thing as static power draw, but I suspect that the transistors in the L3 cache are optimized to have lower static leakage than the transistors in the core logic, which are optimized to be fast.
I repeat my stance that x86 instruction decoding is a tiny part of a processor, and things like vector units (which are also often powered down when idle) and reordering logic take far more power.
There's a paper about this that compares the efficiency of different ISAs, and basically concludes that ARM and x86 are no different in that respect. Only MIPS is an awful outlier.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-sho...
My previous laptop was a 2016 MBP with an i7, and the M1 destroys it. I can build large projects like LLVM or WebKit fast and it doesn’t even get hot.
I’ve also been running Linux VMs with the new Parallels and they feel native speed.
Rosetta 2 is incredible, Intel apps are very responsive on M1.
My work computer is a high end 16” 2019 MBP with 64 GB of RAM and honestly if it weren’t for needing the extra RAM or the occasional x86 VM I’d trade it in for an M1 in a heartbeat.
I’ll agree the Apple hype is unrealistic at times, but the M1 is one that absolutely deserves it.
You would need to benchmark it against a current chip from someone else.
I think people are a little too nostalgic when talking about Apple build quality. There's a 2011 MBP here that still works well. But recent releases... no better than the competition really.
I considered that keyboard to be designed to fail. I'm not interested in gambling that another component won't fail the same way. It's easier to use products that have not demonstrated such designed failures.
The good news however is that due to this garbage tier engineering I've discovered that desktop Linux is more stable for me than post-Catalina OSX - I'd have probably never found this out otherwise.
It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate but banal: someone went too far with making the key mechanism as thin as possible, and all plastic to make it easier to manufacture. Ends up the plastic wasn't strong enough for the little pins in the mechanism.
That's it. Just an ordinary design mistake. Embarrassing but no conspiracy.
FWIW they've resolved it. The keyboard on this M1 MBA is perfectly fine.
I see it as a symptom of the Jony Ive ideology, untethered from realty by Jobs, poisoning Apple in the early 2010s. iOS7 flat UI, overthin devices, keyboards.
Signs are pointing that Apple is recovering from this (new aTV remote).
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL
I don't see any evidence that Apple's stock price was affected. Apple can ship any garbage (they shipped a keyboard they knew was defective for three years) and people will buy it because they're locked in to Apple's services, another reason they're pushing services so hard at the expense of the rest of the company.
Given that you know the keyboard has been fixed, is there a reason why you didn’t make it clear that you were talking about older machines and not current ones?
You make it sound like the current machines have the flawed keyboard, which is not true as far as I am aware.
Coming from lifelong Linux-land it's actually comical reflecting on how poor these things operate in day to day. The most prominent issue for me is how poorly they operate with my USB-type C dock I use for multi-monitor.
(Honestly I never even noticed that the apple touchpad was better than any other touchpad, but I understand that touchpad users will notice things I didn't.)
If a product fails within the first 10% of expected lifespan I'm no longer interested in that product. If it fails _AND_ the manufacturer refuses to take responsibility until months of bad press and class action lawsuits then I'd have to be insane to trust them with another device.
It's a different keyboard. Different mechanism, very different feel, larger key travel, much more comfortable.
I have a 2018 i7 MBP and a 2020 M1. The keyboards feel incredibly different. On top of that the 2020 M1 has a real Escape key which is a huge upgrade for anyone in unix land/developer land, etc..
The 2019+ keyboard has had no controversy or reputation for failing.
My 2018 one does feel like it's on it's last legs FWIW. It's a work machine.. just hoping to get a refresh before it dies.
edit: form factor, performance, build quality.. is also up there, I just didn't mention it, because I think the battery life is the killer feature of the M1.
Check out Chrome build time benchmarks between 3/4xxx and 5xxx series (or any dev tool related benchmarks). 10-20% off your iteration cycle is noticeable - and that's a single generation jump.
Increasing iteration speed is a big productivity boosts, seeing professionals with 5+ year old devices is just ridiculous to me, you spend 8+ hours on that device - investing 2000$ for an upgrade every two years is not that much to ask.
Compiling Chrome is a nice benchmark but in reality dev cycles are quite smaller (or you might want to optimize your toolchain).
Finally, it's quite common for developers to forget the kind of hardware their users are running on. Then they produce software that only runs well on the next gen hardware. If you develop on a beast, then at least test whatever you are producing on a 3-4 year old machine to see how it will work for the clients.
I have a 2014 retina iMac. At some point in the next few years, I’ll probably replace it with an M series iMac, and then put Linux on it. It’s hard to imagine that it will ever really reach end of life due to speed at that point.
I’m not sure why Lenovo doesn’t use better IPS panels, they can’t be saving that much margin from them.
That’s one of the highest end ThinkPads though, so I guess that’s to be expected. Have heard that getting a good panel on more mainstream models like the T-series can be tough.
The main bottleneck is the production capacity, we badly need more manufacturers of high end chipsets.
But do you think that Apple stopped innovating after releasing the M1 last year? Don't you think the M2 (or M1X whatever it's called) is well into design and prototyping at this point?
Just because it matters on Android, which is a COMPLETELY different system, doesn't mean it matters as much on iOS.
Yes, it matters a bit when switching between multiple apps, but app suspend is handled in a completely different way on iOS than on Android.
Apples to Oranges.
Eh, I'm not sure that's true. They did with the original PPC, and also the G3 and G5.
It's difficult to compare the Apple Silicon versus PowerPC, because the new Apple hardware is far more ambitious, the whole platform. I would expect that the memory SSD controllers are to some degree licensed from other industry players. The CPU architecture is something else again. Issues eight instructions per clock -- per core. The M1 core design has more in common with IBM mainframe POWER9 than with a typical x86 core. It's remarkable to see this design ina low end consumer device. A mobile.
There have been just so many genuine tech news articles of the form, "Future Apple Competitor Product Beats Current, Widely Successful Apple Product".
It's the twin brother of all the "Currently, successful Apple product feature technically existed on [not-Apple] Product years ago (even though basically nobody used it)."
People read those articles and conclude it's all marketing hype but never ask themselves why it seems to happen again and again where simply checking off the box for having a specific feature never seems to actually lead to broad adoption. And if it truly is ONLY marketing hype leading to those ecosystem effects, then maybe you should start thinking of marketing hype as a feature?
I see what you did there. Really casting shade on Intel!
I can answer why _I_ downvoted the comment. It was this part:
> [...] it's really surprising to me how many eagerly lap up the angle Apple is pushing without much reflection, even on HN. Like the good old Apple hype days.
You can make a point without implying that anybody who doesn't agree with you is incompetent (the "Apple hype" meme is really stale).
Chips like the M1 (or ideally, something similar made available to other device manufacturers) is still really interesting. The ARM architecture can scale down better than x86/x64 can, allowing a device maker to hit low end performance targets with less cost than x86 chips can manage. For the low end, it also tends to provide better power consumption for a fixed performance target than the x86 offerings.
This makes M1 type chips really interesting for any manufacturer who want to make devices that span a huge scale of performance requirements, from slow kiosks performance range to the decent laptop range. All being the same ISA makes sharing firmware and applications across the lineup easier than having to switch to x86/x64 above some threshold.
It also does not hurt that M1 means that the really popular for development Apple devices are now running on ARM, which helps ensure that more software has been ported to (and/or tested on) ARM devices. ARM's weak memory model for example is something that can trip up a lot of software that tries to implement low lock algorithms, but whose designers were only familiar with the x86/x64 memory model.
This is purely theoretical. Apple will <<never>> sell its chips to other companies.
So if you were expecting Apple Silicon on its own to start a revolution, that's never going to happen.
Microsoft already have a Surface product with an ARM chip that didn't get updated in this round AFAIK. It already has solid ARM performance, but it's not as good as M1. It was let down with how well x86 emulation worked, but there seem to have been improvements including x64 support. If they focused on improvements with the chip design then they could see improvements along the lines of Apple. It's a question of whether the investment is made rather than whether it's possible.
The team that built the M1 is a collection of top tier ASIC designers that came from several acquisitions, from PA Semi forward. The Qualcomms and Caviums and so on just aren't in the same league. Lord spare me another tarball of garbage and random kernel patches called an "SDK." They don't really have the same bench and don't pay top dollar and it shows.
It is unlikely that there will be an M1 equivalent from any of those guys. Intel? AMD? Absolutely.
Back in the 90s, when Jobs was gone, Apple licensed its OS and almost went bankrupt as you could simply get a cheaper clone of Apple's computers with the OS on them. They won't repeat that mistake again.
Also, saying that people are "lapping up" the Apple marketing suggests that it's more sizzle than steak. But it's completely undeniable that the A chips, and by extension, the M1 is a beast.
Reasonably close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Until a 5nm version of the AMD stuff can run MacOS, there’s no point comparing the 2.
If the AMD stuff blows past the M1 (or the M-whatever), Apple’s marketing will turn on a dime.
So no, the Ryzen 5000 with 5nm would NOT level the field.
I mean, this is _kind_ of true, but it's not unique to Objective C, the M1, or even particularly intentional. The _ARM_ memory model is more conducive to reference counting in general than the x86 one. Nothing special about Apple's chip in that respect, tho.
So does every other Intel & AMD laptop CPU from the last 5+ years. So does every Qualcomm SoC from the last 5+ years. This has been incredibly common for years and years now.
This does a lot less than you think it does, particularly since there's very few consumer workloads that switch between CPU & GPU.
Overwhelming majority of MacOS/iOS software is written on Obj C and Swift, which have the same underlying semantics.
That said ARC doesn't have such a great impact on performance as some people (esp. fans of Java's GC etc.) would convince you. Most ++/-- operations on the refcount are eliminated by the compiler.
So they made the only sensible decision, and just like Microsoft did with COM, they added support to the Objective-C compiler to automate retain/release messages in OS X Frameworks.
Naturally being Apple, that pivot had to be sold in a way that the reason was being of RC being better and not because of the technical failure to have a tracing GC in Objective-C , while remaining compatible with C memory model.
Apparently, moving the GC document with all its caveats regarding possible programming issues, out of search index also helps to keep the story as well.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
There is of course a GC language on iOS (JavaScript) but expensive webpages get killed quickly.
It's not unavoidable, but Swift doesn't give good tools for avoiding ARC-based performance cliffs, so it takes a lot of profiling and effort compared to other languages.
It’s the first time in a over a decade I’ve felt a revolutionary step forward in a chip and the only time it has ever come with less power.
Process node is a factor but I find it hard to believe it’s the only factor. I know enough about the X86 legacy tax to know that is not the case.
Apple didn’t do black magic. They just took a cleaner superior CPU architecture and made a desktop class muscular chip with it. Other ARM manufacturers could equal or exceed the M1 if they wanted. X86 has been delivered a death sentence.
IMHO the greatest threat to AMD is ARM not Intel, and vice versa.
I see lots of people saying "If only $company had an ARM device", and I don't understand it. My experience of ARM device is slow laggy janky products - from competing smartphones, tablets, router and network device management interfaces, year on year, the pairing is always (arm + fucking slow).
It's only Apple who have managed to get "desktop class" performance, and at this point I'm more willing to attribute that to Apple doing black magic than to ARM being inherently superior.
Microsoft have piles of money, thousands of developers, they make hardware, they've been working with ARM since the likes of the Compaq IPAQ PDA and Windows CE 21 years ago, and the Surface RT in 2012, their ARM devices are nothing to speak of. Google, industry gorilla of tech with the finances to match - see the famous Gruber/DaringFireball about iPhones far ahead in single core JavaScript performance year after year after year. Tech giants like Samsung, Qualcomm, Sony, who have been designing and building chips for decades, with their own drivers, firmware, and customized Android builds, and building their own flagship products.
Apple whomps in from "nowhere" with the fastest ARM device anyone has ever seen, and the critics response is "anyone could do that if they wanted to".
Then why don't they want to?
[Edit: Consider also that Apple spent $278M on acquiring PA Semi chip design company in 2008, and $600M on Dialog Semiconductor in 2018, and Microsoft spent $2.5BN on Minecraft. I say these companies "are tech giants with finances to match", but it's not like Apple had to lean hard into their hundreds of billions cash pile to do what they've done. Instead they had to do something that appears to be "black magic" (i.e. desire + leadership + execution + long term planning + ???)].
> Apple whomps in from "nowhere" with the fastest ARM device anyone has ever seen
Not really from nowhere; they've already had the fastest (non-datacenter) ARM chips anyone has ever seen, fairly consistently, in their phones, for years.
The first A-series chip they officially released and named was the A4 in March 2010. That is 11 years ago. That is the beginning of M1. And the reason is originally in this amazing Ars Technica article [1]. Apple has always wanted to fully control the entire stack.
Any competitors in the same space lack either the vision, or the products, or the money to do the same thing. In the case of Microsoft and Google, their internal politics don't allow them to do the same thing (Google couldn't care less about hardware because the Web is where Google's money at; MS cares about hardware but traditionally they have relied on throwing money at partners to make them come up with solutions).
[1] Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack...
One of the ways we already know that beefy ARM processors can work well (and with better power efficiency than Intel CPUs) for heavier workloads/at higher scale than mobile or embedded devices is that it's already being done in the server space. Is scaling ARM processors up for the desktop radically different? (If so, I'd love to learn a bit about how )
The problem that remains for anyone who wants to sell PCs with something other than x86 is that desktop users want their apps, and for Windows users those apps are distributed as x86 binaries, and users aren't in control of that (especially for unmaintained or legacy software). Software publishers won't build or optimize for a new architecture if they suspect it's just going to be a flash in the pan, and this creates a chicken-and-egg problem.
But Apple can just declare that their new architecture is the only option for you if you're buying a new Mac, and a ton of their users will come with them no matter what. App publishers will just deal with it, knowing that they have to play along if they want their application to have a first-class experience on Mac. This is a huge deal, and not a position any particular PC manufacturer could hope to be in!
I'm sure Apple has done lots of technically impressive stuff that I'm not even competent to really appreciate in order to make this architecture change happen. But other vendors are more capable of technically impressive stuff than they are of forcing adoption for enough users to reach critical mass to get people who sell/distribute proprietary software to come along with them.
Apple is in a position where it can move swiftly and decisively. They have an army of software engineers who can port Apple's OS and associated Apps to a new architecture. They can force their entire ecosystem to move to a new architecture, and are emboldened by the fact that they've done it twice in the past (the first time they were more hesitant).
If Samsung wanted to pull down the latest Qualcomm ARM chip, slap a Macbook-sized heatsink on it, and go head-to-head with Wintel and Apple, they would fail. What are you gonna run? Linux? Some abortive version of Windows on ARM that doesn't support the vast number of x86 apps?
Even ChromeOS is missing barebones necessities like Photoshop, so professionals won't touch it. So the ChromeOS market is doomed (at present) to have "thin & light" and "long battery life" as it's only selling point.
I think we'll see M1-style ARM devices come out of the woodwork in 2021-2022, running ARM Windows and Linux and ChromeOS, simply to attempt to copy Apple. But I don't think they'll be as successful, simply because the apps aren't there, and no one can force developers to port to the new architecture as Apple can.
Thing about your comment is "Who would buy it" assumes it's basically the same and people are indifferent. My griping is assuming ARM is generally worse. But if we take this alternate world seriously then the reason for ARM is superior performance, so the answer to "who would buy it" and "why would developers switch" is driven by that - like when Apple was falling behind with PowerPC - it wouldn't be Microsoft pushing it on an unwanting market, it would be a demanding market pulling it with demand.
If Samsung could push a better-than-Intel chip, would Microsoft not want a piece of it?
If Samsung Chromebooks were suddenly more powerful than an Intel i7, would developers not sit up and take notice?
My contention is they can't, because ARM isn't that different, and it's Apple's black magic that is the real difference.
I remember the jump from the 486 chips to the Pentium being that dramatic. Heck, 486DX2-66 to P100 brought Linux kernel compile times from 45 minutes down to like 5 minutes.
Back then, I think a big part of these jumps wasn't just CPU design. I think a lot of it was that those CPU design changes were often accompanied by massive improvements to overall system architecture. So the I/O buses, memory, peripherals, all of it got a lot faster as part of the same upgrade.
Last time it felt like there was a jump this big was around 2005-2006 when the Core 2 Duo started becoming common.
Is it really a gamechanger for surfing, coding, videos, etc?
Curious because I might grab the base mac mini 8gb for music production, surfing, Java coding etc.
Also you said music production so verify before hand that your DAW, etc of choice will work fine. I use Reason and the visuals in the DAW itself are still laggy, but it isn't M1 native yet.
Other things like the fact that World of Warcraft runs at medium settings on a 1440P monitor feel kinda magical given I can barely feel any heat leaving the M1 Mini.
In the end I returned my M1 Mini (8gb/256gb) because my personal experience still felt half baked at this time. Once we hit the next generation a lot more software will have caught up.
Apple's memory and storage options tend to always be on the disappointing side.
The impressive thing about the M1 isn't just raw performance but performance / watt. There are obviously faster high-end many-core x86 chips, but the power use difference is wider than the speed difference. The M1 destroys mid-range Intel and AMD offerings at a fraction of the power consumption.
Check out this madness:
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
The MacBook Air trounces the top-end Mac Pro on single core performance. No this is not the top-end Intel you can get, nor is it as fast as AMD, but it's a MacBook Air and consumes a small fraction of the power.
Again... the power efficiency is the thing that really blows me away. 5nm accounts for only some of that.
On multi-core the same MacBook Air is just below recent Mac Pro models on total computational throughput. To beat the MacBook Air you have to go up to newer-generation Xeon chips with 8 full-speed cores. The Xeon is branded as a server chip and uses as much power as probably eight to ten M1s.
It's just insane. If Apple puts, say, 16 full-speed core in one of these chips it's absolutely over for all other vendors. Speculation is that the 16" Pro will end up getting 8 performance cores and 4 low-power cores. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up beating the top-end Intel Mac Pro.
I'm not sure that they can easily add more cores to the M1. If they can, that would also raise the TDP. And adding more cores does not increase performance linearly, even if the architecture is made for it.
Also keep in mind that comparing it to 14nm Intel processors with an architecture from a decade ago is a fair comparison when comparing M1 vs prior Apple products, but is not a fair comparison when comparing it against what x86 can do in general. You would need a modern x86 processor targeting the same watt usage to have a completely valid comparison. As discussed in the thread above.
So yeah, it's a great processor for its target. And it likely will also be a very strong processor when scaled up - it bodes well for the future of ARM. But don't extrapolate the performance too linearly, that is likely to be misleading.
I expected the M1 to be like a much lower power and maybe a bit faster version of this chip, and was really blown away by it being far beyond that.
Heck, he might have used an old dual core with an HDD from all we know. Of course the new M1 models would make a big difference then. So would all other modern laptops.
But in that context of x86 and ARM Zen3 is absolutely the only sound comparison.
I would have some sympathy with that - but that's not the same as discounting the parent's perspective because Apple somehow weren't using "modern processors" previously - because that simply isn't true.
And I still think it's very valid to not forget how old hardware used for subjective comparisons will be. E.g. the old Macbook air sold very well all that time.
It's likely the M1 is better in that category, but it does not look like a huge difference if you factor in the higher performance you get from the Ryzen 9 5980HS.
Multi core better but still lower but not too surprised as it's got 8 large cores vs big.LITTLE 4/4 for M1 - not clear when those cores will start throttling down.
Suspect single core performance is what drives apparent responsiveness so I'd say not too surprising that the M1 gets rave reviews from users.
With my 2400G the benchmark takes 5.5 seconds. With someones M1 it takes 1.3 seconds.
We still need to verify that was run at the same settings, but it looks like the M1 is going to be faster than the 5000 series APUs regardless, possibly by a large margin and I'm assuming the 5000s are between 1.4x and 2.0x the speed of the older 2400G.
It will still be interesting to see AMD on a 5nm process, and Zen 4, and with 8 core, but by then Apple will probably have an M2 on the 3nm process. You gotta compare what can be obtained today.
The 5800H gets 2.5x on cpu benchmark's rating vs the 2400G. This is composed of a 50% single core and 300% multi-core improvement.
2400G: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+2400G&i...
5800H: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+2400G&i...
That's in large part because its 8 cores instead of 4. The test I ran makes good use of multicore, but going from 4 to 8 won't cut the time completely in half. I suspect the M1 will still beat it by a bit.
I take back my comment on availability. We ideally need to compare things on the same process node to see which design team has done a better job ;-)
AMD’s 5nm shift is scheduled for 2022
iPhone 13 (2021) rumors indicate a 4nm SoC
Option two would just be to make an A15 be only a die shrink and surprise ! It fits.
The whole article is about not having to choose between performance and powerusage. With "5000", which 5000 do you mean? A 100W cpu of about the full cost of a macmini?
This is the whole point of the article. Apple made a monster move. Next up: Apple Cloud. M1 based cloud computing. Will save them a couple billion per year on aws which expires in '22 or '23 iirc.
I thought the company would wait and deploy a later gen chip. Though with the standardization of M1 across such a wide array of products makes me think it is going to be the M1.
So I had thought there may be something learned in the mass deployment that would trigger even minor design changes.
Perhaps those are software issues. Or maybe the M1 as a product name should not be taken literally to describe the SoC in the current lineup.
We know the Secure Enclave component appears to have been updated mid-production this past fall for a host of A-series chips.
Perhaps, if light changes were needed Apple would not see them a sufficient to designate a new moniker.
Or perhaps they are but the iMac and (theoretical) apple silicon-based data centers are intending to build consumer confidence in this bold foray.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/12/apple-security-a12-and-s5-pro...
Also do you know how many machines it would take to outfit a reasonable demonstration scale facility?
Is that number so large that it constrains the ability to just go that much further?
(Hint: we do)
And for 5nm, I'm quite sure AMD already has contracts for that with TSMC. So the gap should be even smaller.
It’s not that it doesn’t matter at all, it’s just that it matters a lot less once you’ve checked boxes like that. The effective experience of both would be “you only need to charge it overnight”
The same can't be said for the MBPs I've owned over the past decade. They get ok battery life but I always needed to know where the nearest outlet was. While an 11 hour Ryzen might be close to a 13 hour MBA, those extra two hours is the difference between a full weekend worth of work or just a full day.
For anyone wanting long battery life in a laptop those extra couple hours are important.
On the other hand, I think if you can go a full day on a battery, that should be enough. You won't be using your laptop for 20 straight hours.
The 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile chips are not very power hungry either.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16446/amd-ryzen-9-5980hs-ceza...
- With M1, Apple has finally closed the loop and created a fully closed system that it has control over vs an x86-64 platform that is more open and gives us users more choice and control.
- All new devices with M1 SoC score very poorly on repairability and upgradebility vs the x86-64 platform that still allows you to repair / upgrade RAM, memory, CPU's and other parts in an affordable manner.
- And because of the above two, all M1 devices with low ram and storage, have planned obsolescence of 3-5 years built-in, along with a kill switch to totally disable the device.
Apple has a found a great fit for their business model with the ARM SoCs. Even when (not if, when) AMD and Intel bring out better processors, Apple will stick with their ARM SoCs because todays computing power has far outpaced the demand made by the common softwares used by all. And Apple can cater to the common denominators with their own OS + CPU + 8GB + 256 GB NvME quite well for maybe another decade.
I am happy there is some good tech development and competition in computer systems. But my Intel Mac Mini will be the last mac I will buy from Apple. macOS Mojave still runs fine on it. Otherwise there's always Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. That's the real advantage of the x86-64 platform that people like me will never sacrifice for closed systems like the M1 devices.
Have you opened many x86 devices of a similar form factor to the current M1 devices? I haven’t seen a socketed CPU in a laptop in over a decade, and the vast majority of ultrabooks and thin-and-lights have soldered RAM now too. The latest trend has been to start soldering SSDs as well.
can you elaborate?
But if a government (or Apple) wants, this can be abused - for example, tomorrow if your country goes to war to the US, the US government could ask Apple to disable all Apple devices in that country, and Apple could do it, whether you like it or not.
(The conspiracy theory part that others are hinting at is that many believe that this can be easily extended to totally cripple the device and make it unusable.)
I didn't insinuate anything like that. I was just pointing out that it exists.
I've always thought that a system like
i7-4-8-10-M (4 cores, 8 threads, 10th gen - Mobile)
i5-8-8-11-H (8 cores, 8 threads, 11th gen - High perf/Desktop)
When I shop for a cpu I care about a handful of things, manufacturer, cores, threads, generation, model
I usually end up putting it into cpubenchmark to get any sort of comparable numbers.
Nowadays a chip from 2014 and 2019 can both be named i5, and the 2014 can have higher clockspeed while being half as slow... You just can't tell, and maybe that's the goal.
We've never really recovered from that.
Generally speaking, AMD had some more advanced microarchitecture features than Intel, leading to better per-clock performance.
Intel marketing struck back by emphasizing GHz, GHz, GHz. At least until Pentium 4 scaling hit a brick wall.
Then, a chip was sold as a "Pentium 4" "2.8 GHz" (or a "Pentium II" "300 MHz"). No other codes.
By the end of that range, the multicore era had started, and both Intel and AMD had moved to new systems of processor labelling.
Of course intel also released new CPUs and AMD didn't want their newer CPUs to have lower numbers than their old one, so that number eventually got inflated.
There's two main Eras of this;
During the P5/P6 Days, AMD, Cyrix, and NexGen made CPUs with 'PR' ratings, based on what they felt their CPU's compared to.
Ironically, this first era is probably why folks got so soured on 'PR ratings'; As far as the AMD K5 and Cyrix 6x86 went, These numbers were based more on integer performance, additionally Intel's P5 had a very novel (at the time) pipeline that some Game developers were optimizing for (Quake comes to mind here.) For NexGen the situation was even worse, in that some of their models completely lacked an FPU.
All those factors together made consumers a bit more wary of PR ratings for quite a long time.
Thankfully, AMD Bought out NexGen, took their arch and made it into the K6, which was very competitive with the P5 Clock for clock, and PR ratings went away.
They came back in the days of the Palomino K7s, but what a lot of people might not remember is that the Athlon XP's PR ratings were technically supposed to relate to a Thunderbird core. IOW, an Athlon XP 1800 was supposed to be 'equivalent' to an TBird Athlon running at 1800Mhz.
But, of course, PR ratings drifted again, as they tended to... and now we are in model number hell.
The 4004 was a hit and the rest is history!
And it's not that like Intel is really competing with anybody.
It's been a mess for a long time. An i7 may be less performant than an i5, which may be less performant than an i3...all depending on which specific processor is chosen.
Makes it next to impossible to give advice to family members what to look for when buying a new laptop. Simply Macbook M1 becomes much easier to recommend. As bonus you don't have to worry about underpowered ssd, noisy fans, weak backlight or what else the oem might have saved on.
It meant at one time “quad core”
So I'd argue you can't really "ruin" something you've just introduced. I do agree that for a while it was standard that a desktop i7 was a quad core and a mobile one was dual core.
Edit: nope, actually, I'm wrong - Core i5-430M was a straight dual core, no hyperthreading part.
But I'm sure even at the beginning there were SKUs that broke the coding due to customer demand.
Some of it is inevitable, they have too many aspects to contain in a reasonable product name, but letting the names become divorced from any sort of reality helps nobody.
Of course. I got a new laptop last year with a Core i5-10300H, and it easily beats my desktop i7-4790K, despite the same number of cores, in every workload.
UserBenchmark is your friend for this kind of thing really:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/
I do have to say that nowadays buying an Intel CPU is a really bad idea though.
Product lines 1 - 10. Bigger is better.
A minimal number of qualifiers next to the numbers, ideally just 1 of them next to a product line number (Pro/Home/Hobby/Enterprise/whatever).
Date, month and year format if you really want flexibility.
OblioCorp Oblio 1 Home 2020.06. Oblio 10 Enterprise 2021.04.
How hard is that? Not that hard, from where I'm standing.
Consider; “hey man check out my new M1 machine!” Versus: “hey man check out my M1 2021.04”
Even with the Core series it’s short and sweet.
“10th gen. Core i7” still sounds futuristic and always will.
Ryzen 7 also.
Honestly I think folks here are overthinking this stuff. It’s easy enough to compare the specs on a 10th gen cpu vs 8th gen. I think that’s easier than comparing different product names.
For instance, just by the names: Pentium 5 versus Core i5 it’s not quite clear unless folks were old enough to remember Pentiums. Whereas, everyone knows current generation has better processing than previous generation.
Noone would ever say it like that. They would simply say: “hey man check out my new M1 machine!” And if it happened to come at a generation shift the context would make it obvious if it was the old generation at a bargain or the brand new generation. (or that the person saying it couldn't care less about specs and generations)
Now if you would buy a used computer, or would like to compare your current i7 to the latest i7 - then you would take notice. How much difference is there between a i5 2021.04 vs. i7 2016.8 ?
That is dead simple to google and reason about.
Compare that to: So what computer do you have? Oh, it is an i7 with 16 GB of RAM. I have no idea what decade that machine is from. And noone remembers the specific version, and if they do I have no idea how to parse it anyway.
Also, given that AMD copied Intel's 3/5/7/9 numbering, I'll be interested to see if in a few years they're selling a 10800x.
And product lines are speced 12 months in advance.
So you need precise demand prediction all the way along your supply chain for this to work.
Apple never says iPad 2019 on their website, until you start digging really hard.
Vendors want version numbers to push upgrades to consumers. They don't want to deal with demand forcasting for something with a limited time of life though.
Nobody said that they have to make that versioning public and shout it from the rooftops.
Users do use the informal versioning that I mentioned, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to differentiate the products. I've heard "MacBook Pro 2015" a million times.
And a date <<is>> a version number. It also nicely auto-increments to prove to your customers that the latest thing is better than the old one.
Doodad Pro, 2021 edition. It's not that hard, as I was saying.
The alternative is the garbage that everyone is doing. WH-1000XM3, really?!?
I'm not into hardware but I have a rough overview, though whenever I'm supposed to help someone choose a laptop I only see a whole page with dozens of products and the only difference are a few numbers in the CPU serial number and some other weird product names and I simply have no idea what to say. I fully understand people who just go "I take this one because it has a nice color" - a layperson simply has no chance at understanding the difference, and good luck finding a store where the employees know more.
I never owned an Apple computer and I can still tell you on the spot which category of Macbook is better and more expensive, and why. Might have to do with the devices having normal names instead of alphanumeric strings that probably came from a password generator.
My wife was confused about that earlier this week. She was like: 'you mean i7 is not newer than i5? And if i7 is better than i5, why can an i5 be better than an i7? (when it's an old i7)'
I get they have the generation. But:
1 - it's not easy to compare different models of different generations. How can a non-technical person compare 7th gen i5 with 5th gen i7?
2 - Many places that sell computers don't put the generation on the 'headline'. You have to dig in the specs to discover that, if you can find it at all
It is not just “advertisement”. Btw I still confuse marketing meant segmentation, target selling, ... may be they are as so far only on low end. As said by a YouTuber it is so much better if they do Color on macbook aid or macbook 12”.
EDIT: Though, thinking about it, I can see why they might have been reluctant. Of the big releases over the last 15 years or so, Core 2 was, while a massive improvement, also essentially an admission that P4, and their whole strategy around it, had failed, and Skylake had a lot of teething troubles. The only big microarch shift that was an unqualified plus was Haswell, and I don't understand why they weren't louder about that.
It honestly just feels desperate to me.
It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1".
It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably).
I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years with only the obscure (to the general public) suffix changing from generation to generation.