I’ve been thinking of doing the cooling mod too, where you pop open the back and add a thermal pad to the cpu. It increases conductivity with the back of the case, letting you roast your legs while you work, aka cool the cpu. :)
You bought a computer that crashes reliably when used "heavily"? I mean, if you heard that same statement from an individual PC user in past decades, you'd roll your eyes about the ridiculous overclockers and go back to work on your slightly slower but actually reliable development machine.
But this isn't a too-l33t-for-her-own-good overclocker. It's Apple Computer! Jobs is clearly still directing the reality distortion effect from the grave.
But it's rare enough that I just don't care much. The performance in other areas is too good to gripe about "if I run make -j8 for an hour, it'll hang for a few minutes."
Another possibility is system bugs that can be exposed when it thermal limits because it will stop running background QoS tasks, and things waiting on them will hang. It's pretty hard to stress it to that level.
I have done both these things by building compilers on M1. The memory pressure wasn't always from the host compiler but rather tools like dsymutil that may not be perfectly optimized themselves.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macbook-pro-17-my-cooli...
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/14/cncd-macbook-breathes-easy/
https://www.ifixit.com/News/6882/why-i-drilled-holes-in-my-m...
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people wonder why their 10-year old computer is slow. “But I have an i7”
For years CPUs had numbers that went up: 286, 386, 486, Pentium.
After that, it was Mhz and Ghz that people used to rate a CPU.
But none of those things are as relevant as they used to be.
So what number goes up? i3, i5, i7, i9. That's what Intel is telling us. That's the number they want us to see.
How would you differentiate?
> MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)
> Processor 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
prettly clear there
Honestly - it's not even the i3, i5, i7, i9 thing. It's the fact that two i5s, etc; can be ludicrously different in terms of performance from one another because of the sub-generations within the named generations.
Yes - it's ridiculous that I could buy an i7 ten years ago, buy an i7 today, and yet - of course - they are absolutely nothing close to each other in terms of performance.
IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.)
In fact, lots of things are like this.
In CPU land, the architecture codename or process node might be part of such a "minimal tuple" but these are frequently omitted by OEMs and retailers in their advertising materials.
Let’s go to a full quarter mile, which show a bigger difference, but again not a huge one.
2009: 11.2 seconds/130.5 mph
2019: 10.6-seconds/134 mph
This would be a better comparison of Ford Mustang GT’s of the same year. Massive improvement.
Time to stop from 60 mph?
Effective turning radius at 60 mph?
Interior noise in decibels at 60 mph?
Maximum shock absorption at 60 mph?
Or 0-100-0.
7:06 vs 7:24 for the old car. Although in 'segmented' times it had went something like 6:54
About 10 years ago. 7:19.63 (ZR1 / i9)
https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-s...
About a year ago 7:29.90 (base model / i3)
Better measure than top speed anyway
This take is deceitful. Acer typically uses a very simple scheme to define their products, which goes something like "Acer <product line> <model>".
The scheme "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" is more a kin to a product ID, which goes way beyond make and model and specifies exactly which hardware combination is shipped in a particular product.
Complaining that Acer names its products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" makes as much sense as complaining that Apple names its laptops like MVFM2xx/A, which Apple uses for the same effect.
https://www.amazon.com/Acer-XR382CQK-bmijqphuzx-UltraWide-Fr...
Current Pentium and Celeron chips can either be mobile variants of the Core line or... Atoms.
I have a Celeron N4100 in my cheap netbook. It's listed as "Gemini Lake" in Intel ARK, which is a rebranding of its original lineage... Goldmont. (Goldmont Plus)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_micropro...
If you were to look at other Gemini Lake cores... You'll see that "Pentium Silver" also falls into that group.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codenam...
TLDR: Intel has made it nearly impossible for anyone to know if they're getting Core based or Atom based mobile chips unless significant research is done beforehand.
This is not to say avoid Atoms at all costs. The N4100 I have is reasonably on par with the Core 2 Q6600 quad, which was quite the beast of a chip back in its day.
The current Atoms are nothing like the in-order-execution only monstrosities they originally launched as... but I still find Intel's branding a bit more than confusing. If incredibly deceitful.
Instead, you have designations like "Intel Core i7 8565U Whiskey Lake" or "Intel Core i7 10510U Comet Lake". The first one is 8th generation (=8xxx), the second one is 10th generation (10xxx, but the 14nm one, not the 10nm "Ice Lake"), and most OEMs do put these into their marketing materials and they are on their respective web shops (these two specifically were copied from two different Thinkpads X1 Carbon models).
The "pro" version might be an i8, while the budget version is i3. In a few years time, the pro version will be up to i12 while the budget version is now i8.
You have model numbers for when someone needs to look up some super specific detail.
And it's cycle- and power-efficiency figures are?
Only the frequency wars ended, the marketing and features wars continue the prohibition on computer architecture enlightenment unabated.
OSes, platform toolchains, and apps need to prioritize UX (UI response time and time-to-first-window) to lessen the perception and the reality of waiting on apps doing unimportant activities rather than appearing and beginning interaction.
My wife had a “my computer is slow” issue the other day. Fans blowing like crazy, extremely hot, battery draining fast. Turns out, lsof was stuck on some corrupt preferences file. Killed the process and file and all was fine. Regular people lack the tools to diagnose the problem and just deal with it, restart or buy a new one. We really should make diagnosing easier.
No, seriously. Once the root cause is found, humanize the description of the problem and ask the user what they want to do about it.
I bet they would to reduce labor costs.
Desktop Reliability Engineering ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110703091817/http://buyafuckin...
The memory hierarchy of a modern CPU with spinning rust might as well be the Parker Solar Probe waiting on a sea anemone.
I am remiss how someone these days can buy a laptop with spinning rust and 4 GiB and then complain it's "slow." Maybe they should've bought a real laptop for real work that's repairable and upgradable?
Unfortunately, the best ones aren't anymore.
I bought a T480 with dual batteries that does run for 10 hours. It has a 2 TiB SSD and 32 GiB. Works fine for me. Water-resistant, repairable, awesome keyboard, and MIL-SPEC drop rated too. Optional magnesium display top assembly cover.
It is worth noting that if you think GPU model numbers are fine, CPUs are actually very similar. There's the 2600k, 3770k, etc. (sandy bridge and ivy bridge CPUs respectively) The first number goes up each generation and the rest is how powerful it is within the generation. Similar to Nvidia having a GTX 980 and later a GTX 1080.
I don't get why not a single brand other than Apple gets product names remotely right. Every time a relative asks me for a laptop recommendation and shows me a list of models I have absolutely no clue what to tell them. All the model numbers look like they came from a password generator and the only discernible difference without hours of looking at spec sheets is the price.
(I know it’s a different product category. It’s relevant because it’s name and number is perfect)
We can blame Apple for using chips that are too intense for their laptops, and we can blame Intel for making garbage chips that can't really perform in real world cases while spending a decade not bothering to innovate. Apple at least is moving away from Intel as a result of all of this, and I'm really impressed with how well the M1 transition has been going.
Not to say that M1 isn't amazing, but I think Apple has been preparing for this for a while and needed to make sure it would succeed even if their ARM CPUs weren't quite as groundbreaking as they turned out to be.
Or longer, really; while everyone, of course, loves the 2015 MBP, they're mostly thinking of the integrated GPU one; the discrete GPU version was pretty thermally challenged. Arguably Apple's real problem with the post-2015 ones was that Intel stopped chips with fast integrated GPUs, so Apple put discrete GPUs in all SKUs.
Possibility 2: Apple had a master plan to intentionally torpedo performance in order to make their future first-party chips appear more competitive
It's absolutely possible to do high end Intel in a compact laptop with relatively good thermals - look at thin Windows gaming laptops for plenty of examples of this (and these have way beefier GPUs than macbooks too).
The power draw drains batteries, and the heat is... very annoying at best. I have used a couple ThinkPads and a Dell XPS over the past 5 years too, and all of them had the same issues where they'd constantly be pushing out very hot air, and the battery life was never more than 4-6 hours.
I went to ifixit and clicked the very first laptop teardown I saw, it has one. https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/gnBU5dVYrIhInIXV.med...
Or, let's see, razer blade stealth, that's a 3 pound laptop. https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/nHPaankElOWQndsv.ful...
What's a light 15 inch laptop, XPS 15 7590? https://i0.wp.com/laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...
Acer swift 5 SF515, "lightest 15 inch laptop on the market" https://i1.wp.com/laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01...
LG Gram https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/fFlFJB3PKThJs3TA.hug...
They've gotten around it with M1 by building an entirely new chip that's power efficient enough that it practically doesn't need good thermal design to perform near it's peak. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, but it's also hilarious that Apple had to go this far to cool a chip properly.
That's just not a defensible position to take.
Intel's inability to execute a node transition has led to a situation where for years their only way to increase performance has come at the cost of major increases to power and heat.
>Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250943808
It's clear they have hit a limit of what they could really do with Intel's top of the line processors from a thermal perspective, with the form factor they want to deliver.
Now I have sort of an expensive paper-weight sitting next to my M1.
That was a bug on Apple’s part, not a feature. Case in point my Kaby Lake Windows laptop package power draw is less than 2W when plugged into 1440p.
Maybe they did this in the hope that the i9 HEDT “brand halo” would help them sell more of these consumer CPUs. But if that’s the case, they don’t get to complain when someone posts that an M1 beat an i9 and people accidentally interpret that as “the M1 competes against Intel’s HEDT line”.
M1X and M2X in the making, too?!
Look at this from this POV:
- Apple started on custom ARM many years ago.
- Apple isn't really smaller then Amd, and Amd also rewrote and restructured their architecture some years ago.
- Apple hired many greatly skilled people with experience (e.g. which worked before with Intel)
- Apples uses state of the art TSMC production methods, Intel doesn't and the "slow" custom chips from China and Russia don't use that either as they want to have chips controlled by them produced with methods controlled by them. (TSMC production methods are based on tech not controlled by Taiwan).
- Apples had a well controlled "clean" use-case, where they bit by bit added more support. This includes that they could drop hardware 32 bit support and don't have any extensions they don't need for their Apple products, this can make thinks a lot easier. On the other hand x86 has a lot of old "stuff" still needing support and use cases are much less clear cut (wrt. thinks like how many PCI lanes need to be supported, how much RAM, etc.). This btw. is not limited to their CPUs but also (especially!) their GPUs and GPU drivers.
So while Apple did a grate job it isn't really that surprising.
Do you mean "TSMC production methods are based on tech controlled by Taiwan", or "TSMC production methods are based on tech not controlled by China/Russia"?
Update: after reading the thread I think I understand that you meant TSMC production relies on tech/equipment from ASML, which is not controlled by Taiwan.
Good point overall - the performance of Rosetta 2 helped facilitate much of this and - at least from what I've read - does seem to be surprising to folks in the space. So that also helped them out.
Apple is designing processors and GPUs at least since iPad2's tri-core GPU. They're neither coming out of the blue, nor newbies in this game.
Sometimes it's hard to figure out all of the things left out of the plans that were stolen. Some engineer saw something not working, looked at the plans, and then noticed where the plans were wrong. The change gets implemented, but the plans don't get updated. Anyone receiving the plans will not have those changes. Becareful of those plans that fall of the back of trucks.
The whole point behind the effort of China and Russia is to have a CPU under their control, starting with the design but also including the manufacturing.
And TSMC uses technology for their nodes which is not under their control at all.
The amount of expertise China already has and will accumulate in the next decades should not be underestimated.
Note it's also not under TSMC's control - a lot of fab technology comes from other suppliers like ASML in Europe.
Why would you want to compare a desktop class i9 with a 10 watt M1 chip?
There was a Linus Tech Tips the other day about how even current gen Intel laptops can see better perf on an i7 than an i9. It looks like the i9s simply don't make sense in this thermal form factor and are essentially just overpriced chips for people who want to pay the most to have the biggest number.
It's been known for years that apple has been limiting the intel chips by providing insufficient cooling. I don't overly care about how fast an M1 chips in a macbook is compared to an intel chip in a macbook. I want to know how fast an M1 is compared to a desktop I9 (given mac minis have M1 chips now), or compared to a properly cooled laptop latest-gen I9.
All this experiment shows is that insufficiently cooled processors perform worse than sufficiently cooled ones. It's a classic example of cherrypicking data. Admittedly, my solution would be different to the article's author. Instead of using a badly cooled laptop to compile stuff, I'd setup a build server running linux.
If I wanted absolute best compile times I'd go build a threadripper workstation, but I need mobility and can't always rely on an Internet connection.
I think part of it is because I don't care about mac computers. I'm interested in how the M1 - a consumer ARM chip - stacks up against the best x86_64 chip, not how it performs in one particular laptop.
It just seems like a cherry picked fight - there's more to the laptop market watt/performance wise than 2019 macbooks.