Right now everyone is drooling over insane battery life (how much of that is perf/W and how much of that is power management improvements?), things like glitchless resolution switching (I think many modern GPU pipes can do that... if your drivers are up to par)
-
-
Show this thread
-
Things like unified memory (already a thing on x86 game consoles for 2 generations, e.g. PS4, even though legacy PC drivers on the same hardware have trouble doing it properly).
Show this thread -
I've even heard a claim that "the M1 uses less RAM because object acquire/release is faster" going through some nonsense comparison with Android/GC-based systems which, uh, no? macOS has always used reference counting, this just means it's faster, it doesn't use less RAM.
Show this thread -
Then Apple also bought their way to being first to 5nm, so that instantly gives them another perf/power boost over the competition (decent leg up on AMD and Intel is left way behind), so that's another confounding factor.
Show this thread -
Rosetta 2 is somehow simultaneously amazing new translation technology (it isn't, it's just a really good JIT emulator) but also proof that the M1 is insane because it can beat previous Intel chips Apple used for that range under emulation...
Show this thread -
The M1 GPU looks really interesting too, but what can it really do? Apple's architecture derives from the mobile tile-based world, that's very different from typical PC stuff. Is it better at some things and worse at others?
Show this thread -
Obviously Apple pulled a lot from their software/drivers from the iOS space, which have had years to mature and be optimized (and Apple has put a *lot* of work into that, while GPU drivers are historically vendor-provided and almost universally suck).
Show this thread -
The M1 Mac release is just such a huge pile of little improvements *all around*, some of which would be almost certainly possible on previous x86 chips too, that it's really hard to get at the details. I hope someone does.
Show this thread -
Just remember, there's no such thing as magic. There's good engineering, and there's *caring*. The former is often hard to come across these days, and the latter is, well, increasingly rare. Apple has managed to find a bunch of both for the M1 Macs, and it shows.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
the main limitation of RISC is that it cannot execute complex instructions like CISC, apple makes a serious mistake.
-
In the back-end all CPUs are RISC
- Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.