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ARM MacBook Pro I don’t want an Overpriced Netbook.
- Thread starter TheRealAlex
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Apple doesn’t make servers. Massively parallel systems dont make much sense for 90% of users.
The problem is not that ARM is inferior. It is power efficient, and that's great for laptops. The problem is that Apple's motivation is to turn the mac to a big iphone, and milk customers from the 30% fee for all app store applications. The could not care less about scientists or compatibility, so they blocked Nvidia, CUDA, Bootcamp, 32 bit applications, etc. It's very sad, because Steve Jobs wanted the Mac to be the best tool for scientists in academia, and was very successful, but Tim Cook is moving further and further away from that paradigm, converting the mac into Fischer Price laptop with an Apple app store. It's a sad direction Apple is going, and the Apple logo is no longer shining on the mac.
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Like for like software, the iPad runs better than the MBA - I've run the three things below on both, back to back:
- Stars Wars: Knights of the old Republic
- Neverwinter nights
- Swift playgrounds
Sure, that's not every application out there, but its also an embarrassment for intel that a 2020 i7 13" laptop CPU gets made look stupid by an iPad processor from 3 years ago in ANY software - when the iPad was less than half the price, runs in 12-15 watts (total system power) instead of 30 and has no cooling. Especially when you consider that two of the above things (the games) were originally written for the PC architecture
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I'm looking forward to them in a few years after they hammer out all the bugs and any hardware issues. Hopefully they will be better than a netbook...I mean, my iPhone is already like a gazillion times faster than my 15-inch work laptop, so I figure they should be pretty fast.
Maybe, you could have waited until you knew that your applications and hardware were supported by operating system upgrades?
Actually, the MacBook Air 2020's CPU is rated for 9W. That means it can get to 1.1GHz around 9W.
Apple constrained the chassis of the 2020 MacBook Air to about 10W, so... of course it is going to suffer.
You're basically saying the iPad Pro at 2.4GHz is outperforming an Intel chip that's purposefully constrained to 1.1GHz. That's not a surprise to me at all.
And yes, I can agree Apple Silicon is more efficient, but your statement that they can rival Intel chips at 4-4.5GHz? I'm not sure I'd believe that until I see it with my own eyes.
Under sustained load (>30 minutes), my Core i9 MacBook can only sustain 3GHz clock speed because Apple is very stingy with power draw constraints. The 16" MacBook can only draw a maximum of around 90-95W in sustained load and the Core i9 needs something like 120W to reach 4GHz. Heck, the dGPU can draw 55W, which causes the CPU to be scaled down to 35W (compared to the rated 45W TDP), so... it drops even below the base clock speeds of 2.3GHz.
So if you're comparing A12Z against the performance of current power and thermal constrained Mac computers, it's a very skewed comparison.
In fact, if we are going by core count and speed, the more "apples to apples" comparison would be the Core i9 MacBook w/ Turbo Boost turned off against the A12Z. Both are 8 core, both are around 2.4Ghz. The iPad is far more efficient, sure, but it's far slower. That's what's preventing me from using my iPad Pro as my main computer. I don't think the situation will change until maybe 2 years later.
But Apple can feel free to prove me wrong. I'll nab that next MacBook that they come out with as long as it can drive my 5K monitor without breaking a sweat.
Not to get off-topic, but gaming on iOS and iPadOS is centered on independent developers and smaller studios. They simply can't compete with the big development studios that create the top games for Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, and Windows.
If you're not a serious gamer then iPadOS is fine for casual gaming.
Gaming on the Mac will always be an inferior experience compared to the established gaming platforms. ARM SoCs will not change this, and some studios will choose to not port their existing Intel macOS games to Apple Silicon.
Air's i3 is not constrained to 1.1 GHz. It is a new Intel's naming trick to avoid any court filing. It is working at 3GHz on average, and only if overheats, it will deliver the "guaranteed" 1.1GHz. So the 1.1 GHz in its' name is just a mark of the lowest GHz possible.
Do you have a MacBook Air 2020?
I got one a short while ago. Under sustained (>30 minutes) load, it drops to 2.3GHz and then eventually to 1.1GHz.
The 3.2GHz is only seen very briefly for the first seconds of a load.
Needless to say, the abysmal performance caused me to return it.
In comparison, my 16" i9 goes to 4.2GHz for the first few seconds then settles around 3GHz indefinitely.
So for "my" workload at least, the average for the Air is base clock, while the 16" is above that.
I doubt it. Some people just don’t like Apple don’t understand computers so no matter what they're still going to not like Apple and not understand computers. I don’t see anything wrong with that because not everyone likes the same things.
I wouldn't be so sure - at least not in the long term.
The Switch is ARM based and the AppleTV 4k is significantly more powerful than the switch. Same with any current iPad, all the new iPhones, etc..
Also, plenty of indie / young game developers are growing up writing their first games for... iOS. With the switch to apple silicon those games will pretty easily run on the Mac as well - without even the need for a recompile.
It will take time, but apple is definitely pushing for game development, and their hardware is already plenty capable of it. Give it a few years, and I give it 50/50 chance that Apple will be a significant gaming platform.
I agree. That ship has sailed, and there would be no financial benefit to Apple going back to making servers. The point I was making was that Apple is set to fill the gap for ARM-on-desktop (which hasn't existed since the 1990s AFAIK) and that there is nothing than makes ARM inherently incapable of running in a powerful workstation / desktop computer like the Mac Pro. The fact that 128-core ARM CPUs exist (or will shortly) implies that it should be technically possible to build an ARM cpu that is equivalent or better to a Xeon W CPU.
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I was comparing it to the 28W TDP Ice Lake in higher tier 13” MBP. Not the MBA - the iPad Pro runs circles around the MBA.
This is not my statement. Refer to A12 and A13 deep dive reviews by Anandtech and others. Funny fact: a year ago I was the same opinion as you. ARM Macs? Give me a break, why does one want a dead slow toy? Then I actually looked at the data and I was shocked. Apple CPUs are an engineering marvel.
The 16” MBP debilere around 60Watt of sustained CPU performance, which allows the i9 to run above its spec. This allows the CPU to maintain clocks of around 3.2-3.4 on all cores if I remember correctly (been a while since I tested it). On single core max turbo boost it consumes around 25 watts. Yes, the GPU makes it more complicated, as the laptop in total offers around 80Watts of power delivery that needs to be shared between CPU and GPU. Note that all i9-equipped laptops suffer from this.
Which again illustrates the problems Intel is having. You need to run a 45W CPU at 60W to get a performance gain. These chips are clocked way above their comfort point so that Intel can claim performance advances. To get most out of those chips you need to run them on a desktop.
Why would it be a fair comparison? The i9 has 8 cores (the A12Z has 4, the low performance cores barely count), and the iPad can do substantially more work per clock - it has 50% more execution units per core than Intel CPU.
Since you were curious, I did some quick tests while sipping my morning tea. The CPU in question is i9-9980HK in a 16" MBP. I only used Geekbench, because despite it's many flaws it's readily available and I only hat 10 minutes. Power usage and clocks were monitored with Intel Power Gadget.
- Disabling turbo boost (limits the clocks to 2.4Ghz). Single-core power usage is around 5 wats, multi-core usage is about 30 watts. Geekbench score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3695566
- Disabling turbo boost, hyper-threading and limiting the core count to 4 cores in order to better match the iPad Pro with 4 high-perf cores. Multi-core power usage drops down to 15 watts. Geekbench score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3695627
P.S. Disabling the turbo boost made my MBP laggy as hell.
Edit: an A12 core actually consumes only 4 watts at 2.5ghz (https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4) — 20% less than optimized Skylake at 2.4ghz.
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If Apple were to come out with an ARM chip that beats the fastest Intel chips, in real benchmarks, not just Geekbench, as well as had noticeable power savings, then Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft would all be beating down their door trying to buy the chips for their servers.
ARM server chips that compete with Xeons are already on the market. You also might want to check out a startup called NUVIA. Talking about "real" benchmarks: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4
Anyway, you comment doesn't make much sense since Apple does not make server-grade chips.
Not in single-threaded tasks.
They'd take the opportunity to make more money though!
I’ve played WoW for the first time in 15 years, mostly because friends and family were doing it and it was a way to stay connected. To me it isn’t that the games themselves are important, it’s the ability of a computer to smoothly run a complex program that uses input from a user, whether keyboard or mouse or game controller along with sound and video and do it smoothly. If a computer can handle that it will handle anything else I am likely to ever do with it.
And there are games like Kerbal and Minecraft that I keep saying I am going to try. But I’ve been saying that for a long while now.
Apple did not become a $2 trillion company by selling merchant processors. It is difficult to see the company believes that its path to $3 trillion goes through that market.
You're gonna have to come up with new material soon.
Which can be covered by IPC increases. Something that Apple's likely focused on with their architecture.Running lots of VMs is a reasonable use case, but I'd have to question whether the most cost-effective way to do it is to have a super-expensive workstation computer. You may find that cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure are better options - both in terms of cost and the management effort required to run and configure them on your own hardware. It depends on your use case. Are you spinning VMs and containers up and down for development, or running them 24x7?
In my industry (enterprise cloud computing), I have seen a rapid decline in the number of clients using VMs on their own hardware, and most of those are ESXi servers in their data center, not workstations. I used to use a lot of VMWare or VirtualBox VMs for test environments, but now it's easier, less time-consuming, and often cheaper to just spin them up in the cloud.
Video editing / rendering has diminishing returns over about 24 cores (Premiere Pro CPU performance: AMD Threadripper 3990X 64 Core) - with the 64 core Threadripper running slower than the 32-core version.
Photoshop only shows minimal improvements with >8 cores (https://www.pugetsystems.com/recomm...-Adobe-Photoshop-139/Hardware-Recommendations)
You could run thousands of Docker containers on a 64 core machine with sufficient RAM, so this is overkill to run 50-100 containers (which is a relatively complex micro-service architecture).
You might argue that need to do all of the above *at the same time*....but this is definitely an edge use case.
By all means, spend your money on £4000 CPUs....you probably aren't getting your money's worth though
Disaster yes, complete... maybe not. Pathetic for Apple? I agree.
I'm guessing they had a robot press the switch mechanism a million times in a nice clean dust and grime free space and said it was good. Then reality struck.
This conspiracy theory still doesn't hold up to any basic scrutiny.
If these apps work like an iPad, such as Files or Numbers - that would be a grim joke. I just found out that my spreadsheets are not available.