It is indeed revolutionary, because it is at the heart of the first widely popular fully-functional powerful general-purpose ARM-based laptop ever being produced on a massive, industrial scale. If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.
> first widely popular fully-functional powerful general-purpose ARM-based laptop ever being produced on a massive, industrial scale.
I submit if you need to qualify your use of the word "laptop" with fully eight adjectives or adjectival phrases to avoid ambiguity with pre-existing products, that it's probably not "revolutionary" by definition.
The M1 is a good CPU. It's incrementally better than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions of the same product.
It is very notable in that it was produced in-house and not purchased from Intel. And that says important things about the business climate in which Apple finds itself. But that's not the same thing as "revolutionary" in a technological sense. It does what competing chips do, somewhat better.
> I submit if you need to qualify your use of the word "laptop" with fully eight adjectives or adjectival phrases to avoid ambiguity with pre-existing products, that it's probably not "revolutionary" by definition.
I count five: It's the first "widely popular", "fully-functional", "powerful", "general purpose" ARM-based laptop ever being "produced on a massive, industrial scale"
My counterpoint: it's revolutionary because it's the first ARM-based laptop which doesn't have to make a ton of compromises to make it out the door.
It's got mass-market appeal ("widely popular", unlike the PineBook Pro).
It's not limited in functional scope ("fully functional", unlike Chromebooks).
It's not limited in computing power ("powerful", unlike any other ARM laptop).
It's not restricted to a subset of tasks ("general-purpose", unlike the iPad Pro when treated as a laptop).
It's being mass-produced for retail, i.e. it's not a limited-run or a prototype ("produced on a massive, industrial scale").
Every other attempt at an ARM laptop has made one or more of these compromises; the M1 Macbooks (and the M1 Mini) don't have any of these compromises, meaning that it's fit-for-purpose for the vast majority of laptop users (those for whom a Macbook would have sufficed before the M1 line).
I think being good and useful is pretty revolutionary; I haven't seen another ARM laptop offer that, and those are pretty important features.
>My counterpoint: it's revolutionary because it's the first ARM-based laptop which doesn't have to make a ton of compromises to make it out the door.
This should not be understated. You could hand an M1 Mac to anyone and unless they were technical and understood what you were handing them, they would neither know nor need to know that it has an entirely different CPU architecture.
It's totally transparent. Not one application did I try did it do anything other than just run as I would have expected. Heck the vast majority of x86 Windows software I tried - either under Crossover (commercially supported version of WINE) or in the Windows 10 ARM beta under Parallels - worked just fine.
And very speedily too. It was not apparent that emulation was going on - at all.
It really is quite astonishing. As they say, seeing is believing - in this case using is believing. The overall feel of the system is just not something that's easily to articulate. It's not just about running a benchmark or application quickly; the whole thing is just more responsive.
The only reason I took my M1 Macbook Air back on the last day of the return window was it turns out to do everything I want if it just had more RAM. Which was NOT my starting position; the M1 ran so well that I ended up realizing it could do everything I wanted and more if I could get at least 32GB of RAM - 64GB would be perfect.
So I'm rather impatiently awaiting the next round. As soon as I can get more RAM I'm so getting another Apple Silicon laptop!
> The M1 is a good CPU. It's incrementally better than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions of the same product.
I suppose everything can be called incrementally better by some viewpoint but calling it incrementally better than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions is wild to me. I specifically switched to my first ever Apple product because of how revolutionary the generational step was compared to what we've been getting on x86 laptops year to year and no equivalent x86 laptops of the year came close. Not only is it comparable to my overclocked desktop in tasks from 1-4 cores it does so without kicking on fans and the battery life is astounding while it does it. It even runs emulated x86 software faster than the native x86 version of the same year.
Here is what I find confusing. When people say the M1 is revolutionary, it really seems to suggest that the playing field is "available CPUs on the market". But, then some mean it to be "no, just compared to old CPUs in the previous generation of the same product".
It trounces the majority of either of those - which something a revolutionary product would do.
It's not until you get to the highest end desktop CPUs from Intel or AMD that you see competition with the M1 on a per core basis.
Keeping in mind this is Apple's lowest end, low power, mobile part. It wipes out all but the highest end desktop processors - not just on a core basis, but even a multicore basis - agin for all but the highest end.
Nope, I don't think revolutionary is hyperbole at all. It also makes me wring my hands with glee thinking about what a part designed for the desktop where higher power and cooling are readily available. Where adding more cores makes a lot of sense. How big of a gap is there going to be with that SOC?
The prospects of new hardware are once again exciting. CPUs have been stagnant for a LONG time now. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed to learn my i7-7700K was still not that far off from the latest CPUs - hardware unboxed had a great video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAX1lh985do
At best - on average a 30FPS between my lowly 7700K and the highest end parts? Yeah, newer parts have more cores - but most games are not well optimized for multiple cores. On one had I'm relieved - no need to spend money on upgrades since it just isn't worth it. On the other hand - it isn't worth it to upgrade! And what nerd doesn't like having the latest tech?
So yeah, it's nice to have someone pushing the boundaries and something to be truly excited about. Also stark contrasts like this tends to light a fire under others, if nothing else. Rising tides raising all boats and all that...
> It trounces the majority of either of those - which something a revolutionary product would do.
This isn't even remotely true. Computers are really good at doing more than one thing at a time. I find it mind-boggling that there is such a focus on the performance of a single core. This hasn't been all that relevant for the last 15 years. As for what this matters, the difference for single core isn't all that big regardless (one M1 core performs about the same as one 5980HS thread). When you want to know how powerful the computing power of a CPU is, how about comparing .. you know... what it can do?
And, what it can do when it is asked to do everything it can, I can reiterate that the M1 is nowhere near the competition. The 5980HS mobile CPU will get the same multi-threaded job done in half the time, which is a huge difference. Which is why discussion threads like these feel... chilling. Like as if I stepped in to a cult meeting, where we praise normalcy as revolutionary. It's not even close to the last generation of CPUs in terms of compute power. It just a step up from the Intel CPUs apple used in the previous MBPs.
And, it's not that the M1 is a bad CPU. It's actually pretty good for what it does, and it is exceptionally good at power efficiency. The 5nm and low thread count does contribute significantly to the power performance, so it will be interesting to to see how future M1 processors perform.
Imagine if the M2 doubled core count, and thus doubled multi-core performance compared to the M1. It would then be just as powerful as the current 5980HS. Another revolution no doubt.
While I agree, I think you're not giving credit to RISC + Apple's vertical integration here. What does it do? It produces a lot less energy per instruction.
I think that other manufacturers will look into their energy usage as well. That's quite revolutionary, because it seems to me that it has shown a proof of concept for which there's a lot of room to grow in. Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.
My thinking is simplistic but I think someone with more understanding of it will tend to agree with my high level view and tell you exactly why this is revolutionary.
Note: I'm not giving Apple full credit here, I'm giving it half credit. The other half goes to the invention of ARM and RISC micro-architecture in general.
That's still evolutionary not revolutionary. Every CPU intended for laptops over the last 20 years has been both increasing performance and reducing power consumption compared to the generation(s) before them. Apple didn't buck a trend, they didn't do anything new. They "just" had a really good execution of the standard, tried & true improvement path.
This was the whole marketing push behind projects like Intel Centrino - to drive even lower system power consumption by mandating certain combinations of certain parts that worked well together. Which continued with things like Intel Atheno & Evo.
Nothing Apple did with the M1 changed the game. It's the same game, it's the same race it's always been, they just are now in the lead of that race with their car. Which is impressive in its own right, but definitely not "revolutionary"
> Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.
This goes the other way around. To improve efficiency you reduce the clock cycles and increase IPC instead. That was the M1's advancement over the status quo, a significant increase in IPC. Clock speeds didn't change - in fact, it regressed by a tremendous amount. This regression in clock speed is how the M1 consumes so little power by comparison.
No, it doesn't. If it did we'd be seeing similar performance from other ARM CPU vendors, and we aren't. Apple pulling far ahead of Intel is largely independent of them using ARM and more a function of how much investment their poured into their own chips.
IMHO for every invention that's the definition of "revolutionary" that matters.
The first lightbulb isn't revolutionary, it's a nifty toy invention that doesn't affect anything, much less cause a revolution like the first practical efficient general purpose mass produced lightbulbs did.
The first radio isn't revolutionary, the first practical efficient general purpose mass produced radios make the revolution.
The same for computers, the same for smartphones - iPhone was revolutionary because it impacted the world; while its competing predecessors that had almost the same tech did not and so were not revolutionary.
lol - if you had actually used one, rather than pontificating in an Internet comment thread, you would not be describing the M1 as an "incremental" improvement.
It's night and day. Readily noticeable by non-technical people. It's not just faster, it's snappier, more responsive and just has an all around different feel.
> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.
Nothing changes in the way people use their computers. It's a performance leap, but there have been many such in the past. Back when PCs and laptops got 2 cores instead of 1, "real" multitasking was finally possible and performance doubled almost overnight. That was IMHO a bigger leap than M1, but I don't hear people calling Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 "revolutionary".
It's not just a performance leap. The whole machine feels a hell of a lot more responsive. Or tight. Or like it's reading your mind - it's hard to describe. It's just snappier, and it's not a subtle difference either.
It also delivers incredible battery life, and runs a lot cooler so you don't have annoying fans or face throttling as much, if at all, under load. No more cases hot enough to burn skin.
If you think you understand the M1 just by looking at benchmarks or reviews, you are sadly mistaken. Use one of these machines for a couple of days and you will more than likely not want to give it up.
Heck there are developers ditching their iMac Pro's in favor of M1 Mac Mini's for everything but long compiles. When Apple releases desktop versions of their SOC things should get stupid spicy. And I'm very much looking forward to it.
I love my M1 Air, but ultimately it's a moderately faster version of what I had before. The real benefit, so far, is that I have a fanless machine with the same kind of power as the previous pro level machines. Otherwise, it hasn't exactly changed what the computer is on a fundamental level.
> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.
Then you might want to look up the definition. A revolution is "radical" and makes "fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation".
Life after the printing press / steam engine / transistor fundamentally changed. Even if tomorrow, all x86 chips were replaced with ARM chips, what radical and fundamental changes to society would take place?
Even if that were true, it would still just be an incremental improvement. We've been mass marketing laptops for decades. Switching to a different architecture while a big engineering task isn't revolutionary.
But it's not true. ARM based Chromebooks have been on the market for years already and cornered educational markets and had massive consumer success overseas.
One interesting thing about the M1 is that a single chip (currently) powers apple's tablet, entry level laptop, entry level desktop, and their most recent all-in-one desktop and high end pro laptop. The differentiation is done elsewhere. What is missing is the high end pro level hardware, but if the rumors are true those will have the same but "more of it". It's the first chip I know of that answers the "should we optimise for speed or for power consumption" by "yes".
Simply by application of existing cutting-edge technology (mobile chipset) to a different use-case (laptops/desktops).
The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade, but the execution required to achieve it is definitely remarkable.
My M1 MBA is better than my 2020 Intel MBP (which cost over 2x) in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery life, and incredible responsiveness.
And x86 will never catch up. That's why it's revolutionary - it has destabilized the existing regime.
The A15 performance cores seem to be equivalent in performance to AMD Ryzen 5950x desktop cores, at 1/5th of the power budget.
True, AMD has a few tricks up their sleeve, and is a node behind Apple at TSMC, but on a purely technical level it's clear that Apple ahead of both AMD and Intel.
The power consumption is very impressive indeed. But, I think there are many compromises to be made when scaling up, so we'll see how the M2 performs in this regard. However, aside from power consumption, I find it interesting that people refer to it as such a revolution. Maybe I'm just imagining a unspoken "... for what is to come". Because as is, the only thing the M1 does better than it's competition is arguably the power consumption. The 5950x you mention, although an apples to oranges comparison will outperform highly parallelizable tasks by a factor of 4. Throw in a top end GPU and it becomes a factor of 14.
Now, power consumption may be the end all be all for some people. If your work tasks actually don't require a lot of computational power, then I can see it being much more valuable to have the flexibility of a cool laptop with a long battery life.
But, touting the M1 as revolutionary, because all that matters is power consumption, feels like a disconnect to me. I'm all for people liking stuff they like. But, I don't get what's revolutionary at all. I was interesting in hearing what people thought about it though.
The reason why I asked was because you say x86, but you don't mean the competition of x86, but the older generation of apple's x86 based hardware. Also, three of those things you mention are arguably the same -- quieter, cooler and battery life are all tied to power efficiency, which the M1 excels at. So, it is kinda like with every discussion thread on the M1, everyone kinda suggesting it is a powerful CPU, while it is just power efficient. From a computational point of view, where it matters, it is far behind the competition. "Catching up to x86" in this regard makes very little sense, but you also explicitly omit computational power, which of course is accurate. I certainly would not think this was revolutionary for a CPU any sense of the word, but to each their own.
This discussion also comes up again and again on HN on the M1. People say weird things like that the never experienced such a jump in computational power from one generation to the next. And what they tend to mean is from older apple hardware to newer hardware.
By the metric that I can have an entry level Macbook outperform maxed out Macbooks of a previous era. Oh and, do that with a ~20 hour battery life. And no fan.
At passmark, anyway, in a chart that seems to have some rather questionable orderings to it. Like the Ryzen 5900 is according to that AMD's fastest single core performance CPU. But that's certainly not the case as it's just a power-restricted & clock-restricted version of the 5900X, and the 5950X has then an even higher clock ceiling.
Similarly on the Intel side they have the 11900 ranked higher than the 11900K. Which again, there's no way that's true since the 11900K is literally an 11900 with a higher power limit & higher turbo frequency. And then the 11900KF, which is just an 11900K but with the iGPU disabled, is then somehow a lot faster than both?
Actual binnings & achievable frequencies vary, of course, but these orderings aren't passing a sniff test, either.
In fairness though, that first link you posted had the M1 beating the 5950X in geekbench 5 single threaded, so that confirms the Passmark result under certain workloads.
In any event, you'll notice M1 achieves an extremely competitive level of performance with a peak power of 22% of that used by the Ryzen 5950X and 10.5% of the 11900K. That's crazy!
In terms of efficiency there really is no comparison the M1 is a remarkable product.
We'll have to see how the M1X/M2 goes, but given what we've seen so far, we should see some stellar results from an M series chip designed for a workstation class laptop.
At peak power the M1 is also struggling to achieve 1/2 the performance of the 5950x, if that. The peak power draw is for the multi threaded workloads, where the m1's 4+4 obviously loses badly to the all the big 16c/32t 5950x
Put another way, the M1 achieves half the multithreaded performance of the 5950x while using less than a quarter of the energy. That's pretty impressive.
We'll see how they scale up, with the new MacBook Pros.
> Put another way, the M1 achieves half the multithreaded performance of the 5950x while using less than a quarter of the energy. That's pretty impressive.
That isn't impressive, no. Power scales non-linearly with clock speeds (and thus performance across a particular CPU design). Compare a 3700x vs. a 3800x for example: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2665?vs=2613 - Huge increase in power draw, barely any performance increase.
You'd have to compare at equivalent power levels to draw a meaningful conclusion like that. Especially since the 5950X is paying power for things the M1 just doesn't have at all, like the large amount of PCI-E lanes. But otherwise for a wall-powered system quadrupling the power for doubling the performance is a quite straightforward "yes please!" tradeoff to be made. Often the gains are much smaller than that.
Of course the M1 also isn't designed to excel at heavily multithreaded workloads having "only" 4 big CPU cores, so it's an unfair fight in that direction as well.
The revolutionary aspect of the M1 is that the processor for a computer is once again under control of the computer designers. For thirty years it has been outsourced as a commodity and been optimized for the interests of the CPU producers. The centralization of CPU design had benefits of scale, but maybe at this time Apple’s scale is big enough that taking control of the design is more advantageous.
When you look at the history behind the M1, it's been an inch-by-inch progression, grinding away at that CPU architecture. The culmination of that work is having one single CPU power iPads, macbooks and iMacs, which I think can reasonably be called revolutionary.
ARM was a company created by Acorn, Apple and VLSI. The ARM was the Acorn RISC Machine, and I owned one, but the first ARM chip was by Apple as much as Acorn. They didn’t decamp dozens of engineers to Cambridge for no reason…
Not sure who downvoted you - I completely agree. People have been talking about Arm as the next generation for a long time. I would suggest that Amazon made it successful with Graviton in the cloud, and Apple made it successful on the laptop/desktop with the M1.
Do revolutions typically start over night or do they build up until there's a tipping point? Apple has been working towards a revolution, the M1 is the tipping point.
Good question. It completely untethers me from my desk. The battery life is so good I can get through an entire work day without worrying about power at any point. This frees me up to leave (e.g. for a meeting, to work in the park or just on a couch, or simply being frazzled and in a hurry) without even considering a power brick or when I'll be able to plug in again.
To have that freedom in a 3 lb laptop with virtually no performance compromises is incredible.
How so? If I build a house with a revolutionary blueprint, but I build that house brick by brick to make sure it's the best representation of that blueprint possible, is it still not a revolutionary home?
