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Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

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Eug

Eug

Lifer
M1
5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LP-DDR4
16 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 12 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache
(Apple claims the 4 high-effiency cores alone perform like a dual-core Intel MacBook Air)

8-core iGPU (but there is a 7-core variant, likely with one inactive core)
128 execution units
Up to 24576 concurrent threads
2.6 Teraflops
82 Gigatexels/s
41 gigapixels/s

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Products:
$999 ($899 edu) 13" MacBook Air (fanless) - 18 hour video playback battery life
$699 Mac mini (with fan)
$1299 ($1199 edu) 13" MacBook Pro (with fan) - 20 hour video playback battery life

Memory options 8 GB and 16 GB. No 32 GB option (unless you go Intel).

It should be noted that the M1 chip in these three Macs is the same (aside from GPU core number). Basically, Apple is taking the same approach which these chips as they do the iPhones and iPads. Just one SKU (excluding the X variants), which is the same across all iDevices (aside from maybe slight clock speed differences occasionally).

EDIT:

Screen-Shot-2021-10-18-at-1.20.47-PM.jpg

M1 Pro 8-core CPU (6+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 16-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 24-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 32-core GPU

M1 Pro and M1 Max discussion here:

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M1 Ultra discussion here:

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M2 discussion here:

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Second Generation 5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LPDDR5, up to 24 GB and 100 GB/s
20 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 16 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache

10-core iGPU (but there is an 8-core variant)
3.6 Teraflops

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Hardware acceleration for 8K h.264, h.264, ProRes

M3 Family discussion here:

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M4 Family discussion here:

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M5 Family discussion here:

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I mean, the price is $200 less than what some people were fretting about here. The rumor was always it was gonna be an A18 Pro which has 8GB of RAM. So that’s not really surprising.

Sure, the next gen Neo will have the upgrades to the SoC and bump to 12GB of RAM, and to be fair that will be more compelling. But the first iteration isn’t that bad especially considering the target market. If you need to heavier computation go up to the Air or Pro.
 
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The Hardcard said:
If you are surfing the web, using Office style app for basic letters and reports, using social media, and streaming, 4GB is enough. There are millions in the US who do nothing more.

A new MacBook locks in years of updates. Plus most of those tasks are single threaded, so buyers still get first-class snappyness. It’s a typing, reading, watching machine, it has more than enough memory for that.

I would love to see someone restrict themselves to such simple apps and demonstrate any kind of memory pressure, stuttering, or beachball stalls.
Click to expand...
Someone with bare minimum needs can also get a $300 8GB windows laptop, or use the phone or TV they already have.

In my opinion this device only makes sense if you've already decided that you want a MacBook.
 
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trivik12 said:
I am more curious around M5 Pro/Max configuration. It appears they have fewer performance cores than M4 Pro/Max. Wouldn't that be a big deal considering pro apps would need more P-cores. Especially when used in Mac Studio kind of device.
Click to expand...

On a basic math measure with 100 for an S core, 70 for a P core, and 33 for an E core based on percentage of compute:

6 S + 12 P = 1440.

12 S + 6 E = 1398.

12 S + 4 E = 1332. Just based on configuration the new layout wins.
 
The Hardcard said:
If you are surfing the web, using Office style app for basic letters and reports, using social media, and streaming, 4GB is enough. There are millions in the US who do nothing more.

A new MacBook locks in years of updates. Plus most of those tasks are single threaded, so buyers still get first-class snappyness. It’s a typing, reading, watching machine, it has more than enough memory for that.

I would love to see someone restrict themselves to such simple apps and demonstrate any kind of memory pressure, stuttering, or beachball stalls.
Click to expand...
I would get stutters and stalls with 8 GB RAM on my Intel Mac mini even back with Monterey. And 4 GB on another machine with an older macOS was just painful. I upgraded from 4 GB to 8 GB all the way back in High Sierra on a MacBook Pro due to beachballs with even just light usage. That was with a SATA SSD.

For that Monterey 8 GB machine, the slow downs would not happen immediately, but after some use, even with relatively light usage - Mail, Safari (maybe half a dozen tabs or so), Messages, Calendar, MS Excel with a one page spreadsheet with very simple equations. macOS would slowly start to accumulate a bit of swap, but I would only start to notice the stutters once it hit around 1-2 GB swap. Interestingly, memory pressure was never even yellow when the stutters occurred. Beachballs were uncommon, but stutters were frequent enough to become annoying. It’s disconcerting when you’re working and then all of a sudden there would be a pause of a couple of seconds. As mentioned, this would usually only happen if there was at least 1 GB of swap. This would never happen when the swap was 0 or a few hundred MB. This was with a NVMe SSD too.

With my 16 GB M1 Mac mini with moderate office app type multitasking I’d occasionally get very short stutters, but it was really minor and infrequent so it didn’t really bother me much. However, this has completely disappeared with my 24 GB M4 Mac mini. The 16 GB Mac mini sometimes had a bit of swap. With my usage, the 24 GB Mac mini never has any swap at all. It is literally always at 0 swap. In this context I think 16 GB is probably the best bang for the buck, but I’m actually glad I got 24 GB.

Anyhow, my wife tells me we should get my kid a new laptop this year, not next year, so it is very likely to be a 16 GB / 512 GB MB Air. For the price, there are just too many compromises with the 512 GB Neo, the biggest of which is the 8 GB RAM. This machine needs to last until at least 2030.
 
Covfefe said:
Someone with bare minimum needs can also get a $300 8GB windows laptop, or use the phone or TV they already have.

In my opinion this device only makes sense if you've already decided that you want a MacBook.
Click to expand...
That category accounts for a lot of sales. There won’t be stacks of Neos collecting warehouse dust.
 
Eug said:
I would get stutters and stalls with 8 GB RAM on my Intel Mac mini even back with Monterey. And 4 GB on another machine with an older macOS was just painful. I upgraded from 4 GB to 8 GB all the way back in High Sierra on a MacBook Pro due to beachballs with even just light usage. That was with a SATA SSD.

For that Monterey 8 GB machine, the slow downs would not happen immediately, but after some use, even with relatively light usage - Mail, Safari (maybe half a dozen tabs or so), Messages, Calendar, MS Excel with a one page spreadsheet with very simple equations
Click to expand...

It isn't designed for people who are going to have all that stuff running. People running a typical corporate office workload aren't the target market for this.

I find it hilarious that all these people here were predicting it was gonna be $799 and laughed off my claims (and back of the envelope BOM comparisons with the 17e) that Apple could easily do it for $599, it was just a matter of if they decided to.

They come in a full $200 under what people were projecting despite the memory market chaos, don't skimp down to 128 GB like some feared, add a second USB-C so you can charge and have an external device connected at the same time, and still people are sh---ing on it! This thing is going to sell like gangbusters, especially since the supply of Windows PCs under $600 is drying up and may get even worse over the next year or longer.

A LOT of people out there are using Macs or Windows PCs with 8 GB, or even less, and are just fine. Or maybe some of them are experiencing some slowness but just think that's how computers work and aren't as sensitive to it as people in a forum like this. What would be the average RAM installed on their main PC for people posting in this thread? I'll bet it is > 32 GB...we are not the target market for this thing lol
 
Covfefe said:
Someone with bare minimum needs can also get a $300 8GB windows laptop, or use the phone or TV they already have.

In my opinion this device only makes sense if you've already decided that you want a MacBook.
Click to expand...
This is for people who
1. want a keyboard and larger screen. (Which is a huge number of people. Phone is convenient, but not where you want to type papers or create small spreadsheets.)
2. want the "don't have to worry about it, whether *it* is security, updates, hardware incompatibility, etc etc). In other words people who DO NOT READ anandtech.

There's this weird idiocy around any cheap Apple product where people pretend that every user is training leading edge AI models, running huge Mathematica simulations, and playing leading edge video games (all simultaneously!), and if an Apple product can't support that it's garbage.
CUT IT OUT! It's a waste of your and everyone else's time!
If you have useful comments on product/market fit, great.
But generic whining that a cheap product is cheap is not providing value to anyone.
 
name99 said:
This is for people who
1. want a keyboard and larger screen. (Which is a huge number of people. Phone is convenient, but not where you want to type papers or create small spreadsheets.)
2. want the "don't have to worry about it, whether *it* is security, updates, hardware incompatibility, etc etc). In other words people who DO NOT READ anandtech.

There's this weird idiocy around any cheap Apple product where people pretend that every user is training leading edge AI models, running huge Mathematica simulations, and playing leading edge video games (all simultaneously!), and if an Apple product can't support that it's garbage.
CUT IT OUT! It's a waste of your and everyone else's time!
If you have useful comments on product/market fit, great.
But generic whining that a cheap product is cheap is not providing value to anyone.
Click to expand...
A Chromebook also fits that criteria
 
gdansk said:
Wow, it's much, much worse than I thought. Too big, too small battery, no RAM, and priced at nearly M4 MBA 13 sale level. A rare miss from Apple. I don't think this will help their market share much.
Click to expand...
They'll sell a gazillion of these. You say too little RAM but it'll still be faster than a $1500 Windows laptop. Macs get loads more mileage than Windows on low RAM. The small battery still meets the needs of casual users just fine. Most will never plug in a USB accessory, except maybe a USB drive. $599 is SO much cheaper than the MBA (why I suspected that $599 was guessing too low, was wrong on that) that Apple probably tripled their addressable market.
 
jdubs03 said:
I mean, the price is $200 less than what some people were fretting about here. The rumor was always it was gonna be an A18 Pro which has 8GB of RAM. So that’s not really surprising.

Sure, the next gen Neo will have the upgrades to the SoC and bump to 12GB of RAM, and to be fair that will be more compelling. But the first iteration isn’t that bad especially considering the target market. If you need to heavier computation go up to the Air or Pro.
Click to expand...
And Apple isn't always sad if their first iteration doesn't meet the full potential of the market. Even Apple has trouble ramping production and they have a long horizon.

As for the heavier computation - by the time I retired I was doing more work in Google Sheets than Excel, and I was a data scientist. The browser based tools are pretty good and have compelling benefits. One of the bigger problems in education isn't computation, it's how to submit, access, and return work from instructor to student and that was really the driving factor behind Chromebook adoption - Google drive solved a lot of those problems in a way that institutions could control without having to jump through Microsofts enterprise hoops.
 
Eug said:
I would get stutters and stalls with 8 GB RAM on my Intel Mac mini even back with Monterey. And 4 GB on another machine with an older macOS was just painful. I upgraded from 4 GB to 8 GB all the way back in High Sierra on a MacBook Pro due to beachballs with even just light usage. That was with a SATA SSD.
Click to expand...
8GB on Apple Silicon is not comparable to 8GB on Intel Macs. Apple really has done some wizardry in AppleSilicon MacOS for low RAM environments. My wife still has an 8GB M1 MBA, spends most of her day using it, in Google sheets, some graphics apps, a screen full of browser tabs etc. and every so often I ask if she's noticed any slowdowns, etc. Nope. Runs great. 8GB on an Intel Mac ran like garbage years before the M1 came out.
 
DZero said:
Even worse, the M1 and M2 Mac would be cheaper than the Neo now.
Click to expand...
M1 has been cheaper than this for years. But it's hard to recommend MBN or M1 MBA in 2026.
johnsonwax said:
Macs get loads more mileage than Windows on low RAM.
Click to expand...
No, they do not. Electron bloat is all-encompassing. Windows, MacOS, Linux? It matters not. I am constantly facing memory pressure on a 24GB MBP14. I can't imagine anyone using Chrome on an 8GB Mac without paging. No wonder they didn't skimp too hard on storage. M4 MBA was clearly a better buy.
 
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johnsonwax said:
You can drop this without destroying it. Also approximately 1000x faster than a Chromebook.
Click to expand...
johnsonwax said:
Brother, most people using $599 laptops never leave the browser.
Click to expand...
So what exactly they need this performance for? And if they already own the phone, why Apple won't sell them a clamshell form factor dock where they could plug it in, or docking station where they could connect a monitor and keyboard/mouse in a rare occasion they would need physical keyboard?
 
gdansk said:
M1 has been cheaper than this for years. But it's hard to recommend MBN or M1 MBA in 2026.

No, they do not. Electron bloat is all-encompassing. Windows, MacOS, Linux? It matters not. I am constantly facing memory pressure on a 24GB MBP14. I can't imagine anyone using Chrome on an 8GB Mac without paging. No wonder they didn't skimp too hard on storage. M4 MBA was clearly a better buy.
Click to expand...
That's because Chrome is garbage on low RAM. Safari is not. Note the long focus on RAM in Android phones while Apple blithely offered up half and still crushed them on performance in things like browser tests. I have built enough heavy JS data visualization websites for enterprise use to know who was going to call me complaining the site doesn't work, and who wasn't (don't miss that since retiring). With enough resources Chrome will be faster, but it doesn't like to be starved.

And yeah, the performance difference between iOS react native apps and MacOS electron ones (which is a split you see fairly regularly) is frankly shocking. For causal users the iPad is actually the better product than the Mac for a lot of these reasons - which is why Apple spent years trying to convince users of this. Zoom on iOS was great, on Mac was godawful. In fact, I can't think of a single app that runs better on the Mac than iOS where iOS is suitable for that kind of work. Neo exists for the people who couldn't be convinced.
 
johnsonwax said:
Safari is not.
Click to expand...
Blah blah blah people (overwhelmingly, on Mac OS) don't use it.
Students are going to have electron bloat installed if they own the machine. This might be an OK machine in 2026 for the bill payer and emailers. But for students, I really see this as a downgrade from 2025's end-of-the-year MBA sales. And its mere existence removes a lot of pressure from Apple to allow sales nearly that good next year.
 
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