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Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 6 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.42s | source | bottom
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andy_threos_io ◴[12 Nov 20 04:34 UTC] No.25066484[source]▶
Can somebody explain how is M1 going to work on larger GPU tasks (rendering, encoding etc) with it's memory bandwidth M1 total memory bandwidth is 68.2 GB/s (128 bit LPDDR4x-4267)

AMD Radeon Pro 5600m memory bandwidth is 394.2 GB/s (2048 bit HBM2)

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-5600m.c3612

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gjsman-1000 ◴[12 Nov 20 04:42 UTC] No.25066523[source]▶
It's not clear, but here's some knowledgeable speculation:

- All M1 models only have 1 Thunderbolt Controller, thus can only handle 2 Thunderbolt ports on all announced models so far.

- All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K.

- No M1 model supports >16GB of RAM or 10GB Ethernet.

All of the above seem like bandwidth limitations to save cost that a future "M1X" or "M2" or "X1" would be extremely likely to fix, and that's where you'll see the bandwidth increase.

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1. fludlight ◴[12 Nov 20 04:55 UTC] No.25066584[source]▶
Is there a legitimate laptop purpose that requires 10GB internet? If so, how niche is that purpose?
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2. russler23 ◴[12 Nov 20 05:33 UTC] No.25066788[source]▶
Ethernet ≠ Internet
3. geerlingguy ◴[12 Nov 20 05:36 UTC] No.25066803[source]▶
More the Mac mini, which had built in 10G as an option in prior generations.

For laptops, you can use an external dongle. It has its uses, like for a NAS on a 10G network for video or other data-intense work.

4. the_lucifer ◴[12 Nov 20 05:36 UTC] No.25066805[source]▶
Well, the older Mini that the M1 Mini replaces has 10Gb Ethernet. That being said, there's no modern MacBook that has 10Gb Ethernet anyways. Cannot that port be added over Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 based dongle?
5. jmnicolas ◴[12 Nov 20 07:48 UTC] No.25067494[source]▶
I have about 20TB of data on several external hard disks / nas / machines. Due to some disks failures I had to move these data and believe me I wish I had 10GB Ethernet so that transfers don't take literally days.
6. soneil ◴[12 Nov 20 12:29 UTC] No.25069087[source]▶
It makes a huge difference for networked storage. For some rough equivalency (ignoring seek times, but also ignoring tcp overheads etc, total spherical cow territory)

- An 8x cdrom narrowly beats 10meg ethernet.

- 1x dvdrom narrowly beats 100meg ethernet.

- ATA133 narrowly beats 1gbit ethernet.

Original SATA is 1.5gbit, so 1Gbit ether bottlenecks us to 1999 storage speeds.