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

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 1 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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Steko ◴[12 Nov 20 04:52 UTC] No.25066573[source]▶
The Mac Mini supports two monitors one 6K and one 4K.

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

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maxyme ◴[12 Nov 20 05:32 UTC] No.25066786[source]▶
If you count the display in the macbook that's the same number of screens
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fastball ◴[12 Nov 20 06:49 UTC] No.25067166[source]▶
So if the Macbook is closed can you drive two?
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1. JohnBooty ◴[12 Nov 20 08:35 UTC] No.25067741{3}[source]▶
Theoretically yes (the M1 Mac Mini supports two external) but it's unknown whether the capability to disable the built in display is actually exposed.

You can disable the built in display on (some?) Intel MBPs via `sudo nvram boot-args="niog=1"` according to another poster. Whether this is supported on M1's remains to be seen.