MacBook Pro with the M1 processor

[Eric]

I thought this was worthy of its own thread, thanks to @SuperMatt and @DT for bringing this to my attention. I thought the only version this came in was the MacBook Air but see it's now coming out in the MacBook Pro, so I changed my order from the Intel model to this one instead since it's about the same price with the M1 chip.

There aren't many reviews since it's just being released by I'm keeping my fingers crossed on this one, the 8 core processor sounds like a game changer. I'll report back on how it handles all of my intensive Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom processing. I'm pumped.

 

[DT]

Full specs you SOB ...

 

[DT]

So while we're waiting ...

The MBP should give you a good bit of additional processor/performance headroom because of the chassis/active cooling (aka, fans), plus the improved speakers, display, the groovy Touchbar (if you're into it ...), and another 3 hours of battery over the MBA (for a stunning 20 hours).

The M1 GPU is incredibly stout (way more performance vs. any Intel based 13" MBP), and as products start utilizing the Neural Engine, you're going to see insane performance (given the price/TDP).

 

[Apple fanboy]

I have a 13" CTO Intel MacBook Pro on order at work. However it might be cancelled and I'll have the M1 one. I'll find out what the supplier is doing tomorrow.
I'm easy either way tbh. Its not my £££

 

[Eric]

Full specs you SOB ...

Oh yeah, sorry.



Costco baby. Oh and I got Apple Care.

 

[Apple fanboy]

Oh yeah, sorry.

View attachment 1415

Cosco baby. Oh and I got Apple Care.

is 8GB enough RAM? I assume your photos are on an external?

 

[ronntaylor]

We got a couple of MacBook Airs (16GB RAM & 256 SSD). My current machine is a dying 2014 MBA, his is a 2019 unit that he's using a decent trade-in value to offset our total costs. Since we waited till the day after the announcement, we have to wait till the end of the month, early next month for delivery.

I'm already stressing out about transferring data. No transfer issues with our new phones, but my MBA is still on Sierra and I've been lax with updates and organization.

 

[Eric]

is 8GB enough RAM? I assume your photos are on an external?

Do you know if it's upgradable? I was able to add it to my iMac.

 

[Eric]

We got a couple of MacBook Airs (16GB RAM & 256 SSD). My current machine is a dying 2014 MBA, his is a 2019 unit that he's using a decent trade-in value to offset our total costs. Since we waited till the day after the announcement, we have to wait till the end of the month, early next month for delivery.

I'm already stressing out about transferring data. No transfer issues with our new phones, but my MBA is still on Sierra and I've been lax with updates and organization.

It sounds like Mine is "supposed" to ship next week according to Costco, I guess we'll have to wait and see but I don't mind waiting.

 

[JayMysteri0]

Do you know if it's upgradable? I was able to add it to my iMac.

I believe Apple is continuing down their path of you buy the ram you want/need at the time of purchase.

 

[ronntaylor]

It sounds like Mine is "supposed" to ship next week according to Costco, I guess we'll have to wait and see but I don't mind waiting.

Not sure how shipping times are determined. Seems a bit arbitrary, but maybe you lucked out by going the Costco route. Both M1 MBAs purchased direct from Apple: mine is getting the educational discount via hubby. Since he's trading in his 2019 MBA the cost is minimal.

Forgot to mention that we ultimately decided that the MBP was too much for our needs. May get a M1 Mac Mini or M1 iMac some time next as the house computer once we see how things go with the MBAs.

 

[DT]

Do you know if it's upgradable? I was able to add it to my iMac.

Definitely not, I'd upgrade to 16GB.

 

[Apple fanboy]

Do you know if it's upgradable? I was able to add it to my iMac.

No. All soldered RAM on a MacBook. Of course what we don't know is if an Intel i7 and and M1 will use similar RAM so where as 16GB is the minimum I'd go with on an Intel chip, who knows on an M1 chip!

 

[User.45]

So while we're waiting ...

The MBP should give you a good bit of additional processor/performance headroom because of the chassis/active cooling (aka, fans), plus the improved speakers, display, the groovy Touchbar (if you're into it ...), and another 3 hours of battery over the MBA (for a stunning 20 hours).

The M1 GPU is incredibly stout (way more performance vs. any Intel based 13" MBP), and as products start utilizing the Neural Engine, you're going to see insane performance (given the price/TDP).

Will this compete with CUDA anytime soon? Currently CUDA is the reason I'll never have a Mac only gig. My crafty GTX 1070 does stuff with CUDA in 30 sec what a fully spec'd 2017 MBA 15" would do in 2H.

 

[Mark]

definitely would benefit in many situations from 16GB RAM
worth canceling order and starting anew if need be to do this.

 

[User.45]

definitely would benefit in many situations from 16GB RAM
worth canceling order and starting anew if need be to do this.

Agree. This is 2021. Never go below 16Gb RAM.

 

[Eric]

Appreciate the replies, I'll just stick with 8GB since it won't be my primary editing machine anyway. I have already cancelled the Intel version which got charged to our card (almost immediately) so we'll have to return that, we don't want to add this one as well. I will use for backup for photos (like on trips) so if I have to wait around for on it to process a few it's no biggie, but mostly it will be using it for MS Office and web browsing.

 

[SuperMatt]

The RAM is on the chip itself I believe. For your uses, sounds like 8GB will be fine

 

[DT]

Will this compete with CUDA anytime soon? Currently CUDA is the reason I'll never have a Mac only gig. My crafty GTX 1070 does stuff with CUDA in 30 sec what a fully spec'd 2017 MBA 15" would do in 2H.

I don't know what the compute is like for the integrated SOC GPU on the M1, but it does have a dedicated neural engine, that I think is going to be powerful for ML type processing.

 

[thekev]

Will this compete with CUDA anytime soon? Currently CUDA is the reason I'll never have a Mac only gig. My crafty GTX 1070 does stuff with CUDA in 30 sec what a fully spec'd 2017 MBA 15" would do in 2H.

A lot of that will come down to the API. CUDA is very mature, and it has a well established data model for parallel calculations, including generation of reductions and inter-warp shuffles.

Much of the weakness with your Macbook pro is really that compilers are inconsistent with generating parallel code for x86_64, since SIMD vectorization acts like a bolted on feature rather than a programming model and multi-threading typically needs to be explicit.

There's a really good description of the issue here. Vectorization is quite far from the core programming model of most of these languages, since early on, only things like Crays tended to support it.

The story of ispc: origins (part 1)

This one time, at Intel, I wrote a compiler...

pharr.org

The tldr is that it shouldn't be that great of a disparity. Your macbook pro likely has a lot of untapped power. Also keep in mind, the GTX1070 is not meant to run in a laptop and is therefore allowed to soak up a lot more energy.

I would expect Apple to see some improvements if the APIs are really there and they have enough developers pushing them, like what happened with CUDA.