maybe the issue is I’m not looking at the mainstream stuff and am just looking at Hardware and Anandtech which has been almost uniformly negative until very recently haha. I believe this though yeahHave you seen Dave 2D comment section on the new surface video. People were not all judging Qualcomm or Microsoft pricing and SKUs.
I agree that some comments like 8GB ram is bad on a $1000+ laptop is definitely warranted ( Apple is stupid to do that in an AI era) but to say it’s the fastest CPU or core is not good. Statements like we beat the Mac from Satya.
The tide turned against Apple now. Let’s be honest people love to see Apple beaten or fail. They take Qualcomm and MS words as truth but not Apples.
They preach as tho it’s the best thing ever happened. We don’t see MacRumours staff or 9to5Mac and even the Android folks aren’t this obsessed. People like Zac, Tim Warren, Paul T and Jez etc are corporate writers.
I know many Macrumors staff but while they like Apple. They are critical of Apple when Apple launches a product.
This tweet says it all:
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There are many more.x.com
Trust me when people are at the top in the public eye, the enemies number one job is to make you look bad.
It is corporate warfare.
What I wrote may seem like it’s “out there” but all stories that seem far out have a kernel of truth.
Anyways this was a long post. Logging off and turning off notifications. These are my thoughts and I don’t want to spend more time on this.
Nuvia: don’t hold your breath
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I’ve got apple’s back on this.
Qualcomm, for years, promises big things and they’re going to beat apple and yadda yadda, and to this day I can’t hold one of those chips in my hand.
Apple, meanwhile, keeps their mouth shut and surprises everyone with M4 9 months or something ahead of schedule, by the time we knew about it you could own it, and let’s its chips do its talking. That’s the way to do it.
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LOL okay this is funny
But tbf this is a random twitter comment yes? This is some moron. I care about what the technically inclined people are saying. Like as in, everyone here or your median commenter on R/hardware.
yeah, to be clear here:
Qualcomm themselves are terrible. Apple keeps their mouth shut. But within hardware inclined corners, I usually see two groups *dominate* and ruin discussion, usually the latter group here.
Apple guys (or sympathetic) or AMD guys (who tend to hate Apple more than QC but it’s just a given). The skepticism I think had outweighed what was necessary, but from a corporate perspective I won’t defend much of QC. Apple does a good job of letting their chips do the talking.
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meanwhile, guys who actually work at AMD tend to like Apple quite a bit. Many of them went to Apple and helped design these chips!
People who actually do these jobs laugh at all this fandom and sycophancy. I had a young lady attending a local college in sunnyvale where my wife worked at the time ask me for a signed poster by the opteron team. As I went around collecting signatures, everyone was very perplexed at why anyone would want such a thing.
Now, we all had our own feelings about other companies, but it was much geekier. (“i can’t believe they measure features in mils! I can’t believe they double pump the ALUs!”)
Right, like they don’t care at all. It’s very rare — you might see someone like Jon Masters but he’s more on the software end, and to your point it’s more technical — see X86 variable opcodes (I feel a similar distaste for that mess even if they’ve “solved it” in some ways).
lol
Yeah exactly
Yep. I mean, as you can probably tell, I just like the tech here. I’ve used all sorts of shit, bought the M1 when it came out, excited for Nuvia. But the fandom is absolutely insane on the internet. Stuff like the Surface Laptop body from the tweet — dude who cares? It’s all very bizarre.
There is a real divide between architectural fandom so to speak and the kind of stuff like exoticspice just posted which is so bizarre.
Btw: re; double-pumped — Cliff you might have seen — but you know they Double-pumped AVX-512 on Zen 4, which was a pretty good solution. Cut down on area that way and didn’t harm the overall performance much afaict.
Btw: re; double-pumped — Cliff you might have seen — but you know they Double-pumped AVX-512 on Zen 4, which was a pretty good solution. Cut down on area that way and didn’t harm the overall performance much afaict.
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wasn’t aware.
“But anyway, we live in a very strange world now. AMD has AVX512, but Intel does not for mainstream... If you told me this a few years ago, I'd have looked at you funny. But here we are... Despite the "double-pumping", Zen4's AVX512 is not only competitive with Intel's, it outright beats it in many ways. Intel does remain ahead in a few areas though.”
from another place:
“Zen4 AVX512 is mostly double-pumped: a 256-bit native hardware that processes two halves of the 512-bit register.”
So they saved area and complexity (they have four total 256-bit units but for different purposes each) along with power and just double pumped but still found a way to beat Intel’s original, hotter implementation of AVX-512. It’s a pretty great implementation.
Similarly, AMD’s E Cores were smarter than what Intel did so far and less costly to implement — same cores with different physical designs — cut area down by nearly half. They’re killing Intel on keeping engineering overhead low for some stuff right now.
KingOfPain
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I was a bit cautious when Apple presented the M1, because it almost sounded too good to be true, which is why I didn't order immediately.
When all the reviews came out and confirmed Apple's claims, I ordered as soon as possible.
Maybe a little bit less speculation would be good for this thread. Let's wait for the real hardware and then discuss the results.
I find the Surface Pro and Surface Laptops to be odd ducks, not bad or anything but it's not actually easy to directly compare them to the Mac lineup. One might say, well it's the PC market place so they have to succeed there, but one of the reasons MS was so hot to get an "M1 moment" was to blunt any further market share gains by Apple in the PC space and they reportedly spent quite a bit of time comparing themselves to the M3 Air.
But it's a 13.8" screen and a 15" screen, which, again coming from a Mac perspective, seems oddly close together. They're heavier than their respective MacBook Air counterparts though priced competitively with them. It's not clear to me if they have fans for active cooling or not. MS was quick to point out their multithreaded performance and has been discussed already yeah with 10-12 P-cores they are obviously going to beat the Air here, but then that's not often the point of the machines at that price point and I'm not sure how much battery life they'd get at full tilt. So how much does that matter compared to single threaded performance? Beyond that though, they're really more comparable to the base/Pro M3 14" MacBook Pro - where depending on the price point and feature they have some wins and some losses. Obviously there is also the 13" Surface Pro 2-in-1 which is yet again a different beast and again sits uncomfortably for comparison somewhere in between an Air and iPad Pro. The future of the iPad is a topic we (and everyone else) has been discussing at length for years and is not something we need to get into here. However, the Surface Pro can be priced quite high to the point that the MacBook Pro with the Pro chip again comes into the picture and again, depending on price point and specific feature one is interested in, it can rack up some wins and some losses in paper specs.
One thing that bugs me a little: of course MS is interested in highlighting its best attributes, but you'll note that in its write up in Macrumors* they highlight the multithreaded performance of the Surface Pro but the battery life of the Surface PC (with larger batteries than both the Surface Pro and MacBook Air and more akin to the MacBook Pro which has the same battery life) when compared to the Air (and on a single threaded task where obviously Apple has a substantial advantage).
This isn't quite as egregious as what Intel did when the M1 first launched as at least here they are the same chips in their PC/hybrid and lord knows that Apple has had some seriously misguided comparisons in its marketing past which we have talked about ad nauseam as well, but it still rubs me the wrong way when companies continually change up their comparisons and try to make it sound like it's all one device and one performance characteristic. *This writeup is not unique to Macrumors and seems to be reflective of the actual presentation, again not a fan when anyone does this. It stinks of pulling a fast one. I suppose I should be bothered less by this since it is so common, but ehhh .... I think we should still get bothered by something regardless of its commonality.
Now there are many other device makers out there but this does highlight that even though Windows PC should indeed experience a large leap in performance per watt with the adoption of an actually performant ARM chip that it still is non-trivial to compare to the current ARM-based Macs. The design ethos is just different. I'm not necessarily saying worse mind you, everyone has different needs and priorities, but it is different. On the point of multiple device makers, while Qualcomm had previously said they were interested in designs with discrete GPUs, I find it interesting that so far there haven't been any shown despite quite a number of design wins announced.
But it's a 13.8" screen and a 15" screen, which, again coming from a Mac perspective, seems oddly close together. They're heavier than their respective MacBook Air counterparts though priced competitively with them. It's not clear to me if they have fans for active cooling or not. MS was quick to point out their multithreaded performance and has been discussed already yeah with 10-12 P-cores they are obviously going to beat the Air here, but then that's not often the point of the machines at that price point and I'm not sure how much battery life they'd get at full tilt. So how much does that matter compared to single threaded performance? Beyond that though, they're really more comparable to the base/Pro M3 14" MacBook Pro - where depending on the price point and feature they have some wins and some losses. Obviously there is also the 13" Surface Pro 2-in-1 which is yet again a different beast and again sits uncomfortably for comparison somewhere in between an Air and iPad Pro. The future of the iPad is a topic we (and everyone else) has been discussing at length for years and is not something we need to get into here. However, the Surface Pro can be priced quite high to the point that the MacBook Pro with the Pro chip again comes into the picture and again, depending on price point and specific feature one is interested in, it can rack up some wins and some losses in paper specs.
One thing that bugs me a little: of course MS is interested in highlighting its best attributes, but you'll note that in its write up in Macrumors* they highlight the multithreaded performance of the Surface Pro but the battery life of the Surface PC (with larger batteries than both the Surface Pro and MacBook Air and more akin to the MacBook Pro which has the same battery life) when compared to the Air (and on a single threaded task where obviously Apple has a substantial advantage).
This isn't quite as egregious as what Intel did when the M1 first launched as at least here they are the same chips in their PC/hybrid and lord knows that Apple has had some seriously misguided comparisons in its marketing past which we have talked about ad nauseam as well, but it still rubs me the wrong way when companies continually change up their comparisons and try to make it sound like it's all one device and one performance characteristic. *This writeup is not unique to Macrumors and seems to be reflective of the actual presentation, again not a fan when anyone does this. It stinks of pulling a fast one. I suppose I should be bothered less by this since it is so common, but ehhh .... I think we should still get bothered by something regardless of its commonality.
Now there are many other device makers out there but this does highlight that even though Windows PC should indeed experience a large leap in performance per watt with the adoption of an actually performant ARM chip that it still is non-trivial to compare to the current ARM-based Macs. The design ethos is just different. I'm not necessarily saying worse mind you, everyone has different needs and priorities, but it is different. On the point of multiple device makers, while Qualcomm had previously said they were interested in designs with discrete GPUs, I find it interesting that so far there haven't been any shown despite quite a number of design wins announced.
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i saw somewhere that they DO have fans.
This is correct imo. There’s a huge cope on like Anandtech about how much Apple matters for Windows. The truth is a mix. Qualcomm doesn’t have to be as good as the latest M chip, but Microsoft clearly wants them to be good enough to blunt small market share losses and in that regard battery life matters a lot. They don’t literally have to match the M4, but they need to beat AMD and Intel and offer something better and more similar to what Apple does.
I have known people to switch solely for the hardware these days. Not MacOS bells and whistles, just hardware. All iPhone users but that’s standard in the US.
Oh they for sure do
I mean look it’s MS marketing, it’s tilted and BS but all of these vendors are going to do this stuff. No one is convinced by these things alone really
No no, I will defend them on this part: They said they’re open to it. It requires integration from them and the dGPU maker.
But it requires demand too. There is 0 market for this yet, they are just saying if and when, you can absolutely do that with a Snapdragon.
Basically with fans and big batteries and higher weight and 10-12 P-core processors these are more akin to cheaper MacBook Pros than MacBook Airs really (cheaper is not to say worse, that can be plus). They may physically resemble the latter (well the old wedge ones), but they definitely seem more geared towards the former in function. I'm sure with all the variants that are launching there are other devices somewhat more similar to the Air. However, to me anyway, these Surface devices just highlight what an odd design, relative to Apple!, these first Qualcomm PC chips are - a hybrid of Mx Pro and base chip. To be honest, I think as developer machines they'll be great - good to great CPU performance, light gaming potential, great battery life, decent size/weight. I'm sure there are other use cases as well, I'm just highlighting one particular that came to mind.
In fact, if and when Apple eventually goes down the tile route a la Lunar Lake which @leman believes they will based on patents, such a configuration of CPU and GPU would be a good one to offer if Apple lets different configs on CPU and GPU be glued together. The opposite config would obviously be useful for gaming. I don't know if Apple ever will, that would complicate logistics and overall Apple has always preferred "balanced" designs when they could even in the Intel Era, but I think that would be pretty neat if they did.
Don't get me wrong, I understand ... but I still find it annoying - and actually I have seen even members of the tech press, who should know better, get convinced by these things - even the Intel slides I mentioned from the M1 launch which were palpably desperate and much worse than this which is run-of-the-mill by comparison. In fact just watched a little bit of Techlinked LTT where I'm pretty sure they confused MS claim of better peak and sustained MT performance with better ST and MT performance and that's not even MS' fault, strictly speaking.
No need to defend them. It was not an attack but merely an observation - I would argue a surprising one since especially in the PC market gaming laptops occupy such an outsized portion mindshare (especially online) that I would've thought they would've been a priority. So I'd say there could be a demand here, gotta have a product though to test that! Of course ... depending on who indeed is doing the integrating with the Snapdragon SOC and the dGPU, their options for dGPUs are AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all of whom have a vested interest in not cooperating with Qualcomm here ... so maybe it's a little less surprising on second thought. Then again, we've seen much worse "tech enemies" cooperate on deals like this, so if an OEM wants it, I think it could happen.
Note I'd prefer them tackle the gaming segment with a more powerful GPU in their APU, but since that isn't going to happen this first generation, it's still a good idea to get their foot into the door of that market ...
That was always exactly the point.
Windows market sweet spot is more MT than the MacBook Air. Apple will give you more MT albeit with a 192/256-bit bus and then a 512-bit bus, and same with more than 24GB of RAM, but that’s not really targeting mass market as most even power users don’t need the fat GPU, the base models already have massive GPUs by even 2018 gaming standards.
Right. I’m just saying it wasn’t dishonest. They can’t force AMD or Nvidia to build dGPUs and Arm drivers. And then what — then you still have to port games. So it’s really not surprising. I feel like a lot of the stuff people find surprising about this announcement is based on warped expectations.
RE: Leman and patents, lol, Maynard has really spread the “look at these patents” stuff throughout the community like wildfire. The patents I wouldn’t pay much attention to. Apple might do tiles eventually because it makes sense economically and the packaging becomes low power enough. They use commercial off the shelf packaging for the M2 Ultra or whatever. Focus on TSMC to see that stuff.
Lunar Lake fwiw is not like Arrow Lake. It’s just two tiles. They simplified vs MTL and Arrow Lake.
Panther Lake = adopting more of a Lunar Lake structure, with two tiles: SoC/IO/CPU and then the GPU.
So they actually went too far and then went back on it lol
Lunar Lake fwiw is not like Arrow Lake. It’s just two tiles. They simplified vs MTL and Arrow Lake.
Panther Lake = adopting more of a Lunar Lake structure, with two tiles: SoC/IO/CPU and then the GPU.
So they actually went too far and then went back on it lol
@dada_dave yeah developer machines is exactly the case I think the X stuff will excel provided stuff gets ported. That or “Creator” machines
leman
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Why not? The patents so far have been great indicators of upcoming CPU and GPU features. We knew details about raytracing, GPU dual-issue, dynamic caching, new branch predictors etc. months before the chips themselves were available. I do agree that their packaging tech patents are much more general.
They won’t do tiles, they will jump straight to 3D packaging. I mean, they’ve been doing tiles for years.
There is some evidence that Apple helps co-developing some of this tech.
I wasn't accusing them of being dishonest about dGPUs ... there's no need to be preemptively defensive. Edit: I guess if I reread my original post I can see how you thought it might've been an attack, but it wasn't. It was just something that I thought was interesting. Literally. That's it.
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