M1 Apple Silicon for Chess?

[AlexChess]

Yes, also Parallels could be the cause.

[Ckappe]

I have no idea. Then again, I wouldn't recommend a laptop that has the flash storage soldered instead of using a proper M.2 socket. The main reason why Apple doesn't use M.2 is so that they can shut out market competition and demand insane prices. For changing from 512 GB to 2 TB flash, Apple charges 690 EUR. A Samsung Evo 970 Evo Plus with 2 TB (M.2 NVMe fast SSD) is technically on a par, but costs only 290 EUR.

Also, I suspect their reason is to shut out 3rd party service/support in general, to better control all customer interaction. Another ulterior motive may be as a "nudge" to its consumers (especially corporations using apple products) to promote a faster upgrade cycle (ie increase new-sales revenue, and hw subscription plans).

[Milos]

But also the system until now has been on day and night to play my Arena engine tournament...

Good consumer SSDs with 500 GB allow about 300 TBW (terabyte written).

600 P&E cycles for QLC??? I'd say you are clueless about real life performance of modern NAND Flash. That kind of performance is not possible even with the best TLC consumer NAND flash (that's pretty much an enterprise territory). And please don't quote me BS PR specs of companies that assemble them.
I do test all of them on a daily basis directly from manufacturers (there are 4 of them in total in the world Samsung, Micron, Toshiba and SK Hynix) and I know what I'm talking about.

[AlexChess]

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 35 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 16%
Data Units Read: 429. 154. 771 [219 TB]
Data Units Written: 488. 723. 529 [250 TB]
Host Read Commands: 2. 057. 733. 232
Host Write Commands: 1. 228. 381. 471
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 124
Power On Hours: 773
Unsafe Shutdowns: 18
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0

Read 1 entries from Error Information Log failed: GetLogPage failed: system=0x38, sub=0x0, code=745

Aren't this data crazy? 250 TB Its an a 256 GB SSD...

[towforce]

I have nothing against M1 as such if it was open and not tied to Apple's locked proprietary DRM-control, locked bios, AIO "appliances". it would be a more valid option.

I agree: I wouldn't actually buy a device that's got one in, because I don't want to move my life into AppleWorld: just saying that IMO it's a truly stunning SOC for a mobile device by today's standards, and the team that built it deserve kudos.

This said the 39W TDP and performance/power ratios do not appear to be significantly ahead of other more low-powered mobile 5nm ARMs like Snapdragon, Kirin, Exynos, etc. in the perf/power ratio aspect (not even that much ahead of AMD's 7nm CPU it seems in real-life testing), hence their massive marketing bandwagon pushes out endless of comparisons against only older-gen Intel x86 CPUs, online.

The main problem with M1 today is the performance/price ratio, external I/O, and the lack of GPU/AI processing matching the price-tag if I see this from a chess-perspective.

I also think more laptop/phone/tablet makers of both ARM CPUs and x86-CPUs will follow suit and include on-chip RAM. I would also assume Apple as well as others will need much more than the limiting 16GB on-chip as long as external/extended RAM is not accessible from CPU.

Again, I agree.

I am not that fond of combining too much on the SOCs, I think RAM and GPU make sense but not really at the expense of the ability to access RAM and GPU externally as well.

SOCs are a good idea IMO: they're cheap, the components are close together increasing speed, and a lot of them are seriously light on power consumption. Some of them can also do a lot of processing very quickly. I think an SOC could be a very good idea for a Chromebook, for example, and happily be able to do YouTube, GM level chess, amateur video editing etc.

I am even more against soldering wear-and-tear parts like SSDs etc to motherboards in laptops. In essence, this leads to throw-away products with an OS-controlled planned obsolesce scheme that I am not too fond of. And when people report that the OS overuses the soldered SSDs the lifespan of these "netbooks" looks questionable, indeed.

Again, I agree - somebody needs to explain why Apple made that choice. So with a small number of caveats, I think a good SOC could well be a good choice for a light laptop, but their are cases where it wouldn't be the best choice right now.

[Ras]

600 P&E cycles for QLC??? I'd say you are clueless about real life performance of modern NAND Flash.

That's what Samsung offers as warranty. They also have quite some over-provisioning because what's sold isn't 512 GB, but 500 GB in the small model, and one GB is counted as 1,000,000,000 bytes. The catch however is that the warranty is 5 years or 300 TBW, whatever is reached first. That means you'd have to write 164 GB per day on average to reach the 300 TBW within 5 years, and that's far from what the average user will have.

[Ckappe]

SOCs are a good idea IMO: they're cheap, the components are close together increasing speed, and a lot of them are seriously light on power consumption. Some of them can also do a lot of processing very quickly. I think an SOC could be a very good idea for a Chromebook, for example, and happily be able to do YouTube, GM level chess, amateur video editing etc.

Totally in agreement, I hope that some chip-makers will go for the best of both worlds (kind of what we see with combining on SOC GPU with external in many laptops today). SOCs that can act stand-alone in a netbook, tablets type devices, but also be flexible enough to provide both on-chip ddr and memory controller for DDR4/5/6 and PCIe-4/5 for flexible configurations.

[AlexChess]

600 P&E cycles for QLC??? I'd say you are clueless about real life performance of modern NAND Flash.

That's what Samsung offers as warranty. They also have quite some over-provisioning because what's sold isn't 512 GB, but 500 GB in the small model, and one GB is counted as 1,000,000,000 bytes. The catch however is that the warranty is 5 years or 300 TBW, whatever is reached first. That means you'd have to write 164 GB per day on average to reach the 300 TBW within 5 years, and that's far from what the average user will have.

But my results couldn't be true... 250 TB in less than 90 days = 3 Tb of SSD writing every day On a 256 gb SSD... almost only playng Arena Chess

alex@Mac-mini-M1 ~ % brew install smartmontools && sudo smartctl --all /dev/disk0

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 35 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 16%
Data Units Read: 429. 154. 771 [219 TB]
Data Units Written: 488. 723. 529 [250 TB]
Host Read Commands: 2. 057. 733. 232
Host Write Commands: 1. 228. 381. 471
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 124
Power On Hours: 773
Unsafe Shutdowns: 18
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0

Read 1 entries from Error Information Log failed: GetLogPage failed: system=0x38, sub=0x0, code=745

[Ckappe]

600 P&E cycles for QLC??? I'd say you are clueless about real life performance of modern NAND Flash.

That's what Samsung offers as warranty. They also have quite some over-provisioning because what's sold isn't 512 GB, but 500 GB in the small model, and one GB is counted as 1,000,000,000 bytes. The catch however is that the warranty is 5 years or 300 TBW, whatever is reached first. That means you'd have to write 164 GB per day on average to reach the 300 TBW within 5 years, and that's far from what the average user will have.

200GB I/O per day (or 3TB as Alexchess) in practice is probably not unthinkable at all. Depending on use and how SW behaves I could easily see this happen (or more) if your OS swaps RAM in and out a lot from memory, writes system memory to SSD when you put the computer to sleep/hibernation multiple times a day. Streaming. media and caching web content, apps that use caching and virtual storage, cloud-sync, etc.

As far as I know, Apple does not use the Samsungs you refer to as well in their M1s. Rumor has it that the soldered SSDs are TLC NAND from Western Digital, so real TBW is an unknown really (i would seriously doubt it is over half of what you quote).. (BTW this is also an additional problem with Apple's "un"-openness by not clearly specify components and warranty details, to their customers!!)

[Ras]

200GB I/O per day (or 3TB as Alexchess) in practice is probably not unthinkable at all. Depending on use and how SW behaves I could easily see this happen (or more) if your OS swaps RAM in and out a lot from memory

If the machine is constantly swapping, it's either because the machine is loaded with applications that are too demanding WRT to how much RAM is there, but that should be noticeable with lagging. Or it's because the OS is misconfigured and swaps for the lulz when it shouldn't.

writes system memory to SSD when you put the computer to sleep/hibernation multiple times a day.

Suspend to disk isn't really that useful anymore, given the short boot times. Especially not when the RAM itself is already LP-DDR anyway. But yeah, such abuse could also be a reason, but since Arena won't run in hibernate, I don't think that this is the issue here.

Streaming. media and caching web content, apps that use caching and virtual storage, cloud-sync, etc.

No way this would be 164 GB every day. It's a laptop, not a server.

As far as I know, Apple does not use the Samsungs you refer to as well in their M1s.

Apple is charging three times (!) of what Samsung does, so Apple's stuff better be at least on a par with Samsung.