$100 off already at CM, rumors are that discount will reach $200 around March time

Apple 13.3" MacBook Air M1 Chip with Retina Display, $899

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1604825-REG/apple_mgn63ll_a_13_3_macbook_air_with.html

APPLE MACBOOK PRO 13 WITH M1, $1199

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1604809-REG/apple_myd82ll_a_13_3_macbook_pro_with.html

I'm still confused at why blazing fast video editing capabilities for relatively cheap prices is such a bad thing?

The answer to these (valid) concerns is NextCloud (on your premises even), and treating the Mac like a knife, for video cutting only.

QNAP comes with an app/service called HybridCloud, I'll start exploring it as I have one of their entry level NAS.

NextCloud is open source. If one is determined enough one can build it from source and run it on their own servers, with Elbrus CPUs. Good enough for you?

@Vitaliy_Kiselev then you're not understanding what NextCloud provides. Conditional on one's IT proficiency, you have the option to run your own and have the same functionality as Google's cloud, under your own domain. It's work, but you have full control over the data. This is one extreme. It can be hooked into the /e/ OS (the de-googled Android) instead of the Google account.

If you just want to escape iCloud or Google Cloud data mining, then select one of the SaaS providers from here https://nextcloud.com/signup/ , which provide service in exchange for money, not free service in exchange for your data privacy. Authorities can still get your data with an injunction, but at least your data isn't mined and tracked.

@radikalfilm

I don't need my own cloud, as much simpler solutions exist for backup and sync of files at one server. And if I have my own server - the simple the solution - the more safe are my data. Whole thing of cloud is ability to store stuff at large amount of servers in distributed way.

Not free service in exchange for your data privacy. Authorities can still get your data with an injunction, but at least your data isn't mined and tracked.

And still any of this guys can index your data, sell it for NN training and do any stuff they want.

@radikalfilm

NextCloud isn't just remote data storage. That's like saying a house is its foundation. It has email, Office suite, (video) conferencing, text chat, everything the Google cloud or Office365 offers to users.

I don't need any of that.

The point of a cloud is to access computing services remotely, not remote data backup. Remote data backup has existed for 20 years, way before anyone's cloud.

Clouds started as way to store data reliably, and no, remote backup that had distributed data among centers located in different places all around the world with complex algorithm to have redundancy and so on was not present 20 years ago on the market.

After this fast it became a way for corporation to reduce expenses on infrastructure, hence providing instances.

All else just followed on third step as way to increase income from already existing infrastructure.

I suggest QNAP's HybridCloud, a free service on the QNAP OS. You keep the data on a QNAP NAS on your premises/home, and access it from anywhere (icluding mobile) through an account at qnapcloud.com. There is some setup involved, but doesn't require massive IT skills. It's analogous with Microsoft and Google Drive, a live filesystem you can mount.

And one nice day QNAP will be bough, in months time your remote access will cease to work and at one year time all OS patching and further development will stop. Thanks.

Btw, same is true for all but few top Linux and BSD distributives.

@radikalfilm

My point is that I am sure you propose superb products.

But I play Devil's Advocate role here going little extreme in responses, but still reasonable.

@miko

Make sure to provide some summary to the links, do not post link alone.

One important moment that author lost is that RISC architectures always had their bright moments and after this fade again into oblivion (and mobile space).

For stationary powerful computer it is ALWAYS preferable to have CISC architecture.
Reason being that with same processor cache and same memory throughput you will always get more done on CISC machine (as size of overall instructions is smaller). In exchange you essentially have translator inside CPU, so it is less energy efficient.

x86 lead originate also from very slow memory speed progress.

Note how Apple uses fastest widely available DDR4L memory (memory in most Windows laptops is much slower, 1.77x times slower, for top gaming and performance notes it is also 30% difference). If they had cheap 2400Mhz chips the M1 performance had been much worse. The hit will be much larger compared to x86 chips.

Apple also seems to have quite big cache that is also shared between CPU and GPU ( benchmarks properly optimized by Apple will hide this). Having exclusive access to 5nm process they could do it.

Apple also specially optimize both software and all leading benchmarks to have as much as possible inside cache, and also have as small and as efficient code as possible where it is important. They have huge money for this, rumors are that M1 total development cost is less than 10% compared to money they spent on optimizing and adapting software and paying to third party developers.

This is where we finally see the revenge of RISC, and where the fact that the M1 Firestorm core has an ARM RISC architecture begins to matter.

You see, for x86 an instruction can be anywhere from 1–15 bytes long. On a RISC chip instructions are fixed size. Why is that relevant in this case?

Because splitting up a stream of bytes into instructions to feed into 8 different decoders in parallel becomes trivial if every instruction has the same length.

However on an x86 CPU the decoders have no clue where the next instruction starts. It has to actually analyze each instruction in order to see how long it is.

The brute force way Intel and AMD deal with this is by simply attempting to decode instructions at every possible starting points. That means we have to deal with lots of wrong guesses and mistakes which has to be discarded. This creates such a convoluted and complicated decoder stage, that it is really hard to add more decoders. But for Apple it is trivial in comparison to keep adding more.

In fact adding more causes so many other problems that 4 decoders according to AMD itself is basically an upper limit for how far they can go.

This is what allows the M1 Firestorm cores to essentially process twice as many instructions as AMD and Intel CPUs at the same clock frequency.

This part is some mangled mess, as first he correctly said that ARM instructions are usually shorter, but thing is that to do same real operations total instructions number and total length of them will be MORE. Btw ARM instructions are generally not fixed length is you take all extra stuff, DSP and so on. ARM is also very complex.

Complex decoders are not a unsolvable problem. And note that x86 CPUs are also very smart and complex, for example CPU can cache the instruction length for code he recently saw.

We had similar period in 90s and early 2000s (remember PowerPC and stuff), where all presstitutes published countless articles on how x86 is dead and how RISC is total future for everything. But time proved them wrong.

Guy also do not understand that M1 is made using most expensive and most advanced available tech, tech that US even want to fight for using military forces and that they prohibited openly to use to Huawei. It is also must be noted that Apple M1 is made using low power version of TSMC 5nm, so it does not scale at all. M1 is operating on absolute top margin of transistors stability. Contrary to x86 product that will follow.

As soon as Apple will try to move to 5nm high performance version (it does not exist for now in mass production version) the energy efficiency for same performance will instantly drop 30-45%.