Mac Studio Teardown Reveals Huge M1 Ultra Chip That Dwarfs AMD Ryzen CPU in Size

[Zarathustra]

M1 Ultra is around 860mm2, Epyc/TR package comes in at just over 1,000mm2, so it is a bit larger.

Not to mention, EPYC/TR does not have a GPU, and has much less other stuff in there compared to the M1.

 

[Zarathustra]

To be honest I don’t know if M1 has hardware level virtualization support (like the VT-d or AMD-V extensions). You would imagine it would at least for security sandboxing, but Apple doesn’t do a whole lot of first party virtualization - and if they don’t need it they aren’t going to fool with adding it.

I know hypervisors can work without it, and at least one third party hypervisor does exist on M1, I just don’t know if there are various degrades in performance associated with it.

On the plus side - apparently you can virtualize most ARM distros

Is it possible to do a bare metal non MacOS install on an M1 like with x86 Macs or do they have that locked down?

Would be interesting to run an ARM Linux build and use that as a basis for virtualization using KVM.

 

[Brian_B]

Is it possible to do a bare metal non MacOS install on an M1 like with x86 Macs or do they have that locked down?

Would be interesting to run an ARM Linux build and use that as a basis for virtualization using KVM.

The phoronix link shows the first bare metal Linux distro

 

[Zarathustra]

The phoronix link shows the first bare metal Linux distro

My bad, I didn't see a Phoronix article linked.

I was thinking it could be cool to run a native ARM Linux build as a kind of KVM/ESXi hypervisor, and pass through the GPU to a MacOS guest, running other linux guests in the background in headless mode, controlled via SSH or some sort of screen sharing tool, like X2GO.

This is chanllenging to do even with PC desktop parts though, so I am going to go out on a limb and guess that this will not work on any M1 macs, as Apple tries to have pretty strict control over the user experience.