41–50 of 640 posts
I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up up…
I may be out of date or wrong, but I recall when the M1 came out there was some claims that x86 could never catch up, because there is an instruction decoding bottleneck (instructions are all variable size), which the M1 does not have, or can do in parallel. Because of that bottleneck x86 needs to use other tricks to get speed and those run hot.
ARM has better /security/ though - not only does it have more modern features but eg variable length instructions also mean you can reinterpret them by jumping into the middle of one.
M1’s efficiency/thermals performance comes from having hardware-accelerated core system libraries. Imagine that you made an FPGA do x86 work, and then you wanted to optimize libopenssl, or libgl, or libc. Would you restrict yourself to only modifying the source code of the libraries but not the FPGA, or would you modify the processor to take advantage of new capabilities? For made-up example, when the iPhone 27 comes…
This isn't really true. Linux doesn't use any magic accelerators yet it runs very fast on Apple Silicon. It's just the best processor.
The GPU is significantly different from other desktop GPUs but it's in principle like other mobile GPUs, so not sure how much better Linux could be adapted there.
RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast? ARM is great. Those M are the only thing I could buy used and put Linux on it.
I thought people stopped believing this around 2005 when Apple users finally had to admit that PPC was behind x86. Even though this was the case for the most part during the entire history of PPC Macs (I owned two during these years) https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
M1’s efficiency/thermals performance comes from having hardware-accelerated core system libraries. Imagine that you made an FPGA do x86 work, and then you wanted to optimize libopenssl, or libgl, or libc. Would you restrict yourself to only modifying the source code of the libraries but not the FPGA, or would you modify the processor to take advantage of new capabilities? For made-up example, when the iPhone 27 comes…
I think this is partially down to Framework being a very small and new company that doesn't have the resources to make the best use of every last coulomb, rather than an inherent deficiency of x86. The larger companies like Asus and Lenovo are able to build more efficient laptops (at least under Windows), while Apple (having very few product SKUs and full vertical integration) can push things even further. notebookch…
Framework is a bit behind the others in terms of cooling, apparently due to compromises needed to achieve modularity. However, a well-tuned Ryzen U in the latest ThinkPads is not that far from M chips in terms of computing power per Watt according to some benchmarks. Most Linux distributions are not well tuned, because this is too device-specific. Spending a few minutes writing custom udev rules, with the aid of powe…
However, with AMD Strix Halo aka AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (PRO) there are Notebooks like the ZBook Ultra G1a and Tablets like the Asus ROG Flow Z13, that come close to the MacBook power / performance ratio[2] due to the fact, that they used high bandwidth soldered on memory, which allows for GPUs with shared VRAM similar to Apple's strategy.
Framework did not manage to put this thing in notebook yet, but shipped a Desktop variant. They also pointed out, that there was no way to use LPCAMM2 or any other modular RAM tech with that machine, because it would have slowed it down / increased latencies to an unusable state.
So I'm pretty sure the main reason for Apple's success is the deeply integrated architecture and I'm hopeful that AMD's next generation STRIX Halo APUs might provide this with higher efficiency and hopefully Framework adapts these chips in their notebooks. Maybe they just did in the 16?! Let's wait for this announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZRG7Og61mw
Regarding the deeply thought through integration there is a story I often tell: Apple used to make iPods. These had support for audio playback control with their headphone remotes (e.g. EarPods), which are still available today. These had a proprietary ultra sonic chirp protocol[3] to identify Apple devices and supported volume control and complex playback control actions. You could even navigate through menus via voiceover with longpress and then using the volume buttons to navigate. Until today with their USB-C-to-AudioJack Adapters these still work on nearly every apple device published after 2013 and the wireless earbuds also support parts of this. Android has tried to copy this tiny little engineering wonder, but until today they did not manage to get it working[4]. They instead focus on their proprietary "longpress" should work in our favour and start "hey google" thing, which is ridiculously hard to intercept / override in officially published Android apps... what a shame ;)
1: https://youtu.be/51W0eq7-xrY?t=773
2: https://youtu.be/oyrAur5yYrA
I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up up…
5 hours seems a lot worse than the ~10 hours I get on my M4 Air.
Is that your metric of performance? If so...
$ sudo cpufreq-set -u 50MHz
Here's a video about it. Skip to 4:55 for battery life benchmarks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymoiWv9BF7Q