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Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

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Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#471

Post by mschuster91 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #347
mschuster91 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. The original article is gone, however there is the key excerpt in an old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532257 Apple, unlike a lot, if not all large companies (who are run by MBA beancounter morons), holds insanely large amounts of cash. That is how they can go and buy up entire markets of vendors - CNC mills, TSMC's entire production capacity for a year or two, specialized drills, god knows w…

Some of the other big tech companies have or are able to have just as much, if not more cash, than Apple: https://www.capitaladvisors.com/research/war-chest-exploring... They just don’t want to bet they can deploy it successfully in the hardware market to compete with Apple, so they focus on other things (cloud services, ads, media, etc).

Google is not a hardware company (outside of the Pixel lineup where they just take some white-label ODM design).

Microsoft has a bit more hardware sales exposure from its consoles, but not for PCs. They don't have a need for revolutionary "it looks cool" stuff that Apple has.

Amazon, same thing. They brand their own products as the cheap baseline, again no need.

And Meta, all they do is VR stuff. And they did invest(ed?) tons of money into that.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#472

Post by commakozzi »

devjab wrote: post #304
fafhnir wrote: post #201

I have the same experience here with my MacBook Air M1 from 2020 with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. After three years, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro, 36GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. I use this as my main machine with 2 displays attached via a TB4 dock. I'm working in IT and I get all new machines for our company over my desk to check them, and I observed the exact same points as the OP. The new machines are eith…

I'm still using my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb of Ram as my personal workhorse. It runs docker desktop and VSC better than my T14 whatever windows machine with 32gb ram. But that is windows and it has a bunch of enterprise stuff running. I assume it would work better with Linux, or even windows without whatever our IT does to control it. With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any…

I'm using Geforce Now on my M1 Air and it's wonderful. Yeah, i'll play competitive multiplayer on dedicated hardware (primarily Xbox Series X because i refuse to own a Windows machine and i'm too lazy for Linux right now -- also, i'm hoping against hope for a real Steam console), but Geforce Now has been wonderful for other things, survival, crafting, MMO, single player RPGs, Cyberpunk, Battlefield, pretty much anything you can deal with a few milliseconds of input latency. To be honest, what they're doing here is wizardry to my dumb brain. The additional latency, to me, just feels like the amount of latency you will get from a controller on an Xbox. However, if you play something that requires very quick input (competitive FPS, for example) AND you're connected to servers through the game with anywhere from 5ms to 100ms+ latency (playing on EU servers, for example), that added latency just becomes too much. I'll say this though: I've played Warzone solo on Geforce Now, connected to a local server with no more than 5ms latency via that connection, and it felt pretty decent. Definitely playable, and i think i got 2nd or 1st in a few of those games, but as soon as it gets over like 15-20ms, you're cooked.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#473

Post by yusefnapora »

noisy_boy wrote: post #456

To those who are using the newer MacBook pros, how easy and seamless it is to run Linux on it via Parallels etc without going all the way to Asahi etc? Like if i'm super comfortable with Linux, can I just get near native Linux desktop experience and forget that all of it is running on top of MacOS?

Parallels is quite good - I can watch 4K YouTube videos at 60fps with no noticeable frame drops on an M1 Pro, and general desktop animations, etc. are fine. That said, I do occasionally get rendering glitches, usually in Firefox where a small rectangular portion of the screen will briefly flash black while scrolling quickly through a page.

The biggest quality of life issue for me personally is the trackpad. Although support for gestures and so on has gotten quite decent in Linux land, Parallels only sends the VM scroll wheel events, so there's no way to have smooth scrolling and swipe gestures inside the VM, so it feels much worse than native macOS or Asahi Linux running on the bare metal.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#474

Post by gigatexal »

aurareturn wrote: post #168
gigatexal wrote: post #81

I think the Ryzen ai max 395+ gets really close in terms of performance per watt.

It isn't. https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF In single threaded CPU performance, M4 Pro is roughly 3.6x more efficient while also being 50% faster.

Then the m5 is going to be even more of a beast.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#475

Post by veidr »

I don't give any fucks about battery life or even total power consumption cost; I just hate that I have some crap-ass Apple mid-range (for them) laptop with only 36GB RAM and an "M4 Max" CPU, and it runs rings around my 350W Core i9-14900K desktop Linux workstation, and there is essentially no way I can develop software (Rust, web apps, multi-container Docker crap) on Linux with anything close to the performance of my shitty laptop computer, even if I spend $10,000.

That's actually wild. I think we're in a kind of unique moment, but one that is good for Apple mainly, because their OS is so developer-hostile that I pay back all the performance gains with interest. T_T

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#476

Post by lotsofpulp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #471
lotsofpulp wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the other big tech companies have or are able to have just as much, if not more cash, than Apple: https://www.capitaladvisors.com/research/war-chest-exploring... They just don’t want to bet they can deploy it successfully in the hardware market to compete with Apple, so they focus on other things (cloud services, ads, media, etc).

Google is not a hardware company (outside of the Pixel lineup where they just take some white-label ODM design). Microsoft has a bit more hardware sales exposure from its consoles, but not for PCs. They don't have a need for revolutionary "it looks cool" stuff that Apple has. Amazon, same thing. They brand their own products as the cheap baseline, again no need. And Meta, all they do is VR stuff. And they did invest(…

The point is they have enough cash to make an attempt to be whatever company they want. Apple chose to delve into hardware, the others chose not to, not because they don’t have the cash.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#477

Post by hajile »

Remnant44 wrote: post #131
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is the uOp trace cache free? It surely doesn’t magically decode and put stuff in there without cost

For sure.. for what it's worth though, I have run across several references to arm also implementing uop caches as a power optimization versus just running the decoders, so I'm inclined to say that whatever it's cost it pays for itself. I am not a chip designer though!

Apple never used a uop cache in their designs. ARM dropped uop caches when they removed 32-bit support. Qualcomm also skipped uop cache.

uop made sense with 32-bit support because the 32-bit ISA was so complex (though still simple compared to x86). Once they went to a simplified instruction design, the cost to decode every single time was lower than the cost of maintaining the uop cache.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#478

Post by commakozzi »

alt227 wrote: post #358
lokar wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a bit unfair to say apple threw out backwards compatibility. Each time they had a pretty good emulation story to keep most stuff (certainly popular stuff) working through a multi-year transition period. IMO, this is better then carrying around 40 years of cruft.

Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further. This in turn means you cannot install new software as the applications themselves require the newer versions of the OS. It has been this way on apple hardware for decades, and has laid the foundation of not ever needing to provide backwards compatibility for more than a few years as well as forcing new har…

> Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further

"oh a post about Apple, let me come in and share my hatred for Apple again by outright lying!"

As stated already, macOS 26 runs on the M1 and even the 2019 Macbook Pro. So i think i know where you got the "3 new versions" figure, and it's a dark and smelly place.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#480

Post by kwimajs »

veidr wrote: post #475

I don't give any fucks about battery life or even total power consumption cost; I just hate that I have some crap-ass Apple mid-range (for them) laptop with only 36GB RAM and an "M4 Max" CPU, and it runs rings around my 350W Core i9-14900K desktop Linux workstation, and there is essentially no way I can develop software (Rust, web apps, multi-container Docker crap) on Linux with anything close to the performance of m…

To be honest, I haven't done any research on this, but it's something that crosses my mind from time to time. My laptop has 32 GB of RAM and an i7-14700H processor, with Linux Mint installed. I'm more than happy with its performance, especially considering I bought it for a price that was very cheap for the market.

I wonder what specs a MacBook would need to give me similar performance. For example, on Linux with 32 GB of RAM, I can sometimes have 4 or 5 instances of WebStorm open and forget about them running in the background. Could a MacBook with 16 GB of RAM handle that? Similarly, which MacBook processor would give me the real-world, daily-use performance I get from my 14700H? Should I continue using cheap and powerful Windows/Linux laptops in the future, or should I make the switch to a MacBook?

(Translated from my native language to English using Gemini.)

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