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Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

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Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#251

Post by sixothree »

jsgo wrote: post #138
socialdemocrat wrote: post #68

The truth is somewhere in the middle, so while this article has some good points it is too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking. I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan ho…

Hope so, but Apple implemented the wholesale Metal Only (not Metal Only unless you run a command in terminal) update which killed off using Nvidia cards for those of us who bought MBPs for eGPUing Nvidia cards. Considering Apple hardware doesn’t have a Nvidia option and people like me are probably niche to bring their own GPU (even though CUDA exists), it’d be highly unrealistic to think that Nvidia would rewrite the…

Isn't it still an open question as to whether M1 Macs will support discrete graphics cards at all?

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#252

Post by throwaway129013 »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #68

The truth is somewhere in the middle, so while this article has some good points it is too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking. I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan ho…

> too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking

> It is a bit too conspiratorial to think Apple control is all about some dictatorship fetish

So much for "Hacker" News.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#253

Post by 2wrist »

valuearb wrote: post #202
dhruvmittal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly naive question but does anyone know if CUDA is supported on the new M1 macs? I think I heard on a podcast last week that eGPUs would no longer be supported, but I can't find a reference.

EGPUs aren’t supported for the M1, but Big Sur still identifies and connects to them, implying Apple may restore this feature in the future.

I saw this mentioned recently that they are just missing drivers. Which this being ealy days for Apple Silicon makes sense.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#254

Post by throwaway129013 »

cinbun8 wrote: post #20

I don't understand why exerting better control over hardware + software would mean we are being duped. A more cohesive experience provided by Apple can only be a win for them and their customers.

> I don't understand why exerting better control over hardware + software would mean we are being duped

So much for "Hacker" news.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#256

Post by spijdar »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #233
rsynnott wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in any case there's no reason they couldn't do that on Intel if they wanted to. IIRC there was some Windows variant back in the day that did this on Intel. Windows 10S, possibly?

They couldn't do that on intel because if they made it too draconian people would just install windows. Now people are locked in tight.

Intel Macs have never had typical BIOSes or standards compliant UEFI, to say nothing of their device drivers.

Without Apple providing a HAL FLL for the windows executive and device drivers along with a special bootloader shim (the marketing guys call this package "Bootcamp"), Windows would not work on Intel Macs. Microsoft or some third party would have to reverse engineer the device drivers, and they're definitely not making that investment.

Not to mention more basically that Apple has to sign the NT kernel for it to load on Macs without disabling the equivalent of SecureBoot.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#257

Post by bfgoodrich »

Tade0 wrote: post #226
bfgoodrich wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power-sipping, integrated GPU has performance 30% better than a GTX 1050 Ti [1]. The GTX 1050 Ti is still a current, sold product [2], selling for $150 or so USD [3], and consumes about 75-100W in your PC. We can no true Scotsman this, but that GPU performance is a literal magnitude+ greater than what the majority of users have in their computers (and I am including full desktops in this discussion). The overwhel…

The 2080 Max-Q in my laptop is fairly underpowered (even for a mobile GPU) and yet it achieves ~3x the performance of the GTX 1050 Ti. Also its TDP is 90W - not exactly power sipping, but also not 300W. The M1's GPU may be efficient (thanks mostly to TSMC's 5nm process it's built in), but in terms of raw power it's just not there.

"The 2080 Max-Q in my laptop is fairly underpowered"

The 2080 Max-Q only exists in ~$3000 gaming laptops. Poor battery life, 4lb+ laptops. There is no universe where that is "fairly underpowered" unless we've moved the goal posts to pretend that everyone is rolling with a GTX 3080 and anything less is unbearable. In the real world you have to go to the seriously compromised "gaming" tier to get better graphics performance.

"but in terms of raw power it's just not there"

That depends upon what we define as the destination. It in no way competes with dedicated gaming rigs, as I made clear. Not by a huge margin. It isn't going to be something a guy reviewing 300W, $1000 GPUs will care about. That isn't the target market.

But the vast majority of people don't having those gaming rigs. Laptops that have better GPUs are a _tiny_, minuscule component of the market. And if you actually use those dedicated GPUs, you'd better be plugged in.

So when we talk about "gaming" we get into a No True Scotsman thing (to repeat myself) where it isn't gaming unless it's someone playing Warzone at 120Hz at 4K. But a pretty heady number of users are doing things like Civilization, The Sims, Roblox, Minecraft, and similar gaming. The M1 can host that style of gaming with ease.

"thanks mostly to TSMC's 5nm process"

It's kind of interesting that we're at this point. Apple has made a pretty capable GPU, stellar CPU cores, stellar inference cores, among other remarkable hardware. It was pretty stellar at 7nm too. It's all being dismissed as the 5nm advantage. I don't think it's remotely so simple.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#258

Post by barnacled »

This is obviously about control.

Apple's MO with every _smaller_ supplier has been:

1. Set up office down the road 2. Poach top engineers 3. Come up with some excuse to cancel use of supplier and integrate in house.

The media and fanboys are remarkably complicit, coming up with excuses for apple's behaviour and giving very favourable coverage.

In this case, intel are too big for this trick to work and apple already have loads of ARM talent so it makes perfect sense to transition.

I wouldn't rule out apple trying on the whole 'we don't need a license' thing any more with Nvidia but it's probably unlikely given their size.

I worked at imagination technologies who was bankrupted by Apple doing this technique and whose GPUs are still used by them so I saw this and people's remarkable lack of attention on the incredibly consistent pattern of control first hand.

While all of this is obviously true, I actually think it's great that intel and AMD are receiving some serious ISA competition and it will net benefit non-apple consumers too long run.

Congrats to apple for pretty impressive technical work but I do wish more would see apple for the ruthless control freaks they are.

At the end of the day I think rather mundanely it's really more about money than anything else.

Re: Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

#259

Post by efficax »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #107

Yes Apple is about platform control and monetization, and they're pretty good at it. They want you to buy-in into their ecosystem and stay loyal; even developers of iOS and Mac OS apps have to open Apple dev accounts (and the process of rolling out an app on the App Store is ... byzantine). They keep off copycat and privacy-invading apps that way, and their customers love that aspect of their platform (I even use a c…

> I don't consider MBPs as "professional" devices due to lack of options

Counterpoint is the 10s of thousands of "professionals" (like me, senior software engineer at a Company You Know) who use them....

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