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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#41

Post by bound008 »

neilpanchal wrote: post #4

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is. Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a m…

I've had "reduce motion" turned off on my iOS devices since it was an options... The animations in the latest Messages.app have been driving me crazy, but sure enough "Reduce Motion" is available in the `Accessibility` preference panel under display.

FWIW, I am blown away by my M1 Mac, but my x86 Mac feels about 5-10% snappier on Big Sur.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#42

Post by fsflover »

azangru wrote: post #28
jrm4 wrote: post #6

At the risk of being that (Linux) guy -- What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software? If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff d…

Another linux guy here, on the market for a new linux laptop. After reading the article, which linux-compatible laptops, would you say, come the closest to compete with the new generation of Apple products? Long battery life, plenty of power, good screen, good speakers? Is it the inevitable Dell XPS 13 and Thinkpad X1 Carbon, or are there any other darlings among the linux community?

It's not as good as Apple yet, but getting there IMO: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#43

Post by LaGrange »

saagarjha wrote: post #23
berkut wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to something like Android, sure, I get that, but compared to ObjectiveC/Swift on x86 (which I think was being argued - i.e. against the Intel Macs)? I guess it makes reference counting in general more efficient, I'm just saying I don't see why that would mean Apple Silicon Macs running ObjectC/Swift code would have less memory usage than the same code compiled and running on x86.

I'm not necessarily convinced by the posted argument. That being said, I tend to think that people running a bunch of VMs and Electron apps and Docker cause them to use a bunch more RAM than I would consider to be "reasonable", and they've lost sight of how much you can do in a lesser amount of memory. (Typing this from a computer with 8 GB of RAM, which I have repeatedly been told is "below adequate" for development…

The problem is, by now development practices in many companies effectively force using multiple large containers. I know an x stack could use 4x less memory if I spent considerable time on ripping out unnecessary cruft, but few people in the company would agree that it's time well spent, and the home office allowance suffices for a machine with 32-64Gb RAM (especially in 2020, when I don't really see that much value in laptops for dev work anymore).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#44

Post by lisper »

brundolf wrote: post #25

This is fascinating: > Retain and release are tiny actions that almost all software, on all Apple platforms, does all the time. ….. The Apple Silicon system architecture is designed to make these operations as fast as possible. It’s not so much that Intel’s x86 architecture is a bad fit for Apple’s software frameworks, as that Apple Silicon is designed to be a bespoke fit for it …. retaining and releasing NSObjects i…

Remember Lisp machines? The M1 is a Swift machine.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#45

Post by Teknoman117 »

Tin foil hat warning - but how much of the M1 performance improvement is from optimizations made in Big Sur for Apple Silicon that they just didn't bother implementing for x86 since it's now the outgoing technology for Apple?

I realize the reducing in power consumed for any given quantity of work is downright amazing for laptops, but I guess I'm more curious about workstation and (build) server kinds of applications.

Also, how many of these benchmarks are x86 versus Apple Silicon where both are running Big Sur. I've been seeing so much "Xcode on Catalina" versus "Xcode on Apple Silicon on Big Sur"

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#46

Post by saagarjha »

jdminhbg wrote: post #30
ianhowson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think retain/release perf has anything to do with memory consumption, but I have seen a bunch of reviews claiming that 8GB is perfectly fine. This is fascinating to me, because: (a) every 8GB Mac I've used in the past has been unusably slow (b) since upgrading my 32GB Hackintosh to Big Sur, my usual 40GB working set is only about 20GB. (c) My 2015 16GB MBPr with Big Sur is also using about half as much physic…

iPhones and iPads also have relatively small amounts of RAM compared to Android devices in the same class, so I wonder if Apple is doing something smart with offloading memory to fast SSD storage in a way that isn't noticeable to the user.

Not on iOS.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#47

Post by ooooooooooo2 »

jrm4 wrote: post #6

At the risk of being that (Linux) guy -- What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software? If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff d…

I would 100% use linux (because I like tinkering) if it didn't have issues with HiDPI, and really terrible localization compared to MacOS.

Everything else I can deal with, not having those two work out of the box just sucks.

Also, if you have a headless Linux server (even in a virtual machine, say Hyper-V), I don't really see how you will get less stuff done by using any other OS.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#48

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

bound008 wrote: post #41
neilpanchal wrote: post #4

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is. Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a m…

I've had "reduce motion" turned off on my iOS devices since it was an options... The animations in the latest Messages.app have been driving me crazy, but sure enough "Reduce Motion" is available in the `Accessibility` preference panel under display. FWIW, I am blown away by my M1 Mac, but my x86 Mac feels about 5-10% snappier on Big Sur.

>I am blown away by my M1 Mac, but my x86 Mac feels about 5-10% snappier on Big Sur.

For clarification, do you mean your x86 with Big Sur is faster 5-10% faster than you M1 with Big Sur, or is it compared with the same machine running what I'm going to guess is Catalina?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#49

Post by fsflover »

fassssst wrote: post #12
neilpanchal wrote: post #4

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is. Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a m…

Seems pretty obvious that some future Macs will have touch screens or larger iPads will run MacOS. I’d buy a Surface Studio style iMac in a heartbeat.

Sounds like you are speaking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#50

Post by nothowthisworks »

joshstrange wrote: post #32
jrm4 wrote: post #6

At the risk of being that (Linux) guy -- What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software? If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff d…

> But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff done." Moreover, I think we're pretty close to "beauty" parity here as well. This is just not true. I'm sorry but I've used linux on the desktop many times, using many different distros, and many different desktop environments. It's shiny and pretty when y…

What are we meant do with these ever constant, hand-wavey "linux bad" posts with exactly ZERO specifics. They mean nothing to all of us reading this comment on Linux systems that give us less fuss than Windows (and I know because I game on it) and there's nothing actionable. It's just a "nuh uh!!" after someone suggests there might be a better tool for the job.

Also, I really can't sympathize with this implication that not following the platform UI principles is somehow fundamentally "breaking" the user experience. It's virtually impossible to find two mainstream, popular, "good-UX" Win10 or OS X apps that follow some mythic standard UI.

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