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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#81

Post by krrrh »

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…

It’s pretty trivial to disable most animations (and more importantly transparency!). I’ve been doing that on new MacOS installs since Jaguar and it only takes a few minutes. If you want to move quickly you’re probably already using keyboard shortcuts and ignoring the dock and toolbars.

For less technically adept users (ie. most users) the animations and spacings mostly seem to help them understand what’s going on. I know everyone has their preferences, but I don’t really get the level of griping that accompanies every release.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#82

Post by steveklabnik »

lilyball wrote: post #72
brundolf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering if the "optimized for reference-counting" thing applies to other languages too. i.e. if I write a piece of software in Rust, and I make use of Rc , will Macs be extra tolerant of that overhead? In theory it seems like the answer should be yes

I sure hope so. In macOS 10.15, the fast path for a retain on a (non-tagged-pointer) Obj-C object does a C11 relaxed atomic load followed by a C11 relaxed compare-and-exchange. This seems pretty standard for retain-release and I'd expect Rust's Rc to be doing something similar. It's possible Apple added some other black magic to the runtime in 10.16 (and they haven't released the 10.16 objc sources yet) but it's hard…

(Rc does not use atomics, Arc does and from a peek at the source it does indeed use Relaxed)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#83

Post by ryukafalz »

CalChris wrote: post #51
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…

Linux gets the look right. But it gets the feel wrong, very wrong. This surprises me. I don’t understand why they haven’t caught up on feel.

This is entirely subjective. As a primarily Linux user who uses a Mac for work, I would argue the opposite. Likely based more on familiarity than anything else.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#85

Post by vimy »

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…

You can start terminal in rosetta mode and most brew packages will work.

Cmd + i on terminal.app, rosetta mode.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#86

Post by torgian »

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…

As a new Linux user, I don’t think I agree, at least not 100%. I picked Linux Mint, and found it quite easy to install and maintain on my AMD desktop. All the drivers were already there.

The only difficulty I had was installing Docker, but an hour later I had that and my other required programs installed and I was able to be productive.

It took me less than three hours to make a USB stick, install, and get my programs needed for me to code again.

That said, I had also tried Ubuntu and found it a not-so-great experience. I had to look for a few different drivers and learn how to install them from the command line. After that it was fine, but I didn’t like the UI and didn’t really want to spend the time learning how to tweak it to my liking.

So I think the right distro really matters in the case of making Linux attractive to common users. IMO Cinnamon/ Mint is the one for that.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#87

Post by darren_ »

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…

This quote doesn’t really cover why M1 macs are more efficient with less ram than intel macs? You’ve got a memory budget, it’s likely broadly the same on both platforms, the speed at which your retains/releases happen isn’t going to be the issue. it’s not like intel macs use GC where m1 uses RC.

(It explains why iOS does better with less ram than android, but the quote is specifically claiming this as a reason for 8GB ram to be acceptable)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#88

Post by FroshKiller »

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…

With so many projects in need of changes to work on the M1, it sounds like it's more than ready for developers.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#89

Post by raphaelj »

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.

This is most probably more linked to Java/Kotlin vs Objective-C/Swift. Want an array of 1000 objects in Java ? You'll endup with 1001 allocations and 1000 pointers.
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