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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#191

Post by Aperocky »

yardie wrote: post #16

I'm typing this from a 2014 i7-4980HQ 15" MBP. This machine would have been replaced in 2017 but I wasn't impressed with that years model. I had planned to upgrade in 2020 but the announcement of the M1 basically quashed that. I've been on this planet long enough to know when Apple changes course like this the old architect is already obsolete. 68k -> PPC -> x86_64 -> ASi. The PPC G5 got exactly 1 OS upgrade (10.5) b…

I bought one and I have 0 regrets.

A laptop that satisfy my long battery life ultrabook experience AND capable to run steam games without compensating on performance.

Though the 13" air is not in the same target user group vs. the 15" pro, so you might not find the same excitement as I did.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#192

Post by nikolay »

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…

Yeah, a lot of spacing... except of dismissing notifications! The small X icons are so hard to click on Big Sur!!! I miss the old notifications! The grouping makes my work even harder! It's a notifications disaster!

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#193

Post by ytch »

nottorp wrote: post #115
nojito wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote right after explains your concerns. >The memory bandwidth on the new Macs is impressive. Benchmarks peg it at around 60GB/sec–about 3x faster than a 16” MBP. Since the M1 CPU only has 16GB of RAM, it can replace the entire contents of RAM 4 times every second. Think about that…

Sounds like some form of GDDR instead of plain DDR. Not only faster, but I bet simultaneously accessible from both the CPU and GPU.

This reminds me that Xbox series X/PS5 use Unified GDDR for higher memory bandwidth, I'm curious if such design can help x86 catch up M1?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#194

Post by blihp »

jml7c5 wrote: post #173
blihp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a contributing factor. If things like retain/release are fast and you have significantly more memory bandwidth and low latency to throw at the problem, you can get away without preloading and caching nearly as much. Take something simple like images on web pages: don't bother keeping hundreds (thousands?) of decompressed images in memory for all of the various open tabs. You can just decompress them on the fly a…

Decompression is generally bound by CPU speed, not memory bandwidth or latency.

CPU speed is often bound by memory bandwidth and latency... it's all related. If you can't keep the CPU fed, it doesn't matter how fast it is theoretically.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#195

Post by jlokier »

crazygringo wrote: post #129
megablast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every 8gb mac I’ve used before was fine, and that was with running Xcode, Firefox, photoshop, mail, terminal, and other programs.

Seriously, I'm utterly baffled by all the people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user. The only situation I ever ran into where it was a problem was in trying to run multiple VM's at once. Otherwise it's just a non-issue. Programs often reserve a lot more memory than they actually use (zero hit in performance) so memory stats are misleading, and the OS is really good at swapping memory not touched in…

For me with 16GB in an MBP, there is currently 20.5GB used + swap, and I haven't even started Firefox today, that would add another ~6GB or so.

Usually if I'm running Safari, Firefox and my 4GB Linux VM, that's 16-18GB used up in those. At the moment I have a few other things open, PDF viewer, Word, iTerms, Emacs etc, but nothing huge.

Most of the time this level of usage is ok, but I've had times where I've had to wait 30+ seconds for the UI to respond at all (even the Dock or switching workspaces) and wondered if the system had crashed.

For that reason I'm generally waiting for the next 32GB model before committing, that's assuming I stick with Apple instead of switching back to Linux (which I used for ~20 years before trying the MBP).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#196

Post by jrockway »

redelbee wrote: post #69

I have an iPad Pro with keyboard and a 15-inch MacBook Pro I got when my previous MacBook Air couldn’t handle the video editing I was dabbling in. I desperately want one machine (and probably in the iPad form factor) but I don’t know if Apple is ever going to get me there. What say you HN? Is there a future where I can have a single machine? Any other suggestions for what I can do about it today? I’ve test driven Sur…

What is stopping you from selling your iPad and having a single machine right now?

I have personally avoided laptops for years because I hate managing more than one machine. The one time a year I need my laptop, it's out of commission for a day while updates install or whatever. For that reason, I have a desktop and take an iPad Pro when I'm going to be away from home. The iPad is no computer replacement, but it can SSH places and can do enough work to justify not owning a laptop. More importantly, it can't have any configuration done to it. But if you already have a laptop, I would just skip the iPad entirely. The laptop is your "one device".

(Would I want a mobile processor as my primary means of doing work? Absolutely not. But, people seem to make it work... at the cost of being blown away by a new processor that's slower than HEDTs they could have been using for a few years ;)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#197

Post by rodgerd »

darren_ wrote: post #87
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 8G…

I can't speak to the MacOS system, but from years spent JVM tuning: you're in a constant battle finding the right balance of object creation/destruction (the former burning CPU, the latter creating garbage), keeping memory use down (more collection, which burns CPU and can create pauses and hence latency), or letting memory balloon (which can eat resource, and makes the memory sweeps worse when they finally happen).

Making it cheaper to create and destroy objects with hardware acceleration, and to do many small, low-cost reclaims without eating all your CPU would be a magical improvement to the JVM, because you could constrain memory use without blowing out CPU. From what's described in TFA it sounds like the same is true for modern MacOS programming.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#198

Post by zarkov99 »

I am thinking about getting thing mostly to ssh into a linux server. I would like to run emacs on the server and have its display bounced back via X to the Mac. Is this practical? I tried Quartz on my wife's Mac but the fonts looked like crap.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#200

Post by jrockway »

nojito wrote: post #90

I upgraded from a 32gb x86 machine to the 8gb macbook pro and it's downright amazing and I saved a bunch of money in the process. Apple is going to make an absolute killing on people upgrading RAM unnecessarily.

I don't understand this comment. The new M1s all have 16GB of RAM integrated with the SoC, and it can't be upgraded. If you had 32GB on your old machine and didn't need that much, that's kind of on you, right?
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