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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#211
This is not only Apple. All modern mobile ARM processors, ones that are used in Androids, too, they all are far ahead of Intel in TDP to performance ratio, almost by order of magnitude. Just make bigger ARM chips with more high-perf cores, and they will destroy Intel.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. That's the same shenanigans that got them into trouble with the 68000. Everyone stuffed data into the top 8 bits of pointers because even though the 68000 had 32-bit addressing registers, it only had a 24-bit address bus and the top 8 bits were dontcare's. Then, the 6802x came out with more address lines and... ...and that's basically why x86_64 was specified to require a particular bit pattern in high-order b…

Tagged pointers are an officially accepted thing in ARM -- the relevant feature is called top-byte ignore (TBI). It only applies to the upper 8 bits of a pointer, leaving 56 bits for addressing.

Today I Learned - thanks!

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#214

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…

> Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion. Of course it is. Our phones are intimately close to us. Physically, cognitively, socially and even emotionally. They may be the most widely-owned intimately-connected object humans have ever invented outside religion. Our computers don't occupy as close of a niche. But they're in a similar space. I agree with your observation that the new OS feel…

Well said.

I think the beauty of the iPhone lies in its elegance, but I suspect I'll always code on my Linux computer.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#215
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?

Nope. Regular usage at around 17-18 gb ram.

Similar workflow peaks at barely 6gb on the macbook pro.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#216
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're saying that devs won't spend as much time optimizing, since they know that the CPU is faster.

That makes sense and is to be expected. A faster hardware does take away some of the incentive. As the old adage goes - "Necessity is the mother of invention"

A lot of people think that less than maximal performance is sacrilege though, which is why people are already complaining.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100% animations are out of control. There are a few situations where the animations hide loading. Instead of the ui freezing temporarily there's a fancy animation. Outside of situations like that I just want an instant action.

Yeah. There is this system wide bug on iOS where the animations actually BLOCK user input / state changes. You can see this if you type in your pass code fast enough on the lock screen, such that you are interrupting the animated fade in of the dot for the previous digit. You’ll often lose a digit and have to start again from scratch. Infuriating! It’s the most fundamental relationship to betray, the relationship bet…

Ugh yes, this is infuriating and happens all over the place. And combine it with sinusoidally tweened animations where it often looks like the tail end of the animation has finished before it really has, making it easy to mistime your inputs so they they’re dropped.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#218

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…

> Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion. Of course it is. Our phones are intimately close to us. Physically, cognitively, socially and even emotionally. They may be the most widely-owned intimately-connected object humans have ever invented outside religion. Our computers don't occupy as close of a niche. But they're in a similar space. I agree with your observation that the new OS feel…

But one can choose to ignore fashion and wear comfortable clothes.

Apple has chosen to make everyone live in its crazy world. Letting users skin the OS would be a better choice.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#219

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…

> Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion. Of course it is. Our phones are intimately close to us. Physically, cognitively, socially and even emotionally. They may be the most widely-owned intimately-connected object humans have ever invented outside religion. Our computers don't occupy as close of a niche. But they're in a similar space. I agree with your observation that the new OS feel…

I'm surprised they're getting rid of long held keyboard shortcut conventions though. Previously, modal popup options (i.e. for saving docs) could be selected via Option-letter, i.e. "Save _a_ll" could be selected with Option-a. Their new popups which may or may not be prettier force you to either use the mouse or turn on "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" globally and tab around. Neither of these options is as elegant as being able to select what you want with a single command.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#220
post #155
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You've completely changed the scope of what's being discussed, though. Retain/release being faster would just surface as regular performance improvements. It won't change anything at all about how an existing application manages memory.

It's possible that apps have been completely overhauled for a baseline M1 experience. Extremely, extraordinarily unlikely that anything remotely of the sort has happened, though. And since M1-equipped Macs don't have any faster IO than what they replaced (disk, network, and RAM speeds are all more or less the same), there wouldn't be any reason for apps to have done anything substantially difference.

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