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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#241

Post by plorntus »

grishka wrote: post #150
sesuximo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/inefficient/doing more/g

Doing more of what ? As a user, I'd rather wait a month for a proper native app than get an electron pile of crap in a week.

While theres no way for me to have a source for this but I would hazard a guess and say most apps that use Electron simply would not exist without it. Maybe someone would fill the void if they had the idea, money and knowhow to build a native app on whatever platform you use but probably unlikely.

Basically, no way you'd just be waiting an extra month for your native version.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#242

Post by webmaven »

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 want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

You'd have to redesign it somewhat for the higher resolution screen, and so there are many improvements in typographical rendering you would also want to include, plus Win95 was in some respects still inferior to System 7, but overall, yes, there is a certain directness to that era of OS UIs (see also Motif & BeOS).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#243

Post by tobyjsullivan »

sooheon wrote: post #219
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thes…

In Apple's defence, I've been exclusively a mac user (work and personal) for going-on eight years now and I had no idea about the Option-letter shortcut. I've always found keyboard nav within modal popups confusing. I consider myself lucky if hitting Space selects the primary button. Doesn't sound like the change is necessarily an improvement, though.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#244

Post by taranissnark »

klelatti wrote: post #66
lisper wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember Lisp machines? The M1 is a Swift machine.

But how? It has an Arm CPU - how does it differ from any other machine with a 64 bit Arm CPU?

Remember, ARM instruction set, aka an interface, not an implementation. Arm holdings does license their tech to other companies though, so I don't know how much apple silicon would have in common, with say a Qualcomm CPU. They may be totally different under the hood.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#245

Post by fouc »

spurgu wrote: post #121
apatheticonion wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon. So much this. I used to run Windows 7 in classic mode and really liked the low footprint, no nonsense appearance. Windows 10 has no such mode. I wonder if we will see Linux support

Linus on the topic: https://i.redd.it/0c7c4h2t9u061.png

Sounds like he's up for using an an M1 MacBook the moment it can run linux.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#246

Post by headeffects »

sliken wrote: post #111
brundolf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact reason is out of my depth, but the original quote makes it clear that there is something. Memory bandwidth would be one possibility.

Extremely low memory latency is another. It's also has 8 memory channels, most desktops have 2. It's an aggressive design, Anandtech has a deep dive. Some of the highlights, lower latency cache, larger reorder buffer, more in flight memory operations, etc.

Isn’t a typical desktop. 64-bit bus meaning this would be 4 channels because it’s 128-bit?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#247

Post by mhh__ »

brundolf wrote: post #67
klelatti wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how? It has an Arm CPU - how does it differ from any other machine with a 64 bit Arm CPU?

The M1 is much more than a CPU, and a CPU is much more than an instruction set

That's true but for it to be a "swift machine" as mentioned above it would imply some kind of isa level design choices, as opposed to "just" being extremely wide or having a branch predictor that understands what my favourite food is

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#248

Post by lukeh »

vt240 wrote: post #238
phillco wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon. You don't even need to go as far as Windows. Classic Mac OS would be just fine.

Yes, can I please have System 7.1 or 7.5.3 back? I recently installed MAE on my SunBlade 2500 and it has been an amazing experience. A Classic Mac, without all the issues of HFS corruption from crashing out. Running 68k software at G4 speeds. Haha. For a lot of tasks it certainly works better than the Classic environment did under 10.1-4 since it's not targeting the System 9.2.

Well, that was the beginning of Classic.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#249

Post by kllrnohj »

sunflowerdeath wrote: post #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.

Not even close to true. Apple's ARM processors are unlike anyone else's, and everyone else's ARM processors are not particularly impressive. The power/performance isn't really there, and scaling performance up is not linear, either. You can't just "make it bigger" and retain the same power/performance ratio you had. The 1W power draw that the 'big' ARM cores target, like the Cortex-A78, isn't even that special. You can run x86 cores at 1W/core all day long as well. How it performs at the power level is the question, but the ARM cores don't really perform all that well. See for example the slaughtering that is the 64-core Graviton2 vs. the 64-core Epyc Rome: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-... (spoiler, the x86 chip has an overall performance lead of 50%, and they really aren't targeting that different of a power budget)

But even the M1 isn't an order of magnitude ahead on power/performance ratio. It's the leader, but it's sure as shit not 10x faster for the same power draw.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#250

Post by jml7c5 »

blihp wrote: post #194
jml7c5 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

What I mean is that (to my understanding) memory bandwidth in modern devices is already high enough to keep a CPU fed during decompression. Bandwidth isn't a bottleneck in this scenario, so raising it doesn't make decompression any faster.
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