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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#341

Post by saagarjha »

duskwuff wrote: post #112
CountSessine wrote: post #78

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.

I believe Apple leaves this off.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#342

Post by throw0101a »

xoa wrote: post #57

Not to speak for anyone else, but one thing I gently disagree with: > Given that Hackintoshers are a particular bunch who don’t take kindly to the Apple-tax[...] I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. I think a major generator of interest in hackintoshes has been that there are significant segments of computing that Apple has simply completely (or nearly completely) given up on, includ…

> I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware.

Especially if the margins allow them to not engage in silliness on the software side of things like violating privacy and serving ads in the OS.

There are certainly places that Apple can be criticized, but I think in these two areas they're acting pretty well.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#343

Post by dheera »

encom wrote: post #128
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're getting rightfully downvoted (although I won't join in), it's worth underlining how much "they have always advertised and placed themselves as such" is utter nonsense. Apple has always advertised functionality and performance of their products, even when the case was (charitably) pretty shaky. They advertised their PowerPC Macs that way, up until the point they couldn't, then advertised their Intel Macs…

You're not wrong, but Apple also does advertise themselves as fashion. Their products are highly visible. Not too long ago, their computers literally had a giant glowing logo on them. Now it's just shiny. You can spot someone wearing their Apple headphones from 300 meters away. Apple is a fashion statement. It's designed that way.

Yep, and to a great degree, Apple has mostly been behind the curve in technology advancements, just good with the marketing, build quality (necessity if you want to market yourself as fashion) and most importantly, timing.

I'll give them the Apple silicon, but remember the iPhone X's advertising? "We've always wanted a phone that was all screen." Guess what, Android has been that way all along. High-end Samsung, Xiaomi, HTC phones were always that way. Apple just marketed it.

Now that Pixel 5 got rid of the notch entirely, expect the iPhone 13 to have that too. Just that Pixel didn't care to actually market it. You bet Apple will.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#344

Post by jolux »

bitwize wrote: post #330
gumby wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree: this kind of thing is infuriating because it's such a slowdown to have to go touch the mouse and find the pointer on the screen. Really interrupts the workflow.

The stopwatch consistently proves it takes less time than using the keyboard. Apple's HCI research showed that people "lose" the time it takes to hunt and acquire the keyboard shortcuts.

assuming you're referring to https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html, I find this dubious for a number of reasons and would like to see Tog's methods and data. for example if I want to cycle through undo, I can hold down command and hit Z and shift-Z as many times as I want, as quickly as my fingers can press the keys. acquiring the menu item for this over and over would get tiresome quickly. similarly with opening new tabs and switching between them. I suspect his data only holds for inexperienced users using typical shortcuts in typical applications, not for expert typists who spend all day with their hands on the keyboard. the amount of complicated text manipulation I can do at speed with keys in emacs and vim would be absolutely infeasible if I were clicking through some massive menu.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#345

Post by alwillis »

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.

Seems pretty obvious that some future Macs will have touch screens or larger iPads will run MacOS.

Probably not. Apple has said they've prototyped touch screen Macs and from a UI/UX perspective, it doesn't really work. They've recently downplayed touchscreen Mac talk recently [1].

What Apple has shown is iPadOS becoming more like macOS, supporting a keyboard and a mouse instead of the other way around.

I have a 2-in-1 Surface on loan and it's not particularly good at being a laptop or a tablet because of the design tradeoffs that have to be made. Apple is unlikely to make such a device unless there's some kind of UI/UX breakthrough.

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/12/apple-touchscreen-mac-intervi...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#346

Post by lern_too_spel »

nemothekid wrote: post #154
uncomputation wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone please correct me for the sake of all of us if I’m wrong, but it sounds like Apple is using specialized hardware for “NSObject” retain-and-release operations, which may bypass/reduce the impact on general RAM.

I saw that point brought up on Twitter and I don't know how it it makes more efficient use of RAM. Specifically, as I understood it is that Apple software (written in objective C/Swift) uses a lot of retain/release (or Atomic Reference Counting) on top of manual memory, for memory management rather than other forms of garbage collection (such as those found in Java/C#), which gives Objective C programs a lower memory…

For a very long time, budget Android devices that were one or even two generations older were faster than just released iPhones at launching new apps to interactivity (see: hundreds of Youtube "speed comparison" videos). This was purely due to better software, as the iPhone had significantly faster processors and I/O. RAM doesn't play a big factor at launch. One very minor contributor would be that the GC doesn't need to kick in until later, while ARC is adding its overhead all the time.

Edit: apparently, this isn't common knowledge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emPiTZHdP88

https://youtu.be/hPhkPXVxISY

https://youtu.be/B5ZT9z9Bt4M

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#347

Post by saagarjha »

wtallis wrote: post #56
berkut wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just tagged pointers essentially? That's possible on x86 isn't it (unless it's an endian-thing)?

x86-64 was designed to prevent (or at least discourage) efficient use of tagged pointers, with the higher half/lower half split in the virtual address space. All the excess high-order bits you don't need for actual addressing are required to have the same value, so you effectively only get at most one tag bit.

They’re required to have the same value upon dereference; there is no restrictions prior to this as assembly doesn’t care what a register is. The bits are appropriately masked off when necessary prior to using the pointer.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#348

Post by throw0101a »

macintux wrote: post #287
jandrese wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RAM limitation on the first gen M1s makes this claim a bit dubious.

https://www.diyphotography.net/this-700-computer-can-edit-8k...

That's nice. But what does CPU/GPU horse power have to do with memory?

If I want to spin up a bunch of VMs to do pre-commit test builds in clean environments, and each need RAM for the OS and user land, being able to edit a lot of raw video does nothing for me. I'm generally fine running macOS (or Linux), but sometimes I need to boot up Windows in a VM for specialized apps: how do I assign >16GB of memory to it if I only have 8-16GB of RAM? Even with fast storage I'm enamoured that I may need swap.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#349

Post by rudedogg »

bitwize wrote: post #330
gumby wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree: this kind of thing is infuriating because it's such a slowdown to have to go touch the mouse and find the pointer on the screen. Really interrupts the workflow.

The stopwatch consistently proves it takes less time than using the keyboard. Apple's HCI research showed that people "lose" the time it takes to hunt and acquire the keyboard shortcuts.

> Apple's HCI research showed that people "lose" the time it takes to hunt and acquire the keyboard shortcuts.

This may be the case for "casual" computer users, but not for "power" users.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#350

Post by saagarjha »

CountSessine wrote: post #78
trevyn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They stuff the reference count in the unused bits of the 64-bit pointers.

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…

The bits Apple uses are not “don’t cares” this time; they’re masked off before the pointer is used.
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