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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#391

Post by eternalban »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177
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…

> 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…

>> 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.

"Phone" =/= "UI"

but that said, I'm actually puzzled as to how "fashion" plays such a central role in your model of human society. Even if UI was the fetish object (which it is not) in what sort of cultural matrix does the core fetish object mutate constantly "like fashion"?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#392

Post by lern_too_spel »

devwastaken wrote: post #336

I see no mention of simd in these threads. The only thing that has made high data throughput possible is vector operations. What's the performance of libjpegturbo or hevc in software?

It supports NEON like most phone CPUs. The new thing for a desktop is sharing memory for the CPU and GPU with a much faster bus instead of having the GPU sit on a slower bus with its own fast memory, so if your workload can benefit from using the GPU, you don't have to worry about host to device transfer.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#393

Post by herpderperator »

klodolph wrote: post #385
herpderperator wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: It looks like satire. My bad :) Doesn't your article here go directly against what you're saying? https://neil.computer/notes/hacker-news-design-is-ugly/ Specifically, you redesigned HN to have more "pop" and have rounded corners and padding: https://neil.computer/content/images/size/w1600/2020/07/Scre... which is exactly what you were saying macOS looks like... Isn't that hypocritical?

What the hell is going on here? Digging through someone's post history to figure out if there are contradictions in what someone says? Can we not just evaluate what people say on its own merit and instead of putting people under the lens for hypocrisy?

What is the point of putting links on your profile if you expect people won't visit them? It was on the index page. Anyway, it looks like satire. I definitely got fooled. My bad.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#394

Post by plorkyeran »

brundolf wrote: post #54
lisper wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember Lisp machines? The M1 is a Swift machine.

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

Yes, it applies to everything which uses atomics and is not something special in the runtime. It's also worth noting that this is an optimization that iphones have had for the last few years ever since those switched to arm64.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#395

Post by berkut »

sedatk wrote: post #103
berkut wrote: post #15

I don't quite understand how 'retain' and 'release' can be more memory efficient on Apple Silicon than x86.... I can understand how they can be more efficient from a performance standpoint in terms of more efficient reference counting, but I don't understand how that translates to less memory usage which is apparently what's being argued... ? Unless on x86 some of the 'free's when the ref counts hit 0 were being batc…

Reference counting releases memory as soon as it gets dereferenced, while GC cleans up memory periodically, which means higher memory usage (more than what's actually in use at any moment).

That explains a iOS vs Android difference (ARC vs Garbage Collection), but it doesn't explain the article (and Gruber's) apparent argument that Apple Silicon machines running native ObjectiveC/Swift code use less memory than the same apps natively built via ObjectiveC/Swift code on Intel running the same OS (but different machine code obviously).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#396

Post by fomine3 »

wsc981 wrote: post #354
fomine3 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand why less RAM is enough specially in Apple Silicon rather than Intel. Is the argument proved? RAM capacity is just RAM capacity. Possibly Swift-made apps uses less RAM compared to other apps, but microarchitecture shouldn't be matter.

I’m guessing swapping happens quicker, perhaps due to the unified memory architecture. With quicker swapping you’d be less likely to notice a delay. That said I’d still be very hesitant buying a 8 GB M1 Mac. When my iMac only had 8 GB it was a real pain to use. Increasing my iMac’s memory to 24 GB made it usable.

Bottleneck for swap in/out must be SSD, not memory. Also its SSD isn't fast compared to other NVMe SSDs in both throughput and IOPS. Possibly latency is great thanks to integrated SSD controller onto M1 but I don't think it changes the game.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#398

Post by totalZero »

paultopia wrote: post #147

I bought a pretty heavily specced (not top of the line, but close) 16" MBP in April. Kinda kicking myself... and aggressively insisting to myself that the screen real estate matters a lot to me. Damnit.

Don't kick yourself. Versus the MBP16: RAM is capped, USB-C ports are scarce, GPU is not discrete, software compatibility is still thin, and screen resolution is less. Not to mention you have better speakers on your machine.

I have a top of the line MBP13 delivering in mid-December. I could cancel the order at any moment, but I'd rather have ports, software compatibility, and RAM.

M1 may benchmark well, but it isn't an EMP that magically disables every Intel machine on the face of the planet.

I'm excited to see what happens when Apple rolls out its own silicon for the higher-end MBP devices.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#399

Post by 3np »

crazygringo wrote: post #334
3np wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty much daily have to do a closing round to not run out of my 24GiB. That’s all web browsers (Usually 100-200 tabs), vs code with some extensions and 2x4k display.

But what do you even mean "run out"? This is what I don't get. If you have multiple browsers with hundreds of tabs, the majority of those tabs are probably swapped out to your SSD already. With swapfiles and SSD's, physical memory is less and less relevant except when you're performing very specific computational tasks that actually require everything to be simultaneously in memory -- things like highly complex video…

I don't swap. You can do all your arguments about why I should if you want but yes, there are legit reasons not to and there is such a thing as running out of memory in 2020.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#400

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

dognotdog wrote: post #141
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, too, am on 2014 hardware. The real step that would move me to update would be more RAM with the Apple Silicon. The last gen Intel hardware did offer 32GB of RAM, but not much else to justify the cost over a 6 year old precursor.

Was planning on getting the pro 16 but the extra cost for 32gb is obscene. Ended up going with a dell xps 15 (still in shipping) which even has an option for 64gb at a reasonable price. Can't wait to get rid of this pro 13 which constantly overheats.
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