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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#411

Post by jolux »

sneak wrote: post #390
jolux wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re working on the OCSP issue and I would say it’s more of a disclosure bug than telemetry, which implies intent. You’re right about Maps but you’re saying it’s “almost every app,” do you know of others? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not “almost every app,” and moreover in Maps it’s required to deliver the functionality, so I’m also not sure I would call it telemetry.

Stocks. Weather. News. Maps (has a unique ID across multiple interactions to serve as explicit telemetry). App Store (sends device serial). TV (sends device serial). iMessage (sends device serial). Telemetry doesn't imply intent. Many things serve great as telemetry that aren't intended to be such. There's no way to limit the way the raw data collected can be mined later, offline.

Do you have resources on the data collection these apps do? I'm interested in digging deeper.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#412

Post by mhh__ »

ianhowson wrote: post #26
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…

I don't think retain/release perf has anything to do with memory consumption, but I have seen a bunch of reviews claiming that 8GB is perfectly fine. This is fascinating to me, because: (a) every 8GB Mac I've used in the past has been unusably slow (b) since upgrading my 32GB Hackintosh to Big Sur, my usual 40GB working set is only about 20GB. (c) My 2015 16GB MBPr with Big Sur is also using about half as much physic…

> but I have seen a bunch of reviews claiming that 8GB is perfectly fine.

Has anyone actually used one of these long enough to fairly compare with an x year old laptop in regular use?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#413

Post by sneak »

jolux wrote: post #411
sneak wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stocks. Weather. News. Maps (has a unique ID across multiple interactions to serve as explicit telemetry). App Store (sends device serial). TV (sends device serial). iMessage (sends device serial). Telemetry doesn't imply intent. Many things serve great as telemetry that aren't intended to be such. There's no way to limit the way the raw data collected can be mined later, offline.

Do you have resources on the data collection these apps do? I'm interested in digging deeper.

tcpdump them, or read the data/privacy disclosure link at the bottom of the first launch pane of any of them.

https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM if you need an easy way to fire up a fresh install.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#414

Post by sneak »

alwillis wrote: post #365
sneak wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can turn off all the telemetry in macOS and they ask you if you want it on when you setup the computer. That's false. You can turn off OS analytics but there is tons of telemetry built into almost every Apple app, separate from that, that you cannot disable. It tells you about it on first app launch. Open Maps, for example, and it will tell you about the unique, rotating identifier it uses to track your searche…

Additionally gatekeeper OCSP checks on app launches serve as telemetry in practice, and this has no preference or setting to disable it. This is just a check that the developer's certificate hasn't been revoked or expired. I wouldn't call it telemetry. Apple has said they're working on allowing users to opt-out of Gatekeeper checks if that's what people want. Details— https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/16/checks-on-exe…

> This is just a check that the developer's certificate hasn't been revoked or expired. I wouldn't call it telemetry.

It's an unencrypted network transmission of a unique identifier, at the time of an app launch, that maps to a single app for 99% of cases (due to the fact that almost all developers publish only a single app). That's objectively telemetry no matter what you call it, irrespective of the intent of the designers.

Approximately 0% of all users of macOS will change this setting, so Apple adding a preference toggle (that defaults to "send my local app launches to Apple via the network") is irrelevant from a privacy perspective.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#415

Post by thinbeige »

koffiezet wrote: post #188

I understand the machine is great or going to be great for most use cases. My mbp is my main workhorse, but as a freelance SRE "devops" guy, the Apple ARM platform won't be suitable for my job any time soon, if ever. Docker is not yet available - but even when it would become available, emulating virtualised x86 code is explicitly not going to be supported. That in many cases means pulling a docker image built in a c…

FWIW, I never run docker on my local machine (I develop on a remote machine), benefits: remote machine os + setup is very close to production and GBit bandwidth up and down at my hoster is so much nicer when working with Docker images.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#417

Post by harpratap »

zamadatix wrote: post #376
harpratap wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe better to wait for good ARM chips on a PC. Now that there is a demand for it, I'm sure some ARM vendor will step up if not Qualcomm

Qualcomm has been at the Windows laptop market for a while and has yet to come out with anything nearly as performant. I'd like to see it but they've been behind for many years in the mobile space compared to Apple as well.

It's the same what Apple did with wireless bluetooth audio. There were already companies making them but they didn't try their best. When Apple made Airpods, it defined them as a new category and every company started pushing their own take on it. Now we plenty of good options to choose from.

ARM was typically making very conservative reference designs keeping PPA in mind but now that they have customers asking for a higher TDP chips on the PC side. And they are already making bigger chips like Apple's with cortex X1 - https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a78-cortex-x...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#418

Post by accountofme »

jml7c5 wrote: post #250
blihp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RAM bandwidth limitations (latency and throughput) are generally hidden by the multiple layers of cache in between the ram and CPU prefetching more data than is generally needed. Having memory on chip could make the latency less, but as ATI has shown with HBM memory on a previous generation of its GPUs its not a silver bullet solution.

I am going to speculate now, but maybe, just maybe, if some of the silicon that apple has used on the M1 is used for compression/decompression they could be transparently compressing all ram in hardware. Since this offloaded from the CPUs and allows a compressed stream of data from memory, they achieve greater ram bandwidth, less latency and less usage for a given amount of memory. If this is the case I hope that the memory has ECC and/or the compression has parity checking....

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#419

Post by mhh__ »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #392
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.

I can't find a number for it on M1 but I'm guessing a memory to SIMD register move is still a lot faster than faster CPU-GPU shared buffers, i.e. Even if it is a powerful tool it won't scale in the same way.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#420

Post by neilpanchal »

herpderperator wrote: post #381
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…

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?

lol that was satire, I didn't write it well enough :-)

I absolutely adore HN's design. 100% serious!

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