Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

singhkays.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#441

Post by vagrantJin »

brundolf wrote: post #25

This is fascinating: > Retain and release are tiny actions that almost all software, on all Apple platforms, does all the time. ….. The Apple Silicon system architecture is designed to make these operations as fast as possible. It’s not so much that Intel’s x86 architecture is a bad fit for Apple’s software frameworks, as that Apple Silicon is designed to be a bespoke fit for it …. retaining and releasing NSObjects i…

> This, in a nutshell, helps explain why iPhones run rings around even flagship Android phones,

For the price, it better run circles and squares. It should cook my dinner too.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#442

Post by ogre_codes »

mhh__ wrote: post #410
zamadatix wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be interesting what happens in a couple of years if server side gets more mixed with ARM as well.

Linus Torvalds was and is probably still right that unless developers have the same breed of processor (not just AArch64 but the actual chipset, for example) on the bench it'll probably never be particularly prevalent server-side. That and Apple presumably dream of not letting developers touch anything without going through their stack, so no touching the hardware for you. For example, I believe Apple expose Performa…

I suspect the previous poster was referring to non-Apple ARM hardware, not Apple servers.

> The wider point being that Apple will probably never let you run Linux on their hardware

Apple has already issued docs on how to load alternative OSs on their system and has said explicitly that Windows support is up to Microsoft. Linux on Mac metal is not out of the question, but it's going to take some time to get running well.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#443

Post by erosenbe0 »

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?

Basically reference counting requires grabbing a number from memory in one step, then increasing or decreasing it and storing it in a second step.

This is two operations and in-between the two -- if and only if the respective memory location is shared between multiple cores or caches -- some form of synchronization must occur (like locking a bank account so you can't double draft on two ATMs simultaneously).

Now the way this is implemented varies a bit.

Apple controls most of the hardware ecosystem, programming languages, binary interface, and so on meaning there is opportunity for them to either implement or supplement ARM synchronization or atomicity primitives with their own optimizations.

There is nothing really preventing Intel from improving here as well -- it is just a easier on ARM because the ISA has different assumptions baked in, and Apple controls everything up the stream, such as the compiler implementations.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#444

Post by Shared404 »

kube-system wrote: post #429
nycticorax wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, large businesses at least get Windows 10 Enterprise, which doesn't come with all of that nonsense. The real shame is that you can't get Windows 10 Enterprise without a volume license.

You can get Win 10 Pro. I don’t remember my system having any of that junk preinstalled

You do get obtrusive telemetry (Cortana is a good example), but you avoid Candy Crush et al.

You can disable some of the telemetry during install as well.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#445

Post by alwillis »

azangru wrote: post #28
jrm4 wrote: post #6

At the risk of being that (Linux) guy -- What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software? If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff d…

Another linux guy here, on the market for a new linux laptop. After reading the article, which linux-compatible laptops, would you say, come the closest to compete with the new generation of Apple products? Long battery life, plenty of power, good screen, good speakers? Is it the inevitable Dell XPS 13 and Thinkpad X1 Carbon, or are there any other darlings among the linux community?

which linux-compatible laptops, would you say, come the closest to compete with the new generation of Apple products?

When there's a technological jump, there's not much you can do.

There's not a laptop you can buy that close enough to the M1-based MacBook Air or MacBook Pro to matter really.

You can't get something as light, as powerful and with the battery life these machines have.

Look, Apple demonstrated Debian running in a VM on an Apple Silicon Mac in June, so we know it's possible. And I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's blazing fast.

You saw the comments in the article; people are talking about more than a day without having to plug these devices in. People are rendering 8k video while doing other stuff with no slowdown and without hearing the fan, in the case of the MacBook Pro.

These machines can drive up to six displays using DisplayLink adapters. Just nuts.

"M1 Macs Able to Run Up to Six External Displays Using DisplayLink Adapters": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25199444

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#446

Post by hrydgard »

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?

Apple CPUs have great NEON performance, so if those libraries have NEON paths, they'll scream.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#447

Post by zamadatix »

harpratap wrote: post #417
zamadatix wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple isn't just now entering into this space with the M1 though, it's been this bad for 5 years vs Qualcomm already the change is now even the best power hungry x86 cores can't keep up with it. What Apple is delivering in the M1 continues to be 2 generations ahead of the Qualcomm's best in terms of performance an the +10% uplift on the usual +20% generational increase isn't changing that - Apple has been doing that level of improvement consistently every generation so Qualcomm can't "catch up" by doing the same in some generations.

I'm generally not a fan of Apple as a company and own no Apple products but I've long acknowledged what they've been doing in mobile hardware has been miles better than what the competition has been doing - this isn't some sudden upset and entrance just a on-pace continuation of what has been going on for years. I only wish it was decoupled from their software.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#448

Post by devxpy »

brundolf wrote: post #25

This is fascinating: > Retain and release are tiny actions that almost all software, on all Apple platforms, does all the time. ….. The Apple Silicon system architecture is designed to make these operations as fast as possible. It’s not so much that Intel’s x86 architecture is a bad fit for Apple’s software frameworks, as that Apple Silicon is designed to be a bespoke fit for it …. retaining and releasing NSObjects i…

I, for one would love to see an M1 chip cripple itself under the memory load of 4 intellij windows and chrome tabs, among other applications.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#450

Post by erosenbe0 »

brundolf wrote: post #74
klelatti wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a fast Arm CPU - I've read the Anandtech analysis etc - and that there is lots of extra hardware on the SoC. But the specific point was why is it a Swift machine. What makes it particularly suited to running Swift?

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.

Memory bandwidth costs a lot of power so I think the idea is to reduce the need for unnecessary memory ops both saving power and reducing latency
Post reply on HN