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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#511

Post by michaelmrose »

vbezhenar wrote: post #469
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…

If you don't have issues with paying a lot for hardware, why don't you buy Mac Pro?

A machine that wont outperform the new mini $6000

16 cores 32GB of ram least powerful gpu on the list 2GB of storage $8,799.00

28 cores 48GB of ram same gpu 4GB of storage $14,699

MSRP on a 2020 Toyota Corolla $19,600

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-Core 3.7 GHz Socket sTRX4 $2,629.90

Cost of the same basic GPU about $219

Cost of complete system equivalent to the almost car priced mac about 4200.

9k-15k isn't "a lot" its a crazy amount. 15k is 1/4 of the median households income.

Most of planet earth can't sink 6000 into a computer let alone 15000. Under Apple the standard expandable board in a box with room to expand is a category available to 1% of the US and 0.1% of the world.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#512

Post by IceWreck »

seabrookmx wrote: post #480
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…

> emulating virtualized x86 code I don't think this is an issue for Docker. They can run an ARM64 Linux VM instead of the current x86 one, and then use QEMU to run x86 Docker containers within it if they want. The bummer is that this won't be taking advantage of Rosetta 2 so it'll likely perform bad, but it might be good enough for debugging the odd image or even development depending on _how_ bad.

> I don't think this is an issue for Docker. They can run an ARM64 Linux VM instead of the current x86 one, and then use QEMU to run x86 Docker containers within it if they want.

If youre at the point where you have to run a container running inside an emulator inside a VM on an ARM Mac then you should just get an x86 linux machine and enjoy performance and native support for containers.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#513

Post by eesmith »

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.

> Blosc [...] has been designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than the traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch approach via a memcpy() OS call. Blosc is the first compressor (that I'm aware of) that is meant not only to reduce the size of large datasets on-disk or in-memory, but also to accelerate memory-bound computations (which is typical in vector-vector operations).

https://blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#514

Post by _a1_ »

Labo333 wrote: post #498

I might have an explanation for the reduced RAM consumption thanks to the M1 chip: RAM compression ( https://www.lifewire.com/understanding-compressed-memory-os-... ). I'm using zram on manjaro and I see it as a trade-off between RAM and CPU power.

TBH this sounds like Windows '95 era "RAM doublers" like SoftRAM 95 :D

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#515

Post by dirtypersian »

Veedrac wrote: post #497
dirtypersian wrote: post #476

I didn't really understand the TSO explanation given in this article and found it to be a bit hand-wavy. The article says to emulate the x86 TSO consistency model on an ARM machine which is weakly ordered you have to add a bunch of instructions which would make the emulation slow. I followed that much but then after that it doesn't really explain how they would get around these extra instructions needed to guarantee…

> It just says "oh, it's a hardware toggle"; toggle of what exactly? A toggle that makes the chip treat all loads and stores from that thread as TSO.

so you're saying somehow Rosetta2 is looking at an x86 binary and figuring out exactly which portions of the program rely on the TSO ordering for correctness and then dynamically switches to weak ordering for parts that might be able to do without?

I don't really know much about the internals of macOS but figuring out when there are applications for example running on two different cores (since TSO is only really needed for multi-core use cases) that need to access the same memory and then applying TSO on the fly like that seems difficult. If that is what Rosetta2 is actually doing, that is impressive.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#516

Post by MobiusHorizons »

sliken wrote: post #438
gameswithgo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no its normal mobile ram

The M1 has 4 LPDDR4x chips inside the the CPU package running at 4266 Mhz and showing some of the best latencies I've seen. What "normal" laptop has that?

I believe the poster meant "normal" in the sense that it's a conventional memory technology for laptops. (ie LPDDR4 not GDDR like had been suggested above).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#517

Post by _a1_ »

crazygringo wrote: post #129
megablast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every 8gb mac I’ve used before was fine, and that was with running Xcode, Firefox, photoshop, mail, terminal, and other programs.

Seriously, I'm utterly baffled by all the people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user. The only situation I ever ran into where it was a problem was in trying to run multiple VM's at once. Otherwise it's just a non-issue. Programs often reserve a lot more memory than they actually use (zero hit in performance) so memory stats are misleading, and the OS is really good at swapping memory not touched in…

> Otherwise it's just a non-issue.

Nah, sorry, but you're wrong. I had to upgrade my laptop because I wanted to run Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA and an Android emulator on the same machine. Nothing else. This was not possible on 8GB ram.

So it's not like multiple VMs are needed and above scenario is pretty average for a common mobile developer (but still not an average user, I admit)

Second thing is, lots of games require 16 GB RAM. Maybe gamers are still not average users, I don't know.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#519

Post by Eric_WVGG »

bound008 wrote: post #41
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've had "reduce motion" turned off on my iOS devices since it was an options... The animations in the latest Messages.app have been driving me crazy, but sure enough "Reduce Motion" is available in the `Accessibility` preference panel under display. FWIW, I am blown away by my M1 Mac, but my x86 Mac feels about 5-10% snappier on Big Sur.

second this. The roll-out was a mess, but Big Sur does appear to have some serious optimizations under the hood. Time Machine is also, finally, vastly improved.

(The changes to menu bar icon behavior, and shortcut keys on modal buttons, are infuriating)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#520

Post by smokey_circles »

I'm not a huge fan of the thermal throttling comparisons.

Apple completely fucked the pooch on the previous gen(s?) when it came to design.

They don't get points for fixing an utter fuck up. That should have triggered a recall, imo.

However, the performance of M1 looks hella solid, and kudos to them. I'm gonna stay with Linux because I'm comfortable in it, but innovation is never a bad thing.

INB4 walled gardens and code signing: stop drinking the koolaid and do your own research

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