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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#571

Post by lazyjones »

yurishimo wrote: post #434
bak3y wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first comment that's made me actually want one...

Tbf, WoW will run on just about anything... I remember playing it on an Acer (or maybe Lenovo?) netbook back in 2009/10. Checked it out from school right before Christmas break so I would have a computer at home for a month. In the article here they show Minecraft running at native res and 60 fps. No small feat nowadays considering draw distances that are popular now.

It doesn't run on my 2015 iMac 27" with anything near even medium settings... That's with a Radeon R9 M380, 24GB memory, 3.2 GHz i5.

So I find it hard to believe that it will run with max settings / 60 fps on the new MBP, despite the lower native screen resolution.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#572

Post by pocket_titan »

exoji2e wrote: post #548

"iOS software uses reference counting for memory management, running on silicon optimized to make reference counting as efficient as possible; Android software uses garbage collection for memory management, a technique that requires more RAM to achieve equivalent performance." This statement is nonsense. Reference counting is typically used in garbage collection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_counting It…

Looks like the comparison is between tracing garbage collection & reference counting, both of which could be said to belong to the broader category of "garbage collection" algorithms. I do agree tho that it's confusing

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#573

Post by deergomoo »

ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

> you're still going to be stuck using OSX

One folk's bug is another folk's feature

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#574

Post by lazyjones »

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.

72PB ought to be enough for anyone...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#575

Post by Findeton »

ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

I'm gladly waiting for Ryzen 4800u to actually be available in good quality laptops, or otherwise the next iteration of Intel Mobile CPUs, but like you I won't use Apple's walled gardens (except for work, as I'm forced to).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#576

Post by aseipp »

dirtypersian wrote: post #515
Veedrac wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nee…

AFAIK: Apple Silicon features an MSR you can toggle which swaps the memory model for a core between ARM's relaxed model and x86's TSO model, all at once. When Rosetta2 launches an app, and translates it, it simply tells the kernel that the process, when given an active slice of CPU time, should use the TSO memory model, not the relaxed one. Only Rosetta2 can request this feature. That's about all there is to it, and it does this whether the app is multicore or not (yes TSO is only needed in multicore, but enabling it unilaterally is simpler and has no downsides for emulating single-core x86 apps.)

There's also a similar MSR for 4k vs 16k page sizes I think, another x86 vs Apple Silicon discrepancy, but I'm not sure if Rosetta2 uses that, too.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#577

Post by skohan »

oblio wrote: post #495
ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

Does "Linux run stable" on existing Macs? Not that I know of, 15 years after the introduction of Intel Macs. You might have to wait forever.

Isn't this mostly about driver support? I'm not a hardware guy, but it's hard to understand why it's so difficult to reverse engineer something like the touchpad driver. Isn't it just a matter of measuring the IO and reproducing it? I mean how has MS done this for bootcamp?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#578

Post by oblio »

Aperocky wrote: post #191
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 bought one and I have 0 regrets. A laptop that satisfy my long battery life ultrabook experience AND capable to run steam games without compensating on performance. Though the 13" air is not in the same target user group vs. the 15" pro, so you might not find the same excitement as I did.

Regrets rarely appear 1 week after buying a product :-)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#579

Post by ogre_codes »

deergomoo wrote: post #573
ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

> you're still going to be stuck using OSX One folk's bug is another folk's feature

> One folk's bug is another folk's feature

Historically people bought Macs because they run MacOS instead of Windows.

It's funny how quickly the debate changes once the bang-for-the-buck went completely upside-down.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#580

Post by oblio »

freetonik wrote: post #550
oblio wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does "Linux run stable" on existing Macs? Not that I know of, 15 years after the introduction of Intel Macs. You might have to wait forever.

Anecdata: KDE Neon and Kubuntu run flawlessly on a MBP 2015.

Do they run flawlessly on hardware you can buy today, not stuff from 5 years ago? :-)
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