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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#601

Post by dschuler »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #535
cactus2093 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously “I’m willing to pay a lot” can mean a wide range of things, but pretty clearly the comment is talking about paying a moderate premium over the competition. The same way a MacBook Pro model might cost $2500 where you could get a similarly specked windows laptop for $1800. Or an iPhone might cost 30% more than a similar android flagship. It’s an order of magnitude different with the Mac Pro, the base model is…

I don't mind paying for a new Apple, but I do mind paying for repairs on a system that fails just after the warranty runs out. Paying $1500 for a new computer every 5 years or so is good. Paying $1500 for a computer every 16 months, not so much. The monitor on my MacBook Pro just died, and I bought it July of last year. The repair was about $850 USD. Luckily my credit card covered the hardware warranty, but I'm kind…

AppleCare for the Macs is definitely worth it. They even replaced the display on my MBP after 5 years when I called (that seems to be the key is to call someone at Apple directly). This was a part they should've recalled, but anyway I wouldn't have gotten a new display without AppleCare.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#602

Post by foldr »

nicolas_t wrote: post #589
michaelmrose wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Exactly this, I was fine with the Mac Pro until 2012, it was a little more expensive than PCs but not much outrageously so (maybe 30% more, that's a tax I was fine paying given the OS and that it was quite a well built machine). The new Mac Pro is 3-4x the price of a machine built around AMD having equivalent performances. I'm building a Threadripper for exactly this reason. Most of the issue is Intel vs AMD and the…

There is also the iMac and iMac Pro range. The Mac Pro is clearly demarcated as a "money is no object" product.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#603

Post by read_if_gay_ »

hrktb wrote: post #507
momokoko wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be extraordinarily grateful for some insight into why this comment was downvoted.

I think the parent comment is just completely ignoring the argument of the post they reply to. Just looking at the first sentences: GP: > I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. parent: > the hackintosh/enthusiast market [...] are the most price conscious segment

Then buy the new Mac Pro? I don't understand why that's not an option for GP.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#604

Post by donmcronald »

seabrookmx wrote: post #481
thinbeige wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VS Code Remote SSH makes this a really nice experience too.

The dev containers that power codespaces are pretty exciting tech imo.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#605

Post by joking »

notriskfree wrote: post #558
darren_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote doesn’t really cover why M1 macs are more efficient with less ram than intel macs? You’ve got a memory budget, it’s likely broadly the same on both platforms, the speed at which your retains/releases happen isn’t going to be the issue. it’s not like intel macs use GC where m1 uses RC. (It explains why iOS does better with less ram than android, but the quote is specifically claiming this as a reason for 8G…

I doubt the M1 macs are really using memory much more efficiently; the stock M1 macs with 8GB were available rapidly; the Macs with 16GB ram or larger disk space had a three to four week delay when ordering; a lot of enthusiasts and influencers rushed out and got base models; they are then surprised to find they can work ok in most apps with only 8GB. Perhaps they never really needed to fit 32GB into their intel macs…

When you need 32 or 64gb of ram is not because the data structures or the programs you use need memory, it's because the data they use (database content, virtual machines, images, videos, music... ) fill that ram, and those data is not going to occupy less on an arm machine.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#606

Post by pjmlp »

masklinn wrote: post #566
torginus wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post kind of does: > The benefit of sticking to RC is much-reduced memory consumption. It turns out that for a tracing GC to achieve performance comparable with manual allocation, it needs several times the memory (different studies find different overheads, but at least 4x is a conservative lower bound). It implies that ref-counting is more economical in terms of wasted memory than GC, with the tradeoff being pe…

Apple’s runtimes have always used rc, this is not a change between Intel and arm.

Nope, they also tried a tracing GC for Objective-C on the desktop, but it was a failure due to interoperability across libraries compiled in different modes alongside C semantics.

Then they pivoted into automating retain/release patterns from Cocoa and sold it, Apple style, as a victory of RC over tracing GC, while moving the GC related docs and C related workarounds into the documentation archive.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#607

Post by dirtypersian »

aseipp wrote: post #576
dirtypersian wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think I understand now. Rosetta is just doing translation from x86 to ARM; however, native ARM doesn't have a notion of TSO which means they're still putting in the logic to maintain TSO just to assist with the better emulation performance. On a purely ARM machine I guess that logic wouldn't be needed.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#608

Post by cjgk »

thinbeige wrote: post #415
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.

> If I wasn't freelance, I could probably get away with some cloud instance to run all my docker stuff, but I'm dealing with too many different environments, for clients with various different legal requirements making this simply 'not an option'.

While not the exact same reasons as GP, I also need to be able to do this locally.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#609

Post by michaelmrose »

piokoch wrote: post #598
michaelmrose wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Yes and no. 15k hardware is for people who are using it professionally. By "professionally" I mean that they can throw such purchase into their cost and just pay less tax. From my perspective it does not matter if I pay ~15k to tax office or to Apple. In Europe the incentives to buy expensive goods as a company (like cars, fancy office furniture, etc.) is even bigger because of VAT tax (much bigger than US sales tax)…

That just isn't how taxes work. If you spend 15k of your profits and buy capital goods you don't reduce your taxes by 15k because no one was going to charge you 100% tax on it. You save only the foregone taxes rate on the purchase.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#610

Post by Toutouxc »

pentae wrote: post #470
DominikPeters wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If rumors are to be believed, the next macbook generation is going to get a new body design and new screen, so will be 1st gen in a different, probably more severe sense. Makes it difficult to decide whether to just buy now.

Great point, unless the new hardware is also a touchscreen for those iOS Apps - then we'll see a lot of people wishing they'd waited

Touching your computer screen to run mobile apps on it? Is that what people really want?
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