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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#681

Post by [deleted] »

Tepix wrote: post #647
victor106 wrote: post #109

> A task like editing 8K RAW RED video file that might have taken a $5000 machine before can now be done on a $699 Mac Mini M1 or a fan-less MacBook Air that costs $999 That’s insanely great. Maybe I am exaggerating but Apple’s M1 might be the best innovation in the tech industry in the past 5 years.

Why are we even talking about 8k video? It's something that almost noone needs and even fewer people have to edit. My guess is most people are still happy with editing their FHD videos. Something that works well on a five year old laptop.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#682

Post by hans1729 »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #400
dognotdog wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, too, am on 2014 hardware. The real step that would move me to update would be more RAM with the Apple Silicon. The last gen Intel hardware did offer 32GB of RAM, but not much else to justify the cost over a 6 year old precursor.

Was planning on getting the pro 16 but the extra cost for 32gb is obscene. Ended up going with a dell xps 15 (still in shipping) which even has an option for 64gb at a reasonable price. Can't wait to get rid of this pro 13 which constantly overheats.

Hey man, I'm using the xps with 64 Gigs. Good luck with yours. It's a great laptop, but I can't wait for my m1 air with 16 gigs, because for mobility, I'm missing the outrageous stability that macos and Apples hardware are delivering. I'll keep the xps as a daily driver for work (wsl 2 and vscode are just unmet in apples ecosystem), but for the couch, conferences, trains etc., it's going to be the mba 100% of the time. Are you transitioning to windows?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#683

Post by brutal_boi »

Shared404 wrote: post #444
kube-system wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just run any of the reclaim series. Pure gold if you ask me.

https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#684

Post by Maxion »

Twisell wrote: post #646
joking wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

However real case usage of such massive amount of data are limited for typical desktop user. Massive database load usually happen on specialized servers in which 256Go RAM and more are pretty mundane. So on customer PC ram is maybe more used as caching mechanisms or eaten away by poorly designed memory leak/garbage collection. And if your GPU is able do to real time rendering on data heavy load maybe you need less ca…

Plenty of use cases for more than 8gb of ram. When you're doing data analysis on even smaller datasets you may need several times more available memory than the size of the dataset as you're processing it.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#685

Post by nbzso »

sneak wrote: post #406
1over137 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. But at least pre-Big-Sur you could use Little Snitch to block Apple apps from sending things, but now that's no longer possible. :(

If you have an intel mac, you can still install LS 4.x (once you have booted into recovery to permit the kext) on Big Sur. HN user miles pointed this out recently, and it is awesome. https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917 It's 5.x that uses the new restricted APIs. I'm going to contact the developers and ask for an ARM build of 4.x so the same trick will work on M1, at least until Apple forbids all…

This is deal breaker for me and lots of security conscious professionals. I have foreseen this "Apple goal" in the past and the only thing thats keeping me to use MacOS is Little Snitch and Mullvad VPN combination. Sadly in Linux world there is no commercially viable option for access rules per app basis and I don't understand why. I don't have answer for another question: As a business I learned from Apple that keeping tight security and protecting your intellectual property is big thing. How on earth big business is complicit in this telemetry approach from Microsoft, Google and Apple? If you are business captured metadata is enough to know important metrics about your company and this may work against you in the long term. Thats why I am against cloud based apps (like Figma), and I am furious with Sketch for not providing collaboration solution and bragging about "Mac Only" approach.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#686

Post by hombre_fatal »

emadabdulrahim wrote: post #183

The only downside of the amazing new M1 MBP is that it runs WoW on max settings 60fps. And now I'm back into the world of Azeroth. Especially with the launch of Shadowlands. What the hell, Apple, I thought I was safe and immune from video games with my MacBooks.

Further, here's a spreadsheet of the perf people are seeing with common games on various M1 hardware.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#687

Post by ajuc »

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…

Android phones are build on managed code, but PC computers are built on C/C++ mostly (almost all productivity apps, browsers, games, the operating system itself). And the only GC code most people run is garbage collected on apple too - it's Java Script on the web.

I'm not familiar with MacOs, are the apps there mostly managed code? Even if they were and even if refcounting on Mac is that much faster than refounting on PC - refcounted code would still lose to manual memory management on average.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#688

Post by garretraziel »

jml7c5 wrote: post #151
darren_ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, reading some more of the discussions it seems like the answer is that (roughly) the same amount of memory is used, but hitting swap is no longer a major problem, at least for user-facing apps. Seems like the original quote is reading too much into the retain/release thing.

If the same amount of memory is used, then wouldn't swap usage be the same?

Yeah, but swapping suddenly isn't as big problem as before (probably). You had to be very careful not to hit trashing on x86_64, now you don't have to worry so much.

Or that's how I understand this, I don't actually own M1 Mac.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#689

Post by kenneth »

I do take slight issue with the section about RAM performance. The idea in the article is that M1 Mac runs software that uses reference-counting instead of garbage collection as its memory model (i.e. Objective-C and Swift software). Two issues…

1/ Sure, but that's also the case with with x86 Intel Macs. Still running reference-counting Obj-C and Swift software for the most part. So how is this a M1 differentiator?

2/ Also, Macs run plenty of software that mostly uses garbage collection, e.g. any Electron app (Spotify, Slack, Superhuman, etc.) is mostly implemented in GC'd Javascript. There's also plenty of software written with other runtimes like Java or implementing a GC.

So this does nothing to explain why 8GB of RAM on an OS X device with an M1 chip is better than 8GB of RAM on an OS X device with an x86 chip from Intel.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#690

Post by m463 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #511
vbezhenar wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

3970x 32-core is I got curious...

  - amd 3990x 64-core 128 thread    $3849
  - 256gb g.skill ddr 3600          $978
  - noctua nh-u14s cooler           $80
  - samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4  $229
  - evga 1000w power supply         $207
  - fractal design define 7         $170
  - asus trx40-pro mb               $396
  - nvidia rtx 3080                 $699 (?)
  - steve jobs: a biography         $15  (hardcover)

  = a really maxed out system       $6623
probably 1/2 that for a 5950x/am4 system

EDIT: ok, I had to know...

  - amd 5950x 16 core 32 thread     $799
  - 128gb g.skill ddr 3600          $489
  - noctua nh-u12s cooler           $60
  - samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4  $229
  - evga 850w power supply          $139
  - fractal design define 7 compact $130
  - asus x570-pro mb                $240
  - nvidia rtx 3070                 $499 (?)
  - steve jobs: a biography         $14  (kindle)
  - linux with kde mac-look icons   $0

  = a really really great system    $2599
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