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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#701

Post by cesarb »

rowls66 wrote: post #254
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…

The bit about reference counting being the reason that Macs and iOS devices get better performance with less ram makes no sense. As a memory management strategy, reference counting will always use more ram because a reference count must be stored with every object in the system. Storing all of those reference counts requires memory. A reference counting strategy would be more efficient in processor utilization compar…

> reference counting will always use more ram because a reference count must be stored with every object in the system

In the tracing GCs I have seen, an "object header" must be stored with every object in the system; the GC needs it to know which parts of the object are references which should be traced. So while reference counting needs extra space to store the reference count, tracing GC needs extra space to store the object header.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#702

Post by fvdessen »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #523

One of the things I've noticed recently, and especially since the CPU space started finally moving again is how much of a divide there now is between the computer literate, and the computer illiterate. It probably creates a social divide at least that which existed when the majority of people couldn't read or write, and is just as "not OK". Example of this in the first paragraph of this article: > For everyday users…

It is also wrong, computers from the last decade are not 'perfectly fine' for 'browsing'. I just saw my girlfriend do her website with Wix on her old macbook air and the performance was so slow that I wondered how she could tolerate it. Those new processors will benefit everyone.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#703

Post by pjmlp »

masklinn wrote: post #692
pjmlp wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Nope, they also tried a tracing GC for Objective-C on the desktop Operative word: tried. GC was an optional desktop-only component deprecated in Mountain Lion, which IIRC has not been accepted on MAS since 2015 was removed entirely from Sierra. Without going into irrelevant weeds, "apple has always used refcounting everywhere" is a much closer approximation.

Operative word: failed.

Which then in Apple style ("you are holding it wrong") turned it around in a huge marketing message, while hiding away the tracing GC efforts.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#704

Post by pantalaimon »

BigJ1211 wrote: post #665
m463 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either. I think it's still accurate and honestly that's apple's business model. I think the resale value for a student macbook doesn't really matter. It still costs the student - while they are poor - as much as 4x what other students pay for their laptop. Many students are paying $250 for their laptop.

I threw out a laptop I had from 2008 that was at the time top-of-the-line 3000$. I bought it in the US when I was there on vacation. This was when the dollar was at such a low that I got the device for at the time the equivalent of something like 1200€. I couldn't sell that device for half of that a year and a half later. I got a newer laptop in 2016, again very specced out for a laptop. About 1800€, couldn't sell it…

> Are you sure about that 250$ number? Because I don't think that's a very realistic number.

I got an i7 T430s for 200€ a few years ago and it's still plenty fast for coding, so I don't see why this number wouldn't be realistic.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#705

Post by Nursie »

auggierose wrote: post #657
Nursie wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get the VAT off, sure, but on the rest you just get to pay out of pre-tax profit. In the UK that means 20%. So a machine that's £5k retail becomes £4167 without VAT, effectively £3333 if you take into account tax savings, which only apply if your company is in profit. A £15K machine effectively would still cost you £10k. It's a big saving, sure, but it's still a very expensive machine.

Some people pay more than 20% tax. At 50% tax the savings look pretty good.

That tax rate is corporation tax, not a personal tax. Does any European country have a 50% corporation tax?

You're right if you start looking at "Well I run my own company so the cost compared to paying myself that cash as a dividend is much smaller", but that only really applies to those of us who do run our own small companies, own them fully and run them profitably, and have already pumped their personal earnings up to that level. And then we're on to a question about what that box is for and why it's needed, is it a company asset or a personal one?

And remember that you get to apply the same percentage discount to any other machine - your 15K apple box may come down to a conceptual £5K hit on your pocket, if you're paying 50% personal tax on top of the company taxes, but a £4-5k Zen 3 box with dual nvidia 3090s in it will come in at £1333-£1600 by the same metric and quite likely perform better...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#706

Post by Heliosmaster »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #696
chongli wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not want to offer to the hackintosh/enthusiast market because they are the most price conscious segment. Targeting that segment means putting out extremely performant, low-margin commodity machines. Doing so then cannibalizes the market for their ultra-high-end stuff. Not only that, though. Enthusiasts are also extremely fickle and quick to jump ship to a cheaper hardware offering. If you look at all of Ap…

What Apple could have done is to continue supplying something like the G4 towers. Those where stunningly beautiful machines and practical.

What if they simply decided that they didn't care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#707

Post by abacadaba »

cable2600 wrote: post #493
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 a 90 day demo of Windows 10 Enterprise from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-... Install it in a virtual machine, every 90 days make a new virtual machine from scratch. That or use the secret code to reset the demo days. Enter an Enterprise key when you want to register it for real.

Or just run Linux.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#708

Post by rini17 »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #706
socialdemocrat wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Apple could have done is to continue supplying something like the G4 towers. Those where stunningly beautiful machines and practical.

What if they simply decided that they didn't care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.

Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#709

Post by DanBC »

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)…

Doesn't this mean that you cannot use the computer for personal use, or that you can only reclaim the business-use proportion of that VAT?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#710

Post by cesarb »

skohan wrote: post #577
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.

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?

> Isn't it just a matter of measuring the IO and reproducing it?

No, you also have to understand it.

For a very simple example, suppose that, on initialization, the driver always sends 01 02 03 04 88 99 00 to the hardware, which then replies with 05 06 AA BB 01, and then the driver sends 07 08 11 22 05. What is the meaning of each of these bytes? What should the driver do if the hardware instead replied with 05 06 CC DD 07? Is the AA BB always the same for every device, or is it a calibration constant which it got from somewhere else? Is the last byte some kind of checksum, and if so, how to calculate it? And so on. Even for very simple hardware, reverse engineering the IO can be a lot of guesswork.

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