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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#711

Post by DarkmSparks »

bserge wrote: post #673
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…

The divide has always been there, it's just that "computer illiterate" people massively outnumber the literate ones and as such, are getting more attention. It's kind of like saying there's a huge divide between "house literate" people, who know how everything in their home is built and how to fix it, and "house illiterate" people who just want to come home, turn on the lights, use the shower, the oven and the bed.

Brazilian Favelas spring to mind.

Yeah, like that.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#712

Post by bysja »

vermilingua wrote: post #613

For those of us who are picking up M1 MacBooks as first time Mac users, is there some kind of Mac crash course for devs? What apps are useful, what familiar tools from Linux can we use, etc? I'm aware of Dash, which makes me suspect there are a bunch of other Mac-exclusive tools which will be useful.

I found this guide to be helpful: https://sourabhbajaj.com/mac-setup/

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#713

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

headmelted wrote: post #636
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…

Agree completely. I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either. The machines have always commanded a premium for things that enthusiasts don’t see value in (I.e. anything beyond numeric spec sheet values), so most critics completely miss the point of them. There’s a valid argument to be made that they’re also marked up to higher margins than rivals even beyond the above, but I’m not sure i…

> The machines have always commanded a premium for things that enthusiasts don’t see value in (I.e. anything beyond numeric spec sheet values), so most critics completely miss the point of them.

It's not just intangibles. I really like using Macs, but my latest computer is a Dell XPS 17. This is not a cheap computer if you get the 4k screen, 64GB of RAM and the good graphics card. At those prices, you should consider the MBP16. The MBP is better built, has a better finish and just feels nicer.

Thing is, Dell will sell me an XPS 17 with a shitty screen because I don't care about the difference and would rather optimise battery life. I can get 3rd party RAM and SSDs. I can get a lesser graphics card because I don't need that either. I can get a more recent Intel CPU. And I can get the lesser model with a greater than 25% discount (they wouldn't sell me the better models with a discount though).

I think some of the Apple Tax, is them not willing you sell you a machine closer to your needs, not allowing some user replaceable parts and not having discounts.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#714

Post by hamilyon2 »

skohan wrote: post #583
hnarayanan wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not what running an ARM64 Linux VM means.

Are you just talking about using an ARM64 container your root container? This kind of breaks the point of docker if you're running on x86 in the cloud, doesn't it? You're no longer developing in your exact deployment environment, which is one of the key benefits of docker.

How many years left till everyone run arm on server side too anyway?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#715

Post by 1_player »

crazygringo wrote: post #334
3np wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty much daily have to do a closing round to not run out of my 24GiB. That’s all web browsers (Usually 100-200 tabs), vs code with some extensions and 2x4k display.

But what do you even mean "run out"? This is what I don't get. If you have multiple browsers with hundreds of tabs, the majority of those tabs are probably swapped out to your SSD already. With swapfiles and SSD's, physical memory is less and less relevant except when you're performing very specific computational tasks that actually require everything to be simultaneously in memory -- things like highly complex video…

If your tabs are swapped out to SSD, your computer feels incredibly _slow_. SSD are fast, yeah, but multiple orders of magnitude slower than the slowest RAM module.

You can run 4GB if you're fine with having most of your applications swapped out, but the experience will be excruciating.

Physical memory is still as relevant as it was 30 years ago. No offense but if you can't see the problem, you probably have never used a computer with enough RAM to fit everything in memory + have enough spare for file caching.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#716

Post by skohan »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #714
skohan wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just talking about using an ARM64 container your root container? This kind of breaks the point of docker if you're running on x86 in the cloud, doesn't it? You're no longer developing in your exact deployment environment, which is one of the key benefits of docker.

How many years left till everyone run arm on server side too anyway?

I mean, greater than zero, so it's still a relevant problem

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#717

Post by unicornfinder »

rini17 wrote: post #708
Heliosmaster wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quite possibly - I was a huge Apple fan who's now using a PC because I was fed up with the lack of viable options for me.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#718

Post by cwhiz »

matsemann wrote: post #599
ogre_codes wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's walled garden Apparently over the years the definition of "Walled Garden" has drifted a lot. The iPhone has a "Walled Garden", unless you jailbreak, it's very difficult to run anything outside the App Store. My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store. Nothing needs to be from the App Store. Most of what I run doesn't even go through Gatekeeper and it certainly never touches software I build or compi…

> My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store. For now.

People have been making these comments for years. Every new macOS release.

Except here we are and things are the same. I run whatever I want.

Here’s to having this same silly “argument” in 2021.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#719

Post by sirn »

audunw wrote: post #624
fomine3 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand why less RAM is enough specially in Apple Silicon rather than Intel. Is the argument proved? RAM capacity is just RAM capacity. Possibly Swift-made apps uses less RAM compared to other apps, but microarchitecture shouldn't be matter.

> RAM capacity is just RAM capacity. Possibly Swift-made apps uses less RAM compared to other apps, but microarchitecture shouldn't be matter. My guess it's mostly faster swapping. Microarchitecture could help, perhaps by making context switches faster. But it could also be custom peripheral/DMA logic for handling swapping between RAM and NVM. I think it makes sense.. NVM should be fast enough that RAM only needs to…

I also believe this is the case.

Most experiment with 8GB M1 Macs I've seen so far (on YouTube) seems to start slowing down once the data cannot fit in a RAM, although the rest of the system remain responsive e.g. 8K RED RAW editing test. In the same test with 4K RED RAW there were some shuttering on the first playback but subsequent playback were smooth, which I guessed it was a result of swap being moved back into a RAM.

My guess would be they've done a lot of optimization on swap, making swapping less of an performance penalty (as ridiculous as it sounds, I guess they could even use Neural Engine to determine what should be put back into RAM at any given moment to maximize responsiveness.)

macOS has been doing memory compression since Mavericks using WKdm algorithm, but they also support Hybrid Mode[1] on ARM/ARM64 using both WKdm and a variant of LZ4 for quite some time (WKdm compress much faster than LZ4). I wouldn't be too surprised if M1 has some optimization for LZ4. So far I haven't seen anybody tested it.

It might be interesting to test M1 Macs with vm_compressor=2 (compression with no swap) or vm_compressor=8 (no compression, no swap)[2] and see how it runs. I'm not sure if there's a way to change bootargs on M1 Macs, though.

[1]: https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/a449c6a3b8014d9406c...

[2]: https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/a449c6a3b8014d9406c...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#720

Post by bserge »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #711
bserge wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The divide has always been there, it's just that "computer illiterate" people massively outnumber the literate ones and as such, are getting more attention. It's kind of like saying there's a huge divide between "house literate" people, who know how everything in their home is built and how to fix it, and "house illiterate" people who just want to come home, turn on the lights, use the shower, the oven and the bed.

Brazilian Favelas spring to mind. Yeah, like that.

Did you mean that in a negative way? The way I see it, favelas are more of a government problem, not enforcing rules and standards leads to people making up their own (just like Internet standards).

Going with my analogy, someone who built their own house in the favelas is, in fact, "house literate". Their home might be sub-standard, but they can take care of it all on their own.

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