Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

singhkays.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#721

Post by masklinn »

pjmlp wrote: post #703
masklinn wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Operative word: failed.

That's not exactly relevant to the subject at hand of what memory-management method software usually uses on macos.

> 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.

Hardly?

And people are looking to refcounting as a reason why apple software is relatively light on memory, which is completely fair and true and e.g. generally assumed as one of the reasons why ios devices fare well with significantly less ram than equivalent android devices. GCs have significant advantages, but memory overhead is absolutely one of the drawbacks.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#722

Post by matwood »

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.

> suitable for developers and power users

Important to note 'some' here. I'm a developer and power user, and haven't had a desktop computer in almost 10 years.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#723

Post by kllrnohj »

zamadatix wrote: post #372
kllrnohj wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not very good, but the recent Ryzen offerings are still pretty strong, as is the very newest Intel stuff. See for example the 4900HS & 4800U on this Anandtech chart comparing spec2017 vs. the M1: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119365.png That's basically just sorted by power consumption. 4900HS is the most power used & fastest, followed by the ~22W M1 with all 8 cores loaded, then the 15W 480…

Just to note this is probably the single most slanted you could pick for M1 vs Zen 3 performance. For instance I could pull this graph instead https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119343.png and make the exact opposite claim. In reality it's probably best to read the full review and come to your own conclusions https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... The truth is desktop Zen 3 is onl…

> The truth is desktop Zen 3 is only decently ahead of certain multi core workloads at 10x or more the wattage,

Zen 3 was never really compared to M1 in multicore workloads in that Anandtech M1 article. You linked a single-core one, and Zen 3 isn't using 10x the power in that single-threaded comparison, either.

Also the 27W TDP i7-1185G7 is keeping up with the also around 25w TDP M1 in spec2017 single-threaded. M1 is still faster, but more in the realm of a typical generational improvement.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#724

Post by matwood »

cwhiz wrote: post #718
matsemann wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agreed. At this point the argument is nearing joke/meme level.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#725

Post by kllrnohj »

kevindong wrote: post #332
hu3 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not far, really. Android phones with Qualcom Snapdragon 865 scores better than an Intel i7 7700HQ (4 cores, 8 threads) on Geekbench on multi-core and ties on single core while using a magnitude less energy. While this i7 model is not new, it's not the "U" low voltage processor version. I could see Qualcom getting fancy and trying to scale their processors at 5nm. https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/one…

The last time the i7-7700HQ was sold in a Mac was for the mid-2017, 15" MBP. The current gen (late-2019) base model 16" MBP uses a i7-9750H. Single core performance is ~17.5% better and multi-core performance is ~51.2% better than the 865. The numbers are still surprisingly close given that the Snapdragon uses significantly less power. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-9750h

The i7-9750H isn't Intel's newest or most efficient. Take a look at the i7-1185G7 numbers for example https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4972038

Or the 15w Ryzen 4800U's results https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4972763

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#726

Post by leoc »

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 think it's fairly realistic. The Dell Latitude 7250 is probably a good representative of what you can get used for ~$220-$300 US these days: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m... The dual-core processor should still be serviceable for everyday work, at ~1.3kg it's light enough to carry around all day, a 1080p resolution should be OK on a 12" screen, and it can take up to 16GiB of RAM, though holding out for one with 16GiB preinstalled will definitely tend to push the cost up to nearer $300: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

(Then any laptop with similar specs except with a 2-in-1 form factor tends to cost a fair bit more, but that's not a must-have for most students or anyone who might have been considering a MacBook.)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#727

Post by rbanffy »

unicornfinder wrote: post #717
rini17 wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple will certainly offer an ARM-based MacPro, but I'm assuming it'll be a very different beast - current one maxes out at 1.5TB of RAM and it doesn't seem likely anyone will integrate that much memory on a chip anytime soon ;-)

Memory bandwidth is one key feature impacting M1's performance. When Apple builds an ARM-based MacPro, we can expect something with at the very least 5 DDR5 channels per socket. It's clear, from this, the M1 is a laptop/AIO/compact-desktop chip.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#728

Post by gameswithgo »

rimliu wrote: post #537
gameswithgo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it makes objective c and swift memory management faster but it doesn’t reduce ram usage at all. (maybe a weee bit less bandwidth used)

If memory is released as soon as possible instead of waiting for the next GC cycle, does not it make it more efficient?

these are not gc apps, they are reference counted.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#729

Post by sgerenser »

microtonal wrote: post #491
sgerenser wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I can think of that would actually reduce memory usage on M1 vs the same version of MacOS on x86 would be if they were able to tune their compressed memory feature to run faster (with higher compression ratio) on the M1. That would serve to reduce effective memory usage or need to fall back to swap. I would not expect something like that to be responsible for more than, say, a 5-10% RAM usage decrease…

That would serve to reduce effective memory usage or need to fall back to swap. I would not expect something like that to be responsible for more than, say, a 5-10% RAM usage decrease though. I think you can reach a lot more than that. Presumably, on Intel they use something like LZO or LZ4, since it compresses/decompresses without too much CPU overhead. But if you have dedicated hardware for something like e.g. Brot…

I suspect Apple is using their own LZFSE[0] compression, perhaps now with special tweaks for M1. The reason I only suspected a 5-10% increase though is even if it’s able to achieve a massive increase in compression ratio (compressing 3GB to 1GB instead of 2GB, say), that’s still only saving 1GB total. Which I guess isn’t nothing and is more than 10% on an 8GB machine.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZFSE

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#730

Post by gameswithgo »

sliken wrote: post #438
gameswithgo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no its normal mobile ram

The M1 has 4 LPDDR4x chips inside the the CPU package running at 4266 Mhz and showing some of the best latencies I've seen. What "normal" laptop has that?

being inside the cpu package should allow for less than a 1% improvement in latency by my napkin math. its got good latency because it is a top of the line mobile ram setup but that isn’t unique to m1
Post reply on HN