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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#741

Post by cblconfederate »

nercury wrote: post #736

It's quite clear how this "magic" is possible. Weather you like it or not, the future is a "product on a chip". That includes everything: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, and assembly instructions for vendor-specific things like NSObject. This puts everything physically close together (efficient), eliminates all the protocol compatibility overhead (efficient), removes all the standards the company can't control (efficient). The d…

It's not a sustainable model. Apple relies on the rest of the market being open and interoperable for their products to be useful (even the fastest computer is useless without content). If every competitor turns to monolithic solutions, they all lose.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#742

Post by cormacrelf »

kllrnohj wrote: post #224
gameswithgo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah its a bit of a stretch. to the extent that macos apps use garbage collection less than pc apps it would need less ram. but they are kinda hopping around a macos vs android comparison which makes no sense. I think mac enthusiasts trying to imagine why a max of 8 or 16gb is ok. it is ok for most people anyway.

It also would have no difference between the outgoing Intel ones and the incoming Apple Silicon ones. Same pointer sizes, same app memory management, etc... Some fairly minor differences in overall binary sizes, so no "wins" there or anything either.

All Swift/ObjC software has been doing ARC for ten (?) years. Virtual memory usage will be the same under M1. It will just pay off in being faster to refcount (ie as fast as it already is on an iPhone), and therefore the same software runs faster. Probably won't work under Rosetta 2 with the per-thread Total Store Ordering switch. And it's probably not specific to NSObject, any thread safe reference counter will benefit. There are more of those everywhere these days.

2 more points:

- All the evidence I've seen is gifs of people opening applications in the dock, which is... not impressive. I can do that already, apps barely allocate at all when they open to "log in to iCloud" or "Safari new tab". And don't we see that literally every time Apple launches Mac hardware? Sorry all tech reviewers everywhere, try measuring something.

- I think the actual wins come from the zillion things Apple has done in software. Like: memory compression, which come to think of it might be possible to do in hardware. Supposedly a lot of other work/tuning done on the dynamic pager, which is maybe enabled by higher bandwidth more than anything else.

Fun fact: you can stress test your pager and swap with `sudo memory_pressure`. Try `-l critical`. I'd like to see a benchmark comparing THAT under similar conditions with the previous generation.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#743

Post by marcodave »

hans1729 wrote: post #671
huangbong wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 years ago “why do we care about 4K” 8 years ago “why do we care about 1080p” etc...

We'll see about that (with respect to pixel density and efficiency). I'm typing this on a 4k xps 15, and while the display is great, the battery cost is extreme. There would be no meaningful advantage in an 8k-display of the same form factor, so there is far, far less incentive for manufacturers to race to 8k. there will be 8k tvs, sure, but lets be real - the step to 1080p was massive, the step to 4k already couldn'…

> the step to 1080p was massive,

the step to 1080p I'd say that, for some, could have been seen even as a downgrade. It was possible to use 1600x1200 back in the late 90s and early 2000s, with CRTs. The concept of "high definition" was already known by PC users (gamers and professionals, that is)

4k is a nice upgrade, and I'd say that many professionals already were using it with proper monitors

8k eeh, we'll get there

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#744

Post by tolien »

emsy wrote: post #694
tolien wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as the sibling comments point out, the price of a Mac Pro isn't just an "Apple Tax^WPremium" over a desktop machine but is an order of magnitude more expensive (assuming you don't care about workstation-class components, i.e. Xeon Ws, Radeon Pro GPUs and ECC RAM). There's an enormous price gap between a Mac Mini and the Mac Pro (especially when the Mini now has higher single-threaded performance than the base…

Exactly this. The closest to this would be an i7 iMac but not everyone wants an Aio PC. It’s kind of a bummer. We finally have an iPhone for everyone, even a high end small form factor option. Whoever is responsible for that decision please take a look at the Mac lineup next.

There's even precedent for it: the iMac/iMac Pro. The Pro model has workstation-class hardware in it while the non-Pro does not.

Ideally the enhanced cooling from the Pro models would trickle down to the non-Pro. By all reports the (i)Mac Pro is virtually silent but in the low-power ARM world a desktop machine that size could almost be passively cooled, even under load.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#745

Post by nickjj »

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'm not a student but it's pretty close I think.

I invested $350 into a Chromebook that runs native Linux[0] about 4 years ago and it's still going strong as a secondary machine I use when I'm away from my main workstation.

It has a 13" 1080p IPS display, 4gb of memory, an SSD, a good keyboard and weighs 2.9 pounds. It's nothing to write home about but it's quite speedy to do every day tasks and it's even ok for programming where I'm running decently sized Flask, Rails and Phoenix apps on it through Docker.

If I had to use it as my primary development machine for web dev I wouldn't be too disappointed. It only starts falling apart if you need to do anything memory intensive like run some containers while also running VMs, but you could always spend a little more and get 8gb of memory to fix that problem.

I'm sure nowadays (almost 5 years later) you could get better specs for the same price.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#746

Post by xphos »

nercury wrote: post #736

It's quite clear how this "magic" is possible. Weather you like it or not, the future is a "product on a chip". That includes everything: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, and assembly instructions for vendor-specific things like NSObject. This puts everything physically close together (efficient), eliminates all the protocol compatibility overhead (efficient), removes all the standards the company can't control (efficient). The d…

Yeah I was wondering forever to how that were emulating x86 faster than native x86 its because they brought ram internal. But the ultimate black box is a better word than vendor lock-in. If they are gutting all the common stuff I wonder what dragons are lurking. Like this is the kind of design change that introduces something like meltdown in my opinion. Maybe MacOS can hide these things but there is definitely some hardware issues there its to many moving parts for it not to be.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#747

Post by xadhominemx »

nercury wrote: post #736

It's quite clear how this "magic" is possible. Weather you like it or not, the future is a "product on a chip". That includes everything: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, and assembly instructions for vendor-specific things like NSObject. This puts everything physically close together (efficient), eliminates all the protocol compatibility overhead (efficient), removes all the standards the company can't control (efficient). The d…

Putting the CPU and RAM on the same die is absolutely not the future. Not only is it impossible to mix and match process technologies in that way, it would be extremely wasteful given the far greater numbers of metal layers on a CPU and the performance improvement would be marginal. The same is even more true with integrating CPU and NAND flash.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#748

Post by pbronez »

speleding wrote: post #739
coldtea wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the developers and power users that still use desktop machines/towers are either very cpu-power-hungry niche exception, or the more backwards ones, and thus least likely to influence/be imitated by anyone...

I care to differ (as a developer on a desktop). The reason for developing on a desktop is that my productivity is much higher with 3 screens, one of which is a 40 inch, a full 101 key keyboard and a mouse.

Yeah I’m with you. Laptops are great, but they sacrifice a lot for the form factor. Remove the constraint of needing an integrated screen, keyboard, touch pad and battery, and you can do much more. Sure you can dock it, but docked accessories are always second class citizens relative to the integrated stuff.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#749

Post by jmnicolas »

reader_mode wrote: post #740
jmnicolas wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a C# project that was too slow and used too much RAM. I can attest that structs use less memory however IIRC they don't have methods so no GetHashCode() which made them way too slow to insert in a HashSet or Dictionary. In the end I used regular objects in a Dictionary. RAM usage was a bit higher than structs (not unbearably so) but speed improvement was massive.

>I can attest that structs use less memory however IIRC they don't have methods so no GetHashCode() which made them way too slow to insert in a HashSet or Dictionary You can and should implement IEquatable on a struct, especially if you plan on placing them in a hashset - the default implementation will use reflection and will be slow but it's easy to override.

I just checked, apparently structs can have methods. Is it a new thing or me that was ignorant?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#750

Post by ericmay »

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.

> Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers

You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

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