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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

That just isn't how taxes work. If you spend 15k of your profits and buy capital goods you don't reduce your taxes by 15k because no one was going to charge you 100% tax on it. You save only the foregone taxes rate on the purchase.

And depreciation.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf, WoW will run on just about anything... I remember playing it on an Acer (or maybe Lenovo?) netbook back in 2009/10. Checked it out from school right before Christmas break so I would have a computer at home for a month. In the article here they show Minecraft running at native res and 60 fps. No small feat nowadays considering draw distances that are popular now.

It doesn't run on my 2015 iMac 27" with anything near even medium settings... That's with a Radeon R9 M380, 24GB memory, 3.2 GHz i5. So I find it hard to believe that it will run with max settings / 60 fps on the new MBP, despite the lower native screen resolution.

I have no motivation to exaggerate. The game does run buttery smooth with no heck ups even in very crowded areas.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#773

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...

These numbers are amazing. The fact that most of these aren't even native yet blows my mind.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#774
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.

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...

Apple itself is selling it's new chips as making faster devices. If only a niche want that speed, Apple probably wouldn't be pushing it as part of the pitch so hard.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#775

I’m curious if/how Apple Silicon will compete in the server market. Apple certainly isn’t known for producing cost effective servers, but if they really posses this technology that leapfrogs commodity hardware they’d be crazy not to use it in every market possible, right?

Well, they recently updated their services agreements to allow developer services to update OS on multiple machines free of charge.

MacStadium is one of those companies that provides Mac servers. They wrote about it: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#776

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

> I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it. There's still the issue with the keyboard having 7 fewer keys than a modern ThinkPad, and compared to the classic 7-row ThinkPad keyboard, 15 physical keys are missing. That's a considerable disadvantage. Mac laptops have superior displays, but we're using keyboard just as often.

I'm not the original author but I use a mini as a desktop with one of these: https://www.chriscollins.me/notes/durgod-taurus-k320-mechani...

That has a correct keyboard.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You seem to be insinuating that, used to, people were "more literate" and are becoming more ignorant. No, I'm saying the goalposts moved - a lot. The same way widespread reading and writing moved the goalposts back in the day. >How does not understanding how computers work limit people? It puts them in the class that considers computers to be magic, like not knowing how to read and write put people in a class that c…

Most people can use computers just fine which, by definition, is enough for them to be computer literate. Where's the problem? How much do you need to know about how your car works to benefit from driving it?

If this was 1990 I would agree with you. Its not 1990, and computers do a lot more than edit documents, watch netflix and browse the web, if thats where someones knowledge of computing ends they dont have an understanding of the basics and are by definition computer illiterate, modern day equivalent of signing their name with a palm print.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#778
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that (to my understanding) memory bandwidth in modern devices is already high enough to keep a CPU fed during decompression. Bandwidth isn't a bottleneck in this scenario, so raising it doesn't make decompression any faster.

RAM bandwidth limitations (latency and throughput) are generally hidden by the multiple layers of cache in between the ram and CPU prefetching more data than is generally needed. Having memory on chip could make the latency less, but as ATI has shown with HBM memory on a previous generation of its GPUs its not a silver bullet solution. I am going to speculate now, but maybe, just maybe, if some of the silicon that ap…

> I am going to speculate now, but maybe, just maybe, if some of the silicon that apple has used on the M1 is used for compression/decompression they could be transparently compressing all ram in hardware. Since this offloaded from the CPUs and allows a compressed stream of data from memory, they achieve greater ram bandwidth, less latency and less usage for a given amount of memory.

Are you aware of any x86 chips that utilize this method?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#779
post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it. There's still the issue with the keyboard having 7 fewer keys than a modern ThinkPad, and compared to the classic 7-row ThinkPad keyboard, 15 physical keys are missing. That's a considerable disadvantage. Mac laptops have superior displays, but we're using keyboard just as often.

I'm not the original author but I use a mini as a desktop with one of these: https://www.chriscollins.me/notes/durgod-taurus-k320-mechani... That has a correct keyboard.

You've got a point that the keyboard problem only affects laptops.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I took my decision to leave macOS after their release of BigSur. It's absolutely, 101% unacceptable to me when someone else controls what program I can run on my hardware, and I should hope that their server will not go down. I still congratulate the team of Apple Silicone. Hope it will force Intel to create something similar.

They're adding an option to disable this in a future update. But I agree that it shouldn't have been forced to start with.

That's fascinating/good-news, do you have a reference for that?
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