Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#781

Post by Demiurge » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #408

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…

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…

Being “fickle” is kind of hard to apply to a market segment, because it not a synchronized monolith. There clearly is demand for decent machines hackingtoshes make. It’s just that the mobile market is much higher ROI. So, any R&D other Apple products get are some coincidental opportunities. This entire M1 change is a happy accident.

So it’s not that hackingtosh builders are anything, at all, it’s that they’re outnumbered by iPhone buys 1 to a million.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#782

Post by ubermonkey » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #482

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.

MacOS is not in any sense a walled garden. You can run any code you like on it. It's a general purpose computing environment.

I really wish Apple-detractors would find something true to complain about instead of spreading this misinformation.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#783

Post by bserge » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

DarkmSparks wrote: post #751

bserge wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"housing illiteracy" was your example not mine. I was just suggesting a possible parallel with how great the divide is now compared with the days when the vast majority of the world was lucky to lay their hands on a Z80.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. It seems we're agreeing on there being a divide, except I think the current situation is just a natural result of widespread adoption.

There's more people tinkering with dev boards and writing open source software, too, so it's not all bad.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#784

Post by carry_bit » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

What does this mean for the future of CPU design?

VLIW and other advanced designs never went mainstream in part because the AOT on install/JIT everything future never arrived. But with the success of Rosetta 2, has that future finally arrived?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#785

Post by anentropic » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

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…

Exactly, several reports since the launch have pointed out that both the memory bandwidth of the RAM is higher than before, and also the SSDs are faster than before (by 2-3x in both cases I think?)

combined it should make a big difference to swapping

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#786

Post by ericmay » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

Plasmoid2000ad wrote: post #770

ericmay wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

There's a massive US centric bubble when it comes to Apple. iPhones and Macbooks are not in the majority, let alone universal, with software developers as whole, just in pockets

Sure - so now they're unsuitable for developers?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#787

Post by caogecym » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #591

devxpy wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one would love to see an M1 chip cripple itself under the memory load of 4 intellij windows and chrome tabs, among other applications.

That's my take as well; I have a fairly modern Macbook, it's just fine, it's just that the software I run on it is far from ideal. Intellij has a ton of features but it's pretty heavyweight because of it; I'd like a properly built native IDE with user experience speed at the forefront. That's what I loved about Sublime Text. But I also like an IDE for all the help it gives me, things that the alternative editors don'…

If you want faster Intellij experience, you can try disable built-in plug-ins and features you don’t need, power saving mode is one quick way to disable heavyweight features.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#788

Post by Aperocky » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #578

Aperocky wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought one and I have 0 regrets. A laptop that satisfy my long battery life ultrabook experience AND capable to run steam games without compensating on performance. Though the 13" air is not in the same target user group vs. the 15" pro, so you might not find the same excitement as I did.

Regrets rarely appear 1 week after buying a product :-)

I thought they often happen instantly? Or in the 5 hours after you received the product?

I don't ever recall regretting something I've purchased, say, more than 1 month ago. The act of purchase is foregone past by that point.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#789

Post by mumblemumble » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

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.

> offering no machine suitable for developers and power users

This perception strikes me as having warped in from a different decade. Nowadays, at least in my neck of the woods, developers almost universally use laptops, and Apple's still plenty competitive in the (high end) laptop department.

For the most part, the only developers I know who still use desktops are machine learning folks who don't like the cloud and instead keep a Linux tower full of GPUs in a closet somewhere. And then remote into it from a laptop. Half the time it's a MacBook, half the time it's a XPS 13. And they were never going to consider a Mac Pro for their training server, anyway, because CUDA.

I couldn't speak to power users, but my sense is that, while it meant something concrete in the '90s, nowadays it's a term that only comes out when people want to complain about the latest update to Apple's line of computers.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#790

Post by gameswithgo » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

jb1991 wrote: post #561

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.

> macos vs android comparison which makes no sense. Because the M1 is similar to the chips used in iOS, hence the comparison is not inappropriate.

all comparisons are appropriate, but the question here was whether the mac laptops memory limits were somehow made better by more efficient use of memory. they are not. these are laptops, not phones or tablets. memory is used as efficiently as in previous laptops.