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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#821

Post by maccard » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #789

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.

> 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…

I work in games where we write c++ in a multi-million LOC base. Every developer in my company has a minimum of 12 cores, and 96GB RAM. All of the offices are backed by build farms on top of this. There are entire industries that rely on very high end hardware. (Of course we also rely on lots of windows-only software too, but that's only an issue once the hardware is solved)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#822

Post by mpfundstein » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

cable2600 wrote: post #493

nycticorax wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, large businesses at least get Windows 10 Enterprise, which doesn't come with all of that nonsense. The real shame is that you can't get Windows 10 Enterprise without a volume license.

You can get a 90 day demo of Windows 10 Enterprise from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-... Install it in a virtual machine, every 90 days make a new virtual machine from scratch. That or use the secret code to reset the demo days. Enter an Enterprise key when you want to register it for real.

you are kidding, right?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#823

Post by wffurr » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

I am weirdly obsessed with this. I am burning to see the next iteration of Apple Silicon devices with an M1X or M2 chip and more ports and RAM for higher-spec devices and new MacBook designs even lighter and smaller than the current Air (bring back the 11"!).

I guess I'm just caught up in the hype and excited about movement in the chip design space after many years of Intel stagnation. Zen and the M1 are a breath of fresh air.

Waiting to replace a 2014 11" MacBook Air until the story about Parallels support is clear and maybe new MacBook designs are available.

I also have a 2013 Mac Pro trashcan-style on my desk at work. Until recently it was simultaneously available in the inventory system and marked as EOL. I'm not sure if the 2020 6-core Intel Mac Mini would actually be faster - maybe. I'm only a part-time iOS developer so I keep trucking along with the 2013 model.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#824

Post by mpfundstein » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #796

PixyMisa wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And depreciation.

Of you can put your heavy workloads on the cloud and pass it as opex.

which is the way to go

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#825

Post by motoboi » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:41 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.

> "stuck using OSX"

Oh, god. Stuck is not even close to define the joy of OSX. I've been "stuck" with OSX for 10 years and every time I tried the waters of windows or ubuntu again I came home crying.

Not perfect since Sierra? Yes. Windows and Ubuntu not even close? Yes. Personal opinion? Yes. Hardware was crap for last 2 years and make me consider moving back to windows? F* yes!

But now with those M1 chips I'm already saving money for an Air (very very expensive in Brazil).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#826

Post by Nursie » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #709

piokoch wrote: post #598

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)…

Doesn't this mean that you cannot use the computer for personal use, or that you can only reclaim the business-use proportion of that VAT?

Strictly speaking, yes, there is the expectation that the machine is used entirely for business purposes, if the business is paying for it, otherwise it might be considered a benefit in kind. It's not so much about VAT then as PAYE.

However I feel no particular guilt that the workstation I use for my full-time dev day-job also has a windows partition for gaming in the evening, and I hope that the tax authorities would see things the same way! It's not like the asset isn't a justified business purchase.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#827

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #803

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.

Sure, but there's a legit gap in the datacenter— not having a sanely, legally rackable OS X machine is a pretty big problem for a lot of organizations. Not everyone wants to do their Jenkins builds or generate homebrew bottles on a Mac Mini under someone's desk.

None of those use cases seem relevant for iOS or macOS development.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#828

Post by floatboth » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #644

headmelted wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In terms of high performance products, I’m actually really excited for the next Mac Pro. They’ve got novel design options open to them that no rival has. The M1 costs Apple relatively little to produce per unit - I would expect them to keep the overall design for a Mac Pro but have stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has. O…

AMD would be able to do DRAM on package for the lowest wattage "ultrabook" chips, at the cost of producing a very different package for them vs. the bigger laptops that are expected to have upgradable SODIMMs. But I doubt that this "co-location" is that huge for performance. Whatever memory frequency and timings Apple is using are likely easily achievable through the regular mainboard PCB, maybe at the cost of slightly more voltage. DDR4 on desktop is overclockable to crazy levels and that's going through lots of things (CPU package - socket pins - board - slots - DIMMs).

> stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has

Quad or more package NUMA topology?? The latency would absolutely suck.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#829

Post by ThinkBeat » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

Such an impressive marketing launch. Regular marketing, paid reviews and a bunch of astroturfing. A standard Apple launch receipt.

I will withhold my enthusiasm or judgment until it has been I'm the hands of real users for six months or so.

In principle, I have never seen a Mac product that lives up to the hype. I might be harder to please I guess

There are bound to be issues with Rosetta2 that will be found and hopefully patched. Same with the new OS.

I predict some problems with hardware as well.

To me this is common sense.

This is a gigantic step. A gigantic release.

Such events nearly always have issues.

Which is why so many software developed work With continuous delivery.

Though we might think this is how the development Took place internally.

I do not know how many dev machines were handed out prior to the launch

Like anyone I would like all the glitter and fanfare to be real and accurate. .

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#830

Post by sliken » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #730

sliken wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I 100% agree, but I've audited my code, and on other platforms my code closely agrees with LMbench's lat_mem_rd, which seems pretty well regarded for accuracy.

The latency appears real to me.

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