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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#831

Post by mikepurvis »

pjmlp wrote: post #827
mikepurvis wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely you'd want CI builds for your app? I suppose you can always go the sassy option and just offload this problem onto Travis or CircleCI, but then they're the ones stuck figuring out how to rack thousands of Mac Minis, dealing with thermals in a machine that isn't set up for hot/cold aisles, a computer that doesn't have a serial port or dedicated management interface, etc.

If you're a big enough org or the app is for internal use, this might not be an option anyway. At that point I imagine most people just give up on it and figure out how to run macOS on a generic VM. But at that point you have to convince your IT department that it's worth it doing a thing that is definitely unsupported and in violation of the TOS.

Or maybe some of these are big enough that they are able to approach Apple and get a special license for N concurrent instances of macOS running on virtualized hardware? Who knows.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#832

Post by floatboth »

taranissnark wrote: post #244
klelatti wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how? It has an Arm CPU - how does it differ from any other machine with a 64 bit Arm CPU?

Remember, ARM instruction set, aka an interface, not an implementation. Arm holdings does license their tech to other companies though, so I don't know how much apple silicon would have in common, with say a Qualcomm CPU. They may be totally different under the hood.

Yes, Apple's microarchitecture is indeed completely their own, while Qualcomm uses rebranded/tweaked Arm Cortex cores.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#833

Post by valuearb »

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…

A big part of saving Apple was Jobs killing the clone program. That lesson probably still resonates in the halls of Apple even if allowing hackintoshes is a different thing without the same risks.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#834

Post by vetinari »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #713
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…

> 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. It's not just intangibles. I really like using Macs, but my latest computer is a Dell XPS 17. This is not a cheap computer if you get the 4k screen, 64GB of RAM and the good graphics card. At those prices, you should consider…

It works both ways: if you get something in Apple hardware, you will get the nice version of it. If can't get something there, you will have to be without.

Example: I've been looking at X1 Nano. It is improvement compared to other lines (it has 16:10 display finally!), but it is still somewhere in the middle of the road.

The competitor from Apple has slightly better display, much better wifi and no option for LTE/5G.

Nano has 2160x1350 450 nits display with Dolby Vision. Apple has 2560x1600 400 (Air)/500 (MBP) nits display with P3. The slightly higher resolution means that Apple would display 9 logical bits using 8 physical when using the 1440x900@2X resolution (177% scale), but to get similar scale on Nano that would mean displaying 8 logical pixels using 6 physical (150% scale). Similarly, the Dolby Vision is an uknown (how it could get used?), the P3 from Apple is a known.

X1 Nano has 2x2 MIMO wifi - Intel AX 200 - with no option for anything better. There are only two antennas in the display frame, you cannot add more (ok, 3, but the third one is for cellular, and cannot be used for wifi if you forego cellular). Apple ships with 4x4 MIMO. If you have decent AP at office or home, it is a huge difference, yet no PC vendors are willing to improve here.

The cellular situation is the exact opposite. You can get cellular module for Thinkpads, and you cannot for Apple, at all, so if you go this route, you have to live with workarounds.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#835

Post by valuearb »

darren_ wrote: post #87
brundolf wrote: post #25

This is fascinating: > Retain and release are tiny actions that almost all software, on all Apple platforms, does all the time. ….. The Apple Silicon system architecture is designed to make these operations as fast as possible. It’s not so much that Intel’s x86 architecture is a bad fit for Apple’s software frameworks, as that Apple Silicon is designed to be a bespoke fit for it …. retaining and releasing NSObjects i…

This quote doesn’t really cover why M1 macs are more efficient with less ram than intel macs? You’ve got a memory budget, it’s likely broadly the same on both platforms, the speed at which your retains/releases happen isn’t going to be the issue. it’s not like intel macs use GC where m1 uses RC. (It explains why iOS does better with less ram than android, but the quote is specifically claiming this as a reason for 8G…

Yea, this is a BS theory. I have a 16Gb M1 MacBook Air and the real answer is that it has super fast SSD access, so you don’t notice the first few gigabytes of swap.

But when swap hits 8-9 Gb, it’s effects start to get very noticeable.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#836

Post by kllrnohj »

xenadu02 wrote: post #639
uncomputation wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone please correct me for the sake of all of us if I’m wrong, but it sounds like Apple is using specialized hardware for “NSObject” retain-and-release operations, which may bypass/reduce the impact on general RAM.

On recent Apple Silicon CPUs uncontended most atomic operations are essentially free - almost identical in speed to the non-atomic version of the same operation. Reference counting must be atomic safe whether using ARC or MRR. On x86 systems those atomic operations impose a performance cost. On Apple Silicon they do not. It does not change how much memory is used but it does mean you can stop worrying about the cost…

> On recent Apple Silicon CPUs uncontended most atomic operations are essentially free - almost identical in speed to the non-atomic version of the same operation.

They are fast for atomics but still far, far slower than the equivalent non-atomic operation. An add operation takes around half a cycle (upper bound here - with how wide the firestorm core is an add operation is almost certainly less than half a cycle). At 1ghz a cycle is 1 nanosecond. The M1 runs at around 3ghz. So you're still talking the atomic operation being >10x slower than non-atomics.

Which should not be surprising at all. Apple didn't somehow invent literal magic here. They still need coherency across 8 cores, which means at a minimum L1 is bypassed for the atomic operation. The L2 latency is very impressive, contributing substantially to that atomic operation performance. But it's still coming at a very significant cost. It's very, very far from free. There's also no ARM vs. x86 difference here, since the atomic necessarily forces a specific memory ordering guarantee that's stricter than x86's default. Both ISAs are forced to do the same thing and pay the same costs.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#837

Post by johncalvinyoung »

floatboth wrote: post #828
headmelted wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 slight…

Yeah, I'm no kernel developer, but I've been replying to anyone saying 'just stick n * M1 in it' that even AMD has been trying to move back to more predictable memory access latency, less NUMA woes.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#838

Post by _ph_ »

anigbrowl wrote: post #228

For those of us who just don't where MacOS is concerned, what are the prospects for Linux on an M1?

There is a good chance to run it inside a VM, already shown at WWDC, so it only depends on Parallels/VMWare releasing their updates for the M1. On the bare machine, it is somewhat unsure. Currently it is not possible, but it is not clear how difficult it would be. In any case, the question would be about driver development, as this is a completely custom computer. But as the Mini isn't expensive and this is a really interesting chip, I could imagine, that a lot of Linux hackers are trying to get it running. Even Linus Torwalds expressed interest in the M1 MB Air.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#839

Post by philwelch »

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.

Apple tried selling Xserves for years.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#840

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

bound008 wrote: post #329
cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am blown away by my M1 Mac, but my x86 Mac feels about 5-10% snappier on Big Sur. For clarification, do you mean your x86 with Big Sur is faster 5-10% faster than you M1 with Big Sur, or is it compared with the same machine running what I'm going to guess is Catalina?

Sorry, I mean my x86 machine has improved in performance with the upgrade to Big Sur. The M1 MBA (16gb RAM) feels snappier and more responsive in almost every way to my Mac Mini w/64gb of RAM. RAM usage is also noticeably lower on the M1 when I migrated my browser tabs over (500+ between Firefox and Safari).

Very interesting. Thanks for the clarification.
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