Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#861

Post by pierrebai » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

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…

I agreed. It think it's typical of cargo-culting: explanations don't need to make sense, it's all about the breathless enthusiasm.

Look, want to know how M1 achieve its result? Easy. Apple is first with a 5nm chips. Look in the past: every CPU maker gains both speed and power efficiency when going down a manufacturing node.

Intel CPU were still using a 14nm node (although they called 12+++) while Apple M1 is now at 5nm. According to this [1] chart, that's a transistor density at least 4x.

Not saying Apple has no CPU design chops, They've been at it for their phones for quite a while. But people are just ignoring the elephant in the room: Apple gives TSMC a pile of cash to be exclusive for mass production on their latest 5nm tech.

   [1] https://www.techcenturion.com/7nm-10nm-14nm-fabrication#nbspnbspnbspnbsp7nm_vs_10nm_vs_12nm_vs_14nm_Transistor_Densities

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#862

Post by donarb » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #154

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.

I saw that point brought up on Twitter and I don't know how it it makes more efficient use of RAM. Specifically, as I understood it is that Apple software (written in objective C/Swift) uses a lot of retain/release (or Atomic Reference Counting) on top of manual memory, for memory management rather than other forms of garbage collection (such as those found in Java/C#), which gives Objective C programs a lower memory…

ARC stands for Automatic Reference Counting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Reference_Counting

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#863

Post by ogre_codes » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #753

cwhiz wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been making these comments for years. Every new macOS release. Except here we are and things are the same. I run whatever I want. Here’s to having this same silly “argument” in 2021.

I just got a new MBP this summer from my workplace, running Catalina. Getting it to run software not approved by Apple is a pain. They may always leave a door open somewhere, but I wouldn't want to count on that.

What software are you having trouble getting installed?

I've never had issues with getting things from inside or outside the App Store working. Usually it's just dragging the App into the Applications folder and answering a prompt. Sometimes there is an installer. (or I use Home-brew)

Maybe you are trying to install something from a developer who doesn't sign their code or doesn't have an Apple Developer ID? I'm curious what that might be.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#864

Post by mikepurvis » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #839

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.

Apple tried selling Xserves for years.

I don't think the answer is for Apple to force people into buying custom server hardware any more than it is to force them into making janky rack setups for Mac Minis.

The answer that most people would like to see would be a stripped down, non-GUI macOS that's installable at no cost in virtualization environments, or maybe with some evaluation scheme like Windows Server has, which effectively makes it free for throwaway environments like build agents.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#865

Post by thoughtsimple » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

vermilingua wrote: post #613

For those of us who are picking up M1 MacBooks as first time Mac users, is there some kind of Mac crash course for devs? What apps are useful, what familiar tools from Linux can we use, etc? I'm aware of Dash, which makes me suspect there are a bunch of other Mac-exclusive tools which will be useful.

It's interesting that right now, MacPorts is further along the M1/Apple Silicon porting process than Homebrew. I think this is because Homebrew tries to do everything from a binary repository and MacPorts downloads source, patches it and builds it. Since a lot of the open source repositories have Apple/Darwin AArch64 ports now, it seems to work in most cases.

https://www.macports.org

https://brew.sh

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#866

Post by corytheboyd » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

Call me dumb, but I didn’t realize they had done so much memory optimization to make the physical 8GB of RAM so effective. I saw a very much lower number than I expected and just assumed it wouldn’t handle memory intensive workloads well. As someone who develops web tech my entire life revolves around crushing RAM, now I think the M1 may actually result in big gains for my workload hrmm

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#867

Post by sliken » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #727

unicornfinder wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite possibly - I was a huge Apple fan who's now using a PC because I was fed up with the lack of viable options for me.

Apple will certainly offer an ARM-based MacPro, but I'm assuming it'll be a very different beast - current one maxes out at 1.5TB of RAM and it doesn't seem likely anyone will integrate that much memory on a chip anytime soon ;-) Memory bandwidth is one key feature impacting M1's performance. When Apple builds an ARM-based MacPro, we can expect something with at the very least 5 DDR5 channels per socket. It's clear,…

The M1 already has 8 LPDDR4x channels per socket, running at 4266MHz.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#868

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #851

chongli wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Looking over the shoulder at a 64-core Threadripper with 256GB of ECC RAM, 3090FE, Titan RTX and Radeon VII, yeah right. Some of us do Hac…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#869

Post by ogre_codes » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

intricatedetail wrote: post #760

ogre_codes wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's walled garden Apparently over the years the definition of "Walled Garden" has drifted a lot. The iPhone has a "Walled Garden", unless you jailbreak, it's very difficult to run anything outside the App Store. My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store. Nothing needs to be from the App Store. Most of what I run doesn't even go through Gatekeeper and it certainly never touches software I build or compi…

Customer shouldn't be required to mess up with the system files in order to gain full access to the product they paid for. Such restrictions should be illegal if they are not "opt in". Customers should have a right to install alternative app stores without the need of "hacking". We desperately need regulation to stop greedy, tax shy and privacy violating giants from exploiting the consumers.

> Customer shouldn't be required to mess up with the system files in order to gain full access to the product they paid for.

This comment is quite removed from the reality of using a Mac. I've never even considered bypassing Gatekeeper because it's never been in my way. But bypassing these Gatekeeper checks is comparable in difficulty to adding a second repo to Debian to install apps outside Debian's repo. Are you suggesting Debian is guilty of this too?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#870

Post by thoughtsimple » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

tachyonbeam wrote: post #486

m15i wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am curious how 64 GB unified memory performs for training deep learning models. Even if speed isn't amazing, 64 GB is much greater than the 24 GB available in Nvidia's flagship consumer cards, which would allow for inputting larger images, bigger batch sizes, deeper networks etc. Also, will be interesting to see how all of the different cores are used.

It's only got 8GB or 16GB of RAM AFAIK, because the RAM is part of the chip, and more memory would mean a really big die.

No. This has been misreported. The RAM is on the same package but not part of the same silicon die. Basically the SoC is mounted next to the RAM on a carrier.