Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#931

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #909

rbanffy wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple. A professional workstation, with support, services, guaranteed replacement components, guaranteed service-life, maintenance contracts and so on is very different from an enthusiast-built machine. It's like comparing a BMW M3 to a tricked out VW Golf. You can fit a bigger, badder engine under the VW's hood, stiffen the suspension, replace th…

Well, VW does sells tricked out VW Golf, straight from the factory (GTI, R) :) Though it is more competition to M135i than M3.

Exactly. You can make a VM Golf that performs like an M3, but, in the end, it'll be a lot of work for an unreliable car.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#932

Post by llampx » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #535

cactus2093 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously “I’m willing to pay a lot” can mean a wide range of things, but pretty clearly the comment is talking about paying a moderate premium over the competition. The same way a MacBook Pro model might cost $2500 where you could get a similarly specked windows laptop for $1800. Or an iPhone might cost 30% more than a similar android flagship. It’s an order of magnitude different with the Mac Pro, the base model is…

I don't mind paying for a new Apple, but I do mind paying for repairs on a system that fails just after the warranty runs out. Paying $1500 for a new computer every 5 years or so is good. Paying $1500 for a computer every 16 months, not so much. The monitor on my MacBook Pro just died, and I bought it July of last year. The repair was about $850 USD. Luckily my credit card covered the hardware warranty, but I'm kind…

Unless absolutely everything in the PC fails at once, you can just repair it and change components as needed. Not really doable with a Mac given that you can't buy the components from Apple.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#933

Post by llampx » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

Twisell wrote: post #646

joking wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you need 32 or 64gb of ram is not because the data structures or the programs you use need memory, it's because the data they use (database content, virtual machines, images, videos, music... ) fill that ram, and those data is not going to occupy less on an arm machine.

However real case usage of such massive amount of data are limited for typical desktop user. Massive database load usually happen on specialized servers in which 256Go RAM and more are pretty mundane. So on customer PC ram is maybe more used as caching mechanisms or eaten away by poorly designed memory leak/garbage collection. And if your GPU is able do to real time rendering on data heavy load maybe you need less ca…

"Nobody needs more than 640k of RAM"

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#934

Post by xadhominemx » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

ericpauley wrote: post #921

xadhominemx wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting the CPU and RAM on the same die is absolutely not the future. Not only is it impossible to mix and match process technologies in that way, it would be extremely wasteful given the far greater numbers of metal layers on a CPU and the performance improvement would be marginal. The same is even more true with integrating CPU and NAND flash.

Pretty sure the M1 memory is not on the same die, just on the same "chip". You can see a separation in the teardowns and Apple's advertising materials don't show it on the die images.

I’ve never heard someone use the word chip other than to describe an IC.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#935

Post by andrekandre » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #590

girvo wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking that as true for a moment, I wonder what other programming languages get a benefit from Apple's silicon then? PHP et al. use reference counting too, do they get a free win, or is there something particular about Obj-C and Swift?

Not the specific thing mentioned in the article. There is other hardware that optimizes Objective-C specifically, but it’s a branch hint.

any links or other info about that?

sounds realy cool

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#936

Post by colejohnson66 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 11:13 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.

Isn’t the newest Mac Pro available in rack form?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#937

Post by icedchai » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 11:24 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.

Is this really an issue? They sell shelves that let you rack 2 Mac Minis in 1U space. You can also buy a rack mount Mac Pro if you want to spend really big bucks.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#938

Post by PopeDotNinja » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #911

dschuler wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppleCare for the Macs is definitely worth it. They even replaced the display on my MBP after 5 years when I called (that seems to be the key is to call someone at Apple directly). This was a part they should've recalled, but anyway I wouldn't have gotten a new display without AppleCare.

There was a display replacement program for 2012-2015 MBP13s, due to the staingate. Though I recall that it was for 4 years since date of purchase, or so.

I wonder if there will be one for 2019 MacBook Pros. The repair shop said the replacement display was also faulty, so they had to order a replacement replacement.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#939

Post by EugeneOZ » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

hapticmonkey wrote: post #508

EugeneOZ wrote: post #489

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.

Hope so. Right now their "support" site says:

"If you see this warning, it means that the app was not notarized, and Apple could not scan the app for known malicious software.

You may want to look for an updated version of the app in the App Store or look for an alternative app."

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#940

Post by FireBeyond » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 11:33 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #659

tolien wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as the sibling comments point out, the price of a Mac Pro isn't just an "Apple Tax^WPremium" over a desktop machine but is an order of magnitude more expensive (assuming you don't care about workstation-class components, i.e. Xeon Ws, Radeon Pro GPUs and ECC RAM). There's an enormous price gap between a Mac Mini and the Mac Pro (especially when the Mini now has higher single-threaded performance than the base…

I've had a continuous string of Mac Pros from G3 to 2012 (MacPro 5,1) my main workhorse. I have continually updated and expanded it. The 2013 mac pro was a mess. pass. The latest mac pro... I think it wasn't just expensive, it was sort of sucker expensive.

I just got a new Mac Pro. The only real upgrade I did from Apple was to the 12 core Xeon. Other than that I kept the base 32GB memory, though I did get a 1TB SSD from the 256GB base offering.

... then I went to NewEgg and got 192GB of memory for $800ish, rather than Apple's exorbitant $3,000. And seriously, why? Same manufacturer, same specs. And convenience factor? It took a good 45 seconds to install the memory, and I'd wager anyone could do it (it's on the 'underside' of the motherboard, all by itself, and has a little chart on the memory cover to tell you exactly what slots to use based on how many modules you have).

And then I bought a 4x M.2 PCIe card and populated it with 2TB SSDs (that exceed the Apple, with sustained R/W of 4500MB/s according to Blackmagic) for just around $1,100, versus the $2,000 Apple wanted. Only downside is that it cannot be the boot drive (or maybe it can, but it can't be the _only_ drive).