951–960 of 1001 posts
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It’s stored in the isa pointer inside the object.
thanks, it makes sense now. For what I understand, the isa pointer is sorta-kinda similar to a vtable pointer in C++.
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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). A…
How did you arrive at this number?
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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.
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Great point, unless the new hardware is also a touchscreen for those iOS Apps - then we'll see a lot of people wishing they'd waited
Touching your computer screen to run mobile apps on it? Is that what people really want?
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> If I wasn't freelance, I could probably get away with some cloud instance to run all my docker stuff, but I'm dealing with too many different environments, for clients with various different legal requirements making this simply 'not an option'. While not the exact same reasons as GP, I also need to be able to do this locally.
Even with legal restrictions: just put an Ubuntu server at home and ssh to it. Then you wouldn't have the GBit connection but still better than using Docker on a non-production OS.
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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 throwa…
That's called "Darwin" and it's theoretically open source, but there doesn't seem to be a useful distribution of it. Whether that's due to lack of community interest or lack of Apple support is the question.
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Considering how much the gaming side of the PC market will drop on just a single card I am more of the opinion that Apple chose to avoid this market because it did not want the association with gaming as if that were beneath their machines. At times there seemed to be a real disdain for the people who loved upgrading their machines as well as those who gamed on them. Apple's products were not meant to be improved by…
Why do they highlight games at every WWDC and product announcement?
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…
Remember Lisp machines? The M1 is a Swift machine.
But they learned the lesson from SOAR (Smalltalk On A RISC) and did not follow the example of LISP machines, Smalltalk machines, Java machines, Rekursiv, etc. and build specialized hardware and instructions. The benefits of the specialization are much, much less than expected, and the costs of being custom very high.
Instead, they gave the machine large caches and tweaked a few general purpose features so they work particularly well for their preferred workloads.
I wonder if they made trap on overflow after arithmetic fast.
I understand the machine is great or going to be great for most use cases. My mbp is my main workhorse, but as a freelance SRE "devops" guy, the Apple ARM platform won't be suitable for my job any time soon, if ever. Docker is not yet available - but even when it would become available, emulating virtualised x86 code is explicitly not going to be supported. That in many cases means pulling a docker image built in a c…
> Docker is not yet available - but even when it would become available, emulating virtualised x86 code is explicitly not going to be supported.
Is there any reason why Apple couldn’t add support for emulated virtualized x86 code in a future ARM CPU? The M1 doesn’t support it, but might the “M2” or “M3” support it?
I ask because I’m in the same situation as you, where not being able to run x86 Docker containers would make me not buy an ARM MacBook Pro.
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It's very easy to perform very well on a specific benchmark when there's dedicated hardware for this. I'm not saying this isn't good, it's great for people editing, but this isn't a general indicator of performance (which is reportedly good!)
> It's very easy to perform very well on a specific benchmark when there's dedicated hardware for this. I'd say the same about GPUs as well. It's great for people who game, but beyond a certain baseline, it's pretty pointless for most of us. > I'm not saying this isn't good, it's great for people editing, but this isn't a general indicator of performance Umm, it's also great for people who watch YouTube or Netflix. Z…
As far as I know, dedicated HW versus CPU is closer to 1/100 the power. Although I admit I don’t have a source for this claim.