331–340 of 467 posts
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I thought the m1 has dedicated js instructions.
It's just part of the ARM instruction set.
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What utter nonsense. Different ARM chips aren't "somewhat compatible" anymore than Intel/AMD x86 chips. It's a standard instruction set. And even if we'd get different instruction sets, we have much better toolchains/compilers to work with multiple architectures now than we did in "the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s" (GCC and LLVM aren't really comparable to Sinclair Basic). The M1 has been out for a…
I thought the m1 has dedicated js instructions.
1. If you can increase the performance of a language by adding language specific instruction sets to the processor, how much of a boost would we see on average?
2. Instead of building in instructions for say Python, C#, Java, etc, what if you built it in a language designed to create other languages I.E Racket? (I like Racket but another language that specialized in this would be fine). Since languages built on Racket ultimately compile to valid Racket code, you'll still get the speed up, and can program with the features and syntax you want (within reason obv constrained by the limitations of the base language).
3. I wasn't around for this, but isn't this what made Lisp faster on Lisp Machines? Since they had dedicated hardware for interpreting Lisp instructions?
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Yeah seeing a MacBook Air beat an i9 is hilarious. I think this should put arguments over X86 efficiency disadvantages to bed. The X86 is obviously a huge boat anchor. There is no other explanation for this monstrous of a performance efficiency gap... unless Apple has invented something fundamentally new that has never been done in the entire history of CPU design. I doubt that.
I think people should pay more attention to the LPDDR4X RAM that's tightly coupled to the CPU and likely has significantly less latency and more bandwidth than anything on the Ryzen or i9. This is critical to keeping their wide design fed, and if you swapped this out with standard DDR3200 you'd see some lackluster numbers. Both Intel and AMD try to overcome the memory wall with larger caches and clever prefetching, w…
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Yep. But these days for anything else, I just fire up a cloud VM and kill it when it's done. I spent less on that than the 3900X and RAM would have cost me in 5 years. My main daily driver machine and dev box is now the absolute ass end M1 Mac Mini and it's the best computer I have ever had.
My primary dev environment is in ec2. I don't really care about multiple monitors. It's so convenient.
But on a similar note, I use VS Code's Remote SSH plugin to connect to an EC2 on one monitor and terminal + browser on the other. It's not my primary dev env, but it's great for experiments and side projects.
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How much effort is it really? Make a version of this with more cores and cache and maybe all high-performance cores instead of heterogenous. It's just a remix of the same already designed components. The only really tough thing would be supporting things desktop users want like external video cards, but people may be willing to forego that if the CPU smokes everything else and if the built-in GPU is at least fast eno…
What you’re describing is the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac mini pro, etc. But I think they’ll have the Mac Pro continue to be RAM, GPU and PCI upgradable. How they are doing that is the most interesting secret in the industry.
Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…
What utter nonsense. Different ARM chips aren't "somewhat compatible" anymore than Intel/AMD x86 chips. It's a standard instruction set. And even if we'd get different instruction sets, we have much better toolchains/compilers to work with multiple architectures now than we did in "the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s" (GCC and LLVM aren't really comparable to Sinclair Basic). The M1 has been out for a…
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It definitely uses x86 emulation, if that's what you mean. But based on the these M1 threads I would expect M1 x86 emulation to work like magic, not be 5 times slower than some dual core 2016 model.
Rosetta does quite badly with JITed stuff (notably, it does very, very badly with x86 JVMs). I assume it'll be fine once native Unity is available.
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In laptops, the performance of the CPU in sustained use is heavily tied to the cooling solution. Almost all laptops will hit a performance ceiling due to thermal throttling. A desktop is at a massive advantage here. There are also potentially OS differences or other config differences. You'd need to normalize everything to get an accurate picture when comparing the two CPUs.
But desktop cores use vanishingly small amounts of power for single-threaded tasks. The only time you really run into thermal-limits on desktops (or laptops) is when you're hitting SIMD across many cores: 16-thread or 32-thread tasks with AVX and the like.
I briefly tested the base M1 Air with 8gb of ram (bought for my wife) - enough to get my day-to-day stuff up and running. I’m comparing a 2017 MacbookPro, dual-core i5 with 16GB of RAM. Brew: under Rosetta everything seems to work Java/Clojure: the AdoptOpenJDK works fine but the performance is not good; similar numbers with my old machine. The Azul ARM JDK is literally twice as fast. The jsass library depends on a n…