231–240 of 294 posts
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Apple put some special sauce in the M1 to help make rosetta fast. Support for the x86 TSO memory model, for one thing.
Also ARM now has a bunch of instructions that are blatantly there for efficient x86 emulation, though ARM won't tell you that in the docs.
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Entertainers are not Engineers. They fall for marketing significantly easier and use Veblen goods to signal wealth and power. Then they get used to a system and it's all they know. It's more effort to change and they get locked in.
Out of the FAANG companies I can’t speak for Facebook and Netflix, but I can assure you that the engineers at Apple, Amazon, and Google have a broad preference for macOS and Apple laptops. Since the pandemic even the engineers using desktop Linux have mostly transitioned to Apple laptop + remote Linux server.
They're going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. The DAW/music ecosystem is notoriously bad at these kinds of transitions. Due to how VSTs work, if any of your plug-ins are not ARM compatible, you have to run the whole plug-in host and all plug-ins under Rosetta, with the performance drop and stability compromises that that entails. And a lot of plug-in…
> if any of your plug-ins are not ARM compatible, you have to run the whole plug-in host and all plug-ins under Rosetta, with the performance drop and stability compromises that that entails Is this your personal experience or are you speculating? I haven’t noticed performance drops or stability issues under Rosetta so far. A truly impressive feat of software engineering.
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The abusive relationship trickles down no matter which platform you choice. Even on Linux you don’t have full control of all the driver binaries, control of the silicon of everything running on your rig. Even if you were to go RISC V chances are you are going to have to rely on some binary blob for things like your WiFi card. And even if we over come all those hurdles we still have to convince the avg joe to adopt th…
Agreed. We should all standardize on the most open systems that permit the most users to use the machines as we see fit. For example, on an open system, you can make special systems for Mac users. Or for Windows users. Or LSARS users. That way we don't duplicate effort for an ever closing dictated by one greedy body.
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The current Mac Pro is available in a 4U rack form factor for US$500 more. Click the “Buy” link: https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
Just two of those blows through the budget of 10k for 2 complete redundant sound system given as an example in the article.
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Well if it’s just as fast, what is there to be excited about?
Insert "not sure if trolling" GIF here, but you get that what the OP is saying is that when M1 Macs run x86 code in emulation they're often running it as fast as comparable x86 processors run it natively, right?
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Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.
Sample libraries are pretty efficient compared to digital synthesis VSTs. They really don't hit the processor nearly has hard. But M1 designs that max out at 16GB don't have the memory to handle plenty of sample libraries, so I don't understand how a Mac Mini is supposed to be up to the job. It's not just about raw cycles but about cached access to the samples. The biggest libraries can run up to 1TB and you'll proba…
Memory does pose a bottleneck for huge arrangements in the studio, but in the live setting you literally don't have enough performers at the keys for the same constraint to apply. The stuff they might trigger can be bounced out into multisamples, so the remaining bottleneck is with effects processing.
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Entertainers are not Engineers. They fall for marketing significantly easier and use Veblen goods to signal wealth and power. Then they get used to a system and it's all they know. It's more effort to change and they get locked in.
Out of the FAANG companies I can’t speak for Facebook and Netflix, but I can assure you that the engineers at Apple, Amazon, and Google have a broad preference for macOS and Apple laptops. Since the pandemic even the engineers using desktop Linux have mostly transitioned to Apple laptop + remote Linux server.
Software engineers are forced to use tradition and Authority due to abstraction.
I say this as a programmer.
> Some shows I’ve worked at set aside a $10,000-$12,000 budget for two keyboard rigs. That sounds like a lot of money at first, but it’s not. It's a bit surprising that each show in the same theatre buys their own audio equipment.
This sort of "wasteful spending" tends to happen for big budget events for reliability reasons. You might be able to save $10k by reusing equipment from the last event or using a venue's equipment, but if the equipment cuts out mid-show, it will cost a lot more than $10k in missed opportunity. I spent a week hanging out at Circuit of the Americas helping to run a solar car race, and asked about all the loose CAT6 bur…
They're going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. The DAW/music ecosystem is notoriously bad at these kinds of transitions. Due to how VSTs work, if any of your plug-ins are not ARM compatible, you have to run the whole plug-in host and all plug-ins under Rosetta, with the performance drop and stability compromises that that entails. And a lot of plug-in…