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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

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Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#171

Post by pjmlp »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #154
pjmlp wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, C64, Amiga, Atari didn't had programmable graphics hardware after all.

The Atari did, at least in the technical sense, though not in the sense you mean it. The Ataris had a display process called Antic that you supplied with a display-list, a set of tokens that defined which antic-mode was next as the electron-dot proceeded down the screen. Antic would halt the CPU and take over the bus in order to transfer data from main memory to use for display purposes, be it character or bitmap dat…

Yep, now imagine a 12 year old kid going at it in 68000 Assembly, and showing their demos to other kinds in the gang.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#172

Post by littlestymaar »

littlestymaar wrote: post #94
cambalache wrote: post #6

OK I love this, but I am pretty sure my chances of getting a mac in the future are zero. From which side should I expect the PC response? Intel? AMD? Microsoft? ARM? Samsung? I think Apple willingly or not has just obliterated the whole consumer pc market.

> Apple willingly or not has just obliterated the whole consumer pc market. Apple probably has the best laptop out there as of today, but I don't think Apple sales performances are impacted that much by their hardware perf actually: around 2012-2015 or something they had several years with a subpar mobile phone, both on the hardware a and the software side, and it still sold very well. A few years later, they have th…

Wow it looks like I really pissed off a bunch of Apple fans by saying that they have at some point sold subpar products…

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#173

Post by fulafel »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #129

question from ignorance - Why not use Metal? Is that too embedded in the macOS system to be useful for something like Linux? Or is this for the sake of understanding the bare metal?

There are no Metal implementations to use outside of Apple's proprietary software. But even if you had one, it would be useless on Linux for the existing software stack.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#175

Post by gpderetta »

Someone wrote: post #9
rowanG077 wrote: post #3

Amazing!! This is progresssing literally 10 times faster then I expected.

Indeed. That single triangle likely is way closer to a million triangles than to zero triangles. https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745 : “Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really k…

I remember when the DXVK prototype was reported to beable to render a single triangle. Cool, but far away from completion. A few months later it was running Witcher3.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#177

Post by SXX »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #120
tambre wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have something – Clear Linux [0]. Definitely not too mcuh investment, but they do differentiate by compiling packages for much newer instruction sets compared to other distros. [0]: https://clearlinux.org/

The real differentiator would have been an army of good driver coders and contributors to KDE/GnomeX.

Actually Intel has small army of Linux driver developers. Last time I counted in git logs there was around 100 of developers who one way or another contributed to Linux graphics stack: kernel drivers, Xorg, Mesa, etc. We can't really know how many people are working behind the scenes.

Yeah of course it was possible for Intel to do more, but they're clearly largest contributor to Linux graphics stack anyway.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#178

Post by SXX »

jrockway wrote: post #79
monkmartinez wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if you have the darn thing plugged in anyway? Does the M1 outperform the Threadripper 3990x?

I think to understand the M1, you have to be a Mac laptop user. For years, Mac laptop performance lagged years behind high-end desktop performance -- they have been stuck on 14nm+ process chips with a mobile power budget, while desktop users have had 7nm chips that can draw 500W with no trouble. As a result, what M1 users tell you is fast is what PC desktop users have had for ages. A Threadripper and 3090 will blow t…

I've been high-end desktop Linux user all my life and Thinkpads were my primary choice for laptops. Last two years I've been using x1 carbon gen3 released in 2017 so it's not so far from current-gen Intel laptops.

Yeah Air on M1 cannot beat triple 1440p 164HZ monitor setup with high end desktop hardware, but it's still damn impressive. It's has slightly better 16:10 screen, more performance than any of current x1 thinkpads and Air that I bought is absolutely silent too.

Also might be in the US you have comparable prices on Thinkpad or some Linux-friendly laptops, but where I live I bought Macbook for 2/3 of comparable Thinkpad price. I've used to buy used ones, but now they became much more expensive due to high demand and much less of air travel (less smugling I guess).

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#179

Post by Tade0 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #55

Everyone, remember that in 2019 Alyssa was in _High School_. Where do people get this knowledge? It's astounding. She was literally reverse-engineering Mali for Panfrost starting in her Sophomore year.

Truly impressive work. > Where do people get this knowledge? Time, hands-on experimentation, and focus. Anecdotally, reverse engineering and low-level hacking felt more popular back in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then, there were fewer distractions to soak up the free time of young tech enthusiasts. Old IRC chatrooms feel like a trickle of distraction relative to the firehose of Twitter, Reddit, 24/7 news cycles, a…

Technology is moving faster nowadays.

I picked up JavaScript (or actually JScript) in 2001, when IE6 was this new hot thing. Back then you could cover most of the material on front-end in a week or two and not have to learn anything new for at least a year.

Fast forward 20 years later and browsers have major releases every few weeks while one of the most stable frameworks available - Angular - every six months.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#180

Post by philistine »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #160
flatiron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Ryzen mobile processors should be interesting. Their GPU drivers (while not of the best code quality) are in the mainline Linux kernel. So it all should just “work”

What I want is to take a mobile CPU and put it in a normal form factor for power saving and excellent integrated graphics. Why is this not possible?

The only company making mobile CPUs that are at all competitive in a laptop is Apple. We’ll have to wait to see what Qualcomm et al. manage to build.
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