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Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

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Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#371

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

mcphage wrote: post #336
hans-moleman wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of Apple’s prior ARM experience comes from iOS devices. They had no need to develop io capabilities for iPhones and iPads with a single port. Now they put the chips in computers but most likely haven’t fully yet developed extended io capabilities.

Hmm, but wouldn't features like wifi, all the cameras, the touchscreen, Cellular data, NFC, touch ID, speakers, bluetooth, and so on all come in via IO as well? You're right that they only have one port, but they still connect to a lot of different components.

The problem with this analogy is that NFC, touch ID, speakers, and bluetooth are all in the MB/s or less range. On the desktop side, you have to deal with 10gb/s ethernet and 50-100gb/s for ram. It's just a whole different ballgame.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#372

Post by mortenjorck »

zimpenfish wrote: post #274
clairity wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that’s not just your (conspiracy) theory, it’s exactly what happened (something i’ve also noted before). intel screwed apple years ago and apple decided to move on. it just took many years of chip development to get to this point.

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if it came out that they started working (at least theoretically) on Apple Silicon when they transitioned to Intel in the first place and it just took this many years for all the pieces to be ready and lined up.

Not only plausible, I'd say this is the most likely way it played out.

At the time of the Intel transition, Apple had already gone through the process once before with 68k to PPC. It had to be clear to the long-game thinkers at Apple that this cycle would keep repeating itself until Apple found a way to bring that critical part of its platform under its own control. Intel was riding high in 2006, but so had IBM in 1994.

Within two years of the Intel transition, Apple acquired P.A. Semi. The iPhone had barely been out for a year at that point, and still represented a fraction of the company's Mac revenue – and while it looked to us outsiders like the acquisition was all about the iPhone and iPad, in retrospect, a long-term replacement for Intel was almost certainly the endgame all along.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#373

Post by ericlewis »

dwaltrip wrote: post #306
jdauriemma wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own an M1 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM

Yep. Unfortunately the M1 MacBook Pro currently only goes up to 8GB.

I am typing from an M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB.

edit: you have to select the SSD size then you can choose the RAM.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#374

Post by crazygringo »

flohofwoe wrote: post #216
kumarvvr wrote: post #156

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

But since so much software these days is cross-platform, apps/sites will still have to work performantly on Intel chips. E.g. Google can't slow down Chrome to take advantage of Mac speed increases, because it would become unusable on Windows.

So I actually think that Mac software will hold the performance edge for a long, long time.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#375

Post by jolux »

monocasa wrote: post #344
jolux wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty regularly have Slack running while compiling Erlang in the background, running a Docker container, several dozen Firefox tabs, and a Microsoft Teams call going, and I do not have problems with 16GB on x86. Perhaps ARM Macs use more memory or something. My next MacBook will definitely have more than 16GB if it’s available, but that’s more for future need rather than present.

She has problems with 16GB on x86. A single docker container and compiling erlang really don't use that much. It's many tabs of office 365, google docs, and social media, and how every app is an electron app now that eats memory. I think we as programmers have lost sight of how a single gif in memory is about the same size as a whole docker container.

I don’t think that’s accurate, because Docker on macOS involves virtualization. And Teams is the worst resource hog I’ve used. Though I don’t use Office or social media much (Twitter occasionally) so maybe that’s it.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#376

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

samgranieri wrote: post #162
kumarvvr wrote: post #156

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that

The latest Mac Pro does come in a rack mount option, but I'm not sure what market it's targeting.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#377

Post by amelius »

kumarvvr wrote: post #156

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

> Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now.

As a developer, I'm sweating bullets. Imagine a future where Apple is the only serious platform left on mobile, server and desktop, then developers can forget about starting that next disruptive startup and instead they will become just second-class Apple "employees" with contracts similar to Uber drivers.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#378

Post by walterbell »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #308
homarp wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and this is now called Electron trading speed of development with 'hardware optimization'. Mac being a small market, some users are still opiniated/loud enough to reward nicer/native UI vs cross-ish platform lowest common denominator UI. Maybe there is hope Arm mac stays fast.

+ Mac OS checking every binary you run over the internet.

Pihole and others can block those Apple queries.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#379

Post by [deleted] »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #376
samgranieri wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that

The latest Mac Pro does come in a rack mount option, but I'm not sure what market it's targeting.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#380

Post by imtringued »

coliveira wrote: post #291
flohofwoe wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

We don't even need to wait for that. Right now web developers are creating the new generation of web-based apps that will consume everything that M1 can give and more. In fact these apps already existed, they were just largely ignored because they're so power-hungry (just look at electron and similar stuff).

Where is that inefficiency supposed to come from though? I mean there are four big inefficiencies that came with JS.

1. Garbage collection and minimum runtime

Garbage collection decreases memory efficiency, browsers need a certain minimum amount of resources to render a page, no matter how complicated leading to 500MB RAM text editors like Atom and worse once you open files. Similar problems plague Eclipse and IntelliJ which both often consume 1GB of RAM. The JVM often needs 150MB for an empty or perfectly optimized app.

2. Everything is an object with pointers

This is especially bad in Javascript where every object is basically a hashmap. This causes performance slowdowns because even something as simple as looking up a field is a pointer chase through several layers now. Raw numerical data may consume a lot of memory if you are not using typed arrays. Especially bad with ArrayList in Java.

3. JIT

JIT compilers can only spend a certain amount of time on optimizations, which means JIT languages tend to either suffer from slow start up times or faster start up but less optimizations.

4. GUI complexity

Things like having animations and constantly recomputing layouts.

If you designed your processors for these things and made them fast at this, the only further source of slowdown is a lack of caring because you have already exhausted the unavoidable technical reasons. E.g. your processor is so fast, you write a naive algorithm that takes 5 seconds on the fastest computer available but then takes 20 seconds on an old computer.

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