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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

#411

Post by aryik »

tmccrary55 wrote: post #23
varispeed wrote: post #14

I hate to say that, but I am likely going to buy M2 Mac. I don't like Apple and their anti-competitive tactics, but I admit they won their spot for now. However, as soon as good PC competitor comes in, I'll drop Apple like a hot potato.

I'm really hoping Alder Lake or a similar AMD product gets PC closer to M1+ performance and battery consumption. The M1 chip is amazing but I'm a tiling window manager man.

You’ve gotten plenty of recommendations, but I’ll add one for Magnet [1]. I’ve been using it for years, and I love it. One of the best software purchases I’ve ever made - small, lightweight, does exactly one thing and does it very well, and made by a small developer to boot.

[1] https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/index.html

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

#412

Post by dagmx »

Hamuko wrote: post #348
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD will probably "arm" up quickly, NVidia is acquiring ARM proper, Qualcomm won't sit still. Intel? Well, maybe 12 months after they catch up to AMD in x86. AMD's chips I've seen are decently competitive with M1. If ARM is a not-too-bad microcode adaptation and ditching a whole lot of x86 silicon real estate, AMD might be able to come to market quickly. Intel isn't just getting pantsed in x86 by AMD and process by T…

Isn't the ARM acquisition kinda stuck at the moment?

It is, but nvidia don't need it necessarily to compete in the ARM space, since they already make Arm SOCs

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

#413

Post by monocasa »

jolux wrote: post #375
monocasa wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> because Docker on macOS involves virtualization

Go check out the resource usage. Yes, it involves virtualization, but the stripped down virtualized kernel uses very little resources. Getting that information is a bit complicated by the fact that it's difficult to see the difference between the virtualized kernel and it's applications in a way that's consistent with the host OS, but it's really in the dozens of megabytes range of overhead for something like docker on mac.

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

#414

Post by inDigiNeous »

mrweasel wrote: post #303
Klonoar wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t run Electron apps, even an older Mac will fly. My 2015 is still astoundingly fast, it just doesn’t have Chrome bogging it down.

You can even go back to 2013 and not notice that you’re using a 7-8 year old machine. A MacBook Pro from late 2013 runs Big Sur and performs fine for most everyday use use case and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE. You just can’t run Chrome all the well, which should tell you more about Chrome than Macs.

Still using a mid-2014 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs of ram and a 2.5 GHz quad-core i7 as my daily driver. Everything performs just fine to me, and macOS has even got faster during this time I've used the laptop, which is something to give credit to Apple for.

I use mainly VSCode these days though and Firefox, but even Unity game engine works just fine on this machine.

Any IDE I also throw at this machine works just fine. Only things that feel slow, are things that need a beefy GPU.

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

#415

Post by zepto »

imtringued wrote: post #380
coliveira wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Intell…

> If you designed your processors for these things and made them fast at this

What does that look like?

There is a reason Apple doesn’t do #1 and #3 and is moving away from #2 in their own code.

They are just inefficient ways of doing things. Designing a processor to support an inefficient mechanism will still lose out to a processor which doesn’t have to.

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

#416

Post by clairity »

mortenjorck wrote: post #372
zimpenfish wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 19…

possible, but as outsiders, it's hard to be sure of that sequence of events with those sets of facts, to draw that conclusion definitively. perhaps that was a backup plan that quickly became the primary plan.

but with the 2016 line of macs, it was obvious that apple was expecting faster, smaller, cooler, more power efficient 10nm chips from intel, and intel fell flat on their face delivering. it's not clear how far before that that apple knew intel was flubbing, but 2014 seems a reasonable assumption given product development timelines. as intel's downward trajectory became clearer over the following months, along with the robustly upward trajectory of apple silicon, the transition became realizable, and eventually inevitable.

as an aside, i'm using a beat up 2015 macbook pro and eagerly awaiting the m2 version as its replacement, seeking to skip this whole intel misstep entirely.

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

#417

Post by danlugo92 »

google234123 wrote: post #388
nexuist wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over…

ARM also has some decades of cruft attached to it.

No, the aechitecture used in m1 is from 2012

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

#418

Post by dr-detroit »

amelius wrote: post #377
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.

intel is 1 really FUN Justin Long commercial away from disrupting Apple's market share but slow and steady wins this race for domination.

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

#419

Post by danlugo92 »

asadlionpk wrote: post #406
matsemann wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current laptop has 64 GB. Could probably be fine with 32, but I'm seldom under 20 in usage. I run certain services locally in Docker, and then have 5+ instances of IntelliJ for various stuff open, some of them running a java server or node building the frontend, and others on my team may be running Android+iOS simulator at the same time as well. I could alter my usage patterns and work with less. But people not us…

side-question, isn't iOS simulator running natively on M1? That would mean it consumes less RAM than on x86. If that's true, it should be possible to fit Android+iOS workflow. As a data point: I am running node + iOS Simulator (along with XCode + VSCode + Chrome with 50+ tabs) setup on M1 16GB and it works fine, I also keep them running while I take a break to play a LoL match. Works great for me.

Simulators run natively in x86 they simulate the api/abi as opposing to emulating the processor

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

#420

Post by amelius »

nexuist wrote: post #383
amelius wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over…

> The opportunity for competition exists

Perhaps, but I guess it would take on the order of a decade for a competitor to build their technology including an ecosystem with customers.

And who says they won't copy Apple's business practices?

> but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work.

That's because the complexity of the semiconductor industry is daunting. You need far more than a team of IC designers, especially if you want your product to become successful in a world where there is one main player.

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