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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

#581

Post by dcchambers »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #537
dcchambers wrote: post #258

I haven't yet used an M1 mac but based on what I've read about it I have fully bought into the hype train. Hoping my next laptop will be a M2-powered MBP, assuming they can increase the maximum RAM to at least 32GB.

Why do you want 32GB? With my 8GB m1 Mac mini I was surprised to get away with as little memory as I did. I felt that the M1 needs far less memory than x86 to feel snappy.

I am glad that you found something that works for you, but I am confident 8GB will not work for the type of work I do. 16GB might be passable right now, but I am regularly using 20-25GB at a time on my 15" MBP now with my workloads, occasionally bursting to close to 30GB when I'm really pushing certain dev environments.

I keep my personal laptops for a long time, and I don't want to be stuck with 16GB when it's getting close to not cutting it now based on what I do. I can't imagine being stuck with 16GB in 8-10 years.

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

#582

Post by fomine3 »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #256
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.

Amazon's Graviton 2 is the M1 of the server world in my experience. It's faster, cheaper, and overall a better experience than any other instance type for most workloads. You have to get through a bit of a learning curve with multiarch or cross-compiling to ARM64 depending on what your codebase is like, but after that it's smooth sailing. Azure and Google need to really step up and get some competitive (or even any)…

It's great EC2 instance for perf/cost, but how is it outperformed other x86 instances? Benchmark between Gravition2/EPYC(Zen1)/Xeon(Cascade Lake) shows that all CPUs are similar level. And now C5a EPYC(Zen3) is available, Xeon(Ice Lake) is sold.

For M1, it obviously outperformed competitive.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

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

#583

Post by dcchambers »

reasonabl_human wrote: post #506
dcchambers wrote: post #258

I haven't yet used an M1 mac but based on what I've read about it I have fully bought into the hype train. Hoping my next laptop will be a M2-powered MBP, assuming they can increase the maximum RAM to at least 32GB.

I wouldn’t get too hung up on the RAM. Went from an XPS with 64GB that used about 16-20GB in my day to day, still able to use the same workflows and memory is handled fine behind the scenes on my M1 Air with 16GB. Maybe get your hands on one from a friend and play around with it. Would imagine ram heavy tasks like rendering etc would choke but I just run many workflows / builds simultaneously which works fine.

16GB might be passable right now, but I am regularly using 20-25GB at a time on my work laptop, a 2019 15" MBP, occasionally bursting to ~30GB when I'm really pushing certain dev environments.

I keep my personal laptops for a long time, and I don't want to be stuck with 16GB when it's getting close to not cutting it now based on what I do. I can't imagine being stuck with 16GB in 8-10 years.

My current personal laptop, a 2015 13" MBP, has 16GB of RAM. I can't imagine NOT upgrading.

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

#584

Post by edrxty »

floatboth wrote: post #555
edrxty wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with RISC-V, it has a lot of features that are not yet well explored. In particular the instruction set extension mechanism is extremely robust and capable, allowing much more FPGA fabric integration that you currently see on ARM devices. As we move towards more programmable logic it'll be a massive advantage going forward.

At the same time, the software world hates hardware fragmentation, so ISA extensions are the opposite of desired. RISC-V likely will dominate in microcontrollers and specialized/embedded devices. But in general purpose computers? Highly doubt it. Arm has a giant first mover advantage there now. Great momentum, excellent ecosystem. AWS Graviton2 basically sealed the deal.

This is the really cool part, the ability to add custom instructions are part of the spec which makes them work through standard compilers. Any compiler that can build a RISC-V program can handle the custom instructions as inline assembly so all one needs to do is write a library to abstract them. Obviously you don't have the off-the-shelf ability for the compiler to insert the instructions automatically, but this is rarely the goal for small-to-medium projects.

Example:

https://nitish2112.github.io/post/adding-instruction-riscv/

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

#585

Post by kiawe_fire »

mike_d wrote: post #518
inDigiNeous wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that Electron apps are inherently somehow slow is starting to bug me out. While writing Electron version of our graphics heavy web application, I noticed that the memory usage or CPU consumption is not a lot higher than some other native applications. We have taken careful care in order to write fast and memory friendly javascript if possible, avoiding using slow features of the language (the list is long,…

It isn't just Electron, Node is also plagued by its own low barrier to entry. One of my former employers had the great idea of hiring hundreds of "senior" JS devs and redoing the entire frontend of the website. When it launched to production the whole system scaled at approximately 1 enterprise-grade server to 1 concurrent user. While I applaud your efforts to teach people how to write code faster, the majority of JS…

IMO, it’s not just JS devs. Most of the backend PHP devs I work with are similar.

And when nearly every Stack Overflow post asking about performance implications is answered with a litany of “YAGNI” and “premature optimization”, its not hard to see why.

The current comp sci culture seems to discourage this in all but the lower level languages like C.

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

#586

Post by jshmrsn »

bombcar wrote: post #532
EricE wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Apple would have been perfectly happy buying CPUs from Intel as long as Intel kept their end of the bargain up. After the PowerPC fiasco and IBM leaving Apple high and dry, I have zero doubt that there was a contingency plan always under way before the ink even dried on the PA Semi acquisition, but it wasn't probably a concrete strategy until about the third time in a row Intel left Apple high and dry on a be…

I actually wonder if the end-game isn't going to be a Intel/M1 hybrid on the high-end ... a system with multiple chips and architectures.

That sounds terribly complicated.

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

#587

Post by alanwreath »

BoardsOfCanada wrote: post #149
alanwreath wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES -- it's not just me! At first I thought my monitors were somehow broken (which is unfortunate as I paid a bit extra for name brand LG). I suspected something, as each monitor is plugged into an M1 computer (one's a Mac mini M1 and the other a MacBook Air m1). Both exhibit the visual problem you describe on a random basis.

Just as a data point, I have an MBP M1 and an LG external monitor and this has never happened to me in almost 6 months usage.

I didn't mention this but it didn't happen initially, only after a couple months did the random screen errors happen. And power cycling, disconnecting/reconnecting/changing cables, etc to the monitor changes nothing.

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

#588

Post by alanwreath »

jclardy wrote: post #182
meepmorp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have periodic weirdness on the thunderbolt monitor? Every so often, my m1 mini wakes or boots so that there’s a vertical misalignment by a pixel or two about halfway across. It’s like the desktop was cut in half and taped back together slightly crooked.

I have an Acer Predator that has this issue (Whether using my Mac or PC attached.) Power cycling the monitor makes it go away. Basically the left side of the screen is shifted one pixel higher than the right side of the screen, making a vertical line down the middle where the shift changes.

in my case power cycling does not change anything, could be a separate issue for you. In my case it is also retaining a "ghost" of previous pages I've had open. It does eventually go away (and most of the time is not there).

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

#589

Post by alanwreath »

macNchz wrote: post #130
meepmorp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have periodic weirdness on the thunderbolt monitor? Every so often, my m1 mini wakes or boots so that there’s a vertical misalignment by a pixel or two about halfway across. It’s like the desktop was cut in half and taped back together slightly crooked.

I don't have an M1 machine, but I have had periodic weirdness on external monitors (of every flavor) when waking from sleep on all the Mac laptops I've owned over the last 10 years.

that is ... bad luck. Or I have really good luck (having used mac's for over 20 years). This situation is a first for me (and in my case happens during normal usage, ie not upon waking) - though given Apple's recent track record screams buggy software

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

#590

Post by alanwreath »

bhouston wrote: post #178
meepmorp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have periodic weirdness on the thunderbolt monitor? Every so often, my m1 mini wakes or boots so that there’s a vertical misalignment by a pixel or two about halfway across. It’s like the desktop was cut in half and taped back together slightly crooked.

I have zero weirdness at all. It just works perfectly all the time. Neither monitor supports Thunderbolt. But I run off of a USB-C to Display Port cable and one is using the HDMI port. Both run at 60Hz as it is HDMI 2.

I run from display port to usb-c adapter -- I wonder if it is my adapter which is a simple Cable Matters adapter (which gets somewhat warm). Be nice if you shared what adapter you're using for comparison.
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