261–270 of 427 posts
My 2018 USB-C MBP honestly feels like trash at times, just feels like every part of it is choking to hold the thing up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the Anand article you linked further up: "The first Apple-built GPU for a Mac is significantly faster than any integrated GPU we’ve been able to get our hands on, and will no doubt set a new high bar for GPU performance in a laptop. Based on Apple’s own die shots, it’s clear that they spent a sizable portion of the M1’s die on the GPU and associated hardware, and the payoff is a GPU that can rival even low-end d…
Yeah I believe the M1 GPU(2.6 TFLOPS) falls between a PS4 (1.8 TFLOPS) and PS4Pro (4.2 TFLOPS). Yes the original PS4 came out in 2013, but still I find it impressive that a mobile integrated GPU has that much computational Power with no fan and that power budget. I do wonder what they are going to do with the higher end MBP, iMacs, and Mac Pro (if they make one). Will they have an “M1X” with more GPU cores or will th…
I'm not sure they'll improve that by making a M1X or just gluing multiple M1s together.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those games were designed for UMA nor do they benefit as the API design for graphics forces copies to happen anyway. The M1's GPU is good (for integrated), but UMA isn't the reason why. I don't know why people seem so determined to reduce Apple's substantial engineering in this space to a mostly inconsequential minor architecture tweak that happen a decade ago.
From the article: "Meanwhile, unlike the CPU side of this transition to Apple Silicon, the higher-level nature of graphics programming means that Apple isn’t nearly as reliant on devs to immediately prepare universal applications to take advantage of Apple’s GPU. To be sure, native CPU code is still going to produce better results since a workload that’s purely GPU-limited is almost unheard of, but the fact that exis…
Apple can't just hang onto that void* that's passed in as the developer is free to re-use for something else after the call. It must copy, even on a UMA system. And even if it was adjusted such that glTexImage2D took ownership of the pointer instead, there'd still be an internal copy anyway to swizzle it as linear RGBA buffers are not friendly to typical GPU workloads. This is why for example per Apple's docs above when it gets to the texture section it's like "yeah just copy & use private." So even though in theory Metal's UMA exposure would be great for games that stream textures, it still isn't because you still do a copy anyway to convert it to the GPU's internal optimal layout.
Similarly the benefits of UMA only help if transfering data is actually a significant part of the workload, which is not true for the vast majority of games. For things like gfxbench it may help speedup the load time, but during the benchmark loop all the big objects are only used on the GPU (like textures & models)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think these performance metrics are somewhat limited in their usefulness. A Ryzen workstation might not have the same single-core performance or energy efficiency—however, a ryzen workstation can have gobs of memory for massive data-intensive workloads for the same cost as a baseline M1 device. In addition: let’s talk upgradability or repairability. Oh wait, Apple doesn’t play that game. You’ll get more mileage on…
> But, then why not just VNC into a beastmode machine on a netbook and compile remotely? After all, that’s what CI/CD pipeline is for. Is this how you work?
OTOH, the machine that I'm connecting to has 32c/64t, half a terabyte of RAM and dozens of TB of storage.
This strategy has had a strange negative effect for me a couple of times. It used to be that I would notice rogue background tasks eating up my processor because I could feel the UI acting slow and the fans would kick on. Now the only indication I get is my battery depleting more rapidly than expected. The UI is completely responsive still, and there are no fans. But I’m never checking my battery level anymore, so I…
It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.
I did a side-by-side comparing with my friends' M1 macbook and my (more expensive, nearly brand new) ryzen 5800x workstation compiling rust. The ryzen was faster - but it was really close. And the macbook beats my ryzen chip in single threaded performance. For reference, the ryzen compiles ripgrep in 19.7 seconds. The comparison is way too close given the ryzen workstation guzzles power, and the macbook is cheaper, p…
I don't use Rust, but a quick search returned for example this issue:
Sounds like the consensus here is that the M1 feels faster, and is actually faster, for a lot of tasks. So, for a lot of engineers, the M1 is the better choice over Intels. (Faster compile times are a good thing for devs, among other things) In that regard, the moment feels similar to the mid 2000s, when you suddenly saw a huge uptick in Macbooks at technical conferences: software developers seemed to gravitate in dr…
> So, for a lot of engineers, the M1 is the better choice over Intels. I don't know which engineers you hang out with, but the only "engineer" I know who uses an M1 Mac does web design. Besides that, the M1 doesn't support most of the software that most engineers are using (unless you're working in a field already focused on ARM), and the fragility of a Macbook isn't really suited for a workshop environment. Among th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In native Typescript compile of a very large angular app I see an even more dramatic 1:20s to 40s compared to a desktop i9. I feel as if the M1 may have been designed around a detailed and careful look at how computers and compliers work and then designed a CPU around that rather than the other way around. It's like buying a car and modifying to take it racing vs buying a race car, the race car was designed to do thi…
>> I feel as if the M1 may have been designed around a detailed and careful look at how computers and compliers work and then designed a CPU around that rather than the other way around. This is the position that Apple have set up for themselves with their philosophy and process. It would seem that Intel and AMD have to play a very conservative game with compatibility and building a product that increments support fo…
Everyone who develops for one of their platforms is just used to running that treadmill. An ARM transition is just another thing to update your apps for.
It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.
I did a side-by-side comparing with my friends' M1 macbook and my (more expensive, nearly brand new) ryzen 5800x workstation compiling rust. The ryzen was faster - but it was really close. And the macbook beats my ryzen chip in single threaded performance. For reference, the ryzen compiles ripgrep in 19.7 seconds. The comparison is way too close given the ryzen workstation guzzles power, and the macbook is cheaper, p…
I keep hearing this but have not experienced this in person. I usually get about 5 hours of life out of it. My usual open programs are CLion, WebStorm, Firefox (and Little Snitch running in the background).
However, even with not having IDEs open all the time, and switching over from Firefox to Safari, I’m only seeing about 8 hours of battery life (which is still nice compared with my 2013 MBP that has about 30 minutes of battery life).
Corollary question: could one make a kernel-specific core and would there be benefit to it? Handle all the I/O, interrupts and such, all with a dedicated, cloistered root-level cache.