221–230 of 342 posts
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Formats don't have to be fully implemented to their original spec for all time. If it's not serving us well today then we can change how our software uses it.
They kind of do, though, or you lose compatibility. There are a lot of corners of the internet which just haven’t been touched in a decade. Are you going to break all of them? For what purpose?
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Formats don't have to be fully implemented to their original spec for all time. If it's not serving us well today then we can change how our software uses it.
Wouldn't it be better to make a new specification that provides backwards compatibility?
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https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/15/the-secret-apple-m1-amx... The rumor I've heard is that Apple is keeping their custom extensions to the ISA undocumented in deference to ARM's desire not to have the instruction set just completely fragment into a bunch of mutually incompatible company-specific dialects. It's worth noting that the article you link predates the public release of the M1 by a good 10 months. Given ho…
Undocumented or not, they would be hard to hide: I would think you could scan through MacOS binaries and find them, if they exist. (I guess it's still possible they exist even if you don't find them, maybe unused or only produced by JITs, but that doesn't sound very useful.)
But it's not really about trying to prevent anyone from discovering that these opcodes exist. It's about trying to discourage their widespread use. If it's undocumented, then they don't have to support it, and anyone who's expecting support knows to steer clear. That gives them more freedom to change the behavior of this coprocessor in future iterations of the chip. And people can still get at them, because Apple uses them in system libraries such as the OS X implementation of BLAS.
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For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days. Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use. Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs. And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, m…
I bought a macbook air in ~2012 and it was unusably slow after a year. bought a thinkpad to put linux on after that that I'm still using today (although admittedly it's a bit of a wreck now - still, it lasted for 8 years)
Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.
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It makes about as much sense as calling humans "lactating fish"
Where the category "fish" isn't a clade - it's possible to evolve to no longer be a fish - it's more comparable to a specific generation of ARM chips, like perhaps ARM32, than it is to the ARM line in general. It would be weird to say "64-bit ARMv5" in the same way that it would be weird to say "lactating fish". But it is not weird to say "64-bit ARM" for the same reason it isn't weird to say "lactating euteleostome.…
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Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another architecture (which is also not a first, this now being their fourth architecture, after 680x0, PowerPC and x86). In the desktop/notebook market, Wintel and Apple are firmly entrenched, with only ChromeOS and Linux challenging them - plus a few less significant OSes…
We're getting open source RISC-V wich seems more promising long term than ARM.
Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes about as much sense as calling humans "lactating fish"
Where the category "fish" isn't a clade - it's possible to evolve to no longer be a fish - it's more comparable to a specific generation of ARM chips, like perhaps ARM32, than it is to the ARM line in general. It would be weird to say "64-bit ARMv5" in the same way that it would be weird to say "lactating fish". But it is not weird to say "64-bit ARM" for the same reason it isn't weird to say "lactating euteleostome.…