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Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

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Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#231
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The MacBook Air was not really a "high performance" machine to start with though - you can't compare that with a ThinkPad :) And it was seldomly updated, so you could get very aged specs. If you bought a MacBook 2011/2012 you would typically get an HDD and between 4 and 8GB RAM. Software requirements/demands sky-rocketed shortly after that. On a non-Air you could at least upgrade this yourself, which gave the machine…

it did have a 128gb ssd. The thinkpad was also an x1 carbon (also 4gb of ram), so it had a similar form factor, not sure about cpu specs, I probably should have mentioned that.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I bought the 2011 MacBook Air 11" and it still performs really well for everyday tasks, probably the best computer I've ever owned.

Interesting, I wonder why mine slowed down so much then. From what I remember it was after an OS upgrade, it was my first time trying a mac, and I ended up being disappointed and going back to linux, but I also didn't do a deep dive into figuring out the reasons for it.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#233

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.

My bet is we will have a small explosion of cheap consumer laptops running ARM, but more as a marketing ploy to ride the hype train around Apple computers with ARM better being much better than Intel. (even though those ARM chips won't compare to the Apple Silicon, but like I said, sales).

How is is the ARM build of Windows?

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#234
post #79
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't 4 to 5 years of full-day usage be just fine for worst case life expectancy for a laptop? I've had one that gave up on 3 years, a couple months after warranty ended (that seemed to be quite common for that brand at the time).

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…

AFAIK other than the 32 bit devices and some with smaller vram, all Intel Macs are still supported

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#236
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then code was usually closely tied to the hardware with very little abstraction. Nowadays even if you write in a low level language it's not difficult to target a wide array of devices if you go through standard interfaces. Proprietary software is probably the main reason we haven't had a whole lot of diversity in ISAs over the past couple of decades (see: Itanium). It's no coincidence that ARM's mainstream expl…

ARM's first explosion was in PDAs, not running Linux. SA110 and XScale. A ton of ARM hardware is embedded cores running VxWorks or EmBed. M0 through M4. Yes, Phones are the dominant core consumer here, but there is a whole bunch of embedded/IoT stuff shipping ARM cores every day that will never see Linux installed.

And it's always fun to remember ARM's second explosion: Nintendo. For a while, the most popular device using ARM was the Game Boy Advance.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#237
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then code was usually closely tied to the hardware with very little abstraction. Nowadays even if you write in a low level language it's not difficult to target a wide array of devices if you go through standard interfaces. Proprietary software is probably the main reason we haven't had a whole lot of diversity in ISAs over the past couple of decades (see: Itanium). It's no coincidence that ARM's mainstream expl…

ARM's first explosion was in PDAs, not running Linux. SA110 and XScale. A ton of ARM hardware is embedded cores running VxWorks or EmBed. M0 through M4. Yes, Phones are the dominant core consumer here, but there is a whole bunch of embedded/IoT stuff shipping ARM cores every day that will never see Linux installed.

>that will never see Linux installed.

Right up until you see someone run Doom on it.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#238
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this kids, is why we have key and delta frames. We should drop gif support.

i'm pretty surprised apng hasn't really displaced gif, at least not completely. a lot of people don't seem to even be aware pngs are animatable these days

I think this is because video codecs superseded everything else. An MP4 file is going to be roughly the same size as an apng, while enjoying hardware acceleration on a lot of devices out there.

There's still the weird niche of lossless compression where apng or webp would be preferred.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#239
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not only is it an incumbent switching to another architecture; it's an incumbent switching to another incumbent architecture. ARM is older than PowerPC and almost as old as the Macintosh itself; it came out in 1985.

I'd regard the fact no one seemed to notice that Arm has switched to a more modern 64 bit architecture (Aarch64) that has very little in common with its predecessors as being quite impressive.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#240
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justify it how you like but I consider 16GB too low for my use. 32GB is minimum in 2021, with all my hardware having 64GB

I have a 32gb overclocked hackintosh and my 8gb M1 Air blows it away in nearly everything. I’m not sure exactly what the difference is but in terms of UX, x86 ram needs do not translate to Apple Silicon 1:1

They do, you just notice it less. MacOS is notorious for having one of the most asinine memory management schemes in the history of software, and so causing a memory issue can be a bit of a finnecky task (but certainly not impossible). As a matter of fact, most times you don't even need to fill swap before MacOS runs out of memory: you just need to fool the OS into thinking the memory pressure is high enough to warrant GC.
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