231–240 of 454 posts
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I believe the point is that the "main thread" for your iOS application, is not the main thread of the OS. They're totally decoupled.
Err, same with Android? And every OS ever. That's just standard process isolation. Or am I misunderstanding something?
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One of the reasons iOS feels smoother than Android is because the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app. The apps aren’t allowed to introduce jank, so if you’re scrolling a webpage and stuff is loading simultaneously, iOS will be way smoother. I think this is also why they can have such low latency on inputs, for example with the Apple Pencil which is much lower latency than the surface pen or the android s…
I wonder what made apple give the iPad Pro such an awful screen though, considering all the software optimisations that they do. I got the M1 iPad a month ago, and the screen has absolutely horrendous ghosting issues, like, what is this? An LCD from 2001? Just open the settings app, and quickly scroll the options up and down - white text on the black background leaves such a visible smudge, it bothers me massively wh…
Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC. When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down. It almost makes you anxious. You're wondering if it's about to crash or go on fire. I've always kept a Desktop PC on the go for this reason, a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues. With a laptop, I always feel like I'm comprom…
Kind of depends on the steady state and your target turbo frequency. I have my fans basically idle when temperatures permit it, but aggressively ramp them to full speed to keep the CPU as cool as possible so as to allow the frequency to scale up beyond spec. This results in a similar effect as a laptop fan -- under heavy load, the machine is loud. I don't really have a problem with this, at idle my computer is using ~100W, at full load, it's nearly 1000W. That's a lot of heat to get rid of, and it has to go somewhere. Having a large water cooling loop can help with the noise, but since I really only use the CPU that heavily for bursts that measure in the minutes at worse, I think it's fine.
It doesn't make me anxious but I do kind of like the feedback that things are under load. (I have the ramp-up time set pretty long, so something like "go build" that only uses all 32 CPUs for a second doesn't really trigger anything. There's enough inertia to prevent that from raising temps much.)
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"PC" was "personal computer" years before the IBM PC. Just look at old computer magazines. The whole reason the phrase "IBM PC" existed was to differentiate it from the other PCs that already existed. "IBM" was the adjective. "PC" was the noun. Because of its success in offices, "IBM PC" became just "PC" the same way other words like "omnibus" became just "bus" because it's simpler to say.
Wasn’t ‘home computer’ the generally used term before the IBM 5150 ?
"Home computer" was things like the VIC-20 and the TI-99 4/A. "Personal Computer" was machines that you had in your home or office that you didn't have to share, or timeshare with someone else. Think Cromemco, Kaypro, PET, and SuperBrain.
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It's both. It's harder and harder to grind out progress (and if you compare M1 to where the 90's-early 2000's exponential progression, we're not so close). As it gets harder, it becomes more capital intensive and the probability of success on any given process node decreases. The marginal utility of a doubling of computing is likely decreasing with time, too. At some point, these factors are going to compound to slow…
I don’t think the marginal utility of doubling computing will diminish any time soon. As we gain more computing power, we just start doing more and more computation heavy tasks that weren’t possible before. For example, VR games are notoriously demanding on today’s hardware, especially if you want to put that hardware in the headset. And many applications get slower over time, not faster, as new features are added. T…
E.g. 20 years ago, you could buy a P3-1GHz for $200 or P3-750MHz for $100. So you'd pay about $100 more (2001) for 850 more Dhrystone MIPS.
Vs. modern processors where for a few hundred bucks you get >500,000 DMIPS in a package. You would not choose to pay $150 (2021) more for 850 more DMIPS (I think this is true even if you consider things on a log scale; a doubling is worth less now than it was 20 years ago. Twenty years ago nearly anyone could tell the difference and would pay a bunch more for twice the performance, and now a big subset of the computing market wouldn't.
It makes me a bit sad that for ten years I took it for granted that Moore’s law is dead and notebooks are constantly overheating incapable computers just to learn that the whole issue was Intel messing up their process nodes.
It's a bit of a moot-point. I prefer AMD processors where I can get it, but Intel's position in the market is far from as dire as people make it out to be. Until Apple can find a way to challenge their single-core performance, Intel will still be leading a class of their own.
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Same here, it’s like a freaky experience. I run mostly from the browser but have a couple of things going at the same time. One thing I noticed is the blazing fast typing on the Mac. There is an ever so small lag on windows in perceptible when using it. But, when you type on the Mac you notice it, and the brain just feels good using it. I have no idea if this is a real thing, but it’s similar with scrolling, you touc…
One of the reasons iOS feels smoother than Android is because the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app. The apps aren’t allowed to introduce jank, so if you’re scrolling a webpage and stuff is loading simultaneously, iOS will be way smoother. I think this is also why they can have such low latency on inputs, for example with the Apple Pencil which is much lower latency than the surface pen or the android s…
Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "cl…
Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC. When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down. It almost makes you anxious. You're wondering if it's about to crash or go on fire. I've always kept a Desktop PC on the go for this reason, a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues. With a laptop, I always feel like I'm comprom…
I'm eager to see what can be done with the desktop tower workstation post-M1. I don't think anyone actually wants to have a slim laptop and use "the cloud" to "download more memory" but here we are in 2021 where people are saying 16gb max ram is good.
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Same. The problem is now my work desktop is a 32-core Threadripper w/ huge GPU and way too much ram. It’s kinda nice knowing that if my computer ever slows down it’s because of bad programming and not having a too slow computer. I want to like laptops. I really really do. But they’re slower, have bad keyboards, and have tiny screens. Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful. That said, I can’t f…
> Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful. You might be underestimating the value in that. I’ve been working off of MacBooks since 2011, and for almost all of that time I’ve had them docked and hooked up to multiple monitors, and working just like a desktop. But if I ever need to go anywhere, meet a client, travel, go to another room/office, I just unplug and go. If power goes, I don’t lose any…
The only catch is I need to make sure my dev machine is online.
Now with neovim 0.5 with support for LSP and treesitter, neovim is on par with visual studio code.