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Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

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Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#21

Post by peoplefromibiza »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #12
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.

I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they would…

well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is listed at € 1.429 on the Italian Apple web site.

My sister bought a Lenovo thinkbook with a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32) for € 729

My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and 32GB of RAM for € 1.780 and he's using it to render complex scenes.

Does the increase in performance justify the ridiculous price?

It doesn't, in my opinion.

Also, Apple doesn't want to be a mainstream company, their market is never gonna be huge, premium prices are only justifiable if the product is somewhat exclusive.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#22

Post by LeonM »

RMPR wrote: post #9

This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac, as much as I like ThinkPads, this battery life is simply on another level.

Don't get your expectations up too high.

My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux, and has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt, the external dock, HDMI port, audio and WiFi. For example: when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources. USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by. BMC support seems problematic as well, my battery status is often 'unknown' with the Lenovo ACPI kernel modules.

And this is even with 'official' support from Lenovo for Linux. I can only imagine how bad the experience will be for running Linux on Apple products for the coming years.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#23

Post by peoplefromibiza »

saagarjha wrote: post #19
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.

There's a new set of Apple silicon Macs that go all the way up to 64 GB of RAM, although you'll pay a premium for it.

premium = an arm and a leg.

My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds.

It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#24

Post by sharikous »

automatic6131 wrote: post #11
retskrad wrote: post #7

Alder Lake, Intel's flagship dekstop class CPU, is only 10-15% faster than the M1 Pro/M1 Max in CPU performance but it requires an insane amount of cooling and the power consumption is frankly ridiculous. Seems like Apple Silion will be 5 years ahead of the competition - similar to how long it took for others to catch up with the first iPhone.

Apple will only be ahead of the competition for as long as they can buy out the whole TSMC's latest and greatest node. After that day, it won't be.

It's not only that. They have the knowhow, and a top-notch engineering team. The iPhone processor were developed over the course of 15 years and grew organically to become the M1. Even if you consider other mobile processors on par with Apple's (they are not) - it will take years before they can be adapted to PCs. And as latest Intel efforts show us processors that were not designed with efficiency as a key target from the beginning cannot be easily modified to challenge the M1 either.

Even without TSMC Apple has all the cards - experience in state of the art chips, phones, tablets and PCs, from the silicon to the software, all in one company. They should do some serious slipups before someone has even a chance to challenge them.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#25

Post by [deleted] »

wronglebowski wrote: post #6
hbbio wrote: post #3

The progress on all fronts is really impressive, and even the write-up is top notch. The pace at which the team advances is incredible, as it seems Apple support is minimal... Maybe the core tech users is negligible to Apple, but it shouldn't be: Winning over the power users generally precedes larger adoption and I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead.

I do wonder what Apple will do if this gets any sort of traction. I fear they only allow disabling of secure boot/other OS installs due to fear of regulation. Apple wants you running their OS and in their walled garden.

[deleted]

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#26

Post by saagarjha »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #23
saagarjha wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a new set of Apple silicon Macs that go all the way up to 64 GB of RAM, although you'll pay a premium for it.

premium = an arm and a leg. My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds. It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.

I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#27

Post by sharikous »

LeonM wrote: post #22
RMPR wrote: post #9

This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac, as much as I like ThinkPads, this battery life is simply on another level.

Don't get your expectations up too high. My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux, and has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt, the external dock, HDMI port, audio and WiFi. For example: when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources. USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by. BMC support seems problemati…

Judging from the enthusiasm radiating from Asahi Linux I am optimistic in this regard. It seems to be interesting enough to attract a lot of talents, which is the key to succeeding for OSS projects.

The ThinkPad seems a boring challenge in comparison. It won't surprise me if the Linux support will be better for Macs than it is for Lenovo "officially supported" PCs.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#28

Post by acomjean »

simonh wrote: post #17
automatic6131 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple will only be ahead of the competition for as long as they can buy out the whole TSMC's latest and greatest node. After that day, it won't be.

There is good reason to believe that’s not the case. Oh having access to TSMC 5nm to other designs would definitely help reduce the gap, but we can see from like-for-like node implementations of previous A series chips and other ARM designs that Apple has a significant lead in architecture too. M1 has some really impressive new architectural features of its own that it’s hard to imagine their competitors being able t…

According to AMD you get >1.25 performance at 1/2 the power usage when chips go from 7nm to 5nm. Some of that might be architecture but when x86 gets to 5nm the difference in performance might be fairly negligible.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-unveils-zen-4-cpu-road...

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#29

Post by fragmede »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #2

> Amusingly, while implementing support for this in Linux, we ran into a bug in Linux’s ARM SMMU support that had been there ever since 52-bit address support was introduced. This was breaking systems with more than 256 TiB of RAM - I wonder why nobody noticed? Either way, Linux now correctly supports standard ARM systems with up to 4 PiB of RAM ;-). Interesting how working on new technologies helps improve existing…

Especially handy for SpaceX, which employs a number of ex-NASA folk. SpaceX wouldn't be where they are today if it weren't for the investment in NASA.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#30

Post by floatboth »

sharikous wrote: post #24
automatic6131 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple will only be ahead of the competition for as long as they can buy out the whole TSMC's latest and greatest node. After that day, it won't be.

It's not only that. They have the knowhow, and a top-notch engineering team. The iPhone processor were developed over the course of 15 years and grew organically to become the M1. Even if you consider other mobile processors on par with Apple's (they are not) - it will take years before they can be adapted to PCs. And as latest Intel efforts show us processors that were not designed with efficiency as a key target fr…

Don't discount the other engineering teams. AMD is currently not too far behind (even ahead in a couple benchmarks) despite being on TSMC's previous node. It's all gonna be pretty close.
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