101–110 of 328 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s Unix but it’s not Linux. When Linux is your target it makes sense to use it on your development stack entirely. The irony being that Microsoft seem to make the best Linux OS for development for my use cases of docker / server side / cloud operations. And it runs Office better than Linux or Mac.
> The irony being that Microsoft seem to make the best Linux OS for development WSL?
What don't they just make the chips bigger so there is more surface area contact on the heat sink?
In mobile (anything with a battery really), it obviously doesn't work because you care about battery life.
In server, it doesn't work, since two of the main costs and limiting factors in data centers are power and cooling.
Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but…
Honestly I don't understand why there's not something like a 256 core ARM laptop with 4TB RAM. The benefit of ARM is scale of multitasking due to not requiring the same kind of lock states that Intel's architecture requires, and can additionally scale much better than only one physical+virtual core pair. I guess the only thing that's holding back ARM is Microsoft, as laptops are expected to run an desktop OS that peo…
It's not Microsoft holding it back. It's Qualcomm.
Apart from their very latest SOC (designed by a bunch of ex-Apple employees, no less) their CPUs have are significantly worse than x86 in terms of general performance and have persistently lagged 4 years behind Apple in terms of performance (3 years behind x86). They sell for the same price per unit as x86 CPUs do, so there aren't very many OEMs that take them up on the offer given the added expense of having to design a completely different mainboard for a particular chassis.
As such, x86 is the only game in town if you're buying a non-Apple machine; Qualcomm's products aren't cheaper and perform much worse outside of having more batter life. Sure, Qualcomm owns Nuvia now, but that acquisition will still take some time to bear fruit.
From the perspective of a consumer, my MacBook Pro is basically the perfect laptop, at least in theory. I love the battery life and performance of the hardware, not to mention the unrivaled build quality of the MacBook (screen, trackpad, keyboard). In practice, however, MacOS limits the capabilities of the hardware such that I cannot daily drive my MacBook Pro as a work or personal computer (poor containerization sup…
Would Wine (Proton) work out of the box on M1 Linux? My knowledge of Wine is limited. Based on the How Wine works 101 article [1]:
> The code inside the executables is “portable” between Windows and Linux (assuming the same CPU architecture).
because the CPU architecture is different, Wine would need changes to support it too - just like x32 and x64. Is that correct?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I don't understand why there's not something like a 256 core ARM laptop with 4TB RAM. The benefit of ARM is scale of multitasking due to not requiring the same kind of lock states that Intel's architecture requires, and can additionally scale much better than only one physical+virtual core pair. I guess the only thing that's holding back ARM is Microsoft, as laptops are expected to run an desktop OS that peo…
I think because general compute is hard to parallelize, so 256 cores doesn't help much in practice. (Compute that does parallelize well already runs on GPU).
From the perspective of a consumer, my MacBook Pro is basically the perfect laptop, at least in theory. I love the battery life and performance of the hardware, not to mention the unrivaled build quality of the MacBook (screen, trackpad, keyboard). In practice, however, MacOS limits the capabilities of the hardware such that I cannot daily drive my MacBook Pro as a work or personal computer (poor containerization sup…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I don't understand why there's not something like a 256 core ARM laptop with 4TB RAM. The benefit of ARM is scale of multitasking due to not requiring the same kind of lock states that Intel's architecture requires, and can additionally scale much better than only one physical+virtual core pair. I guess the only thing that's holding back ARM is Microsoft, as laptops are expected to run an desktop OS that peo…
> Honestly I don't understand why there's not something like a 256 core ARM laptop The high power ARM cores aren’t that small. If you took the M2 and scaled it up to 256 cores, it would be almost 7 square inches. You can’t just scale a chip like that, though, so the interconnects would consume a huge amount of space as well. It would also consume over 1000W. The latest ARM chips are great, but some times I think the…
The actual cores are about .6/2.3 mm², and local interconnects and L2 roughly double that.
So with just those parts, 256 P-cores would be about 1.5 square inches, and 256 E-cores would be about half a square inch. And in practical terms you can fabricate a die that's a bit more than a square inch.
Of course it wouldn't use 1000 watts. When you light up that many cores at once you use them at lower power. And I doubt a 256 core design would have all that many P cores either.
As a rough estimate, you could take the 120mm² M1 chip, add 28 more P-cores with 110mm², 220 more E-cores with 300mm², 128 more MB of L3 cache with 60mm², 100mm² of miscellaneous interconnects, and still be on par with a high end GPU.
That sounds doable but is pushing it. A 128 core die, though, has nothing stopping it except market fit.
From the perspective of a consumer, my MacBook Pro is basically the perfect laptop, at least in theory. I love the battery life and performance of the hardware, not to mention the unrivaled build quality of the MacBook (screen, trackpad, keyboard). In practice, however, MacOS limits the capabilities of the hardware such that I cannot daily drive my MacBook Pro as a work or personal computer (poor containerization sup…
i've used a mac for development for various projects which have been globally impactful for over a decade. it's literally unix, man. docker on mac can be improved, but if i'm developing for other architectures it's much easier to just test natively. toolchain for all the languages i use is exactly the same as any other *nix. gaming i'll give you a point, but that's why i have windows dual boot at home. /shrug
Yup, it's NOT Linux.
Been using MacOSX since Powerbook up to first gen Macbook - and I finally gave up: I installed Linux on it instead.
Pretty much all servers are running Linux even back then. Using Unix on work computer/laptop causes way too many encounters with various quirks and glitches. It continuously drags down your productivity too many times everyday.
After much stress, I installed Linux on my Macbook instead - but then I encountered various hardware-related glitches instead.
So I finally gave up, and bought a Thinkpad.
AMD is having some challenges at the moment. In particular, the RDNA3 graphics card line launch has been a dud. The Nvidia 4090 turned out to be far ahead of the AMD 7900XTX. Then there turned out to be an overheating issue on the AMD cards. And now it just looks like both Nvidia and AMD are price gouging GPU buyers instead of competing with each other. They are deliberately keeping prices high and creating artificia…
Their graphics division has certainly been lacking vs Nvidia's cards, but are still far ahead of Intel's. Their desktop and server CPUs are crushing the market. > They are deliberately keeping prices high and creating artificial shortages of GPUs That's simply not true. Check out TechTechPotato's youtube channel for the explanation on this, but under-shipping isn't price fixing. They're just shipping less to distribu…
Seeing plenty of people choose 13th gen over Zen 4, the platform pricing for Zen 4 just wasn't very attractive. AMD [had to] significantly cut prices across the lineup by 20-30 %.
If anyone knows a dataset suggesting what % of world energy usage is used by computing hardware (and what proportion of that hardware is idle vs fully utilised) I'd love to see it.
Also, less on topic, what's the environmental impact of writing your app in something programmer friendly but power inefficient? I strongly suspect some big tech companies will be suffering with this (namely anyone who is still on RoR at scale).