Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The first conformant M1 GPU driver

rosenzweig.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 699 posts

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#191

Post by phkahler »

jmull wrote: post #156
bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

I just don't see how it's incumbent on Apple to implement a standard only because it exists. It takes significant resources and impacts release schedules to, say, support an on-going vulkan implementation... I think there would need to be a business argument for it. Avoiding "shame" probably doesn't cut it. It just strikes me as strange when people expect Apple to spend money and focus on their own personal prioritie…

>> I just don't see how it's incumbent on Apple to implement a standard only because it exists.

Well Apple does implement the standard. They DO have OpenGL, but their driver is not fully compliant apparently.

>> It takes significant resources and impacts release schedules

Well it seems 2 people working for a couple years managed to do it without much in the way of documentation that Apple clearly has (they built the F-ing thing).

Apple has considered OpenGL deprecated for a long time now, but they do support it (they brought it to M1 and M2) and it makes sense to keep doing so. They really should be more conformant. If a standard is worth supporting, it's worth supporting well - and Apply has unlimited funds in comparison to these two people.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#192

Post by Klonoar »

tracker1 wrote: post #127
europeanNyan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

Probably the closest option to M1 on build quality and battery will be the AMD version of the Framework laptop... if you want can run Windows or Linux without issue. Will probably go that direction on my next purchase. Later this year and next year AMD are releasing new laptop CPU/APU that will absolutely kill on performance:watt, while they're a bit ahead of Intel at the moment, they're going to leap a bit further a…

In terms of "premium finish" feeling, I think that the Starbook from Star Labs might be in the convo - they actually make their own chassis, unlike so many other vendors.

https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook

(I know Framework isn't rebranding stuff - just throwing another in the mix)

Good luck getting one though, wait times seem bad every time I look.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#193

Post by acomjean »

cfiggers wrote: post #93
europeanNyan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

> Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned. I have a Surface Laptop 4 with an AMD processor and 16GB of RAM. I'm extremely happy with it, though I'll concede that the build quality is a click lower than a M1 MacBook Air (two of the rubber feet have fallen off of mine, being my main ding against it) and nobody can…

I have an AMD 5700U linux notebook for work. I'll second that they're really quite great on battery and speed.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#194

Post by nwellinghoff »

I really wish nerds would stop supporting Apple hardware and software. It is so closed and everything is a giant pain. Its one thing for the average non-techie that does not want to do anything advanced and just wants to swallow the blue pill. But for an actual techie to support a system that is the antithesis of general purpose compute...Can you even be considered a true techie anymore? I just don't get it.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#195

Post by stetrain »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #61
soulbadguy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in my opinion very wrong, you will end up just selecting for a sub population which might or might have the qualities you are looking for. You seem to be confusing volume of work and passion for skill. Some of the best engineers i know will are very diligent about work life balance (i guess you call that clock in/sign out), do not have publicly visible git hub because in their spare time they are either with…

People who do more will, by definition, have more experience than those who do less. The engineers who spend their time reading and working on problems because they want to, creating larger volumes of work than those who only work an 8-to-5 job will generally always have a larger breadth and depth of experience. Saying the inverse is true is highly unlikely over large populations of individuals across any field, not…

I think it's more that there are multiple spectrums here and a lot more than two buckets to put people in.

Sure there are very passionate people who enjoy programming so much that they wish to do so far outside the standard workday.

Some of those people are also very highly skilled, experienced and organized.

There are also people who work a standard day, push Jira tickets around, and try to blend into the organization and hope nobody really questions how much they personally get done.

There are also plenty who have good work/life balance and are also skilled, experienced, good problem solvers, good communicators, and very valuable to have on your team. They might have some measurable productivity loss compared to your ideal, but probably not by 2x or 10x.

I have also run into several of the ultra-focused passionate folks who will stay up all night hacking at a problem to make it work, who produce prolific line-counts of code, and fall very much into your camp of 10k line indecipherable PRs that are definitely not going to be maintainable long term in a team or organization.

You can try to correlate some of these factors together, but it's perhaps not as simple as your original comment presented.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#196

Post by ralferoo »

hedora wrote: post #177
pohl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Device manufacturers can engineer for longer useful lifespan by oversizing the battery, can't they? Do they all do that to the same extent?

They can also implement better battery management technology (cooling, charge rate curves, keeping the charge between 10%-90% instead of 0-100%, but reporting 0-100% to the user via scaling), etc, etc. For a good counter-example, look at the early Nissan Leafs. They burned out their batteries in a matter of a few years, but battery replacements for other brands from that time are basically unheard of. (The inherent i…

Funny, I heard the total opposite about Nissan Leafs. The industry was guesstimating that batteries would last 8-10 years. The first Nissan Leafs (which was about the first commercially mass-available EV) had battery lives where something like 90% were still going strong and still 80% of original capacity left after 13 years.

Rather than the Leaf being problematic, it was the car that showed the market that worrying about the lifespan of EV batteries wasn't really necessary.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#197

Post by softfalcon »

I wonder if support for OpenGL, Vulkan, etc will improve now that Apple is partnering with nVidia, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc around the OpenUSD rendering/animation/CAD/3D-scene format?

Considering the whole schtick of OpenUSD is "one file format that renders consistently everywhere" (paraphrasing), I would be surprised if Apple doesn't use it as a means to cement more 3D software vendors into macOS land. It's really hard to render consistently if the underlying drivers are all wonk and proprietary.

I am curious to see how this plays out. In my mind, there are two options:

1. Apple conforms to the existing standards of OpenGL and Vulkan we see gaining steam for many film and game production pipelines.

2. Apple tries to throw its weight around and force devs to support their Metal standards even more, ultimately hoping to force the world onto Metal + macOS.

My heart hopes for option 1, but my gut tells me Apple is going to push for option 2 with all the might it can muster. In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist (not really saying much about Apple here though... nVidia, Autodesk, Adobe, and Microsoft are all the same).

The next couple of years are going to be interesting for sure!

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#198

Post by HankB99 »

bwanab wrote: post #98
therealmarv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone. I would never use an iPhone for certain software and UX related issues (biggest is the missing back gesture/button). My Pixel does better photos than ANY iPhone on the market. Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series. Samsung S9 tablets have an OLED display. OLED... you don't get that on any iPad. Apple Wa…

My son bought a Dell XPS for exactly that reason. After 1.5 years, the battery life was at 50%. He called Dell support and they said it was normal. He's now in the market for a MacBook Air M2.

The key to battery life/health on the XPS is to use the BIOS functions to limit charging. My XPS-13 9370 has been plugged in most of its life (about 4 years now) and battery health has dropped from 96% to 93%.

I can't speak to the rest of the comparison to the Macs - they're probably better overall - but the battery life is a solved problem if you know to limit charging.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#199

Post by thinkingemote »

europeanNyan wrote: post #36
bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

Apple is an ecosystem much more than windows is. Devices work together and enhance each other. So jumping to Linux isn't as easy as Everything has to change.

It's more like emigration or a divorce it will hurt and it's a big change. For most it's not worth the bother.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#200

Post by LoganDark »

josephg wrote: post #144
mwint wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an Apple laptop that is a few years old. It does not have shit battery life. Probably 90% of new. Did you research this statement before making it?

Yep. Apple battery health in system preferences will show you how much the battery has degraded since the device was new. My ~2yo M1 MacBook Pro still has 92% capacity compared to when it was brand new.

I don't know if it's in System Preferences, but for me, System Information shows my mid-2015 MBP (running macOS 10.14.6 Mojave) still has a battery capacity of 8266mAh and a remaining charge of 8079mAh at 100%. Compared to the advertised capacity at launch of 8755mAh, that's a charge capacity of ~92% after ~five years (AppleCare replaced my battery during their recall). MacBooks are just built different.
Post reply on HN