Can someone ELI5 what this means?
The first conformant M1 GPU driver
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Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#242Can someone ELI5 what this means?
You can play games and use gui applications on the new M1 devices using Asahi Linux. Which means running Linux instead of MacOS.
The only caveat is that most applications won't be compiled for ARM yet, so emulation will still be needed.
This is in contrast of Apple dropping support for OpenGL on their devices, and using their own API layer: Metal.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#243For clarity, this isn't the first conformant linux drivers. Apple themselves are not conformant to OpenGL® ES 3.1. So this is literally the first conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers for M-Series, for any operating system (Apple or Non-Apple). Hence why the call to action to donate to the team. https://asahilinux.org/support/
I love what they're doing, but last time I clicked a link for asahilinux on hacker news I was taken to a pop up that specifically said that readers from Hacker News are not welcomed on their site and couldn't read their content.
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Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#244Not a single mention of the word ‘Apple’ in the original post, instead ‘the manufacturer’ and ‘the big corporation’.. curious if that is deliberate and if so what the reasoning is (legal?)
Presumably, because this isn't about Apple. They don't care about Apple. Merely about getting the M1/M2 arch to run Linux properly. It could have been Microsoft, Amazon, Google, treatment would have been the same.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#245I 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 r…
> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." The iMac and early OS X went big on open standards, and Jobs made a point of pointing this out: USB for the iMac, JPEG, MPG, mp3, Postscript etc for OSX. IP/TCP built in. They even paid the danegeld for .rtf. Then as they clawed their way ba…
You might actually expand "Apple likes open standards when it is weak" to "companies likes open standards when they are weak."
Generally speaking you get standards consortiums when there is a clear winner that is mopping up the space.
Here's an example that's happening right now: Nvidia-NvLink-Infiniband.
Nvidia owns the highspeed interconnect inside the chassis (HGX), the NICs (Mellanox), the inter-host interconnect (Infiniband), the high performance inter-host interconnect (switched NvLink), the and the ethernet network (Mellanox has the same 52.1Tbps switch performance that everyone else has now). GPU training is RDMA heavy and this is a place where both NvLink and Infiniband shine, ethernet much less so. Retransmissions are very bad, in global-performance-terms, for ROCEv2 transfers. Right now Nvidia is just crushing it and there's zero chance anyone is going to catch up by introducing new Infiniband ASICs.
So what happens? You have a consortium spun up by all of the companies in the Ethernet space - Ultra Ethernet Consortium - to try and use "standards" to push back on customers who don't want to make big investments in "non-standard." UEC is pretty vague but seems to be promising Broadcom-style cellized fabrics, the whole point of which is to have an ethernet-like standard that avoids ECMP-induced flow collisions and retransmissions - that is, get Ethernet into the same territory as Infiniband.
If you look back in time in the tech industry, you see this over and over and over and over. Standards are great, they make certain kinds of multi-sided markets and markets that need broad participation to be viable possible - but they are also routinely about the losers joining together to compete.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#246Earlier 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…
I had a top of the line XPS. Battery life is less than half that of the Air. The speakers in the XPS sound like they are from the 90s. It gets painfully hot on the bottom case. The keyboard wrist rest area is cheap plastic. It was thicker and heavier than the MBA. Intel Iris GPU (ie slow af) versus M1/M2 GPU. One point to the XPS: the pixel density of the 4k 13" was absolutely LOVELY. I have never seen a screen so ni…
Isn't a good high density screen typically a large power drain? Perhaps there's a trade-off that was made there…
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 5x battery life improvement seems like the baseline had some issues, unless your MacBook goes like a week without charging.
My M2 MBA routinely goes past 10-16 hours of life time with simple coding stuff (phpstorm and PHP in Docker), and it stays comfortably cold all time. Most Windows laptops struggle to get more than 3-4 hours and will fry off your balls if used as actual laptops.
The poster was apparently a 100% Linux person previously, though. I’m pretty sure Windows was designed to heat up like that as a funny joke. For example on Reddit I see somebody complain that they only get 5 hours with my laptop model (zenbook flip 13)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUS/comments/ry0nwb/the_asus_flip_...
But it is pretty easy to get 14 in Linux I think, at least if you believe the battery indicator.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#248Earlier 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. The ThinkPads are pretty good laptops, especially if you put Linux on them.
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Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." The iMac and early OS X went big on open standards, and Jobs made a point of pointing this out: USB for the iMac, JPEG, MPG, mp3, Postscript etc for OSX. IP/TCP built in. They even paid the danegeld for .rtf. Then as they clawed their way ba…
>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one. At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performanc…
That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV).
Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control.
As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#250how close are we now to being able to plug in an eGPU into an Apple Silicon device?
That's two completely different things. I'm not even sure if the required hardware elements for eGPU - namedly, a "back transport" of rendered frames via Thunderbolt and shuffling them directly to the screen - are there on M-series machines.
Usually you plug the eGPU into a monitor directly instead of backfeed it to the built in display. The bandwidth is already low enough without showing rendered frames back across the link too.
There are some limitations on the PCIe/Thunderbolt but Marcan has written a few times he thinks it may be possible though probably not worthwhile from a performance perspective. Of course even base thunderbolt is a WIP at this point so that answer could always change.