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The first conformant M1 GPU driver

rosenzweig.io

301–310 of 699 posts

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#301
post #19

Asahi and Alyssa are the titans of reverse engineering. Their work is pretty unbelievable. I would bet Apple is planning to hire them, or has tried already and they refused.

Employment is a poor proposition. Typically employees make poor money in comparison to what kind of profit they generate, that especially applies to IT. Anyone with a talent, should rather seek to incorporate and sell their services at fair price. Unfortunately in some countries, big corporations managed to lobby governments to put a stop to that.

The problem with that option is it involves many skills other than the primary tech-focused skill. Sales, marketing, accounting, negotiation, support, etc. Many technical people don't really want to handle those job functions, even if they happen to be decently good at them.

Certainly you can hire people to do those functions, but you need to have a decently well-established reputation and enough work and income before you're able to hire those people.

Employment does give you a trade off there: less money in exchange for someone else handling the "overhead".

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#302
post #19

Asahi and Alyssa are the titans of reverse engineering. Their work is pretty unbelievable. I would bet Apple is planning to hire them, or has tried already and they refused.

Employment is a poor proposition. Typically employees make poor money in comparison to what kind of profit they generate, that especially applies to IT. Anyone with a talent, should rather seek to incorporate and sell their services at fair price. Unfortunately in some countries, big corporations managed to lobby governments to put a stop to that.

Massive “it depends” on that

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use to be 100% linux person. I've gone through many thinkpads. M1 Air is so far beyond them it's not even close. Battery life is (not exaggerating) 5x or more in my experience. It's honest to god, much faster. Completely silent and cool. (one of my thinkpads almost burned me it got so hot, and the fans get so loud) I've never had a single crash, random restart, failure to sleep, failure to charge, driver problem, tou…

>driver problem, touchpad randomly not working, wifi failing, all of which I've had with thinkpads. Those are Linux driver issues, not HW issues.

If you're using Linux and there are no good, reliable drivers for your machine, it might as well be a hardware issue.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. It's intentionally closed, so network effects can drive usage. Common Apple strategy, straight from Jobs.

Yes, Jobs, the great satan of tech. He died so that Tim Apple could sin with impunity. No FaceTime for Windows users — it will bring the rebels to their knees.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was mistaken, I found a copy of Jobs' letter re:Flash and he does cite the proprietary nature of Flash and Apple's lack of control over the content served on its platform as the most important reason Flash was kept off the iPhone. https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-ap... As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes. I used OSX and Flash…

> This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor's platforms

Funny how one could and maybe should point the same criticism towards electron.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#306

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 r…

I don’t think that’s the shtick behind OpenUSD. It’s not a transmission format like glTF, so the intent is not to get consistent rendering but rather to standardize intermediate graphics representations so that software that works on 3D scenes (unreal, Maya etc) can represent all of their workflow in USD and get consistent interop .

Someone should tell Jensen Huang then. That's the message he pushed heavily at Siggraph 2023 over and over and over again.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2VBKerS63A

They even did a big demo shot showing the same frame being rendered in multiple different editors all creating the same consistent result and matching. All of it was said to be due to OpenUSD standardizing how a scene is defined, animated, and rendered.

Probably just a bunch of marketing buzz though.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#307
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…

> They obviously don't care about standards… Apple has invented, contributed to, and adopted a long list of standards. You can easily Google or ChatGPT the list if you don't know your tech history. Apple deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL support in 2018 for very reasonable technological and strategic reasons that I understand you disagree with. But that doesn't change the fact that OpenGL is a terrible fit for modern comp…

Apple also invented and contributed OpenCL. Then later Khronos invented OpenGL compute shaders, which is completely different.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's because HN has since removed referral headers on links, to work around this specific kind of blockage.

Hm, strange, HN seems to set referrer-policy to 'origin', which seems like it should send a referer header when going to external sites[0]? But clearly it does not. So I guess I'm just misunderstanding how that header works.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I know it's just a file format for scene description. I still believe rendering would work better for the industry as a whole if they could agree to all support, say, Vulkan. I doubt it'll ever happen, but a consistent graphics driver/API standard across operating systems would be pretty rad.

While not at the kernel level I think WebGPU is probably better than something like Vulkan for that "I can target this low level access to the GPU resources but expect it to work everywhere" use case. Ignoring the name hint that it was designed for the web (it works fine outside the browser), it's a lot more portable than Vulkan across its various implementations precisely because it needed to work on various devices…

I'm a big fan of webGPU. I use it within my Three.js projects. Really happy to see it gaining support worldwide. I hope either it or similar projects continue to gain traction!

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yeah Flash was slow, but the common alternatives for in-browser animation/games were (and still are) far slower. H.264/5 maybe did video better than Flash, even then idk, Flash YouTube was always way faster on my old iMac than HTML5 YT. Google Hangouts/Meet will lag a high-end Intel MBP thanks to the unaccelerated VP8/9 video, but AIM Flash-based video calls ran fine on an iMac G4. On top of that, there was never a real replacement to the Flash creation software. All those Flash games that people made without really understanding how to code, no longer doable.

I guess Flash had to die because of how outdated, insecure, and proprietary it was. It did seem like a nightmare to support well on mobile. Just wish someone made something strictly better.

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