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The first conformant M1 GPU driver

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Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#521

Post by xcv123 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #518
xcv123 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a joke. None of the drivers on x86 were open source, and there were literally thousands of devices that needed reverse engineering. The M1 instruction set is ARM which is already supported by Linux.

I am talking about the CPU not other hardware. Comparing Apple’s apples with apples.

Hmm, well the CPU in the M1 is ARM64 which is already open. But the M1 is a system on a chip that includes many proprietary components besides the CPU, such as GPU. So it's not apples to apples with 90's x86, which was a CPU only, not system-on-a-chip.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#523

Post by wsc981 »

dimator wrote: post #259
jjoonathan wrote: post #249

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…

Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.

Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure.

But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now).

It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#524

Post by amluto »

acdha wrote: post #435
coldtea wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen. It's more about control and all the other reasons. Mousovers is a dead herring. They could still give Flash not to run existing stuff, but new apps, that would take iOS into account. And le…

Mouseovers were just the tip of the iceberg: fixed screen sizes and other desktop UI conventions, assumptions that you could just leave things constantly running rather than figure out how to do proper event-driven programming, etc. Yes, they could have tried to do a “Flash mobile” but most of the appeal was compatibility with the huge library of existing apps and users wouldn’t have been happy with that, while autho…

> Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way.

This is par for the course for Adobe. The other day I had occasion to try to fill out a PDF form using Acrobat Pro. I made it through about a page (painfully slowly) until I unwisely saved my work. Then I cursed for a bit, tried quitting and reloading, and eventually gave up and started over in PDF.js. Superior in every way.

I remember when a major selling point of Acrobat was that you could save a filled out form, whereas third party apps couldn’t. Apparently doing so still breaks the form, and third party apps have gotten it right for many years now.

Adobe seems to pretty much never care about their platform once they have market share.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#525

Post by amluto »

memefrog wrote: post #352
als0 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently enough customers wanted it. Magsafe is genuinely a nice innovation that users missed. It solves the cord yank problem. But I do like having the option to use USB-C if I don't have the MagSafe cable.

Also USB-C absolutely sucks. The socket seems to attract dirt and dust in a way that prevents its proper working like no other.

The only port I’ve ever experienced this problem with is Lightning.

At least on many iPhone versions, if anything damages one of the delicate lead springs inside the port, Apple service will tell you to replace the entire phone.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#526

Post by ctippett »

dwaite wrote: post #467
ctippett wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the new MacBooks require a charging port capable of greater than the current USB-C specification limit of 100W, that's likely one reason why they decided against coopting USB-C exclusively for charging.

USB-C now allows 240W

I wasn't aware, thanks!

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#527

Post by saagarjha »

djmips wrote: post #509

The atomic trick was very satisfying, especially extrapolating the swizzle instruction from the PowerVR heritage. I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if the Apple engineers are learning from this or at least they would appreciate the sheer cleverness. It reminds me when back in the day, the Sega Genesis video hardware was reverse engineered at Accolade and our engineers used the public Texas Instruments TMS9918 VD…

I’m sure they appreciate the work but Apple has internal documentation on their chips. It’s not like they make a black box and forget how they designed them when it comes to writing software for them.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#528

Post by saagarjha »

jjoonathan wrote: post #249
i_am_jl wrote: post #226

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…

Spin Control lives on as part of Instruments, which can be configured to collect a tailspin whenever an app hangs.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#529

Post by ironlenny »

saagarjha wrote: post #527
djmips wrote: post #509

The atomic trick was very satisfying, especially extrapolating the swizzle instruction from the PowerVR heritage. I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if the Apple engineers are learning from this or at least they would appreciate the sheer cleverness. It reminds me when back in the day, the Sega Genesis video hardware was reverse engineered at Accolade and our engineers used the public Texas Instruments TMS9918 VD…

I’m sure they appreciate the work but Apple has internal documentation on their chips. It’s not like they make a black box and forget how they designed them when it comes to writing software for them.

Some times an outsider's attempt to reverse engineer your product brings new insights.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#530

Post by saagarjha »

ironlenny wrote: post #529
saagarjha wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure they appreciate the work but Apple has internal documentation on their chips. It’s not like they make a black box and forget how they designed them when it comes to writing software for them.

Some times an outsider's attempt to reverse engineer your product brings new insights.

That is true, but one does not simply implement a fully conformant bit shuffle instruction by accident.
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