Someone should ping Tim and let him know Alyssa is not working at Apple for some strange reason.
Why do people want her to stop working on Asahi so much?
Apple is not Google. She could hack on OSX AND Linux(in sparetime)
The first conformant M1 GPU driver
611–620 of 699 posts
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I had no idea! Those games were amazing.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#613Bravo! A tour de force.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#614Earlier 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.
As a user, I don't really care about the root cause..
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Better than OS 9 and Flash when it would bring down the whole system!
Pre OSX Macs I found to be more unstable than Win95 osr2.
Apple really needed OSX!
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better than OS 9 and Flash when it would bring down the whole system!
Pre OSX Macs I found to be more unstable than Win95 osr2. Apple really needed OSX!
Mostly thanks to flash!
Even in OS X it was still a bad plugin, one of Snow Leopard's headline features was that plugins were moved to separate processes so that Safari could keep running instead of bringing down the whole browser when a plugin had a problem.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist I mean, on one hand, the Metal/Vulkan/OpenGL situation is unfortunate and I don't understand Apple's motivation there. On the other hand I'm sitting here typing on a Mac with nothing but USB-C ports that is connected to half a dozen peripherals and a big ol' monitor over those standard ports using standard protocols. In general I…
> I mean, on one hand, the Metal/Vulkan/OpenGL situation is unfortunate and I don't understand Apple's motivation there. OpenGL is a dead end - while vendors (including Apple) still support their respective GL stacks, there is not really active investment anymore either in those stacks or in the standards. Metal came out years before Vulkan, and Apple has tight integration between the graphics API and their underlyin…
"Years" is overstating it a bit; Vulkan's SDK came out a little more than a year and a half after Metal was available on iOS and 8 months after it was available on Macs.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pre OSX Macs I found to be more unstable than Win95 osr2. Apple really needed OSX!
Mostly thanks to flash! Even in OS X it was still a bad plugin, one of Snow Leopard's headline features was that plugins were moved to separate processes so that Safari could keep running instead of bringing down the whole browser when a plugin had a problem.
I wasn't even using flash. It was Photoshop. When this bogged down from switching between applications it would just shit the bed.
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pre OSX Macs I found to be more unstable than Win95 osr2. Apple really needed OSX!
Mostly thanks to flash! Even in OS X it was still a bad plugin, one of Snow Leopard's headline features was that plugins were moved to separate processes so that Safari could keep running instead of bringing down the whole browser when a plugin had a problem.
If memory serves me right, that was one of the big raisons d'etre for Chrome (released in 2008)... so Snow Leopard (2009) was catching up with it more than solving a Mac specific issue. But yes, back then the big big plugin was Flash, and its security and performance left a lot to be desired (in all platforms).
Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of dev companies force their employees to use bacbooks in part as a result of their locked down practices and the only way to actually compile and test for "everything", because of how much easier it is to cross compile to other platforms and markets. For that reason, I've personally had to use a M2 for a week now, and I find the experience unpleasant. The OS feels old and cumbersome. I had flashback to a time…
> A lot of dev companies force their employees to use bacbooks in part as a result of their locked down practices and the only way to actually compile and test for "everything", because of how much easier it is to cross compile to other platforms and markets. A lot of devs are also choosing them because they are insanely good machines. Simply because ARM64 is a good architecture and there is pretty much no competitio…
My personal experience:
- MacOS user experience: Terrible. It feels like Linux did 10 years ago. Bugs and inconsistencies everywhere. But hey, they are competing with W11 so, no need to improve it either. Forced updates and restarts. And, did I mention bugs and inconsistencies everywhere?
- M2 Computational performance: It feels like my laptop 10 years ago.
- M2 Batterly life performance: It is absolutely brilliant, but, I also work 80% of the time at a fixed desk, so, it's mostly only relevant when traveling.
I'm sure a lot of devs use them because they like them. But, your argument that ARM64 is "good architecture" whatever vagueness that entails, is pretty much bollocks.
Compile time performance is ok at best compared to other laptop CPUs (the fastest laptop Mx hardware is about half of the laptop competition, and that's just comparing CPU). The package management coherence is non existent, so everything is slow to start because everything ships a complete stack of libraries that need to be read from disk and copied in memory. I honestly believe that people who are blown away by the Mx hardware have simply lived too long in the walled garden to know what is out there.
In summary: MacBooks are decent hardware, with exceptional battery life. Priced at 50% would make sense. And the OS experience is somewhere between mediocre to garbage.
Ran an identical GPU workload on AMD hardware with dedicated GPU.
- 3 year old desktop AMD hardware: 50 seconds (1x)
- 1.5 year old laptop AMD hardware: 66 seconds. (1.32x)
- Latest M2 Pro 12 core: 142 seconds. (2.84x)
For CPU-only tasks. 1x, 1.9x 1.7x.
So, the M2 Pro 12 core is about 2x slower than a one year older AMD laptop for GPU tasks, and about the same for CPU only tasks. And the latest AMD Laptop CPU is twice as fast as the one I used.