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Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

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Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#31
post #22
post #2

Hmm, I was thinking of buying an M3 Pro 16” this summer, but maybe I should wait then

That’s actually a nice side effect of all the *rumors pages. The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products. I keep on using my previous products while saving money and planet and being excited about what future holds.

> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.

Spot on!

Back in the nineties, Intel managed to push competing RISC architectures (UltraSparc, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC) out of the market using nothing but promises that Itanium was going to blow them all out of the water.

And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#32
post #27

The most incredible thing about the new iPads is that even with the crazy fast M4 chip MS Teams manages to crawl to a halt. Clearly it takes all the engineering skills of the largest and most valuable software company in the world to make text entry go at about 1 fps on a chip as powerful as the M4.

MS Teams is by far the worst piece of software I’ve ever used. It is ungodly slow and it just gets slower the more you use it. I believe it is actually hitting the server to update the online/away status light for every single message in a conversation. If you turn off all the status update stuff in the settings then the software speeds up dramatically. Another thing you can do is find the folder where it caches ever…

Why is that not at least done asynchronously? I thought part of the whole narrative of shipping these new terrible pieces of software as standalone Google Chrome instances was that it makes it easier to spawn async JS workers for background tasks and whatnot?

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#33
post #23

It seems that M4 was overhyped. Almost of all of the performance improvements, in Geekbench for example, comes from new instructions that most apps won't use, and even if they do they might end up using the faster GPU/NPU for those tasks. https://twitter.com/toniievych/status/1788596920627118248

> Technically, Intel has its matrix extensions (Intel AMX), but Geekbench does not support it. Lmao, and people say Geekbench isn't biased towards ARM

Geekbench supports Intel AMX and AVX-512. This is all in GB documentation.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#34
post #23

It seems that M4 was overhyped. Almost of all of the performance improvements, in Geekbench for example, comes from new instructions that most apps won't use, and even if they do they might end up using the faster GPU/NPU for those tasks. https://twitter.com/toniievych/status/1788596920627118248

Makes one wonder has the apple miracle mostly been first the transition to ARM and having access to TSMC highest end nodes before the rest even comes into the picture. But im glad new competition is coming from qualcomm x elite and Huawei with their Kirin and Ascends chips. Hopefully ARMsrace will be more interesting to follow than the x64 race between intel and AMD.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#35
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still on a i7 MBP because everytime I think I'm ready to update the next one is announced.

Besides maybe battery life (which is a huge win), anything you'd benefit from the M's? I only had a 2008 macbook so I'm curious.

I upgraded from a 2011 MacBook Pro to a M1 MacBook Air and never looked back.

Battery life, portability, COOL. Like, my actual lap is no longer burning.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#36
post #23

It seems that M4 was overhyped. Almost of all of the performance improvements, in Geekbench for example, comes from new instructions that most apps won't use, and even if they do they might end up using the faster GPU/NPU for those tasks. https://twitter.com/toniievych/status/1788596920627118248

It’s a decent, but not revolutionary improvement. Yes, most of the gains outside of SME are coming from clock increases not IPC. I don’t know if I would call it overhyped, more like misunderstood.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#37
post #27

The most incredible thing about the new iPads is that even with the crazy fast M4 chip MS Teams manages to crawl to a halt. Clearly it takes all the engineering skills of the largest and most valuable software company in the world to make text entry go at about 1 fps on a chip as powerful as the M4.

MS Teams is by far the worst piece of software I’ve ever used. It is ungodly slow and it just gets slower the more you use it. I believe it is actually hitting the server to update the online/away status light for every single message in a conversation. If you turn off all the status update stuff in the settings then the software speeds up dramatically. Another thing you can do is find the folder where it caches ever…

hmm I use teams daily all day for work and don't have these issues, maybe your org messed something up?

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#38

The most incredible thing about the new iPads is that even with the crazy fast M4 chip MS Teams manages to crawl to a halt. Clearly it takes all the engineering skills of the largest and most valuable software company in the world to make text entry go at about 1 fps on a chip as powerful as the M4.

Every character you type results in some sort of hit to their telemetry server. It will include the actual letter you typed, if you or your org are not configured to be in EU. With their EU configuration option (pulled from server every launch) it will only report the fact that you typed _something_.

Now if that's not fun enough, their telemetry also covers mouse movements. Go ahead and watch your CPU as you spin your mouse in circles around the Teams window.

For extra fun, block their telemetry server and watch Teams bloat in RAM, to as much as your system has, as it keeps every action you take in local memory as it waits for the ability to talk to that telemetry server again.

If you're going to block their telemetry its best to fake an accept via some mitm proxy and send back a 200 code.

I do not know exactly how much this applies to iPad version, compared to their desktop apps. Mobile offers both more and less data possibilities. It's a different context.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s actually a nice side effect of all the *rumors pages. The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products. I keep on using my previous products while saving money and planet and being excited about what future holds.

> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products. Spot on! Back in the nineties, Intel managed to push competing RISC architectures (UltraSparc, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC) out of the market using nothing but promises that Itanium was going to blow them all out of the water. And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapd…

There may be a world in which Apple is procrastinating in chip design, but it's not this one.

Re: Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

#40
post #23

It seems that M4 was overhyped. Almost of all of the performance improvements, in Geekbench for example, comes from new instructions that most apps won't use, and even if they do they might end up using the faster GPU/NPU for those tasks. https://twitter.com/toniievych/status/1788596920627118248

No, per-clock performance improvements between M3 and M4 range from 0% to 20%, this is ignoring the two subtests that benefit from SME. That Twitter post is moot. GB results show high variation, it is easy enough to cherry pick pairs of results that show any point you might want. You have to compare result distributions. There were some users on anandtech forums who did it and the results are very clear.
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