131–140 of 182 posts
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I run Linux in a VM on my M1 mac all day long. That VM was the fastest Linux instance I had anywhere. Faster the my 5950 and way faster than anything in cloud. Your can't using it is your choice.
Sir, in the comment you're replying to, I was talking about the iPad here, not the Mac where you can indeed use most of the M chips potential while on the iPad you can't do that.
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I don't understand what prompted you to bring up the M4 in a meticulously researched deep-dive on the Oryon architecture. The original article doesn't mention it once. Is this just flame bait?
Thank you for saying it out loud. 100%. Seen a handful of very strange top comments this week that you usually wouldn't see on HN, I assume because of the holidays. i.e. more practicing rhetoric than contributing content, and/or, leaning on rhetorical strategies to do a more traditional definition of trolling circa early 2000s Slashdot. i.e. generate tons of replies by introducing a tangent that'll generate conversat…
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You don't want a RISC-V laptop. Not yet, at least. It will take quite some doing before those compete with x86_64/arm laptops. Beautiful thing about Windows computers is that it's generally not too hard to make them into linux/BSD/etc computers. :) Qualcomm [1] and some vendors [2][3] are making progress towards linux support though. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-ARM-Changes [2] https://www.phoronix.com…
Jim Keller is confident that Ascalon will have performance close to zen5 when it is finished later this year. Chips in hand could be some than a lot of people seen to think.
Source for this claim?
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I don't understand what prompted you to bring up the M4 in a meticulously researched deep-dive on the Oryon architecture. The original article doesn't mention it once. Is this just flame bait?
Thank you for saying it out loud. 100%. Seen a handful of very strange top comments this week that you usually wouldn't see on HN, I assume because of the holidays. i.e. more practicing rhetoric than contributing content, and/or, leaning on rhetorical strategies to do a more traditional definition of trolling circa early 2000s Slashdot. i.e. generate tons of replies by introducing a tangent that'll generate conversat…
And also why people should use the downvote button more often on post that shouldn't be sitting at the top.
The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet without cooling. I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient consumer chips, years after the M1.
Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most.
They did't lost it all at the same time either.
Many of them have been working on M2 and M3, some later ones may be on M4 before they left.
Apple has a node advantage, which is in itself a separate discussion. This article is straightly about IPC.
We didn't even go into Die Size and cost analysis.
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> I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year Or AMD / Intel could just make more power efficient x86 core? What would they gain by switching to ARM? Also developing a competitive ARM core in less than a year is pretty much impossible, it took Qualcomm several years to catch up with ARMs cores (hence the title...). They even had to buy another company to accomplish that.
> Or AMD / Intel could just make more power efficient x86 core? What would they gain by switching to ARM? I mixed some thoughts in rewrites. I hope Nvidia releases laptop/desktop SoC. AMD is getting better at x86 mobile, Steamdeck is pretty decent. I hope they keep getting better. I'd like to see high-end integrated GPU on a SoC from AMD for laptops/desktops. That doesn't exist yet. It requires a discrete GPU and the…
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That’s a very narrow definition of “useful” and one I’d say is rather focused on yourself? Why is Linux the arbiter of what is “useful”? Why would it still be a benchmark flex if it was on macOS, an Os where millions of people do professional work everyday? And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well?
>And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well? I never said people can't use iPads for profesional applications, I was asking what professional tasks are people doing with the iPad that necessitated the M4 to be in that closed platform vs the M3 or M2, instead of being put in a more open one like the Mac where it can be put to better use at…
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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj... Single core performance went from 2300 with the M1 to 3800 with the M4. That is a huge improvement for my workflow (large TypeScript mono repositories) which is dependent a lot of single core performance (even with parallel builds, because one rarely re-builds everything, rather hot reloads.)
These statements are orthogonal though i.e. 2300->3800 is still less than 20% per generation (17% per if you use the exact single core numbers for the M1 vs M4 iPad). That might be meaningful for your workload but it also means 20-30 percent per generation is quite a bit off.
Even ignoring the word generation, For the past 20 years how many times did we see a successful uArch bringing 20% IPC improvement over the current leading IPC?
Where did that 20-30% per gen coming from.
The worst part about Apple, its media is that it seems we have a whole generation of people who were never interested in CPU performance suddenly coming up with these expectation and figures.
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M4 still has a 10% higher Geekbench single core score than the 9950X.
Do note that the M4 is built on TSMC's 3nm process while the 9950X is built on the relatively older 4nm process. This has been the case for the earlier Apple ARM processors too, as Apple made deals with TSMC to get priority access to the newer processes. In the end as a user you get a slighly faster machine, but that doesn't mean that's all thanks to the CPU architecture. Apple's also has lower memory latencies by vi…
That helps (perhaps a lot, hard to say), but note that moving your design from 4 nm to 3 nm pitch isn’t as simple as recompiling your Verilog. So this is still a significant engineering achievement.
Apple is chasing a different design point from the desktop folks: low power and optimized more for single core workloads. Works for them but not of course for everyone.
The Mx machines aren’t SoCs in the sense a MediaTek part is: the main chip has a lot of integrated functional units, yes, but so do the Intel and AMD design. They do have multiple dice in a single package though.
Personally I don’t lose any sleep over the non-upgradability of RAM or mass storage. I started computing when you could add instructions by adding wires to the backplane, and later by writing your own microcode; you could build our own IO devices and wire them into the machine. Gradually we have had more and more integration, and RAM and mass storage are just the latest to go…and in exchange we get better performance and reliability.
I don’t hear people complaining that they can’t upgrade their disk drive’s write cache, or CPU’s cache for that matter. This is the way of the world.
The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet without cooling. I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient consumer chips, years after the M1.
>The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, becaus…
Since I carry a laptop and an ipad, the lighter the better (I use them for different things, and often in concert). That MacBook Air is so powerful and so light that I sometimes have to check my bag to make sure I haven’t forgotten one or both.
That’s definitely worth it to me.