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An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

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Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#171

Post by BirAdam »

duxup wrote: post #165
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

People talk about Apple prices being higher but the longevity of their devices really erases that price difference for me. I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well, I’ve had numerous Android devices die in that timeframe, slow to a crawl, or at best their performance is erratic.

I am not so sure. I had a Pentium4 eMachine that made it all the way to around 2012. The same kind of life for my first Athlon64 machine from the same company. In both cases, the machines ran Linux, and they still work today. They were only retired because no meaningful software could run on them any longer. My PowerBook G4 got no where near that longevity, and owners of late era Intel MacBooks are probably going to have similar issues.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#172

Post by jhenkens »

attendant3446 wrote: post #170
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

I have the opposite experience. Apple is incredibly difficult and expensive to repair. But I have been pleasantly surprised by the longevity and repairability of ThinkPads. I like those Apple M processors, but I know where I'm spending my money.

I agree on modern Mac's being difficult to repair. I also will say that back a decade or two ago, it was likely you'd need to repair your computer after four years. Now, a four year old Macbook Air still feels brand new to me.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#173

Post by pixelfarmer »

bhouston wrote: post #163
throw88888 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you replaced the T400 because it felt slow, maybe it’s just a software/OS issue. The hardware on Thinkpad T-models should last longer than just 5 years in general. My daily-driver laptop at home is a T420 from 2011 with a Core 2 Duo, SSD and 8GB RAM. Works fine still. I run Linux + OpenBox, so it is a somewhat lightweight setup to be fair.

> My daily-driver laptop at home is a T420 from 2011 with a Core 2 Duo, SSD and 8GB RAM. Works fine still. I am not sure I would be productive with that. Any Core 2 Duo is 10x slower single core and 20x slower multi-core than a current generation laptop CPU at this point. Eg: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/8588187?baselin... I think it would mostly be good as an SSH terminal, but doing any real work loc…

The problem is software, though. I have a X200s with 4 GiB RAM from 2009. It was interesting to see how Firefox got slower and slower over the years. Granted, it not only is Firefox but also retard websites which use loads and loads of JS to display static content in the end. In return, it is not like JS didn't exist back then: The XhtmlRequest thingy for dynamic website updates or whatever the name for that was has been added years prior to that.

So, yes, a lot of this comes down to software and a massive waste of cycles. I remember one bug in Electron/Atom where a blinking cursor caused like 10% CPU load or something along that line. They fixed it, but it tells you way more about how broken the entire software stack was at that time and it didn't get better since then.

I mean, think about this: I used 1280x1024 on a 20" screen back in the mid 90ies on (Unix!) machines that are insanely less powerful than even this X200s. The biggest difference: Now you can move windows around visually, back then you moved the outer frame of it to the new place and then it got redrawn. And the formatting options in browsers are better, i.e. it is easier to design the layout you want. Plus there is no need for palette changes when switching windows anymore ("true color"). The overall productivity hasn't kept up with the increase in computing power, though. Do you think a machine 100x the performance will give you 100x the productivity? With some exceptions, the weak link in the chain were, are, and will always be humans, and if there are delays, we are talking almost always about badly "optimized" software (aka bloat). That was an issue back then already and, unfortunately, it didn't get better.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#174

Post by winterismute »

comex wrote: post #79
jsheard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had limited uses and turned out to be incredibly hard to implement efficiently in hardware, so in practice it was nearly always faster to just keep using the proven techniques that GS was supposed to replace. http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=667

And yet one of the fancy new features being advertised in recent years (in multiple APIs including Metal) is support for mesh shaders – which seem to have a lot in common with geometry shaders, including the output ordering property that that post blames for geometry shaders’ bad performance. I’m not a graphics programmer myself, but this makes me suspect there’s more to the story.

I am not an expert on geometry processing pipelines, however Mesh Shaders are specced differently from GS, essentially one of the big problems with GS is that it's basically impossible for the HW, even after all the render state is set and a shader is bound and compiled (and "searched"), to understand how much memory and compute the execution will take, which breaks a lot of the assumptions that allow SIMD machines to work well. In fact, the main advertised feature of GS was to create geometry out of nothing (unbounded particle effects), while the main advertised feature of Mesh Shaders is GPU-driven and efficient culling of geometry (see for example the recent mesh shader pipeline talk from Remedy on Alan Wake 2). It is true that Mesh Shaders are designed also for amplification, and that word has been chosen specifically to hint that you will be able to "multiply" your primitives but not generating random sequences out of thin air.

It is also true however that advances in APIs and HW desgins allowed for some parts that were troublesome at the time of GS not to be so troublesome anymore.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#175

Post by exDM69 »

dtquad wrote: post #39
gigatexal wrote: post #30

Is anyone else astonished at how much is missing in the hardware and how much is emulated?

The graphics pipeline in modern GPUs are mostly a thin low-level Vulkan/Metal-like layer on top of a massively parallel CUDA-like compute architecture. It's basically all emulated. One of the reasons GPU manufacturers are unwilling to open source their drivers is because a lot of their secret sauce actually happens in software in the drivers on top of the massively parallel CUDA-like compute architecture.

This statement isn't true at all. There are tons of fixed function hardware units for graphics in GPUs in addition to compute cores: triangle rasterizers, texture units, raytracing units, blitters, copy engines, video codecs, etc. They interact with the shader/compute cores and it's getting more common that the shader core is driving the rasterizer etc than vice versa (mesh shaders and ray tracing for example).

Calling it "all emulated" is very very far from the truth.

You can independently verify this by digging into open source graphics drivers.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#176

Post by Forgeties79 »

duxup wrote: post #165
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

People talk about Apple prices being higher but the longevity of their devices really erases that price difference for me. I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well, I’ve had numerous Android devices die in that timeframe, slow to a crawl, or at best their performance is erratic.

I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real “bang for your buck” computer IMO

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#177

Post by exDM69 »

musictubes wrote: post #91
adastra22 wrote: post #64

> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.

Can the hardware for ray tracing be used for anything else? Ray tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any non graphics use?

> Ray tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any non graphics use?

It's not "just math", it's data structures and algorithms for tree traversal, with a focus on memory cache hardware friendliness.

The math part is trivial. It's the memory part that's hard.

Ray tracing hardware and acceleration structures are highly specific to ray tracing and not really usable for other kinds of spatial queries. That said, ray tracing has applications outside of computer graphics. Medical imaging for example.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#178

Post by hurutparittya »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142
whitehexagon wrote: post #128

What I really respect is the dedication to completing support for the M1/M2. Too many projects get dropped the moment the next shiny ray-traced toy comes along. I know this type of work can be challenging to say the least. My own dabble with Zig and Pinephone hardware drivers reminded me of some of the pain of poorly documented hardware, but what a reward when it works. My own M1 was only purchased because of this pr…

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

I'm always surprised when people speak highly of Apple devices here. While they do have certain advantages, there are some issues that should be dealbreakers for tech literate people. (in my own, possibly biased opinion at least)

In case of Macbooks, it's the fact that they refuse to provide an official GPU driver for Linux and general poor support for things outside the walled garden. The Asahi stuff is cool and all, but come on, is a 3.4 trillion dollar company really going to just stand there and watch some volunteers struggling to provide support for their undocumented hardware without doing anything substantial to help? That sounds straight up insulting to me, especially for such a premium product.

For iphones, it's the fact that you are not allowed to run your own code on YOUR OWN DEVICE without paying the Apple troll toll and passing the honestly ridiculous Apple Store requirements.

And of course, in both cases, they actively sabotage third party repairs of their devices.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#179

Post by resource_waste »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142
whitehexagon wrote: post #128

What I really respect is the dedication to completing support for the M1/M2. Too many projects get dropped the moment the next shiny ray-traced toy comes along. I know this type of work can be challenging to say the least. My own dabble with Zig and Pinephone hardware drivers reminded me of some of the pain of poorly documented hardware, but what a reward when it works. My own M1 was only purchased because of this pr…

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

>how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade

Are your laptops not lasting 10 years? (battery swaps are a must though)

The only reason I switched laptops was that I wanted to do AI Art and local LLMs.

I have so many old laptops and desktops that each of my 5 kids have their own. They are even playing half-modern games on them.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#180

Post by windowsrookie »

attendant3446 wrote: post #170
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

I have the opposite experience. Apple is incredibly difficult and expensive to repair. But I have been pleasantly surprised by the longevity and repairability of ThinkPads. I like those Apple M processors, but I know where I'm spending my money.

Yes, MacBooks are generally more expensive to repair, but they also tend to not need repairs. It’s quite normal to hear from people who are using their 7+ year old MacBook without any issues and are still perfectly happy with it. I myself still use my 2018 MacBook Pro as my main device.

When considering longevity, I will agree that Thinkpads are probably the only device that can compete with MacBooks. But there are trade-offs.

MacBooks are going to be lighter, better battery life, and have better displays. Not to mention MacOS, which is my preferred OS.

Thinkpads usually have great Linux support and swappable hardware for those who like to tinker with their devices. They also tend to be more durable, but this adds more weight.

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