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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

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Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#111

Post by lostlogin »

rc00 wrote: post #53
laweijfmvo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i hope some day a used M1/M2 macbook air will be the greatest linux laptop around

I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel. Forget the hostile nature Apple has proven to possess when consumers dare treat their hardware as if paying for it makes it their own. Qualcomm has been beating the marketing drum on this instead of delivering. Ampere has delivered excellent hardware but does not seem intere…

> I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel.

Can you see any other machine coming close to a Mac in terms of hardware quality and performance? Obviously the cost is silly, but while I agree with your sentiment, it seems optimistic to hope.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#112

Post by porphyra »

zozbot234 wrote: post #110
porphyra wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly if Apple had embraced Linux, the Apple Silicon CPUs would have been amazing for all sorts of server, scientific, and AI/LLM work. Too bad they are clamping down on the walled garden to focus on consumer toys instead.

> Honestly if Apple had embraced Linux, the Apple Silicon CPUs would have been amazing for all sorts of server, scientific, and AI/LLM work. You can already do this work on M1/M2 using Asahi. A compute server doesn't need fully working peripherals and external displays.

I do have an M2 Macbook running Asahi, which works amazingly well for my casual use, but I think that there is no way that anyone will use last last gen hardware on a volunteer-developed OS for any actual work, server use cases, and so on.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#113

Post by ykl »

hanikesn wrote: post #87
zozbot234 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M3+ GPU is also very different. So while it may be true that the driver development for M1/M2 is now more or less complete as OP says, future work along the same lines will very much be needed.

>The M3+ GPU is also very different. Any sources for that? I'd be quite surprised if Apple had radically altered the architecture.

This is a pretty well known thing; the M3/A17 generation GPU was a ground-up redesign that added things like dynamic caching and hardware ray tracing [1] which are highly nontrivial to simply extend an existing architecture to support. Unfortunately I can’t find where I read this, but IIRC at the time M2 came out there were expectations that M2 would have a new GPU architecture with hardware ray tracing but this wound up being delayed to M3 because it took longer than expected to do a ground-up redesign of the GPU.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375/

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#114

Post by mschuster91 »

jondwillis wrote: post #73
r_lee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like ADD to me. Easy to be labeled as "Lazy" etc.

Yeah, no way there’s any evolutionary fitness to having a brain that only works on problems it finds worthwhile. /s

Ideally, society would be aware of such people and actually use their potential. AR struck it lucky and so did a few others (cough Richard Stallman cough), but most don't and end up burned out by rigid megacorp structures and processes that don't respect that people, even those one might call "neurotypical", aren't cogs in a machine.

I've said it before and I will keep saying it again: the financialization of everything and the utter dominance of braindead, long-since disproven MBA ideology is going to seriously impede our societies in the next decades.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#115

Post by whitehexagon »

Just to say a big thank-you to the Asahi team, and especially for the GPU work. It is still on my list to get back to some OpenGL dev work. Especially since I recently made fedora-asahi remix my daily driver, and I have to say it is amazing. It feels like I once again own my computer.

Their work has inspired me to continue bashing away at my Zig PinePhone code, although I'll never have the skills to get it's GPU running anything beyond a poke'd framebuffer.

That checklist of supported APIs in Asahi is mind blowing, especially in such a short timeframe. Again, well done, thank-you, and best of luck at intel.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#116

Post by jacquesm »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #21
Tiberium wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found out from some Reddit discussions that the developers aim to first upstream everything for M1/M2 to the kernel, and as of https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/ : > With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, th…

i hope some day a used M1/M2 macbook air will be the greatest linux laptop around

Networking is going to be another major issue. Even on the Intel MacBook Pro this is still a problem. The instructions for getting it to work are so bizarre that I ended up with a network dongle with a supported chipset instead.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#118

Post by ndiddy »

tiffanyh wrote: post #35

Kind of amazing Alyssa didn’t end up working at Apple (instead of Intel).

Alyssa's post mentions how lots of the work she's done has at least started as side projects while she's working on something else (Panfrost while at high school, M1 drivers while at Collabora). Obviously I'm not her so I can't say anything specific to her. In general, Apple doesn't allow its developers to work on open source projects on the side while employed at the company. I think this is a stupid idea that costs them a lot of talent, but I doubt Apple cares what I think. I've seen multiple cases where an active open source contributor gets hired by Apple, then their presence in open source communities vanishes. Based on all the open source work she's done so far, I think it would take a lot to make her stop all contributions like that.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#119

Post by brabel »

blu3h4t wrote: post #54

May I ask something, I want an apple silicone MacBook Air and I am probably just be running Linux on it, what are pros and cons of getting an m1 vs m2? Except for more ram or so. Thx

Are you coming from Windows? MacOS is a BSD descendant so it’s quite Unix-y. I never miss Linux on it and I used to only use Linux. Just learn how to get around the minor annoyances (eg the file explorer sucks , I use eMacs for that) and it’s a fine OS. It’s really not worthwhile trying to install anything else on the Mac.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

#120

Post by contrarian1234 »

adrum wrote: post #50
contrarian1234 wrote: post #46

I never understood this project. Maybe I'm missing something, but the timescale is such that by the time they're done the product isn't even being sold anymore At least with Panfrost it made more sense bc it still being used M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point

I believe Walmart has a deal[1] with Apple to sell[2] M1 MacBook Airs. This has been the case for a year or so, so I don't think it's old stock. They have been in stock for since that date, and slowly getting cheaper. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/16/walmart-m1-macbook-air-launch... [2] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-3-inch-Lapto...

Oh interesting! I for some reason thought Apple devices can only every be purchased from Apple (maybe that was only during the Steve Jobs era)

But 8GB of RAM.. that's unfortunately completely unusable by most developers. (Panfrost drivers you can at least use on RPi-like devices)

Maybe in another 5 years it'll work on the M3/4 and I'll revisit this. Good to know the devices are still being built so long after release

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