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Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

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Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#791

Post by crakenzak »

Dansvidania wrote: post #788

I think I remember that at the 8nm architecture times there were talks about "reaching the physically possible limit" with the size of the transistors. These are 2nm. While normally pretty cynical, I am experiencing one of those "what a time to be alive" moments.

I hate to be that guy, but the nm number is completely unrelated to the actual size of the features printed on the chip. It’s become mainly a "chip manufacturing generation" label. But generation over generation, the features printed on the chips are becoming significantly more compact and advanced, so truly "what a time to be alive"! ;)

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#792

Post by teiferer »

alluro2 wrote: post #525

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…

> a little sluggish

> surprised by how quick it felt

Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor?

I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#794

Post by soulofmischief »

zer0zzz wrote: post #620
soulofmischief wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on a…

Why not just stay on the previous 15 release? They still even push updates for it!

I bought a new macbook as insurance against a potential supply chain crash and it came with Tahoe :(

On my M2, I have kept it on 15 but Apple aggressively tries to trick me into upgrading in a way that reminds me of Microsoft's behavior with Windows 8/10.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#795

Post by shrubby »

abrookewood wrote: post #750
alluro2 wrote: post #525

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…

The M1 was genuinely a big step forward, but what has followed, not so much. I have an M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM and it is genuinely good ... but that's about it. I love the battery life, appreciate the hardware, but find the OS to be annoying. Less annoying than Windows for sure, but I'd rather be running Linux.

M4 with 32 gigs and a 1 terabyte here and how I wish this could run Linux properly.

Windows sucks and MacOS perhaps even more, but we're locked in.

Perhaps soon everything will be reversed by AI and we can use whatever OS we wish on whatever device we supposedly own.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#796

Post by sicktriple »

echelon wrote: post #767
plasticeagle wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.

MacBook is great hardware, but I really hate MacOS. It feels perpetually cellophane wrapped, and I don't like any of the window management. Finder is particularly awful too. You should be able to deeply tweak how window management works, but Mac won't let you do that. I'd run Linux on the hardware if it wasn't a hack.

What in particular do you find hacky about Asahi? I've been daily driving Asahi Fedora for about 8 months on a 13" M1 MBP, a significant portion of the project has been upstreamed to the kernel at this point, so the bar is set very high. The most significant compromises I've encountered have to do with Fedora's aarch64 repos, nothing to do with Asahi itself.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#797

Post by gyomu »

jtbayly wrote: post #666
gyomu wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. It was borderline unusable on Tahoe to the point I had to downgrade it, but the Golden Gate beta brought it back to life. I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…

What makes Golden Gate usable?

They clearly did a bunch of optimizations, because working on my Xcode projects (and even basic every day use tbh) in 18.x was fine, on 27.x it’s mostly fine, but on 26.x it was a slog fest.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#798

Post by hnsr »

teiferer wrote: post #792
alluro2 wrote: post #525

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…

> a little sluggish > surprised by how quick it felt Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to…

Yeah, I think they can be a combination of processor, GPU, memory architecture, and G(UI) software.

But I too have ran a super snappy XFCE desktop for ages on pretty old hardware. I only recently switched to KDE+Wayland on much newer hardware and felt like it was snappy enough to not bother me.

I also remember there were times were my much more powerful dedicated GPU was outperformed by my CPU integrated GPU, which I think has something to do how shared memory can be faster for UI rendering (or maybe it was just driver-related)

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#800

Post by MaxikCZ »

tyre wrote: post #777
Humphrey wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder when/if we will start to see Apple include a silicon encoded model into their chips. Similar to Taalas build Llama 3.1 silicon with 17,000 tok/s inference. So could the M7 actually include an AFM 3B model, alongside a generic neural engine?

Why would a local model for a consumer device need 17k tok/s? Apple is better off building chips with generalizable TPUs (or equivalent) so they can upgrade/patch models.

I cant shake the feeling of "640KB is enough for everybody". Imagine not one AI answering over 1 minute but a team of 100+ agents in hieararchical structure taking care of your request in seconds, checking each other.
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