Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

991–1000 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#991

Post by danudey »

jodrellblank wrote: post #948
teiferer wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> " the software has become bloated " Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks. Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance. Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That ove…

While I agree with a lot of what he says (complexity and layers of abstraction impact performance), it's probably worth noting that his examples are not necessarily relevant to all software.

Does my web browser feel slow because of pointer indirection or virtual function calls? Or is it because I have to download 15 MB of Javascript to load this page, which then goes out to 35 other domains to fetch other Javascript and ads and CSS?

In the insanely tight compute loop that he's looking at all of those things definitely make a difference, but a lot of software is slow not because it's inefficiently written (which it probably is) but because it's inefficiently designed and it's doing too much.

In a game engine, where you have 16ms to do 100% of your simulation work, update all your state, and then send all the data out to be rendered, definitely this sort of thing is an issue. In an Electron app? There are a thousand other things that are wasting far more of your time and responsiveness than the misguided 'cleanliness' of your code.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#992

Post by edschofield »

salsa_catsup wrote: post #920
noduerme wrote: post #900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... my solution for the last 3 decades (with a grain of salt) has been to buy the most expensive decked out Apple laptop every 6 years and never, ever update the OS. This is in line with my philosophy about shoes: I only own 5 copies of one pair (4 in boxes in my closet until I wear the current ones out). Rolling everything over to a new dev environment every 6 years is annoying but manageable. This way I took a…

I should have done this with my 2020 Intel Macbook Pro. Now it's basically unusable and spins rainbow wheels constantly, because the OS is apparently garbage for an Intel system.

I had the same experience as you. I bought a super-fast 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM in 2020. It ran beautifully until the moment I “upgraded” to Tahoe, when it instantly became unusably slow.

This cost me half a day wiping the disk, restoring the original OS, and then carefully upgrading back to Sequoia. Now it works well again, but I am counting the days to when Linux is the only way to continue using this great piece of hardware.

Another anecdote: a few years ago I was offered a shiny new never-before-used iPad for free by a client (a telco). There was only one catch, I was told: it was a few generations old. It had sat in its box on a shelf unopened for several years. I thought it might be useful at least as an e-reader, but I soon realized why it was now useless: I could not find a single app in the App Store that would install on it because every app required a “newer OS” (which wasn’t available). Most websites also refused to talk to its old (non-upgradable) web browser. Well played, Apple.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#993

Post by jodrellblank »

Mentlo wrote: post #987
jodrellblank wrote: post #948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " the software has become bloated " Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks. Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance. Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That ove…

Yes, but that's a game developers perspective. Hardware performance is not be-all end-all (an argument can be made on environmental reasons that it should be - but bear with me in the first instance). Software is a tool working within a socio-technical system. Some systems have low user workflow diversity and a low rate of change - a game being a perfect example. Games get patched, but the diversity is purely in user…

> "you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency"

Does this excuse making 75 network calls instead of 5? Or knowing that you make a lot of network calls but designing the code as if they were instant and have the bandwidth of a local SSD?

> "Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn" "structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads."

Based on what studies or evidence is this optimised or optimal? How is it easier to work through code which is atomised and abstracted until there appears to be nowhere that anything actually happens, where the method and variable and parameter names are long compound words, where everything is multiple layers of indirection and generalised, and you have to hold all that context in your head?

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#994

Post by red_hare »

alpaca9 wrote: post #915
gardaani wrote: post #170

Rumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7: "According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6. The reason for this break with tradi…

Their chip release cycle doesn't make any sense to me. Compared to their other hardware like iPhones or Apple Watches they just release a new chip when they feel like it. It might have a pro, ultra, or max version, or it might not. Sometimes that better version only releases when the next generation of the silicon is already out. I think that they really need some structure in their releases.

The difference makes a lot of sense to me.

The phones are watches are primarily sold on annual leases through carriers. And no one is buying them for the chips, it's all camera and form factor.

The macs, on the other hand, can more easily swap between chips in manufacturing. And the form factor is pretty static. So Apple, in a race to have the best chip in the field at any given time, is just releasing them as soon as they're ready.

I agree the whole "m5 max > m6" is confusing, but I think they figure only the nerds who learn the specifics are going to care anyway.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#996

Post by telesilla »

alluro2 wrote: post #528

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…

My M1 macbook with 64GB ram is still going great, I think it will be some time yet before I feel the need to upgrade my daily working machine. Team-wise though, we're looking into getting something to run a local model and offset token costs for generic tasks. It's starting to make sense.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#997

Post by arendtio »

teiferer wrote: post #795
alluro2 wrote: post #528

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…

Yes, even my 2013 Haswell-based Arch Linux KDE Desktop feels more responsive than my M4 MacBook. And I think the MacBook has so much more power under the hood, but somehow the animation settings or whatever are just not that good.

To be completely fair, I use the Desktop via DisplayPort at 144 Hz, while the MacBook uses HDMI + USB-C, and I believe it's just at 60 Hz, which is also a factor, but I honestly think that this is not the primary reason.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#998

Post by NetMageSCW »

achenet wrote: post #366
Topfi wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. Hold up, in what metric/benchmark? Feel personally like we life in an age where, no matter the SOC vendor, something high performant and efficient is offered, so seeing a claim that any vendor, be it Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple, is consistently outperforming another, I'd like to get more context on that.

It seems logical in this case. Intel were x86, Apple Silicon is ARM-based. ARM-based chips are more power-efficient. Also, it's built on a much smaller process. 3nm, if I'm not mistaken, older Intel was something bigger than 10nm. Heck, if you take a really old Intel Mac, you have something like 65nm process, which is much less efficient than 3nm. Here's a random benchmark I found on the internet (literally the first…

Are you sure you read that comment correctly?

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#999

Post by NetMageSCW »

Gud wrote: post #308
bayindirh wrote: post #117

I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again: - Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance. - Apple: *Meep Meep...*

Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.

Really? You could run OS X on any hardware you bought? Or OpenVMS?

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#1000

Post by NetMageSCW »

jonplackett wrote: post #969
alain94040 wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is not "just using arm chips". They have been designing their own 100% custom cores for more than a decade.

Yes as I said in the comment, I know they do design them - based on arm. But come on - if they had to use intel’s fab - their chips would be terrible. The reason the m6 is faster is largely because TSMC invented a smaller process node.

So, so incredibly incorrect.
Post reply on HN