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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

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Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#101

Post by noizejoy »

littlestymaar wrote: post #94
cambalache wrote: post #6

OK I love this, but I am pretty sure my chances of getting a mac in the future are zero. From which side should I expect the PC response? Intel? AMD? Microsoft? ARM? Samsung? I think Apple willingly or not has just obliterated the whole consumer pc market.

> Apple willingly or not has just obliterated the whole consumer pc market. Apple probably has the best laptop out there as of today, but I don't think Apple sales performances are impacted that much by their hardware perf actually: around 2012-2015 or something they had several years with a subpar mobile phone, both on the hardware a and the software side, and it still sold very well. A few years later, they have th…

Agreed - since MacOS is even more of an entire eco-system, moving in and out of that is much more of a long-term commitment for most regular users.

People who are multi-platform in daily life, are much more likely to switch - and that's a rather small percentage of computer users (and of course very much over-represented here at HN).

> they have used that card too much

you can never have enough "magic" :-)

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#102

Post by salawat »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #55

Everyone, remember that in 2019 Alyssa was in _High School_. Where do people get this knowledge? It's astounding. She was literally reverse-engineering Mali for Panfrost starting in her Sophomore year.

Truly impressive work. > Where do people get this knowledge? Time, hands-on experimentation, and focus. Anecdotally, reverse engineering and low-level hacking felt more popular back in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then, there were fewer distractions to soak up the free time of young tech enthusiasts. Old IRC chatrooms feel like a trickle of distraction relative to the firehose of Twitter, Reddit, 24/7 news cycles, a…

That issue you describe, while intuitive and obvious to those of us who were around for the transition period is simple to arrive at. Keep in mind that youngsters nowadays may not have much if any experience with the before world or know someone reflective enough and willing to point it out to them. Many just assume we all mastered it somehow.

There is also the possibility, They might be right. Before, communication and the long access lag inherent in accessing data in remote systems meant change propagated by trickle. Now, change can happen and propagate across the world at breakneck speeds. Which means if one is to have an effect, one must be there/be aware.

This leaves precious little time for following the white rabbit. I think everybody could do with a little somber reflection on just the impact that rapid information propagation has had on the world.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#103

Post by shawnz »

cambalache wrote: post #68
vbezhenar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you expect? x86 is quite competitive. M1 might be slightly better, but it's not like it's miles ahead.

I want a return to the status-quo when for 80% (it could be even less but let's not dwell in the number) of the price of an Apple laptop I could get a windows/linux machine matching or surpassing its specs(including stuff like battery life,energy consumption, screen dpi, noise, etc). This is not true now and I am not seeing an option in the short term.

Perhaps it is still true, but Apple is somehow becoming the budget option in that equation?

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#104

Post by bitwize »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #55

Everyone, remember that in 2019 Alyssa was in _High School_. Where do people get this knowledge? It's astounding. She was literally reverse-engineering Mali for Panfrost starting in her Sophomore year.

When I was 14 I discovered that my computer's CPU (a 186) had two on-chip programmable timers. One was used for DRAM refresh, so I used the other to get fine-grained timing so I could bit-bang the speaker output to get crude PWM sound.

Of course back then, people used to document the components they put in computers...

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#105

Post by gonehome »

The_Colonel wrote: post #95
gonehome wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first release targeting macOS, I'm not pretending their chips for phones don't exist - but the M1 is still version 0 for macs. > "And frankly I don't really see the pull of ARM/M1 anyway. I mean, I can get a laptop with extremely competitive Ryzen for way cheaper than MacBook with M1..." Respectfully, I strongly disagree with this - to me it's equivalent to someone defending the keyboards on a palm treo.…

> but the M1 is still version 0 for macs. Fair enough, it's just important to keep in mind that M1 is a result of decade(s) long progressive enhancement. M2 is going to be another incremental step in the series. > to me it's equivalent to someone defending the keyboards on a palm treo. This is a major shift in capability ... That's a completely unjustified comparison. iPhone brought a new way to interact with your ph…

> "That's a completely unjustified comparison. iPhone brought a new way to interact with your phone."

People don't really remember, but a lot of people were really dismissive of the iPhone (and iPod) on launch. For the iPhone, the complaints were about cost, about lack of hardware keyboard, about fingerprints on the screen. People complained that it was less usable than existing phones for email, etc.

The M1 brings much better performance at much less power.

I think that's a big deal and is a massive lift for what applications can do. I also think x86 cannot compete now and things will only get a lot worse as Apple's chips get even better.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#106

Post by jdashg »

Someone wrote: post #9
rowanG077 wrote: post #3

Amazing!! This is progresssing literally 10 times faster then I expected.

Indeed. That single triangle likely is way closer to a million triangles than to zero triangles. https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745 : “Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really k…

Roughly equidistant milestones for ports: 1. It crashes 2. Black screen 3. Any drawing at all 4. The rest of the friggin' engine

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#108

Post by neogodless »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #17
cambalache wrote: post #6

OK I love this, but I am pretty sure my chances of getting a mac in the future are zero. From which side should I expect the PC response? Intel? AMD? Microsoft? ARM? Samsung? I think Apple willingly or not has just obliterated the whole consumer pc market.

The response from Intel seems to be betting on the Evo platform [1], with third parties announcing laptops like the XPG Xenia XE 1 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/evo.ht...

You have to read between the lines here. They make no claims about CPU performance - just integrated GPU performance from Xe (which is a big improvement from previous Iris GPUs.) Then they claim battery life (9 hours, FHD, 250-nits, etc.)

What that means is laptop OEMs will have to limit TDP on CPUs - probably 15W or less. Given current Intel chips being very power hungry, these are likely NOT going to be great CPU performers.

The only competition in CPU space to M1 will be Ryzen 5000U chips in the 15-25W thermal envelope. They should be ~19% more powerful/efficient than Ryzen 4000U chips, but I would not expect M1 levels of cool or battery life yet.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#109

Post by macNchz »

jrockway wrote: post #79
monkmartinez wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if you have the darn thing plugged in anyway? Does the M1 outperform the Threadripper 3990x?

I think to understand the M1, you have to be a Mac laptop user. For years, Mac laptop performance lagged years behind high-end desktop performance -- they have been stuck on 14nm+ process chips with a mobile power budget, while desktop users have had 7nm chips that can draw 500W with no trouble. As a result, what M1 users tell you is fast is what PC desktop users have had for ages. A Threadripper and 3090 will blow t…

Yeah after years of company-issued Macbook Pros I built myself a Ryzen 3900x dev machine last year and it was like waking up from one of those dreams where you need to do something urgently but your legs aren't cooperating.

Given the benchmarks I've seen I imagine the M1 would be a somewhat comparable experience, but using a desktop machine for software development for the first time since...2003(!) has really turned me off the laptop-as-default model that I'd been used to, and the slow but steady iOSification of MacOS has turned me off Macs generally. Once people are back to working in offices I'd just pair it with an iPad or Surface or something for meetings.

Re: Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

#110

Post by shawnz »

pjmlp wrote: post #64
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #55

Everyone, remember that in 2019 Alyssa was in _High School_. Where do people get this knowledge? It's astounding. She was literally reverse-engineering Mali for Panfrost starting in her Sophomore year.

At the age of 10 I was coding for the Timex 2068, using books like these ones, https://www.atariarchives.org/ Yes, they are for the Atari, just trying to make a point here. So any smart kid in the age of Internet, instead of having what is available at the local library, is quite capable to build up the skills to achieve this kind of work at the high school level.

Strongly disagree. There is a big difference between doing some interesting hacking at a young age and getting your GPU driver included in the mainline Linux kernel. The author appears to be a true CS prodigy.
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