Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II

Apple has no Linux strategy. Nobody is working for Apple for free. People are working on their own time (or supporting the project with their own money) because they want to see this happen.

There is no skin in this for Apple either way.

What I don't understand is why people insist on criticizing a project which won't fundamentally affect them at all. Having Linux on Mac isn't going to hurt you and stands to benefit the community as a whole.

While the GPU port is unlikely to benefit others, it's very likely some of the other work will. Any improvements to the Broadcom drivers will be useful for the entire community. Improvements and optimizations to ARM64 support will likewise benefit the whole community.

Really tired of the mis-directed zealots who think they have the right to tell other people where to direct their time and energy.

In high school, I was lucky enough to not have to do laundry, feed myself, or a variety of other tasks and chores that come along with adulthood. I also could sleep like crap and make it up during school the next day. Not to mention that the time I spent at school wasn't spent programming, so when I got home it wasn't more of the same, it was exciting. I could sit at the computer programing from 3pm to 2am.

I would imagine at that time there were also many fewer kids at a high-school level doing that kind of hacking, so it might not be totally wrong to say they were all prodigies.

They definitely won the "general public use laptop" market (if you conveniently ignore the rest of the laptop and OSX, which are utter crap IMO), but its important to understand that they really didn't invent anything, they just optimized. And optimizing something like this means you make the stuff that is most commonly used better, while reducing the functionality of the rest.

Compare the Asus Zephyrus RoG 14 laptop with the Macbook pro. G14 has the older Ryzen 9 4900HS chip, and while the single core performance of the MBP is better, the multi core is the same despite the 4900HZ being a last gen chip. G14 gets about 11 hours of battery time for regular use, MBP gets about 16, but the G14 also has a discrete GPU that is superior for gaming than the integrated GPU of the mac. Different configurations for different things.

Then, even ignoring the companies decision to mix and match components, the reason why you can buy any windows based laptop and install Linux on it and have 99% of the functionality working right out of the box is because of the standardization of the cpu architecture. With the Apple M1, even though Rosetta is very well built, its support is not universal across all applications, some run poorly or not at all.

And while modern compilers are smart, they have a long way to go before true cross operability with all the performance enhancements. Just look at any graphical linux distro, and the fact that all android devices out there run linux, but there isn't a way to natively run it on them without the chroot method that doesn't take advantage of the hardware.

So in the end, if you are someone that just wants a laptop with good performance and great battery life, and don't care about any particular software since most of your time will be spent on the web or in the Apple Ecosystem software, the M1 machines are definitely the right choice. However, if you want something like a dev machine with Linux where you just want to be able to git clone software and it work without any issues, you are most likely going to be better off with the "windows" based laptops with traditional AMD/Intel chips for quite some time.

I do remember that. iPhone had its growing pains in the first year, and there was a fair criticism back then. But it was also clear that iPhone brings a completely new vision to the concept of a mobile phone.

M1 brings a nice performance at fairly low power, but that's just a quantitative difference. No new vision. Perf/watt improvements have been happening every single year since the first chips were manufactured.

> I also think x86 cannot compete now and things will only get a lot worse as Apple's chips get even better.

Why? Somehow Apple's chips will get better, but competition will stand still? AMD is making currently great progresses, and it finally looks like Intel is waking up from letargia as well.