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Tales of the M1 GPU

asahilinux.org

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Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#111

Post by dlinz »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #77
liuliu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. This sounds very computer-sciency-ish. We build smaller tools to help build big things. Now the big things are so good and versatile we can replace our smaller tools with the big things too. With the more powerful tools, we can build even bigger things. It is just compiler bootstrapping happening in hardware world.

The problem is that there's so much unexplored territory in operating system design. "Everything is a file" and the other *nix assumptions are too often just assumed to be normal. So much more is possible.

Curious student here, would you mind elaborating a bit on this unexplored territory?

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#112

Post by astrange »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #70
wincy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like a full time filter where the only online identity someone presents is as an anime girl. I think it was popularized by a company called HoloLive that has Japanese girls do this as a full time job? It’s a VERY niche culture thing. Check out the Asahi Lina channel to see what I mean. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LonzMviFCNs

Surprisingly it is not that niche anymore - for example, the hololive subreddit has 800,000 subscribers which is about half of the hockey subreddit.

Ironmouse is the most popular female streamer on Twitch (by subs). Pekora is in the top 5 most watched female streamers worldwide (by viewer-hours).

It’s not needed for guys apparently, but it’s not niche.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#113

Post by babypuncher »

Mistletoe wrote: post #51
dimator wrote: post #28

watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever seen! it's easy to forget that this world is looking closer and closer to those dreamed up by Gibson, Stephenson, etc. what a time to be alive.

I like your optimism, but it seems more like a Phillip K. Dick novel to me. >In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerate effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS. Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS. from Johnny Mnemonic What can we do to make it more utopian?

Aesthetically it looks like the worlds imagined in a Phillip K. Dick novel, but none of the actual dystopian aspects are present in what GP described (rampant poverty/class disparity, environmental destruction, etc.)

I don't think someone sharing their craft through a virtual avatar is any more responsible for these things than the flying cars from Blade Runner would be.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#114

Post by steveklabnik »

cjsawyer wrote: post #85
philistine wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to dissociate the concept of virtual worlds which already exist and are quite popular (MMOs etc.), and the idea of a virtual world owned and imagined by Zuckerberg which has been a terrible failure so far.

The opinions around facebook’s metaverse are hilarious when things like Second Life, WoW, EVE, VR Chat, and even Roblox have been so massively popular yet unrecognized for what they are.

I kinda think to some degree those words are the reason those opinions are the way they are. The metaverse is being sold as this new, groundbreaking, fantastic thing, when they've already existed for decades.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#115

Post by babypuncher »

segmondy wrote: post #54
dimator wrote: post #28

watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever seen! it's easy to forget that this world is looking closer and closer to those dreamed up by Gibson, Stephenson, etc. what a time to be alive.

Which is what Zuck is trying to get us all into with the Meta, but the world is not ready yet.

The difference is Zuck wants to control it. He wants to de-democratize the movement so he can more easily profit from it.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#116

Post by astrange »

mlindner wrote: post #76
bitwize wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Let's not head down this direction of madness please. I've followed Japanese vtubers for some time and that is CERTAINLY not the case. Vtubers are just aliases for the real person. And each person picks and chooses how much they blend their real lives into that alias. There are even some vtubers that will have a camera facing on themselves while they stream as a vtuber (for example stream their body, but not their fa…

> This is helped by the fact that it's a legal requirement that all devices capable of taking photographs must make a photographing noise when doing so.

That's not a legal requirement, it's a carrier request.

> For example on iPhone in Japan it is impossible to silence the shutter sound effect without modifying the device hardware.

That now turns off once you take them out of the country though.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#117

Post by ansible »

babypuncher wrote: post #106
helf wrote: post #57

The fact so much hardware these days is running a full real-time OS all the time annoys me. I know it is normal and understandable but everything is such a black box and it has already caused headaches (looking at you, Intel).

This isn't even that new of a thing. The floppy disk drive sold for the Commodore 64 included it's own 6502 CPU, ROM, and RAM. This ran its own disk operating system[1]. Clever programmers would upload their own code to the disk drive to get faster read/writes, pack data more densely on the disk, and even copy protection schemes that could validate the authenticity of a floppy. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commod…

And all that engineering resulted in a floppy drive that was slower and more expensive than comparable units for other home computers. I'm not sure if there is a lesson there...

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#118

Post by RhodesianHunter »

segmondy wrote: post #102
cjsawyer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opinions around facebook’s metaverse are hilarious when things like Second Life, WoW, EVE, VR Chat, and even Roblox have been so massively popular yet unrecognized for what they are.

The difference between Facebooks Meta and other worlds is the difference between getting a billion+ people into the same virtual world. How big is Second Life? or Roblox?

I don't think you can call that a difference until metaverse starts actually hitting those numbers, or even surpassing the existing worlds.

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#119

Post by my123 »

monocasa wrote: post #39
tiahura wrote: post #20

Is anyone porting the GPU driver to Windows?

I think there's larger barriers to getting windows running on Apple Silicon that would need to be addressed first. For one example, Windows ARM kernels are pretty tied to the GIC (ARM's reference interrupt controller), but Apple has its own interrupt controller. Normally on ntoskrnl this distinction would simply need hal.dll swapped out, but I've heard from those who've looked into it that the clean separation has br…

hal.dll no longer exists on Windows. It’s just a stub for backwards compat now.

What you can do is having a small hypervisor to simulate the needed bits…

Re: Tales of the M1 GPU

#120

Post by my123 »

fulafel wrote: post #108
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would take more than a GPU Driver, or actually, drivers at all. Windows has some behavior that is hard-coded and cannot be changed except by Microsoft. This behavior can fairly easily be bent on Linux, but Windows drivers can't bend the rules for some of these issues. The biggest issue that immediately comes to mind is that the M1 MMU (Memory Management Unit) only can handle 16K pages. Linux can easily be built fo…

In https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ it says that 4k pages work on the HW but 16k has tome advantages. Dropping 4k page size supporrt would imply a departure from arm architecture compatibility compatibility I think, it might have also nontechnical problems (ARM license).

The arm spec allows to have machines that implement any of 4KB, 16KB, or 64KB granules or any combination thereof. Apple shipped plenty of phone SoCs that didn’t support 4KB pages for the CPU (A9->A13).
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