131–140 of 548 posts
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Well I wouldn't pay for it if I could print billions in a snap because then I would start my own company that creates open RISC-V laptops and pcs. But in the current market I will because there's simply no alternative.
What do you mean by no alternative?
Most of what makes the M1 interesting is TSMC's 5nm process, why wouldn't we expect similar results from future x86 CPUs on 5nm or smaller. At least AMD is supporting upstream Linux development for GPU support, if you care about Free software and control over your computers, throw your money at companies better aligned with those goals. Don't reward Apple for being assholes. <=5nm AMD Zen SoCs will be fantastic as we…
I’m not sure that’s exactly accurate. The special JavaScript instructions, and the optimizations to retain/release counts within memory blocks, seem much more interesting. https://mobile.twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1331735383193903... I haven’t the foggiest idea if any of this could make it to competing ARM chips, but given how many years Snapdragons have been lagging relative to the iPhone “A” chips, I don’t feel t…
That's an ARMv8 feature, not specific to Apple.
No. Because (in no particular order): - it shouldn't be the community's (or a crowd-funded dev's) responsibility to provide software support for hardware produced by one of the largest companies out there (bonus: with zero hardware specs); - Apple could make all this futile with a push of a button (SecureBoot can be disabled for now, but what guarantees are there this won't change?); - other arm64 machines will be av…
There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with mainstream software available for it), I don't see it happening in the next 5 years. Its a chicken-and-egg problem that Apple is uniquely suited to address with their vertical control over the Mac ecosystem (hardware/dev tools/OS/competitive software).
Server chips, maybe - but we can already see with Azure that competitive x86 chips from AMD have killed Microsoft's plans to deploy arm64 on their cloud service.
But this:
- Apple could make all this futile with a push of a button (SecureBoot can be disabled for now, but what guarantees are there this won't change?);
This is huge. We could all contribute to getting Linux ported to M1, and then Apple could shut us down with little or no effort. And ... maybe they won't? They probably won't? But who knows? Why build an ecosystem around a hostile hardware vendor?
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XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.
Why is XNU not FOSS? Has something changed? Is Wikipedia wrong? It says that XNU is APSL which is approved by OSI and FSF. While I agree that much of the good stuff is proprietary (but certainly not all, eg WebKit), that doesn’t mean that the free stuff isn’t free. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License
Note that that is 2 years behind. You can get a newer source dump from https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/.
So, open source, but development isn’t done in the open. You can’t really expect you’ll be able to see recent commit messages or even just regular source dumps.
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Apple is turning into a services company, though, look at their numbers. And one of those core services is the App Store.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Mac apps still aren't distributed on the App Store. The Mac App Store almost certainly isn't a big money-maker.
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If anyone has been following nvidia/linux story, this nails it on the head. Apple has never played well with FOSS and aren't going to start now. Apple's implementation will always be ahead, better, less bugs, and the linux port will always be a shitty experience that takes up several weeks to get working properly, and then it'll be slower than expected. Get yourself a laptop with an nvidia card and Ubuntu. Even today…
I have a Dell XPS 9500 (the 2020 model) with an nVidia driver. I run PopOS! as my daily driver and it works with the GPU just fine.
I used to run Ubuntu on an Intel macbook back around 2009 or so. In general stuff worked ok but little things like the touchpad was goofy and only basic functionality. webcam had all kinds of problems. Suspend/resume didn't really work. Battery life was terrible. Screen brightness buttons didn't work. So I'm sure it's cool and people will like it but no, I'm not paying $5 month for a crappy computer experience. Good…
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If anyone has been following nvidia/linux story, this nails it on the head. Apple has never played well with FOSS and aren't going to start now. Apple's implementation will always be ahead, better, less bugs, and the linux port will always be a shitty experience that takes up several weeks to get working properly, and then it'll be slower than expected. Get yourself a laptop with an nvidia card and Ubuntu. Even today…
I own an Ubuntu laptop with an NVIDIA card since 2014 (HP ZBook 15 with Quadro K1100M). Not perfect but not garbage. Hours of debugging / workarounds cumulated in 6 years yes, days not. The remaining problems on Ubuntu 20.04: 1. The brightness control keys don't work. They generate the event they are supposed to generate then I see an error in syslog. Workaround: two hotkeys bound to windows+fn+brightness up/down to…
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IMO it's not an unreasonable notion to have. I don't think its out of the question that they would change course and lock it down. I'm not saying it's likely or probable, but I don't think it's an unreasonable concern. In any event, it annoys me that the parent commentator is being dismissed out of hand and downvoted for expressing a legitimate concern.
It's a tired, un-nuanced concern that doesn't indicate any understanding of why Apple favors lock-in. It's like an online political debate: it's possible to persuade someone, maybe, but you need a better argument than mean old Apple wants to take our toys away.
That said, I don't know how it could be tired, as these laptops were just released. I also don't know what you mean by 'un-nuanced', but I don't see how understanding why they favor lock in is relevant. He's not talking about the merits of a closed ecosystem or locking things down, just about whether or not they might lock things down further in the future.
I think most people understand the motivation behind Apple trying to control every aspect of their products, whether or not they think it's a good practice.
Most of what makes the M1 interesting is TSMC's 5nm process, why wouldn't we expect similar results from future x86 CPUs on 5nm or smaller. At least AMD is supporting upstream Linux development for GPU support, if you care about Free software and control over your computers, throw your money at companies better aligned with those goals. Don't reward Apple for being assholes. <=5nm AMD Zen SoCs will be fantastic as we…
I’m not sure that’s exactly accurate. The special JavaScript instructions, and the optimizations to retain/release counts within memory blocks, seem much more interesting. https://mobile.twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1331735383193903... I haven’t the foggiest idea if any of this could make it to competing ARM chips, but given how many years Snapdragons have been lagging relative to the iPhone “A” chips, I don’t feel t…
The only thing it does is remove a branch in arm64 where the various JITs have to do:
Int value = (int)some double;
If (flags) value = x86 sentinel
That is all the “special instruction” does.