261–270 of 419 posts
I want a better system load metric now that we've got heterogenous cores in CPUs. The Pixel 8 Pro has 3 types, efficiency, performance, and one single ultra performance core. If your efficiency cores are always close to max usage, but your performance cores are idle, is your system being heavily or barely used? I understand that system load isn't really a useful metric between systems, but it's useful to compare on a…
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> Isn't it a 15% increase? At least according to Geekbench, it's a 20% performance increase. > The M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of about 3,000 and 11,700, respectively, in the Geekbench 6 database. When you compare these scores to those of the M2's single-core and multi-core scores (around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively), the M3 chip is indeed up to 20% faster like Apple claims. https://www.laptopmag.…
Benchmarks are optimized for specifically.
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> Adding support has a cost that most customers don't need to pay. It also adds heat, battery consumption, and space. For a chip that will also be used in iPads. Still I wished the base M3 chip supported at least two external displays. Or at least let you use two by disabling the internal display (eg. clamshell mode or whatever). > most people aren't going to be plugging in three monitors into their laptops, so most…
It's entirely Apple's choice to use the M chips in iPads. And if that means they need to compromise on laptop performance or features, they should change course.
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I don't understand this pretence that the vast majority of the time laptops are plugged into the power anyway.
There's always one reason after another. "It won't fit", you say sure it can, others do it, "Well, they don't do it efficiently", you say okay, how many times are you driving multiple monitors (most of which support power delivery these days) on battery, then it'll be "Apple just understands this better".
Apple sure could design a chip that drives more monitors, but maybe they decided that making the chip x% more performance/efficient, or having y feature was more important.
Or, maybe this really truly is trivial and they decided to segment their chips by not including this feature. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
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Only 1-monitor support seems like a market segmentation decision, not a lack of capability. (Much like how the iPhone Pro has faster USB-C data transfer speeds vs base iPhone)
Give me a "pro" which is thinner than and without a fan. or Give me an "air" with two external monitors and 64GB ram. The pros are clunky and heavy. I'm on an air, and will stay there for a long time because if this
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> Apple provided CLI tools should only be used to download the tools and versions of tools that you actually want. Why? Why do I need to use 3rd party package managers, or manual installations from 3rd party sources to install common tools that aren't a decade+ outdated? > When the OS version is tied to the version of so many other tools, it's a nightmare. It doesn't need to be tied to anything. If the OS needs speci…
Because the newer tools changed the licensing terms, and the corporate lawyers won’t let anything under GPL3 anywhere near anything if they can help it. GPL2 was viral, but the terms were easier to stomach. Apple is allergic to GPLv3 code because there is a clause in the license requiring you provide a way to run modified version of the software which would require Apple to let users self sign executables. This is a…
Wow, I don't know this before. Good job FSF! This, should, be, a, basic, right.
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Even the lowest tier models probably beat any PC laptop when it comes to usability and comfort though.
Strong disagree. UI is very buggy and inconsistent. CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. Uses it's own set of shortcuts, different from what's standard on windows/linux and most other operating systems. Not sure what people mean when they say completely vague…
Mac OS predates both.
Also, this is personal preference, but I find engaging Command with my thumb far more comfortable than Control with my pinky.
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linux has pressure stall information[0] which tracks the time where some processes couldn't be run because they were waiting for contended resources (cpu/io/memory). An N-parallel compute-bound job on an M-thread CPU will stay at nearly 0 CPU pressure if N=M (assuming no background tasks) because they're not stepping on each other's toes. At N>M pressure will start to rise. [0] https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.…
Note that for memory, as I understand the documentation, it's less about "couldn't be run" than "couldn't have the real memory allocation necessary to avoid paging". This is in contrast to another contended resource, memory bandwidth, "waiting" for which manifests at the process level as CPU cycles like any other code. It's possible to use profiling tools to distinguish memory waits from other CPU activity, but as fa…
additionally, context switches are the same on everything that can run Linux, whereas PMU counters are highly CPU-specific (potentially even different in each CPU stepping), so given the current state of affairs, a generic interface would be very limited.