Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 882 posts

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#331

Post by GekkePrutser »

jcheng wrote: post #312
vetinari wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung stopped Exynos development a year ago. Cavium is basically dead (yes, bought out by Marvell). Qualcomm is interested only in mobile SoCs at mobile SoCs volumes where they can also sell radios, and Nvidia was traditionally not capable of delivering anything at promised power consumption.

Are you sure about Exynos? They announced the 1080 just a couple of weeks ago and the 2100 is expected next year.

Samsung stopped developing their custom cores. They will still continue making Exynos, but with reference design ARM cores.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#332

Post by matheusmoreira »

ekianjo wrote: post #208
simias wrote: post #100

I've never owned a Mac and don't intend to own one but I'm very happy with this M1 move, mainly for the reasons highlighted in the introduction to the article: >M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs — all Intel-based Macs, including automobile-priced Mac Pros, and every single machine running Windows or Linux. Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. I think it's…

> But I think the overarching point is true: now desktop and laptop makers can't just pretend that having a hot and/or slow, clunky, noisy x86-based architecture is just a fact of life. I hope and expect that it'll help create a new generation of ARM-based laptops and maybe even desktops that will run cool and smooth. Be careful what you wish for. X86 is the most open architecture right now. ARM, on the other hand, h…

> messy device trees

Can you please elaborate?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#333

Post by least »

6d65 wrote: post #297

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. With Zen3 on mobile, giving a…

> With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them.

In the past this has not been the case due to Intel's anticompetitive practices and while I think it's good to be cautiously optimistic, I would also not be surprised to not see no-compromise flagship notebooks with ryzen in them from the larger pc manufacturers.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#334

Post by chongli »

danaris wrote: post #182
ghaff wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And partners also means customers. A ton of those Windows systems (and I should have said systems--rather than laptops--as I don't know how things split out on laptops specifically) are going to non-technical users in big companies who absolutely do not want any changes that alter a menu or move an icon or introduce some incompatibility they have to deal with. They absolutely do not care whether there's some signific…

Frankly, I think that the willingness on the part of some, like Microsoft, to cater to that degree of hidebound thinking is actively harmful to us as a society, especially in terms of technology. The more we enable people who are unwilling to even try to learn that this particular option has moved from the Edit menu to the Format menu, or has removed the default toolbar icon (but you can add one), or has simply moved…

On the other hand, we have a lot software in the industry that changes regularly without any perceivable improvement. Google is known for relentlessly pruning whole products that people were happily using but they're also pretty aggressive about removing features from existing products.

One big example of that is the removal of community captioning for YouTube videos. Call me hidebound but I am not happy at all with this, even though I don't use it very much. Captions are critical for making videos accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing communities. The removal of this feature is an ugly snub to a vulnerable group. Now they will be wholly reliant on the video creators to do the captioning themselves or otherwise be stuck with the lousy automatic captioning.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#335

Post by ogre_codes »

6d65 wrote: post #297

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. With Zen3 on mobile, giving a…

> The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements

That is a poor characterization of this article. Gruber's critic of Moorhead's article doesn't reference a lack of benchmarks or measurements at all.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#336

Post by AsyncAwait »

ogre_codes wrote: post #276
AsyncAwait wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> x86 is not "Open" in any fashion. You can't license x86 even for a fee, let alone free. OP is not talking about being able to manufacture x86 CPUs kind of open, that's useless for most folks. They're talking about being able to install any OS, drivers being fairly universal, no device specific out of tree kernel patches for the vast majority of PCs, no device trees etc.

It's a lousy use of the word "Open" in a discipline where Open has a fairly specific meaning. I mentioned that as well though. Using your goofy definition of Open, x86 is no more "Open" than ARM. Pinebook and Raspberry Pi both use no bullshit ARM setups. With ARM, how accessible the architecture is is 100% dependent on the implementation which vary greatly by manufacturer.

> Using your goofy definition of Open

If I buy any x86 PC, chances are I can install mainline Linux on it. Picking up any particular recent ARM SoC and the chance of doing so is much, much less. The M1 included, after all.

> Pinebook and Raspberry Pi both use no bullshit ARM setups.

Both of these took considerably longer to get mainline support that your average x86 hardware needs.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#337

Post by mypalmike »

the_af wrote: post #142
alwillis wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :) Apple showed Debian running in a VM on an M1 prototype Mac nearly 6 months ago. I get that it won't be acceptable for some Linux diehards but the superfast, supercool ARM laptop running Linux will soon be an M1 MacBook Pro.

If I can get it to run Linux not on a VM, but natively and without coexisting with macOS at all, then it'll be good enough for me!... ...except I cannot afford a macbook. The one I'm using now was paid for by my employer. More generally, I'd love to see fast ARM platforms not built by Apple.

Local compensation practices where you live must really suck if you can't afford a $1000 laptop. :(

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#338

Post by 6d65 »

_abox wrote: post #315
6d65 wrote: post #297

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. With Zen3 on mobile, giving a…

Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. His article reads like an Apple keynote transcript, everything is magical and amazing, a marvel and mindbogglingly great. No wonder they throw him so many exclusives ;) Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system (no booting Linux or Windows at this time) and even under macOS you're having even less access to the system's internals than before. Also, A…

Completely agree with regards the closed platform.

I switched to Linux for my development machine for a few years now. And, using something else than i3(or any other tilling window managers) seems like a step down. I like instant switching between workspaces, splits, no animations.

And I'll be looking for a good laptop next year, when everything returns back to normal, and I might have to travel. And will put Linux on it.

And agree with regards to aggressive marketing, in my case it makes the brand a bit toxic for my taste.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#339

Post by [deleted] »

spijdar wrote: post #272
adkadskhj wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing, tiny, and more close to the ARM chip than anything out there for x86, right? I'll be interested to see if Apple can keep this up with 128GiB of RAM and a beefy GPU. So far to me M1 is great, ARM is great, but comparing a tiny amount of RAM soldered onto the C…

Architectural analysis of the chip [0] suggests it is a massive improvement as a general purpose CPU, not just because of Apple's vertical integration and streamlining. The magnitude of extra ROB entries, having an 8x wide instruction decoder, that massive L1I cache, and such fat cores with lots of ALU and other op units while simultaneously keeping over a 3GHz clock is a phenomenal architectural improvement overall.…

[deleted]

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#340

Post by GekkePrutser »

faitswulff wrote: post #14
ghaff wrote: post #12

I'm not sure I see most of the disagreement here. As Gruber says, Moorhead is mostly complaining about software incompatibilities. But that's part of the total package--especially with Apple which is about selling the total experience. Personally I'll probably switch sooner rather than later especially given that I don't run a lot of native apps on my laptop. But it seems pretty reasonable to critique a new architect…

I had a suspicion upon reading Moorhead's review that he was trying to use familiar enterprise Windows software on the M1 instead of trying to use native apps: > So far, I have experienced application crashes in Microsoft Edge, Outlook, WinZip and Logitech Camera Control. I got installation errors with Adobe Reader XI, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, a Samsung SSD backup application, and Xbox 360 Controller for Mac. What Ma…

Enterprise users often don't have a choice. Microsoft is pushing very hard to get Edge set as mandated browser at enterprises everwhere. In work we're also moving away from Chrome for this reason.
Post reply on HN