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Apple M5 chip

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Re: Apple M5 chip

#361

Post by shantara »

ironman1478 wrote: post #325

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional. This works for apps, but it‘s completely antithetical to the way game development processes on any other platform are structured. You finish a project, release it, do a patch cycle, and move on.

And that’s not even talking about porting the game to either Metal or an absolutely ancient OpenGL version that could be removed with any upcoming OS version. A significant effort just to address a tiny market.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#362

Post by llm_nerd »

fooblaster wrote: post #176
hannesfur wrote: post #167

It’s unfortunate that this announcement is still unspecific about what they improved in the Neural Engine. Since all we know about the Neural Engine comes from Apple papers or reverse engineering efforts ( https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine ), it’s plausible that they addressed some quirks to enable better transformer performance. They have written quite interesting papers on transformers on the Neural Engine:…

MLX doesn't use the neural engine still right? I still wish they would abandon that unit and just center everything around metal and tensor units on the GPU.

MLX is a training/research framework, and the work product is usually a CoreML model. A CoreML model will use any and all resources that are available to it, at least if the resource fits for the need.

The ANE is for very low power, very specific inference tasks. There is no universe where Apple abandons it, and it's super weird how much anti-ANE rhetoric there is on this site, as if there can only be one tool for an infinite selection of needs. The ANE is how your iPhone extracts every bit of text from images and subject matter information from photos with little fanfare or heat, or without destroying your battery, among many other uses. It is extremely useful for what it does.

>tensor units on the GPU

The M5 / A19 Pro are the first chips with so-called tensor units. e.g. matmul on the GPU. The ANE used to be the only tensor-like thing on the system, albeit as mentioned designed to be super efficient and for very specific purposes. That doesn't mean Apple is going to abandon the ANE, and instead they made it faster and more capable again.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#363

Post by rs186 »

modeless wrote: post #152
czbond wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am interested to learn why models move so much data per second. Where could I learn more that is not a ChatGPT session?

The models (weights and activations and caches) can fill all the memory you have and more, and to a first (very rough) approximation every byte needs to be accessed for each token generated. You can see how that would add up. I highly recommend Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want to learn details.

Would you mind specifying which video(s)? He has quite a lot of content to consume.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#365

Post by cesarvarela »

lazypenguin wrote: post #340
ironman1478 wrote: post #325

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

I'm sure you literally purchased Nvidia hardware for game development.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#367

Post by astrange »

shantara wrote: post #361
ironman1478 wrote: post #325

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If said fixing is even…

> If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional.

IIRC developers literally got 15 years of warning about that one.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#368

Post by whatever1 »

lazypenguin wrote: post #340
ironman1478 wrote: post #325

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

You do it for Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#369

Post by littlecranky67 »

mrcwinn wrote: post #226
littlecranky67 wrote: post #11

And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat sup…

Going back to the Air's screen from your Pro will be a steep fall.

Not really, 95% of the time I use it in a dock with 2 external screens.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#370

Post by [deleted] »

shantara wrote: post #361
ironman1478 wrote: post #325

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If said fixing is even…

[deleted]
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