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Apple M5 chip

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Re: Apple M5 chip

#371

Post by jjtheblunt »

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

for games, how would you test in a VM, when games so explicitly want direct hardware access?

i am obviously misunderstanding something, i mean.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#372

Post by jdc0589 »

this is cool and all, but what im really exited about is the possibility that one day they update their laptops so the keys stop leaving marks on the screen.

I know we are a few major scientific breakthroughs away from that even being remotely possible, but it sure would be nice.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#373

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

czbond wrote: post #102
nik736 wrote: post #2

This is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to run viable open source LLM models properly.

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

Models are made of "parameters" which are really weights in a large neural network. For each token generated, each parameter needs to take its turn inside the CPU/GPU to be calculated.

So if you have a 7B parameter model with 16-bit quantization, that means you'll have 14 GB/s of data coming in. If you only have 153 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, that means you'll cap out ~11 tokens/sec, regardless of how my processing power you have.

You can of course quantize to 8-bit or even 4-bit, or use a smaller model, but doing so makes your model dumber. There's a trade-off between performance and capability.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#374

Post by jayd16 »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #350
jayd16 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac dev sucks. You're forced to use macos and xcode (for the final build anyway). You're not able to virtualize the build machines. Apple is actively hostile to how you would build for Linux or PC or console.

> You're not able to virtualize the build machines. Sure you can. And officially, too. Apple still ships a bunch of virtualization drivers in macOS itself. Have a look: /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleVmxnet3Ethernet.kext Whether or not you're using ESXi, or want to, is an entirely different question. But "you're not able to" is simply incorrect. I virtualize several build age…

Interesting. The last I looked into it, you could only officially do this on Mac hardware (defeating the purpose).

You can get an xcode building for arm Macs on PC hardware with this?

Re: Apple M5 chip

#375

Post by CharlesW »

eloisant wrote: post #142
toddmorey wrote: post #6

The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.

Apple have always been a hardware company, like Google have always been a software company even if they're doing hardware too now.

> Apple have always been a hardware company…

Apple (post Apple II) has always been a systems company, which is much different. Dell is a hardware company.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#377

Post by insraq »

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.

I wrote a post (rant)[1] about my experience of releasing a game on macOS as an indie dev. tl;dr: Apples goes a long way to make the process as painful as possible with tons of paper cuts.

[1] https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-platforms.html#...

Re: Apple M5 chip

#378

Post by raverbashing »

trymas wrote: post #196
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:…

> the main thing limiting Apple Intelligence (in my opinion) will continue to be the 8 GB of unified memory they still insist on. As you said - it won’t help previous generations, though since last year (or two??) all macs start with 16GB of memory. Even entry level macbook airs.

I bet Cook authorized the upgrade with grinned teeth and I was all for it

Re: Apple M5 chip

#379

Post by coffeeaddict1 »

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…

> an absolutely ancient OpenGL version

I still don't get this. Apple is a trillion dollar company. How much does it cost to pay a couple of engineers to maintain an up to date version on top of Metal? Their current implementation is 4.1, it wouldn't cost them much to provide one for 4.6. Even Microsoft collaborated with Mesa to build a translation on top of dx12, Apple could do the same.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#380

Post by littlecranky67 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #50
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…

Honestly, gaming consoles are so much cheaper and "no hassle." I never games on my Mac.

More expensive on the long run, as the games are more expensive and you need some kind of subscription to play online.
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