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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#431

Post by spfzero »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #371
snazz wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, Apple "derisked" high-performance ARM chips with the A9-ish era five years ago. Other companies have had a long time to spend catching up to Apple mobile chips, and they haven't.

That's a completely reasonable challenge, and I might be wrong. My very amateur speculation is that, in the mobile space, Apple got incrementally better over time. Rank-and-file Android users didn't really notice the performance gap and thus didn't demand faster chips. M1 changed expectations for the laptop market virtually overnight, and rank-and-file users will expect M1 performance, battery life, etc. I think this…

There's more to it than chip design though. There is the OS work to take advantage of the chip's new features. And designing new chip features to accommodate sw bottlenecks. Apple has very close collaboration between software and hardware engineering, while in the competitive space, those two things are not under the same roof. Makes it tougher.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#432

Post by tannhaeuser »

6d65 wrote: post #377
doggydogs94 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last I heard, Linux is not coming to M1 unless Apple opens up on technical specifications.

I'm not planning to get a macbook. My main contender would be an XPS with a new ryzen cpu on 5nm, if they'll have one next year, or a thinkpad again with Ryzen 5nm. I would not accept anything less. But thinking about it, it might be that the mobile AMD CPUs are a year behind the desktop ones. So next year the best ryzen could still be at 7nm Zen3. In that case apple will have a 2 year transistor lead. But, will see.

Is there any statement Dell will build Ryzen XPSs?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#433

Post by jachee »

klelatti wrote: post #385

The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true, but: - Apple has a material (and apparently perceptible) performance advantage against the majority of the laptop market - which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand. - The M1 has killed the idea (which I've heard a lot) that you can't get performance out…

> which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand.

Apple’s brand, yes, definitely. Arm’s brand? Not so much.

Apple have made a very concerted effort to ensure that when the public thinks of the M1, that it is an Apple chip, and not an Arm chip.

I imagine that Arm isn’t too thrilled with that.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#434

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

outworlder wrote: post #381
_abox wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system It doesn't matter. Sure, that might mean that an Apple system is not for you. But the crux of the matter is: Apple did something truly revolutionary. How is the rest of the market going to respond? Specifically, how are Intel, AMD and Microsoft going to respond? Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta. Intel and AMD have nothing remotely…

> "Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta"

I thought that Microsoft's emulation efforts were hampered by Intel making threats, e.g. "Intel recently made an unprecedented public challenge to Microsoft and Qualcomm that basically told the latter two companies: if you ship an x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) emulator, we’re coming after you.", from https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel...

If so, the blame for that really lies at Intel's doorstep as well.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#435

Post by klelatti »

ebg13 wrote: post #399
klelatti wrote: post #385

The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true, but: - Apple has a material (and apparently perceptible) performance advantage against the majority of the laptop market - which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand. - The M1 has killed the idea (which I've heard a lot) that you can't get performance out…

> The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." It feels worse than that to me. Those people are actually saying "But Zen 4 in 2 years will be just as good!" because their claims depend on combining IPC improvements from Zen 3 _and_ a 5nm process that AMD has no plans to switch to for Zen 3. It's a weird bit of gymnastics in order to reach…

Without commenting on the gymnastics (I'm not qualified) the big issue for me is about actually having the machines in the market. Some of the Ryzen laptops seem to be impossible to buy and who knows how much TSMC capacity AMD has (after the Xbox and PS cores) plus how much and for how long have the PC laptop manufacturers already committed to Intel.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#436

Post by Recurecur »

doggydogs94 wrote: post #354
6d65 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

The last I heard, Linux is not coming to M1 unless Apple opens up on technical specifications.

Linux should be on it shortly, running in a VM environment.

That won't satisfy the purists, but it should satisfy the practical in most cases.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#437

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

> x86 is no more "Open" than ARM. Pinebook and Raspberry Pi both use no bullshit ARM setups.

They're ARM SoCs, meaning that you can't just download the Ubuntu ARM ISO[1] and run it on either device like you could with an x86 ISO and an x86 machine.

To run Ubuntu or any Linux distribution, you need to use images that were specially crafted for either SoC.

This is because ARM SoCs use custom bootloaders and don't have hardware on enumerable buses. Each SoC model is essentially a unique hardware configuration that needs an individual Linux port.

ARM servers are more similar to x86 machines in that they use UEFI and have enumerable buses.

As long as machines are shipped that use ARM SoCs, Linux support for all of them will be quite difficult to achieve[2] compared to x86 machines.

[1] https://ubuntu.com/download/server/arm

[2] https://elinux.org/images/a/ad/Arm-soc-checklist.pdf

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#438

Post by chris_wot »

liminal wrote: post #279

Can someone please ELI5 why the M1 is so much faster than every other ARM chip?

Isn't it because it is a SoC?

I found the following article enlightening:

https://screenrant.com/apple-silicon-m1-mac-macbook-chip-soc...

Edit: ignore that previous link, way better is the one mentioned by another poster:

https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#439

Post by shawnz »

neogodless wrote: post #134
toddmorey wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that goes equally across platforms. When I'm on a windows machine, I miss the hell out of Keynote and Bear, for example.

Exactly. So you either go back to using macOS, or you complain that Windows doesn't run the software you like. It's OK to do that for any OS you run. It's a valid reason to not like an OS, or in this case, an OS that is going through a transition to a new ISA. Until it runs the software you prefer, it isn't ideal.

Sure, but it doesn't necessarily make it an objectively poorer product just because it's hard to swim against the current on that platform. Every platform necessarily has some expectation of doing things a certain way, and when things are done that way the experience will be better/easier.

You seemed to be implying that this was some unique problem with OSX and that's what is holding you back from trying M1. But really, it sounds like what is holding you back is just the normal barriers of changing platforms.

Personally as a Windows user I am hoping that Windows for ARM gets supported on M1 soon, but I don't think it's so unreasonable we're not there yet, and I am not going to discount the whole platform just because of it.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#440

Post by klelatti »

jachee wrote: post #433
klelatti wrote: post #385

The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true, but: - Apple has a material (and apparently perceptible) performance advantage against the majority of the laptop market - which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand. - The M1 has killed the idea (which I've heard a lot) that you can't get performance out…

> which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand. Apple’s brand, yes, definitely. Arm’s brand? Not so much. Apple have made a very concerted effort to ensure that when the public thinks of the M1, that it is an Apple chip, and not an Arm chip. I imagine that Arm isn’t too thrilled with that.

It's done Arm's brand a power of good with the sort of people who read HN and that's probably the audience that they care about most.
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