51–60 of 169 posts
If ARM starts dominating in desktop and laptop spaces with a quite different set of applications, might we start seeing more software bugs around race conditions? Caused by developers writing software with X86 in mind, with its differing constraints on memory ordering.
If it is programmed in assembly. This kind of nasty detail should be handled by the compilers.
Kind of weird to see an article about high-performance ARM cores without a single reference to Apple or how this hardware compares to M4 or M5 cores.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Insofar as Apple Silicon beats these things, "I'll take less powerful hardware if it means I'm not stuck with the Apple ecosystem" is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make. Two things, though. First, I don't like making blind tradeoffs. If what I need (for whatever reason) is a really beefy ARM CPU, I'd like to know what the "Apple-less tax" costs me (if anything!) Second, the status quo is that Apple Silicon…
Let's say my company makes systems for in-flight entertainment, with content from my company. I am looking for a CPU. I don't want to confront my users with "Please enter your Apple ID" or any other unexpected messages that I have no control over. Is Apple M series an option for me?
All he is saying: We currently have products in a similar product category (arm based desktop computers) that are widely used and have known benchmark scores (and general reviews) and it would make sense if I publish a new cpu for the same product category ("Reaching Desktop Performance" implies that) that I'd compare it to the known alternatives.
In the end you can just run Asahi on your macbook, the OS is not that relevant here. A comparison to macbooks running Asahi Linux would be fine.
Without being a cpu geek, a lot of the branch prediction details go over my head, however generally a good review. I liked the detail of performance on more complex workloads where IPC can get muddy when you need more instructions. I feel these days however, for any comparison of performance, power envelope needs to be included (I realise this is dependent on the final chip)
ARM Cortex-X925 achieves indeed a very good IPC, but it has competitive performance only in general-purpose applications that cannot benefit from using array operations (i.e. the vector instructions and registers). The results shown in the parent article for the integer tests of SPEC CPU2017 are probably representative for Cortex-X925 when running this kind of applications. While the parent article shows AMD Zen 5 ha…
The arithmetic intensity of most SPECfp subtests is quite low. You see this wall because it ends up reaching bandwidth limitations long before running out of compute on cores with beefy SIMD.
Kind of weird to see an article about high-performance ARM cores without a single reference to Apple or how this hardware compares to M4 or M5 cores.
Kind of weird to see an article about high-performance ARM cores without a single reference to Apple or how this hardware compares to M4 or M5 cores.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say my company makes systems for in-flight entertainment, with content from my company. I am looking for a CPU. I don't want to confront my users with "Please enter your Apple ID" or any other unexpected messages that I have no control over. Is Apple M series an option for me?
Why should it be? All he is saying: We currently have products in a similar product category (arm based desktop computers) that are widely used and have known benchmark scores (and general reviews) and it would make sense if I publish a new cpu for the same product category ("Reaching Desktop Performance" implies that) that I'd compare it to the known alternatives. In the end you can just run Asahi on your macbook, t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> represents a commitment to the Apple software ecosystem I don't see how that's holding you back from using these tools for your work anymore than using a Makita power tool with LXT battery pack.
Pretty simply because I don't want to use MacOS, its terrible window management, quirks and idiosyncrasies. In your comparison, my gripe wouldn't be about the hassle of finding 3rd-party compatible batteries, but about the daily handling of the Makita while knowing the DeWalt to be more ergonomic and better suited to my needs.
I learned to live with macOS, but I also like and use Gnome, which many Linux-only people hate. I tried most WMs on Linux, like Hyprland, Sway, i3, but none ever felt worth the config hassle when compared to the sane defaults of Gnome.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Insofar as Apple Silicon beats these things, "I'll take less powerful hardware if it means I'm not stuck with the Apple ecosystem" is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make. Two things, though. First, I don't like making blind tradeoffs. If what I need (for whatever reason) is a really beefy ARM CPU, I'd like to know what the "Apple-less tax" costs me (if anything!) Second, the status quo is that Apple Silicon…
Let's say my company makes systems for in-flight entertainment, with content from my company. I am looking for a CPU. I don't want to confront my users with "Please enter your Apple ID" or any other unexpected messages that I have no control over. Is Apple M series an option for me?
For better or worse if you make a (high end) consumer CPU it will be judged against the M-series, just like if you make a high end phone it will be judged against the iPhone.
But with hardware IP locks like x86_64. Better favor as much as possible RISC-V implementations. But, I don't know if there are already good modern-desktop-grade RISC-V implementations (in the US, Sifive is moving fast as far as I know)... and the hard part: accessing the latest and greatest silicon process of TMSC, aka ~5GHz. Those markets are completely saturated, namely at best, it will be very slow unless somethi…
This is kind of a solution in search for a problem. RISC-V will grow only if people find some value in it. If it solves their actual problems in ways that other architectures can't.
It took ARM decades to get to where it is, and that involved a long stint in low-margin niche applications like embedded or appliances where x86 was poorly suited due to head and power consumption.