M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness • Hacker News Board

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#541

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:38 PM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #505

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #452

Gruber notes midway: "Perversely, developers, who by nature of their profession best understand exactly what an architecture transition like this entails, might be among the few professions who can’t yet move their primary computing to an Apple Silicon device by nature of the software tools they depend upon. (Some developers can move now, and — because Xcode running on the M1 compiles code so much faster than any Int…

This XCode benchmark disagrees: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark The only machine currently beating M1 for compile times is a 28-core Xeon CPU.

[deleted]

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#542

Post by jitl » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:43 PM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #513

matwood wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. I think it's important to read Gruber and understand he's an Apple person. Not a shill, as much as his world is all Apple. Sure, he checks out an Android phone every couple of years, but for the most part he doesn't care what's going on outside the Apple ecosystem. And, that's fine. As a reader of Gruber, I read for his takes about Apple.

That's fair enough, I have occasionally read his blog over the years (mainly linked from other sites such as MacRumors). That's also how I saw how many scoops he's been given by them (because if they were actual leaks I'm sure he would have been cut off by now, knowing Apple's secrecy). But I don't remember him being this lyrical about Apple as he is here. However I used to be an Apple fan and Mac used to be my daily…

What lockdown is grating to you? I grew up on BSD multi-user systems and Apple things still look the same to me: crusty BSD with ancient coreutils in the terminal, nice rounded corners in the GUI.

What is the iPad-ification? Just the code signing stuff? I guess you can't write to /System anymore these days? And there's something about app notarization, but it doesn't really affect any of my uses.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#543

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

joakleaf wrote: post #509

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does depend on project scale, and what you're doing with it. A full compile of my project on my 2950X (16 core threadripper gen 1) takes 4m20s. If I'm messing around with a new GUI-visible feature, then yes, often it's 1 or 2 files to compile, then a link step (thank you, llc, for parallel linking). Anything can handle that, even if it is C++ :) But if I'm doing a change to the core headers, it typically means mul…

Yes. Agreed. Header files really kill productivity in C++ projects as they grow beyond 1-500.000 lines. I admit, sometimes I work around or postpone a fix in a vital header file, because I know it will initiate a recompile and undesired wait. I simply don't understand this isn't properly fixed after 30 or so years. It is so inefficient for developer time, cpu resources, and overall energy usage that it becomes ridicu…

It would involve somehow being able to identify changes that require compilation from those that don't. This is hard to do in C++.

At least waf (build system) ignores changes to comments :)

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#544

Post by Phrodo_00 » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

hsitz wrote: post #462

throwaway894345 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When iPhone came out in 2007, Android was still an OS for BlackBerry like devices. It didn't take long for Android to discover touch screens once Apple made it clear that they were dramatically better. Similarly, it's not like other ARM chip manufacturers are going to have to go through all of the same R&D expense to figure out how to make chips that are comparably fast--they just need to copy what Apple did without…

> When iPhone came out in 2007, Android was still an OS for BlackBerry like devices. When iPhone came out in 2007, Android did not even exist. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

How is that any true? From the article:

> An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007's Apple iPhone meant that Android "had to go back to the drawing board".

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#545

Post by dtech » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:53 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #534

erik wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rosetta 2 includes both ahead-of-time translation and run-time emulation. It can run x64 jit software for example.

The jit is run-time translation still - not run-time emulation.

Can you provide a definition that specifies the difference? The end result is identical: being able to run software compiled for foreign ISA.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#546

Post by xxpor » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

usefulcat wrote: post #455

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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/s…

Did Intel similarly threaten Apple? If not, why not? Even if they didn't know for sure exactly what Apple was up to with the M1, they surely could have speculated, as so many others did.

Doesn't the force behind that threat depend heavily on the outcome of Oracle v Google?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#547

Post by Skunkleton » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

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…

It is fair to lump Linux in there. Linux is supported on pretty much every largish Arm system other than Apples, at least if you include Android Linux. No other Arm system comes close to matching the M1 in terms of performance.

I don't think that is an indictment of Linux. It is likely if the specs for the M1 were released, Linux could wring more performance out of the M1 than MacOS. At least in some workloads.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#548

Post by andrewprock » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #532

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, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. That's because there are plenty of measurements published, which agree with the author, and disagree with the "another author".

The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above.

The insanely good thermals and 5mm process make M1 a great laptop, but middling performance and a lack of expansion only makes it decent mini-desktop for family use.

If the rumors of the M1x prove true, that might be the first real pro-level ARM CPU.

For pro-level performance, it's roughly matching AMD's three-year-old entry-level Ryzen 7 1700:

https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple%20M1,AMD%20R...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#549

Post by _jal » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #531

p1necone wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple did something truly revolutionary This is hyperbole. Apple has released a CPU that has very good perf/watt compared to it's current competition. That's it. This isn't revolutionary, it's just another incremental step in CPU improvements. Can we please give Apple praise for competing well in the hardware market without fully drinking the kool aid and parroting their marketing.

I would like the people downvoting you to explain why they think it's truly revolutionary. I just went back to reread the Tom's Hardware article on the chip, thinking I must have missed something, and I'm not seeing it. Full credit to Apple for incrementally improving their A-series processors over the last decade until they're good enough for laptops. But I'm not seeing that this makes anything fundamentally differe…

I would like people arguing the opposite to define "revolutionary".

The combination of the performance increase with the power and thermal efficiency in the first release for a laptop is the sort of improvement we haven't seen in a very long time.

> I'm not seeing that this makes anything fundamentally different

I guess we'll see. $1000 dollars buys a lot more laptop utility than it did a month ago, and the abrupt availability of a laptop with higher performance with far better battery life than anything else on the market has certainly gotten a lot of people's attention.

I'm not buying one[1], but I'm really curious to see the M2.

[1] I'm really torn, the atrophy of the Unix side of the OS and the increasing lockdown has frustrated me a lot. But the option of just running MacOS as a hypervisor that happens to run Photoshop may be just fine for me... I'll decide when the current machine dies.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#550

Post by p1necone » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

cellar_door wrote: post #292

romanoderoma wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But honestly, does it matter? People buying a threadripper today don't care about it. What matters to them it's the performance, my gf is a 3d artist, she doesn't care if some cpu consumes more or less power than another (when I say she doesn't care I mean she doesn't even know that CPU have very different power requirements), she needs the fastest gear she can buy on her budget. Apple M1s are not it. There are many…

> People buying Apple for its M1 low power consumption are a niche inside a niche. Got it, watching Netflix in Chrome without the laptop getting hot is "a niche inside a niche" while GPU intensive 3d graphics workflows are mainstream.

This is doable on practically anything. Talking about being powerful with low heat/power consumption implies heavier workloads than Netflix because otherwise the "powerful" part is irrelevant.

Of course I'm sure you can find laptops with terrible cooling design that would get uncomfortably hot watching Netflix, but there's plenty of thin and light laptops available for < $1000 that would do just fine too.