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Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

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Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#541

Post by astrange »

monocasa wrote: post #515
astrange wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that’s fine, RAM is supposed to be full. You’re wasting it if it’s not full. If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps. (which tends to come up way too late, but whatever)

> If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps. Yes, she was getting both. To the point that I asked her to keep activity monitor running in the background so we could see who the problem applications were. I'm not sure why this is in question.

Because "physical memory" being high in Activity Monitor doesn't actually tell you things that cause that dialog to appear. (Unfortunately.) That and a 1GB Firefox tab isn't quite enough to do it.

If "compressed" or "swap space" approach 32GB+/64GB+ (depends on amount of physical memory installed) that can do it, but running out of disk space is a more common problem.

Of course, quitting the top app in the memory list probably is going to fix the issue.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#542

Post by jolux »

monocasa wrote: post #413
jolux wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s accurate, because Docker on macOS involves virtualization. And Teams is the worst resource hog I’ve used. Though I don’t use Office or social media much (Twitter occasionally) so maybe that’s it.

> because Docker on macOS involves virtualization Go check out the resource usage. Yes, it involves virtualization, but the stripped down virtualized kernel uses very little resources. Getting that information is a bit complicated by the fact that it's difficult to see the difference between the virtualized kernel and it's applications in a way that's consistent with the host OS, but it's really in the dozens of mega…

I guess I should say I don't disbelieve that your mother in law was having problems with the memory in her computer, I just find it baffling because I use mine extremely heavily and my RAM usage rarely peaks like 12GB.

Just to check, I opened simultaneous projects in Logic Pro and Ableton Live, I have a Rust project open in VSCode (Electron), compiling Erlang again, I have Slack, Discord, Signal, and Hey running (all Electron apps), and I have Firefox open with Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook (a dozen tabs, just for good measure), Instagram, FBM, Techmeme, NYTimes, CNN, and MSNBC. This is a 15" 2018 MBP with a 6-core i7 and 16GB of RAM, and the CPU is working pretty hard but RAM usage is currently at just over 12GB.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#543

Post by xvilka »

Jetrel wrote: post #462
whatever1 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that 90% of my pc resources are consumed to execute JavaScript code. If we need dedicated hardware to execute this more efficiently so be it. We do it anyway for so many other domains. Video, graphics, encryption etc.

One of the big deals with electron-et-al is that we're not married to JavaScript , really; we're married to "the DOM and css" as our gui, and things like FF/Chrome/Safari devtools to develop that gui. Most javascript developers are already using babel-et-al pipelines to build electron apps, which are already transpiling between major variants of javascript, and I wouldn't at all surprised to see a thing where it gets…

WebAssembly is just another JVM which is notoriously slow for GUI compared to the native alternatives like Qt.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#544

Post by [deleted] »

dmix wrote: post #488
enos_feedler wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The opportunity for competition exists" is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, inves…

There's already multiple billion dollar companies trying to compete and get to where Apple's at. Apple has the lead now but they wont forever. They never do. I don't see what the big deal is here. Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#545

Post by culturestate »

jakeva wrote: post #328
culturestate wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt Apple will release an official eGPU system They already have one[1], and you can even buy eGPUs from the Apple Store[2]. 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544 2. https://www.apple.com/sg/shop/product/HM8Y2B/A/blackmagic-eg...

That's a Radeon Pro 580, AFAIK this eGPU offering hasn't been updated in several years.

That specific one is, yes, but you can also buy third party Thunderbolt 3 sleds (eg Razer makes one) and use more recent cards.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#546

Post by monocasa »

astrange wrote: post #541
monocasa wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps. Yes, she was getting both. To the point that I asked her to keep activity monitor running in the background so we could see who the problem applications were. I'm not sure why this is in question.

Because "physical memory" being high in Activity Monitor doesn't actually tell you things that cause that dialog to appear. (Unfortunately.) That and a 1GB Firefox tab isn't quite enough to do it. If "compressed" or "swap space" approach 32GB+/64GB+ (depends on amount of physical memory installed) that can do it, but running out of disk space is a more common problem. Of course, quitting the top app in the memory lis…

I literally just confirmed that she was getting force quit messages.

I had to have her leave activity monitor open in the corner because it was running so slow it wouldn't open.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#547

Post by valuearb »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #244
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no silicon architect but isn't this why performance is so good? They can cut out all those extra pcie lanes and extraneous stuff and focus on performance. If you start adding back big I/O won't you just be back down to Earth with everyone else?

Not really. The main reason the M1 doesn't have good IO is that it's a beefed up ipad CPU. This was the first generation where they were putting the chips in systems that can use IO, so they probably are just behind on the design for those parts of the chip.

What do you mean the M1 doesn't have good IO?

A 1 Tb Mini with all the SSD write lines benchmarked at

Write: 2,983 MB/Sec Read: 2,710 MB/Sec

That's as fast or faster than Intel Macs, and way higher than most PC SSDs.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#548

Post by floatingatoll »

kumarvvr wrote: post #156

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

Most server infrastructure isn’t designed to be efficient to the degree that Apple’s OS is. I think until we see a significant increase in datacenter power costs due to carbon neutral, we’ll start to see developers focusing more on ekeing out the most performance per watt. Apple’s been doing that for decades and has dragged developers along, kicking and screaming about the upgrade cycle, until they reached today’s pinnacle M1 chip and macOS and iPadOS. The unixy community has refused for years to use macOS APIs unless commanded to by Apple, and only the upgrade to TLS 1.3 finally started compelling app developers to bundle OpenSSL (rather than use SecureTransport), and open source server-type developer adoption of Metal and MLKit and whatever the HTTP request library is (I forgot, sorry) is essentially nonexistent. So the apps that “server infrastructure” might use M1 for are, bluntly, not equipped to perform very well on M1 today.

I’ll know that Apple is a serious contender for datacenters when PHP is updated to use native macOS APIs when running on macOS, because that’s a great litmus test for whether open source is ready to compromise on “generic computing is king” in favor of “high-performance OS APIs for specific hardware platforms”. I’m not holding my breath, and I don’t think most open source projects are willing or able to either decide to take these steps or actually deliver on any such intent. Apple seems content to offer rackmount macOS and that’s more than sufficient for serious businesses that need serious amounts of Apple-accelerated hardware. But I don’t consider most “Internet cloud server” businesses to need that, and I don’t see the developers of our clouds as being willing to give up their dylib freedoms in exchange for higher performance per watt.

EDIT: Think of M1 as a hardware platform dedicated to code that's been ported to Apple’s microkernel, if that helps any. Yeah, it’s not “micro”, in theory; except they run a stripped-down iOS on their HDMI dongle (yes, seriously), so clearly they’re quite capable of “micro” kernel. More on kernels today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26954547

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#549

Post by brigade »

astrange wrote: post #487
meepmorp wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an LG 5k, too! And it only happens on that monitor - my LG 4k over HDMI is fine.

It's because the 5K monitor is actually two monitors taped together ("multi-stream transport").

It is two streams but it actually isn’t MST. It’s two independent HBR2 links; MST would have been two streams over one HBR2 link, which doesn’t have the bandwidth for 5k.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#550

Post by busymom0 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #156

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

I think Apple's been making major leaps in hardware but slow as a turtle when it comes to software. iPad is restricted by the software despite having the best hardwares in its category. Really wish they would pay some attention to it.
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