Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by crossroadsguy » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #216

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.

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

This is so true. My work kept providing latest Macs at excellent configurations and those Macs kept getting slow very fast :)

Also, Apple’s buggy releases (which is tradition now[0]) didn’t really help.

0. Apple essentially stopped fixing bugs and they just release another buggy OS in a year or so with a new name and changes that break everything.

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

#572

Post by moneywoes » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #312

flohofwoe wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

I feel like things have felt pretty good in the PC world since NVMe SSDs and approximately Sandy Bridge. But, I do agree that there is a lot of jank in software that we write these days. Over the weekend I started writing an application that uses glfx + dear imgui, running on a 360Hz monitor. The lack of latency was incredible. I think it's something that people don't even know is possible, so they don't even attempt…

Are nvmes noticeable over say a sata ssd

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

#573

Post by edrxty » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #561

edrxty wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly the design of the core, partly the open source nature. Speaking from experience, it's really hard to push the envelope with ARM chips as they refuse to license them for FPGA deployments so there's not a lot of work being done there.

What stops anyone from implementing ARM ISA on FPGA? If you think of an ISA like an API - that's something that is not copyrightable, so in theory anyone could do ARM on FPGA. So I am guessing that nobody wants to bear the cost of such development and also risking potential lawsuit?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. There's no real upside and you risk a lawsuit. There are plenty of other ISAs that will work and are licensable for FPGA development

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

#574

Post by judge2020 » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

enos_feedler wrote: post #467

nexuist wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over…

"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…

We might get something on-par from a Samsung fab: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-exynos-with-amd-rd...

(ryzen APUs are due for a facelift in the graphics department)

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

#575

Post by _carbyau_ » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #477

nexuist wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It logically makes sense for Windows to move to ARM as well at this point. They already ported it with Windows RT, and now all they have to do is provide a translation layer like Rosetta and release the full Windows experience (instead of the locked down version RT was).

But there's no M1 chip equivalent for PC's. It's fine to have an ARM version of Windows but there's no equivalently high-performance ARM chip to run it on. Unless you're talking about Bootcamp on Macs.

Any reason why Intel and AMD can't do an ARM chip?

I have a vague tickle in my memory that both Intel and AMD have dabbled in ARM before.

Even if they don't assign large production volumes to it now, they could still have a design team working on it for a contingency plan.

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

#576

Post by greggman3 » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

heipei wrote: post #431

inDigiNeous wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that Electron apps are inherently somehow slow is starting to bug me out. While writing Electron version of our graphics heavy web application, I noticed that the memory usage or CPU consumption is not a lot higher than some other native applications. We have taken careful care in order to write fast and memory friendly javascript if possible, avoiding using slow features of the language (the list is long,…

I'm a self-taught JavaScript developer (front- and back-end) and I would love to read such a blog post. I mostly use language features for their expressiveness (map, filter, forEach) and rarely think about their performance implication unless there is reason to believe some piece of code is in a performance-critical path. However with a guide I might reconsider some scenarios where I'd be willing to give up expressiv…

A blog post would be nice. You can also test

https://jsbenchit.org/?src=708dfb8b9bbfe885f5495f74179fdb72

https://jsbenchit.org/?src=f0fd4a14ff9a7049d88f57e0fd45b865

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

#577

Post by judge2020 » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

enos_feedler wrote: post #467

nexuist wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over…

"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…

In a space that requires, quite literally, a decade of good product development plus investing a trillion dollars to make a product that can compete with other companies that have already invested a trillion dollars, it's only natural that there be very few competitors in the market, and they're all competing on different things so they can still make a profit [apple only builds for their own products so they can go the console route and make money on the backend; intel/amd do general purpose computing and thus relatively low-margin but wide market-share; nvidia only does GPUs and server stuff because they can specialize in it very well).

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

#578

Post by mixmastamyk » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #562

mixmastamyk wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You added detail, yet didn't refute the statement. That it isn't easy to simply and specifically turn off is not acceptable.

No, I'm fairly certain I refuted it. The parent comment is incorrectly stating that each request to Apple is checking a binary, and it's not. This has been well documented both here on HN and across the web.

That's not the definition of refute. The distinction between a lazy-implied always and merely often is pedantic. The point is that it happens enough to reduce performance, while doing something no end-user asked for and is difficult, if not impossible to disable without reducing other security protections.

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

#579

Post by doogerdog » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #200

sgt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing about TV's is that they are grainy up close. Being a 55" you probably don't sit very close to it, but how does it overall feel e.g. in font quality? And I also wonder if it's good for your eyes to focus on something that's constantly far away. I would think a mixture of the two (normal distance to a PC monitor with frequent breaks) would be preferred.

> how does it overall feel e.g. in font quality? > they are grainy up close Hmm, maybe it's its "TV-ness", but the individual pixels look pretty sharp to me at a close look (no quantum dots or weird pentile arrangement, that should definitely be looked out for), but I have no other low DPI display to compare it to. My reasoning was always "it's just an LCD panel, why would it be different" and so far I feel proven ri…

A year ago I was looking to get a big screen for my iMac Pro. I looked at many monitors in the 40" range, then on a whim I put my 55" LG OLED TV on my desk 30" from my face and hooked it up. Wow, it is better and easier on the eyes than any monitor I have had. I had planned to use it beside the iMac screen, but now I just mirror to the TV and have the iMac under my desk. I have used dual monitors for decades but I like one big one better.

I run it at 3840 x 2160 and use a trackball to get around. I like it a lot. LCD TV screens do not work well extremely close up but an OLED is fine even at 12" away. Text in the corner of an LCD TV is dim and poorly defined but on an OLED it is just like it would be on a 55" sheet of paper.

Of course I was concerned that the OLED screen would burn in, but it was an older TV so I took a chance.

Most days the computer and TV are on for about 12 hours. I have run them like this for 14 months now. There is no burn in at all. The overall brightness is slowly declining, but it has been doing that since I got it in 2016. (LG OLED55B6P)

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

#580

Post by judge2020 » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

headgasket wrote: post #568

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…

It exists, but not everywhere... I think Kirin was close to being on par for a while, it might even have been dangerous? With regards to privacy ? Plus there must have been some serious PLA money involved... anyway now this ARM cpu cannot be fabbed by TMSC because of the sanctions.

If that even happens, chances are the current industry leaders already know about it and are building their own variants to prevent an extinction event. Maybe that technology is more wearables like AR glasses but even that is probably going to be eaten by Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/22/apple-glasses-sony-oled...