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Apple Mac Studio

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Re: Apple Mac Studio

#721

Post by FireBeyond »

nebula8804 wrote: post #231
gzer0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Parallels? It works incredibly well on the M1 macs. https://www.parallels.com/

They may be referring to the Non-Arm Windows. Let me tell you Parallels running Windows ARM is the snappiest Windows experience I have had in years....only problem is that its Windows 11 :/ Really wish there was someway to easily run Windows 7 or 8 on this thing. It would be bliss. Now that Windows XP Source has been leaked, maybe we can come together as a community, try to harden the OS and make it forward compatibl…

It'd also be extremely problematic, akin to the challenges of clean room implementations, to build software around leaked source code.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#722

Post by can16358p »

mekster wrote: post #688
can16358p wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 Epic (late 2022) M1 Ludicrous (early 2023) M1 Insane (late 2023) Probably they'll make enough changes to release M2 by that time.

> M1 Epic Will Epic add that naming to its case?

Probably. Might want to claim a 30% cut from sales of hardware with that chip.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#723

Post by dexterdog »

pdpi wrote: post #487
dexterdog wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people listened to that advice Apple's stock price would be cut in half. 99% of Mac users can get along fine with the base m1 models.

I'v seen (more than once) Apple Store employees push people away from higher-end devices, or from buying devices altogether (happened with me) when they didn't think the bigger sticker price would serve the customer well, so at least apple is happy to give that same advice to their own customers.

That may be because they don't carry most upgraded models and they want to push stock on hand.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#724

Post by paulmd »

slapslash wrote: post #627
httpsterio wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about my PS/2 keyboard and mouse?

I can send you an adapter for USBA.

Tangent: it's a personal pet peeve that Model M buckling-spring keyboards often pull too much power for modern PCs. This is particularly apparent with the PS/2-to-USB adapters but also happens with some PCs using "native" PS/2 connection. And then I got a fancy Unicomp Model M with native USB connection and... that does it too.

That was on a Dell desktop I had at a previous job. Not sure if it was just kinda crappy, or whether the inrush current on those Model Ms is just that big.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#725

Post by runeks »

forgotmyoldacc wrote: post #528
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect will perform better on standard benchmarks. I wouldn't be so sure about that. These M1 chips have some crazy benchmark performance. What they don't have, is a standard x86 ISA, which means that a lot of applications run emulated (and still tend to beat many Intel specs, anyway). I keep reading people complaining that "It's faster, but not that much faster. What's the big deal?", when they are talking abou…

Geekbench scores came out, The Epyc 7443p scored 27461, M1 Ultra scored 24055 on multi-core. Geekbench uses ARM-native for Mac M1 iirc.

So given the Epyc has 24 cores versus 16 cores for the M1 Ultra, the Epyc has roughly 75% of the single core performance of an M1 Ultra and 115% the multi-core performance.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#726

Post by xwowsersx »

eertami wrote: post #643
TameAntelope wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience at all, docker works just fine on this M1 Mac Mini, and I use docker heavily.

A test suite that takes under 2m to run under Linux docker takes over 4m when I run it on the M1. Yet the M1 is marginally faster than this i7-1185g7. For regular development reloading apps etc it's similarly sluggish. "Just fine" sure, but that time adds up. The M1 is an interesting CPU, but OSX is less popular than Linux for software development. Apple working to support Linux on the M1 would increase sales, though…

Mac is perfectly fine for heavy Docker usage in my experience. Also OSX is extremely popular for software development. Be interested to see data that corroborates your assertions.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#727

Post by krunkcoin »

bredren wrote: post #140
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Mac Pro is almost like a phantom product at this point. Or a riff. Like they're going to say "the new Mac Pro is there is no more Mac Pro". What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio? How are they going to bring developers along when most aren't developing for twenty-core machines? I still think something else is coming. Maybe something unconventionally stackable. Som…

It has been a phantom product, because Apple has needed to fill major gaps in the desktop space first. I suspect Apple is set to debut powerful revision to the Mac Pro focused on AI/ML at WWDC. I wrote about this 10 months back[0], and it still applies following Studio: > It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "comp…

"There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019. Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3] It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon."

---

You don't understand what Afterburner is, and as a result have read far too much significance into it, and haven't noticed that they've already moved on even before the new Mac Pro is out.

Afterburner isn't a "graphics card". It's just a FPGA on a PCIe x16 expansion card. Although in principle you could download an arbitrary bitstream to the FPGA and use it for a really wide variety of purposes, in practice Apple uses it for exactly one function: accelerating ProRes. That's Apple's proprietary low-loss video codec designed for use in video editing software, most notably their own Final Cut package.

They needed Afterburner in the Intel Mac Pro because they didn't want to burn CPU cores on a software ProRes codec, and none of the silicon available in the Intel/AMD/Nvidia ecosystem offers a hardware ProRes codec.

They don't need Afterburner in Apple Silicon Macs because they simply integrated a ProRes codec into M1 Pro/Max/Ultra. I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to share a lot of source code between the two implementations. The M1 version is lots faster than the Afterburner version, which isn't surprising when you know about the penalties FPGAs pay for being reprogrammable in the field.

I suspect the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra project came first, and the Afterburner port was a quick side project. To me, it's not implausible that it's a dead end, instead that's just about all it can be.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#728

Post by krunkcoin »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #442
quirino wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they do create another chip for the Mac Pro, I wonder what they'll call it. We have the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra so far.

I’m surprised they’ve introduced four M1 variants already, and while that makes a fifth variant seem more likely… I still think they’ll want to find another way to differentiate the new Mac Pro. What seems more likely to me: the M2 MBA is released either in tandem with a M2 Ultra MP, or a few months ahead of it, and the other higher spec models will lag 6-12 months behind from then on. Especially given the significan…

re: four M1 variants, the clever thing is that from a certain perspective, they've only designed two. It's just that one of those two (M1 Max) was designed such that it could be scaled down down to M1 Pro and up to M1 Ultra.

On scaling down, they simply designed and laid out M1 Max such that half the GPU cores, memory controllers, and media encoders were divisible from the rest of the chip, with the interface between the two a clean, straight cut line. To make M1 Pro masks, they likely just took the M1 Max mask artwork, cropped it, and did minor cleanup on the cropped edge to terminate all the dangling connections.

To make M1 Ultra, they just "glue" two M1 Max die together with advanced packaging and interconnect technology. Every M1 Max ships with an unused die-to-die interconnect block along one edge of the chip.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#729

Post by krunkcoin »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #379
tonguez wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 mini with 16GB RAM (most possible RAM): $1100 entry studio: $2000 That's a pretty big gap. Basically it means you have to shell out $2000+ if you want to do video editing on any M1 mac. Buying a brand new computer to do video editing that has only 16GB RAM in 2022 is unjustifiable. $2k+ is too much for most people especially young "creatives" that are making entertainment (videos). Lots of people here make hundred…

> 16GB RAM in 2022 is unjustifiable. MacOS on ARM handles memory differently, try it you might like it. They can only print so many M1max chips at a time, they want to sell them in a high margin machine. Give em a year and the M1max will trickle down to the mini.

"MacOS on ARM handles memory differently, try it you might like it."

The only sense in which this claim is true is that macOS on Arm uses a 16KiB page size, while macOS on Intel uses a 4KiB page size. This is actually less space efficient (more wasted RAM due to partially filled pages), although it has performance benefits (N CPU TLB entries cover 4x as much RAM).

If you needed 32GB RAM to avoid swapping on Intel hardware, you still do. There isn't anything which profoundly reduces memory use. Arm Mac hardware does tend to perform lots better while swapping than Intel, which fools some into thinking it is using less memory, but it isn't.

(The reasons for the better performance: one, Apple put in a hardware accelerator block for the memory compression feature which allows macOS to sometimes avoid swapping to disk, so light swapping which only invokes the compression-based pager is faster. And two, the SSD controllers integrated into Apple Silicon are sometimes much faster than the SSDs in the Intel Macs they replaced.)

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#730

Post by vaxman »

kube-system wrote: post #211
hughrr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. So much this. Getting what we need not what Jony says we needed.

Jony contributed what he could. I think Apple is better off for having had him for a period of time, but that time has passed.

"Jony" was reportedly there forever and still influences the joint and previously had designed bathroom fixtures. To his credit, I think he did okay until the transition to magnesium and "al-u-min-ium" (lol) All he had to do was drill some fucking holes in his designs and they wouldn't have become component ovens. But also Apple was a bit of a struggling hardware company when that happened and this was an effective means of generating revenue from the loyal UX devotes, so I'm not sure this was entirely unintentional, at least until they got burned by trying to hold nVidia to the actual thermal specs.
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