761–770 of 1001 posts
So, if I install numpy via conda on a Mac now, it's backed by Intel MKL and is thus amazingly fast. What will it be replaced with? Has anyone at Apple thought about use cases like this?..
Rosetta 2 - the interesting bit was that it was going to pre-translate binaries instead of at runtime. The implications for actual VM emulation is that Rosetta won't work for run time environments like OS emulation. They touched on it briefly with the emulation technologies bit, but it looks like it will be separate from, and likely much less performant than Rosetta.
They explicitly said that it can perform both static and dynamic translation for JITs. I wouldn't be surprised if there is substantial hardware support too.
Can a JIT be static? Isn't that not possible by definition?
For me as a developer by far the biggest concern is definitely technical alignment with production infrastructure. It has been such a boon in the last few years to be able to fire up docker and run to such a large extent the exact stack that ships to production. It's very unclear to me how close an alignment it will now be possible to have on future MacBook Pro's in this way. Between that and lack of nVidia support,…
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I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.
> I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers. Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less. Shareholders benefit from i…
While they won't be competing with Chromebooks for general education use cases, I could very well see Apple trying to upsell schools on a $599 alternative that happens to run GarageBand, iMovie, and even XCode.
Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac. That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine. They intended to go all in with ARM. i.e There will be a Mac Pro with High TDP ARM Chip. I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel. Qu…
That conclusion seems a bit too far fetched from my point of view. There are many users that use Logic on a MBP and with Photoshop it's even more common to use it on a Laptop.
Sooner or later a ARM MacPro is comming but if i'd had to guess i'd say that will take a while. There were 6 years between trashcan and the current cheese grater. So maybe 2025 then ;)
I really wonder what this says about the x86 platform going forward. Mobile completely passed it by. I’ve been seeing more hype about ARM servers for a while with AWS Graviton instances, the new #1 supercomputer in the TOP500, etc. And of course today we see that Apple plans to transition their Macs to their own ARM chips. Even Microsoft made an ARM-based Windows/Surface product but it didn’t seem to amount to much.…
x86 is only dead because CISC is dead. Now we just have to wait for Intel to go "full IBM" and try to ban people from writing emulators...
Think about the iPhone SE and how it is supposed to strengthen Apple bottom line on the long run, its more about the recurrent revenue from services than the one shot from hardware.
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> Logic Pro Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble. But I've been too pessimistic before.
> Logic isn't worth much without plugins… Rosetta 2 cross-compiles Intel binaries to ARM. Why would VST/AU plug-in binaries be an exception?
So, if I install numpy via conda on a Mac now, it's backed by Intel MKL and is thus amazingly fast. What will it be replaced with? Has anyone at Apple thought about use cases like this?..
In the Platforms State of the Union, they specifically listed Numpy as one of the open source projects that they built for Apple Silicon (along with Python 3 and others). Go to 20 minutes and 35 seconds on that video.
However Apple comes across as cruel when they make decisions like these, which break software distributability of things like native machine learning code. For example one build system that enables that use case is: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
At best these new POWER or ARM architecture Apple PCs are going to be like a C-class Mercedes. So I'm honestly not that concerned. Having distributable open source executables support them shouldn't be that difficult, it's just that it'd add bloat and require trading away important parts of Von Neumman architecture, such as self-modifying code, in order to be done easily.
If Apple wasn't being goofballs, they would have taken into consideration that the x86_64 patents should expire around this year, so Apple could have just as easily adapted the POWER design of which IBM divested themselves, to support x86, by simply bolting on a code morphing layer like Xed. Since it'd be pretty great to be able to buy an Apple PC that doesn't have MINIX lurking inside the chip, without making tradeoffs that could be most accurately described as breaking open source software to save money.