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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#851

Post by sliken »

ekianjo wrote: post #208
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…

> But I think the overarching point is true: now desktop and laptop makers can't just pretend that having a hot and/or slow, clunky, noisy x86-based architecture is just a fact of life. I hope and expect that it'll help create a new generation of ARM-based laptops and maybe even desktops that will run cool and smooth. Be careful what you wish for. X86 is the most open architecture right now. ARM, on the other hand, h…

The apple M1's don't have locked bootloaders, there's a warning in the firmware about enabling unsigned booting, but it's just warning. That's why there's an attempted linux port underway.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#852

Post by sliken »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #397
ogre_codes wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both of these took considerably longer to get mainline support that your average x86 hardware needs. Not sure what you are thinking here. It's taken 25 years so far and we still have tons of x86 hardware which isn't supported well in Linux. There is a reason Dell ships a specific laptop for developers with Linux pre-installed.

> There is a reason Dell ships a specific laptop for developers with Linux pre-installed. And yet, even Windows DELL laptops are more likely to run mainline Linux than any average ARM SoC, even including the ones targeted at developers. I am no fan of x86, but trading what we have now for an M1 is a net loss in terms of our ability to install anything we want as users, no question.

Well there's two issues there. One is if the bootloader is open, which it is.

The second is if there's linux port for that hardware, which it isn't. There's a project underway, seems likely that the CPU (which is still AARCH64) will work, and likely networking. However to make a usable desktop you'll need a GPU which is much harder.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#853

Post by jeffkeen »

sushisource wrote: post #535
jeffkeen wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that way. I'm not trying to have an argument here, but I've never really understood what is the "exactly how you want" that Mac OS doesn't provide? Would you mind sharing some details? Is it just a matter of not being familiar with the places to change the defaults to something more to your liking, or is it actuall…

To some extent you're totally right. I can elaborate. Some of it are technical choices Apple has made that make things hard. I like tiling window managers. The best (only?) one for OSX now requires you to go disable SIP to use it: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... -- this wouldn't be the case if Apple cared at all to support these sorts of use-cases, but they don't, so it suffers collate…

I'm actually right there with you with your development related digs on Apple. They're draconian, and it's only gotten worse in the Tim Cook era. The major beef I've had with them the last decade are the whole slew of absurd (imo) hardware/design decisions and tiny oversights that never would've flown under the old Apple. Losing the headphone port to get a slightly thinner phone nobody was asking for? Shipping those damn butterfly keyboards? Ditching MagSafe power cords for "USB C everywhere" (but not on phones and not all usb C cables are power cables)? Pushing the Touch Bar like it’s the solution to everything when it solves nothing? Da fuq? I could go on. Just one silly thing after the other while I imagine them all patting themselves on the back for a job well done while watching that money pour in. And the prices! Macs were always expensive but damn did this last set of Pro level laptops and desktops get stupid expensive.

It's almost like they put a numbers guy in the CEO role of a formerly design obsessed company and the metric turned from "is this insanely great?" to "will this get us to the _next_ trillion dollars?"

So yeah, as a lifelong Apple user I've had some major beef. There's plenty to complain about. But with that all being said, I’ve been pretty happy experience and productivity wise running an old 2013 MacBook Pro and and a tiny iPhone SE and never considered leaving the Apple ecosystem, because honestly… what’s the alternative? Windows feels like nonsense to me, Google is privacy nightmare, and going full Linux feels like… work. I'm sure it would be possible to carve out a nice system and find some linux gui that doesn't look like complete garbage, tweak my settings just right, and find all the free versions of the apps I need. But at the end of the day I don't think I'd get that "it just works" feeling I still get with Mac OS—for me I'd think it'd feel like a successfully completed science project.

So for me, even at their worst, Apple is still best. And this M1 news and the new iPhone form factors (the 12 mini, specifically) has given me some hope that maybe they haven't completely lost their way.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#854

Post by dang »

tambourine_man wrote: post #850
dang wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sorry—I know it's frustrating when a later submission 'wins'. The reason we allow reposts of articles that haven't had significant attention yet is that it's largely random what happens to get noticed on /newest, and we want to allow good articles multiple rolls of the dice. The priority is on the article, not who submitted it. That does make it a bit of a lottery, and it's winner-take-all. There are definitely…

Are people really harvesting links on /newest? You guys should know better of course, but I always thought what drove an article to the top was multiple people submitting the same link. That was my reasoning for a 24h window defining a submission. As for karma inflation, it's an interesting concept, but I don't know if I'd like that :)

I don't know what you mean by harvesting links on /newest. Can you explain?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#855

Post by sliken »

the_af wrote: post #120
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…

> I want to believe. If we can end up with superfast, supercool ARM-based Linux laptops, that'd be a huge deal :)

Contribute to the Linux -> Apple M1 projects, I have.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#856

Post by sliken »

ekianjo wrote: post #620
qppo wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the market for Linux-only laptops is pretty small. but growing more today than it was a few years ago because of the prevalence of Chromebooks in education. Many of which run ARM CPUs!

Most recent Chromebooks are intel-based these days.

Indeed, at least they are running linux though.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#857

Post by sliken »

ianhowson wrote: post #540
alwillis wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>M1 is using standard LPDDRx. >It's not "very high performance". AnandTech disagrees with you: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... Besides the additional cores on the part of the CPUs and GPU, one main performance factor of the M1 that differs from the A14 is the fact that’s it’s running on a 128-bit memory bus rather than the mobile 64-bit bus. Across 8x 16-bit memory channels and at LPDD…

Anandtech is comparing M1 vs A14. It's high performance for a cellphone part. Dual channel DDR3L or DDR4L also has a 128 bit bus. 4200MHz DDR4 is clocked on the high side for most laptops, sure, but it's hardly unusual. Run the numbers and you get the exact same throughput figure as for M1, which isn't surprising, because we're just taking width * rate = throughput. So I'll repeat my assertion, downvotes be damned: t…

I've seen latencies when pointer chasing (in a relatively TLB friendly pattern) of 30-34ns. Have you seen similar elsewhere?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#858

Post by sliken »

formerly_proven wrote: post #209
zionic wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper.

The M1 core is roughly on par with the Zen 3 core, so how exactly would an 8 core part manage to embarrass a 64 core Zen 2 part?

Depending on the benchmark the M1 wins at per core vs the Zen3. The threadripper is substantially behind at per core performance with the Zen2.

The apple also has twice as many memory channels (8 vs 4) and runs the memory significantly faster (4266 vs 3200).

The m1 also has about half the latency to main memory.

So for highly random workloads that aren't cache friendly I'd expect the M1 to win.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#859

Post by haberman »

buran77 wrote: post #814
haberman wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Developer Mode" exists in many new devices, eg. Chromebooks, Oculus Quest, Android phones.

There's a difference between swapping or adding any of the many standardized components you want or installing pretty much any operating system you can think of on your PC, compared to enabling "developer mode" on an Oculus Quest. The fact that so many people casually say how a platform is open or flexible because if you jump through enough hoops you get to make some minor modifications to your device, or applauding…

My understanding is that developer mode on Android and Chromebook will unlock the bootloader. Software wise, that's about as user-hackable as you can get. It's true that the Oculus Quest is not as open.

I don't expect or even really want to swap hardware on these devices: if that was a priority for me I would get a PC, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc. I get the desire to tinker and customize, but from where I'm sitting I have plenty of opportunity to do that.

I also don't expect the device manufacturers to do the work to make Ubuntu or FreeBSD run. They didn't do that for PCs, the community did.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#860

Post by tambourine_man »

dang wrote: post #854
tambourine_man wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people really harvesting links on /newest? You guys should know better of course, but I always thought what drove an article to the top was multiple people submitting the same link. That was my reasoning for a 24h window defining a submission. As for karma inflation, it's an interesting concept, but I don't know if I'd like that :)

I don't know what you mean by harvesting links on /newest. Can you explain?

Sorry, I meant that I for one don’t go to /newest often.

And I didn’t imagine it was what drove most links to the top of the homepage. I always thought that many people submitting the same URLs was more influential.

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