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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

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Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#901

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That’s because new Reddit is laden with ads and JS and crap. Try https://old.reddit.com

Or one of any third-party native iOS apps (Apollo[0] is my preference) that are both faster and feel better than the official app and mobile site. [0] https://apolloapp.io

I love Apollo but I am very annoyed that they don't allow side scrolling between posts. I just find that much easier to do and it somehow bothers me when I don't have it.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#902
post #377

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I didn’t buy the hype until I tested an actual M1. It exceeded the hype. It feels like when I was a kid and went from a 386SX to a Pentium at 4X the speed, except the M1 was also a quarter the power consumption. It’s the first time in a over a decade I’ve felt a revolutionary step forward in a chip and the only time it has ever come with less power. Process node is a factor but I find it hard to believe it’s the only…

> " Apple didn’t do black magic. [...] Other ARM manufacturers could equal or exceed the M1 if they wanted. " I see lots of people saying "If only $company had an ARM device", and I don't understand it. My experience of ARM device is slow laggy janky products - from competing smartphones, tablets, router and network device management interfaces, year on year, the pairing is always (arm + fucking slow). It's only Appl…

Who would buy it?

Apple is in a position where it can move swiftly and decisively. They have an army of software engineers who can port Apple's OS and associated Apps to a new architecture. They can force their entire ecosystem to move to a new architecture, and are emboldened by the fact that they've done it twice in the past (the first time they were more hesitant).

If Samsung wanted to pull down the latest Qualcomm ARM chip, slap a Macbook-sized heatsink on it, and go head-to-head with Wintel and Apple, they would fail. What are you gonna run? Linux? Some abortive version of Windows on ARM that doesn't support the vast number of x86 apps?

Even ChromeOS is missing barebones necessities like Photoshop, so professionals won't touch it. So the ChromeOS market is doomed (at present) to have "thin & light" and "long battery life" as it's only selling point.

I think we'll see M1-style ARM devices come out of the woodwork in 2021-2022, running ARM Windows and Linux and ChromeOS, simply to attempt to copy Apple. But I don't think they'll be as successful, simply because the apps aren't there, and no one can force developers to port to the new architecture as Apple can.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#903

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They could've done this with the iPad already, but have not shown any indication that they will do so. I suspect Apple don't want you to use your phone as a laptop replacement, they want you to buy one of their laptops.

> have not shown any indication that they will do so. I find it very suspicious that the new iPad has a 16GB RAM option. There's ~no use for that in iOS. Wouldn't be totally amazed if some sort of dual boot solution shows up at WWDC.

I'd love for that to be the case, although I think it's more likely they'll anounce a reverse catalyst - running macOS apps on iPadOS.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#904
post #849
post #227

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I can't ever imagine why manufactures of > don't use dates. Product lines 1 - 10. Bigger is better. A minimal number of qualifiers next to the numbers, ideally just 1 of them next to a product line number (Pro/Home/Hobby/Enterprise/whatever). Date, month and year format if you really want flexibility. OblioCorp Oblio 1 Home 2020.06. Oblio 10 Enterprise 2021.04. How hard is that? Not that hard, from where I'm standing…

Cars do this. BWM 3-series or WV Golf has existed with that same name since forever, despite getting smaller or generational upgrades every year. Enthusiasts refer to them by model year. Of course you also have the engine size as the final variable.

Nah. BMW used to have sane numbering, as did Mercedes. Nowadays its all made up bullshit. 28i? you might thing straight six 2.8 Liter, well its a 2.0 Turbo. M550d? 3 Liter. Merc E63? 6.2 Liter. Dont even get me started on Porshes non-turbo/electric Turbos, or Mercedes 4 door "coupes".

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#905

Why does Apple bother with the 13 inch MacBook Pro if it has the exact same processing power as the MacBook Air? Touch bar and 2 extra hours of battery life aren't enough to differentiate the two. My guess is that Apple does intend to differentiate the M line but hasn't been able to do it yet, for what reason I don't know.

The screen on the pro is slightly brighter as well.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#906
post #854
post #448

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An interesting realization that it could, though. Overwhelming majority of MacOS/iOS software is written on Obj C and Swift, which have the same underlying semantics. That said ARC doesn't have such a great impact on performance as some people (esp. fans of Java's GC etc.) would convince you. Most ++/-- operations on the refcount are eliminated by the compiler.

Some fans do measure, and know the difference from marketing and reality in regards to tracing GC versus reference counting marketing material. https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages

Wallclock time isn't the only performance metric to care about. ObjC had a GC in the past and lost it in favor of ARC for a reason; it's a poor fit for iPhone-sized devices.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#907

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> " Apple didn’t do black magic. [...] Other ARM manufacturers could equal or exceed the M1 if they wanted. " I see lots of people saying "If only $company had an ARM device", and I don't understand it. My experience of ARM device is slow laggy janky products - from competing smartphones, tablets, router and network device management interfaces, year on year, the pairing is always (arm + fucking slow). It's only Appl…

Who would buy it? Apple is in a position where it can move swiftly and decisively. They have an army of software engineers who can port Apple's OS and associated Apps to a new architecture. They can force their entire ecosystem to move to a new architecture, and are emboldened by the fact that they've done it twice in the past (the first time they were more hesitant). If Samsung wanted to pull down the latest Qualcom…

Microsoft built Windows kernel to have different backends (Itanium, ARM) and different front ends (Win32, Windows Subsystem for Linux), they make Hyper-V and did a "run your old apps in a Win 7 VM" for a while, they've pushed .Net since the early 2000s where the intermediate code isn't so tied to hardware. They could plausibly have done something for compatibility like Apple does with Rosetta.

Thing about your comment is "Who would buy it" assumes it's basically the same and people are indifferent. My griping is assuming ARM is generally worse. But if we take this alternate world seriously then the reason for ARM is superior performance, so the answer to "who would buy it" and "why would developers switch" is driven by that - like when Apple was falling behind with PowerPC - it wouldn't be Microsoft pushing it on an unwanting market, it would be a demanding market pulling it with demand.

If Samsung could push a better-than-Intel chip, would Microsoft not want a piece of it?

If Samsung Chromebooks were suddenly more powerful than an Intel i7, would developers not sit up and take notice?

My contention is they can't, because ARM isn't that different, and it's Apple's black magic that is the real difference.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#908
post #821

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The worst case performance is very bad though. I have done some playing around with pushing Swift in terms of performance, and it's very hard because of ARC.

Code in the fastpath must not generate substantial garbage whether using ARC or a gc. That's just a coding error.

It's ok to generate garbage if it goes away immediately; that's essentially a stack allocation. Performance problems come up when you have a mix of lifetimes. (that slows GCs down and causes heap fragmentation outside copying GCs)

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#909

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Yep and take computer from 2001 and run it in 2011, you wouldn't have been nearly as happy with the performance. There have been incremental upgrades but mostly just the core count which is great for handling server stuff but not nearly as noticeable as Hz counts increases

The other main improvement in the past 10 years is the power draw. You can get more than 10 hours of battery life in a machine that weighs less than 3 lbs. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago. CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.

If you took the small 2010 macbook air and doubled the size of its battery you'd be extremely close to 10 hours and 3 pounds, so I wouldn't go with "unthinkable".

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#910
post #687
post #469

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You can't forget that there are multiple variants of i3, i5 and i7 every year! And presumably now the i9 but I haven't been paying attention. 6400 6500 6600 6600 k random assortment of numbers and letters! It hardly works! The consumer still has to do just as much work!

It's even worse these days. There are letters in the middle of the model name, e.g. i7-1165G7, not just at the beginning and end! That thing doesn't even sort. You have no idea where to position it without seeing the spec sheet and Passmark scores. We consumers have it easy, though. Go find some Xeon or EPYC model numbers and try to figure out which digit means what. They make absolutely no sense.

> You have no idea where to position it without seeing the spec sheet and Passmark scores.

You can probably get pretty far by adding the 3/5/7 to the generation number and sorting by the sum.

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