Earlier quoted context omitted.
This eventual sluggishness is due to inevitable OS rot. I bought a brand new MBP in 2017 and it was snappy as hell. Booted up instantly, breezed through complex tasks, and ran GarageBand and Logic Pro X very smoothly. Every OS update seemed to take it down a notch and eventually Logic Pro X - my main production tool - was unusable. I happed to be talking about this to a professional music producer friend of mine and…
Interesting -- seems to be a "Docker for music production" product in there somewhere
Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
961–970 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#962Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " the software has become bloated " Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks. Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance. Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That ove…
Not to forget the fact that websites nowadays can be real memory hogs, are dynamically assembled on your machine and burn cycles on pure eye candy UX like animations and transparency. The web's focus on design and cleverness over content and functionality is partly to blame.
its crazy how our devices have become basically dumping grounds for terribly optimized software
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#963>fluid frame rates in demanding games like Mixtape. not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.
cutscenes are often the most demanding part of a game!
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#964Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " the software has become bloated " Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks. Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance. Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That ove…
To be fair, Objective C uses message passing, which doesn't have the same performance characteristics as C++ (worse initially dealing with the selector pool rather than a vtable offset; much better later when maintaining stability in your brittle C++ ABI requires pImpl->pImpl patterns jumping all around heap memory).
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#965Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#966Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s weird to say Apple is faster than Xiaomi when both are just using arm chips and using TSMC to build them, and this chip is only any faster because TSMC made a smaller node. I know Apple do some special hardware software integration magic too.
Apple is not "just using arm chips". They have been designing their own 100% custom cores for more than a decade.
But come on - if they had to use intel’s fab - their chips would be terrible. The reason the m6 is faster is largely because TSMC invented a smaller process node.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#967I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…
> a little sluggish > surprised by how quick it felt Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to…
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#968Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a…
x86 is way more complex when compared to ARM processors, as a result their TDP is way higher when you request performance from them. Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone. Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is s…
To me people that say that x86 is slow etc. never used an x86 processor with anything other than Windows. Yes, Windows is shit and laptops that run Windows are for the same reason shit. I get it. But on an x86 system you can run other OS, and, for example, a Linux distro with well tweaked power consumption parameters can get you even 3 days of battery life, or even more.
The point is that Windows keeps almost always the CPU above the minimum frequency, because it's full of useless background services, because programs are not well optimized for the hardware (to maximize backward compatibility they don't compile target x86_64 v3 for example and thus don't leverage on features and instructions available on new CPU or fall in the emulation case I've mentioned initially), and other reasons.
With a Linux distro you can keep the CPU at 600Mhz while web browsing, you can even turn off cores that you don't need, and the battery with this configuration surely lasts ages (at that point it becomes more predominant the consumption of other peripherals such as the display).
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#969Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am in the same boat. I would buy a Mac if I could run Linux on it. As it is I will pay more for X1 Carbon with a worse CPU just to run free OS on it.
But you aren't buying a Mac at that point, no? The hardware is 1/2 or 1/4. I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS, I like the looks and the aesthetic, don't much care about Linux besides my Proxmox / HA/ *arr setup on an old NUC. Why can't we have it all, eh? :)
I am getting about half the performance (if you combine CPU and GPU) for the same price with X1 Carbon. It's true X1 is lighter, arguably has a better keyboard (although that's a judgement call) and has a trackpoint. At this point though Apple wins on both performance and price overall.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#970I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…