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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

• supernova87a 6y ago
  You know the thing I worry about next: how are apps going to inevitably bloat in inefficiency and claw back the improvements in CPU?
  • singhkays 6y ago
    I don't understand. Don't those two things seem antithetical? Like why would you make your app inefficient at the same time you optimize it for the CPU?
    • sidpatil 6y ago
      I think they're saying that devs won't spend as much time optimizing, since they know that the CPU is faster.
      • singhkays 6y ago
        That makes sense and is to be expected. A faster hardware does take away some of the incentive. As the old adage goes - "Necessity is the mother of invention"
        • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
          A lot of people think that less than maximal performance is sacrilege though, which is why people are already complaining.
      • tsjq 6y ago
        Yes. Exactly this
    • supernova87a 6y ago
      Simple historical observation -- any time a performance jump happens, the underlying uses of it expand to fill up the improvement in processing.
    • Jtsummers 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Applied to computers, if you double the CPU speed, the program can be half as efficient with no apparent loss to the user. Similar with memory. If you can assume your typical gamer has a 2TB (or now much larger) storage capacity, you can ship a 250GB game. But then it gets complicated when everyone does the same thing. If every program is half as efficient as it could be (in CPU usage or memory), then there has been no gain with the new system.
    • grishka 6y ago
      Whenever a new, faster CPU comes out, developers act quick to compensate for that with bloated frameworks to make sure you consistently get the same laggy experience.
  • jonny_eh 6y ago
    Are you suggesting that companies shouldn't make, and consumers buy, faster hardware?
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      I'd suggest that someone who breaks into Slack HQ and secretly installs a underclocking kernel extension on all their developers' Macs wouldn't be a bad person.
      • geodel 6y ago
        I wonder if "Electron runs fine on my machine" can be banned under hate speech rules instead of being allowed under free speech.
      • spurgu 6y ago
        Yeah this is my #1 concern with all of this. It's bad enough in software to need a new leap in hardware to completely bury all the issues.
    • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      The consumers buy part, yes, if the only reason they need it is because software has become stupidly inefficient. All of this e-waste is not good for the planet, and manufacturing is a significant contributor to global warming. If consumers are replacing their computers to do things they couldn't do ten years ago, then great, that's a good use of resources! If consumers are replacing their computers because today's IM clients are 10x slower than the perfectly good clients we had ten years ago, that's a problem!
      • BillinghamJ 6y ago
        Thinking of speed in terms of processing capacity consumption, 10x would be unbelievably generous. It's realistically a LOT closer to 1000x
    • CyberDildonics 6y ago
      Nothing they said indicated that in any way.
  • egypturnash 6y ago
    In Electron 14, we have found an astounding new paradigm for writing apps that results in astounding developer time savings! Now instead of running your Javascript app inside a copy of Chrome, we have a custom hybrid of Javascript and Lisp, which is internally transpiled onto a Brainfuck interpreter running in Conway's Life! Electron 15: The Life machine has been re-implemented as a series of GPU instructions, which will use up approximately 93% of most users' graphics performance in return for a 20% speedup!
    • JorgeGT 6y ago
      Electron 16: completely rewritten in Minecraft Redstone.
      • socialdemocrat 6y ago
        Of course, since Minecraft runs on all platforms, this makes Electron even more platform independent. Sooner or later this is going to turn into that movie Inception. Seriously why can't we just fix the bottom layers!!! Why does every problem have to be solved by adding ever more layers!
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • sesuximo 6y ago
    s/inefficient/doing more/g
    • grishka 6y ago
      Doing more of what? As a user, I'd rather wait a month for a proper native app than get an electron pile of crap in a week.
      • plorntus 6y ago
        While theres no way for me to have a source for this but I would hazard a guess and say most apps that use Electron simply would not exist without it. Maybe someone would fill the void if they had the idea, money and knowhow to build a native app on whatever platform you use but probably unlikely. Basically, no way you'd just be waiting an extra month for your native version.
        • grishka 6y ago
          So let it be. If there's a niche waiting to be filled, there are bound to be multiple attempts at that. The world would've been a better place without electron.
      • 1123581321 6y ago
        The key issue is that you, if you are a typical customer, wouldn't pay for your share of that extra development.
  • crazygringo 6y ago
    Well, the great thing is that as long as computers are bifurcated between a majority of slow Intel PC's and a minority of fast Apple Macs... apps will need to remain usable on Intels, so they'll hopefully stay super-fast on Macs! ;)
    • cmelbye 6y ago
      Was thinking the same exact thing while reading this. We’ll have a good chunk of lead time on that.
  • tsjq 6y ago
    And then Apple will make us buy newer and better and faster models. Now, we can't even upgrade RAM
    • rimliu 6y ago
      I bought a lot of Apple stuff but I don't remember Apple ever making me to do that.
• neilpanchal 6y ago
  I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is. Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a major step backward. So many fucking animations. Everything feels fluid like operating in molasses. The UI changes seem to be shoe horned into a desktop that doesn’t need giant white space for fat fingers. Menu bars are twice as tall taking up precious space. Top bar was already crammed with a lot of icons. Now, they’ve made them sparsely spaced by adding padding between the icons. Everything is baby-like with rounded corners and without borders. Segmentation UI elements are no more. I want to ask Apple’s UI team: WHY!? What is currently wrong with macOS Catalina UI? Until you can satisfactorily answer that, there shouldn’t be any change. Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion. If the reason is to unify everything, all screen sizes, then you’re sacrificing all three. Perhaps making it easy to develop apps for all 3 platforms is a plus, but as a user, this all feels like a regression. I’ve lost hope in modern UI engineering. It’s not engineering anymore. I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.
  • fassssst 6y ago
    Seems pretty obvious that some future Macs will have touch screens or larger iPads will run MacOS. I’d buy a Surface Studio style iMac in a heartbeat.
    • robaye 6y ago
      This was my thought too.
    • fsflover 6y ago
      Sounds like you are speaking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence.
    • ryukafalz 6y ago
• jrm4 6y ago
  At the risk of being that (Linux) guy -- What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software? If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff done." Moreover, I think we're pretty close to "beauty" parity here as well. Apple's advantage now is probably mostly the networked devices, i.e. unity between phone and pc messages, etc.
  • sjmulder 6y ago
    I found the macOS desktop much more responsive than GNOME which feels like a beast. Now I use MATE which is nice and simple but it’s no where near as nice as macOS.
  • sigzero 6y ago
    I have never lacked for "getting stuff done" on a Mac.
  • Jtsummers 6y ago
    macOS has been my daily driver since 2006, fully since 2010 (when I got rid of my desktop which I dual booted between Windows for gaming and Linux for development). It's perfectly suitable for "getting stuff done". In the rare case where macOS doesn't run something that I need that another *nix or Windows supports I spin up a VM or VPS.
  • azangru 6y ago
    Another linux guy here, on the market for a new linux laptop. After reading the article, which linux-compatible laptops, would you say, come the closest to compete with the new generation of Apple products? Long battery life, plenty of power, good screen, good speakers? Is it the inevitable Dell XPS 13 and Thinkpad X1 Carbon, or are there any other darlings among the linux community?
    • fsflover 6y ago
      It's not as good as Apple yet, but getting there IMO: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14 https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.
• brundolf 6y ago
  > cries in 2020 MBP We may need to start a support group
  • whynotminot 6y ago
    Heh, I'm in the 2020 MBP group. But I still think these M1 Macs--as awesome as they undoubtedly are--are not quite yet ready for developers. Virtualization support still looks iffy, and while I really don't care much whether my container is Arm or x86, the ecosystems and tooling around those architectures are still at different levels of maturity. The exciting (or depressing, for the 2020 crew) thing is that the fact that these M1 Macs are such a triumph probably does mean that these various rough edges will be smoothed out way faster than even I, a self admitted Apple fan, expected them to be. I was thinking I'd be waiting until 2022 or 2023 before being ready as a developer to have my primary device be an Apple Silicon laptop. But with the overwhelming success of these chips, every developer wants to be on these things ASAP. I could easily see the ecosystem for Arm being radically improved over the next year.
    • brundolf 6y ago
      I bought my MBP for personal projects, in which I don't use Docker or any other virtualization-based tooling and I could live with 16GB RAM. I expect the kinks with things like Brew to be worked out in a matter of weeks. So I think these would do fine for my purposes
      • thoughtsimple 6y ago
        Brew is claiming otherwise. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 I've had more success using MacPorts (https://macports.org https://macports.org). About 80% of what I've tried has worked. Most things that don't work, you can download source and build it yourself. Autoconf, automake, cmake, pkg-config etc work via MacPorts.
    • X-Istence 6y ago
      I've been pushing my virtualization to cloud providers or my in-home VM beast anyway, so that didn't matter to me. What did make me faster though is compiling Rust is now soooooo much faster that it flies. I've been building some toy projects and the edit, compile, test cycle is now shortened so much that I find myself enjoying hacking on my projects more because there is no dead time while the compiler does its thing. That alone is hugely important. webpack is also faster, as is a lot of other things that don't require virtualization or docker. I bought the 13" MacBook Pro M1 to supplement and use occasionally alongside my 2017 MacBook Pro 15", but I find myself not having touched my 2017 MacBook Pro at all because I keep grabbing the 13" MacBook Pro. It's incredibly fast, and the battery life is amazing, which allows me to not worry about where my charger is, or whether I am comfortable on the couch and damnit now I need to get up and plug in.
• berkut 6y ago
  I don't quite understand how 'retain' and 'release' can be more memory efficient on Apple Silicon than x86.... I can understand how they can be more efficient from a performance standpoint in terms of more efficient reference counting, but I don't understand how that translates to less memory usage which is apparently what's being argued... ? Unless on x86 some of the 'free's when the ref counts hit 0 were being batched up and deferred, and that doesn't need to happen now?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    I believe it was being brought up as an example of "Apple has designed their hardware around their software" and then that translates to "Apple's software does well on machines with less memory".
    • berkut 6y ago
      Compared to something like Android, sure, I get that, but compared to ObjectiveC/Swift on x86 (which I think was being argued - i.e. against the Intel Macs)? I guess it makes reference counting in general more efficient, I'm just saying I don't see why that would mean Apple Silicon Macs running ObjectC/Swift code would have less memory usage than the same code compiled and running on x86.
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        I'm not necessarily convinced by the posted argument. That being said, I tend to think that people running a bunch of VMs and Electron apps and Docker cause them to use a bunch more RAM than I would consider to be "reasonable", and they've lost sight of how much you can do in a lesser amount of memory. (Typing this from a computer with 8 GB of RAM, which I have repeatedly been told is "below adequate" for development.)
        • LaGrange 6y ago
          The problem is, by now development practices in many companies effectively force using multiple large containers. I know an x stack could use 4x less memory if I spent considerable time on ripping out unnecessary cruft, but few people in the company would agree that it's time well spent, and the home office allowance suffices for a machine with 32-64Gb RAM (especially in 2020, when I don't really see that much value in laptops for dev work anymore).
• yardie 6y ago
  I'm typing this from a 2014 i7-4980HQ 15" MBP. This machine would have been replaced in 2017 but I wasn't impressed with that years model. I had planned to upgrade in 2020 but the announcement of the M1 basically quashed that. I've been on this planet long enough to know when Apple changes course like this the old architect is already obsolete. 68k -> PPC -> x86_64 -> ASi. The PPC G5 got exactly 1 OS upgrade (10.5) before it was EOL'd. If the reports are to be believed on performance and Rosetta than this upgrade may be one of the smoothest in Apple history. The Intel CPU has had an incredibly long run, 15 years, at Apple. If they are confident they can make the leap and not leave their users in the lurch more power to them. I'm still on the fence on buying an M1 laptop. Apple users know you pay an Apple tax and a v1 tax. My MBP is getting so long in the tooth I may have to ignore my own advice of not getting first generation Apple hardware.
  • dognotdog 6y ago
    I, too, am on 2014 hardware. The real step that would move me to update would be more RAM with the Apple Silicon. The last gen Intel hardware did offer 32GB of RAM, but not much else to justify the cost over a 6 year old precursor.
    • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
      Was planning on getting the pro 16 but the extra cost for 32gb is obscene. Ended up going with a dell xps 15 (still in shipping) which even has an option for 64gb at a reasonable price. Can't wait to get rid of this pro 13 which constantly overheats.
      • hans1729 6y ago
        Hey man, I'm using the xps with 64 Gigs. Good luck with yours. It's a great laptop, but I can't wait for my m1 air with 16 gigs, because for mobility, I'm missing the outrageous stability that macos and Apples hardware are delivering. I'll keep the xps as a daily driver for work (wsl 2 and vscode are just unmet in apples ecosystem), but for the couch, conferences, trains etc., it's going to be the mba 100% of the time. Are you transitioning to windows?
• vmception 6y ago
  weren't the old exploits on the intel processors patched by essentially making many operations slower? like they had to disable some cpu instructions which were previously innovative and this debilitated the irreparable processors. so a new architecture with better versions of the same instructions would feel very fast, since we went two steps back first.
  • Areading314 6y ago
    Yes, these were due to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities
  • imglorp 6y ago
    Good point. Intel earned this, hard.
• qz2 6y ago
  Even as a miserable pessimist I just bought an M1 Mini today. It cost two months of train season tickets which I don’t have to pay for any more!
  • singhkays 6y ago
    Hah! Author here so this would have been the perfect comment to use in my blog :)
  • betaby 6y ago
    What ticket costs 500+tax per month?
    • MrFlynn 6y ago
      Depending on how long your commute is, Amtrak could run you $500/month for a monthly pass.
    • ggm 6y ago
      Commute from the 2hr circle to central London by train. A one-month season ticket is GBP500 Cambridge-London
    • qz2 6y ago
      London Zone 9
• brundolf 6y ago
  This is fascinating: > Retain and release are tiny actions that almost all software, on all Apple platforms, does all the time. ….. The Apple Silicon system architecture is designed to make these operations as fast as possible. It’s not so much that Intel’s x86 architecture is a bad fit for Apple’s software frameworks, as that Apple Silicon is designed to be a bespoke fit for it …. retaining and releasing NSObjects is so common on MacOS (and iOS), that making it 5 times faster on Apple Silicon than on Intel has profound implications on everything from performance to battery life. > Broadly speaking, this is a significant reason why M1 Macs are more efficient with less RAM than Intel Macs. This, in a nutshell, helps explain why iPhones run rings around even flagship Android phones, even though iPhones have significantly less RAM. iOS software uses reference counting for memory management, running on silicon optimized to make reference counting as efficient as possible; Android software uses garbage collection for memory management, a technique that requires more RAM to achieve equivalent performance.
  • lisper 6y ago
    Remember Lisp machines? The M1 is a Swift machine.
    • brundolf 6y ago
      I'm wondering if the "optimized for reference-counting" thing applies to other languages too. i.e. if I write a piece of software in Rust, and I make use of Rc<>, will Macs be extra tolerant of that overhead? In theory it seems like the answer should be yes
      • lilyball 6y ago
        I sure hope so. In macOS 10.15, the fast path for a retain on a (non-tagged-pointer) Obj-C object does a C11 relaxed atomic load followed by a C11 relaxed compare-and-exchange. This seems pretty standard for retain-release and I'd expect Rust's Rc<> to be doing something similar. It's possible Apple added some other black magic to the runtime in 10.16 (and they haven't released the 10.16 objc sources yet) but it's hard to imagine what they'd do that makes more sense than just optimizing for relaxed atomic operations.
• kradeelav 6y ago
  > looks at 2010 MBP that's working, but starting to have firefox issues. ... This may be the actual upgrade moment. I just hope time machine is compatible. likewise old (CS5) versions of Photoshop since I'm not into this subscription BS.
• Teknoman117 6y ago
  Tin foil hat warning - but how much of the M1 performance improvement is from optimizations made in Big Sur for Apple Silicon that they just didn't bother implementing for x86 since it's now the outgoing technology for Apple? I realize the reducing in power consumed for any given quantity of work is downright amazing for laptops, but I guess I'm more curious about workstation and (build) server kinds of applications. Also, how many of these benchmarks are x86 versus Apple Silicon where both are running Big Sur. I've been seeing so much "Xcode on Catalina" versus "Xcode on Apple Silicon on Big Sur"
  • whynotminot 6y ago
    Apple has been using x86 for practically 15 years now. Your theory is this whole time they've been too lazy to bother to implement "god mode" ? What about Windows and Linux on x86? Also too lazy? It can be fun to put on the tin foil hat, but at least make sure the theory makes even a little bit of sense first.
    • lern_too_spel 6y ago
      > What about Windows and Linux on x86? Also too lazy? No, Windows and Linux are significantly faster. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macos1015-win10-ubuntu&num=10 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macos101... Ubuntu has gotten significantly faster since 19.10, and other distros like ClearLinux are much faster still. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=clear-fall-2020&num=8 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=clear-fa...
    • Teknoman117 6y ago
      I was not saying in any way that they didn't implement optimizations for x86 over the time that they used them. Of course they did. What I meant was that Apple themselves talked about significant optimization for Apple Silicon in Big Sur. The question is if any of these optimizations could have also been applied to x86 but aren't because x86 is the outgoing platform. I'm skeptical of the assertion (without supporting documentation) that there is some hardware design choice in Apple Silicon that makes it _drastically_ more memory (quantity) efficient than x86 when using presumably the same kernel, same toolchain frameworks (LLVM), etc.
• xoa 6y ago
  Not to speak for anyone else, but one thing I gently disagree with: >Given that Hackintoshers are a particular bunch who don’t take kindly to the Apple-tax[...] I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. I think a major generator of interest in hackintoshes has been that there are significant segments of computing that Apple has simply completely (or nearly completely) given up on, including essentially any non-AIO desktop system above the Mini. At one point they had quite competitive PowerMacs and then Mac Pros covering the range of $2k all the way up to $10k+, and while sure there was some premium there was feature coverage, and they got regular yearly updates. They were "boring", but in the best way. There didn't need to be anything exciting about them. The prices did steadily inch upward, but far more critically sometime between 2010 and 2012 somebody at Apple decided the MP had to be exciting or something and created the Mac Cube 2, except this time to force it by eliminating the MP entirely. And it was complete shit, and to zero surprise never got a single update (since they totally fucked the power/thermal envelope, there was nowhere to go) and users completely lost the ability to make up for that. And then that was it, for 6 years. Then they did a kind of sort of ok update, but at a bad point given that Intel was collapsing, and forcing in some of their consumer design in ways that really hurt the value. The hackintosh, particularly virtualized ones in my opinion (running macOS under ESXi deals with a ton of the regular problem spots), has helped fill that hole as frankenstein MP 2010s finally hit their limits. I'm sure Apple Silicon will be great for a range of systems, but it won't help in areas that Apple just organizationally doesn't care about/doesn't have the bandwidth for because that's not a technology problem. So I'm a bit pessimistic/whistful about that particular area, even though it'll be a long time before the axe completely falls on it. It'll be fantastic and it's exciting to see the return of more experimentation in silicon, but at the same time it was a nice dream for a decade or so to be able to freely take advantage of a range of hardware the PC market offered which filled holes Apple couldn't.
  • throw0101a 6y ago
    > I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. Especially if the margins allow them to not engage in silliness on the software side of things like violating privacy and serving ads in the OS. There are certainly places that Apple can be criticized, but I think in these two areas they're acting pretty well.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• redelbee 6y ago
  I have an iPad Pro with keyboard and a 15-inch MacBook Pro I got when my previous MacBook Air couldn’t handle the video editing I was dabbling in. I desperately want one machine (and probably in the iPad form factor) but I don’t know if Apple is ever going to get me there. What say you HN? Is there a future where I can have a single machine? Any other suggestions for what I can do about it today? I’ve test driven Surface computers in various flavors from friends of mine and I really can’t get down with Windows. Am I doomed to carry two machines with me all the time?
  • jrockway 6y ago
    What is stopping you from selling your iPad and having a single machine right now? I have personally avoided laptops for years because I hate managing more than one machine. The one time a year I need my laptop, it's out of commission for a day while updates install or whatever. For that reason, I have a desktop and take an iPad Pro when I'm going to be away from home. The iPad is no computer replacement, but it can SSH places and can do enough work to justify not owning a laptop. More importantly, it can't have any configuration done to it. But if you already have a laptop, I would just skip the iPad entirely. The laptop is your "one device". (Would I want a mobile processor as my primary means of doing work? Absolutely not. But, people seem to make it work... at the cost of being blown away by a new processor that's slower than HEDTs they could have been using for a few years ;)
    • redelbee 6y ago
      That’s a good question. I use the iPad for some work (editing photos, email, etc) but mostly I use it for entertainment. I’m using it now for web browsing, I watch TV/movies on it as I don’t have a TV and don’t always want to use my projector/screen setup, and I do some light gaming on it occasionally. The laptop is for work, which is photo editing (again) video editing, design work, word processing, light web development, and various other business needs (accounting, spreadsheets, etc). I’ve tried to switch to iPad only so I don’t have to cut out entertainment completely but almost everything work related is slower and more annoying on the iPad. So I end up with both. As another commenter above mentioned if the iPad ran OSX I would probably just have the iPad, but here we are.
• nbzso 6y ago
  Those of us who are long enough in UI design know what is a result of attention to detail and professional GUI. We have all used Os X not only for UNIX like core (Darwin) but for consistent UX and UI libraries. In some point in time Apple was influencing our work in really meaningful way by setting the standard (remember Apple Human Interface Guidelines pre Yosemite). For me personally Soundtrack Pro is most polished professional interface ever made. So in this context UI “innovation” trough emoji and implementation of white space for touch interaction (without touch interaction) is funny but not usable. Performance aside ( which is big accomplishment ) I miss the old approach with balance of contrast and natural flow and will stay on Catalina as long as I can. If Apple changes their stance on telemetry, bypassing things and fixes UI/UX design I have no problem to join again. What is lacking in Linux desktop is consistent approach to UI, but for some of us may be is time to revaluate and relearn things. My personal time investment is in Emacs, with time I have more and more respect for those ideas of freedom and consistency. The selling point for me with Apple was professional interface and high UI standards, sadly they are gone. But hey everyone of us is different and this is good, right?
  • grishka 6y ago
    It's all mostly redesign for the sake for redesign at this point. Desktop OSes had been feature-complete for quite some time, but they still have to update every year. They have to. Don't you even dare question that. I'm still on Mojave and it does everything I need from an OS. I also absolutely love native Mac apps, which are becoming rarer and rarer. And no, iOS apps that run on macOS aren't native mac apps. The abomination that is the mojave app store? That definitely took some extra talent to break every single UI guideline, but thankfully I only open it once a couple months.
    • nbzso 6y ago
      Just a thought: If someone in 2008 asked me -What desktop interfaces will be used in 2020? My answer may have been: Apple will implement a new Desktop paradigm on top of Raskin Zoomable UI Ideas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin). But here we are: Monster SOC with Cartoon Network on top. :)
• nojito 6y ago
  I upgraded from a 32gb x86 machine to the 8gb macbook pro and it's downright amazing and I saved a bunch of money in the process. Apple is going to make an absolute killing on people upgrading RAM unnecessarily.
  • jrockway 6y ago
    I don't understand this comment. The new M1s all have 16GB of RAM integrated with the SoC, and it can't be upgraded. If you had 32GB on your old machine and didn't need that much, that's kind of on you, right?
    • nojito 6y ago
      Nope. Regular usage at around 17-18 gb ram. Similar workflow peaks at barely 6gb on the macbook pro.
      • foldr 6y ago
        Modern OSes and apps make aggressive opportunistic use of available memory for caching and other performance-enhancing purposes. A side effect of this is that however much RAM you put in your machine (within reasonable limits), it always looks as though you're using the majority of it once you're running a few apps. Hence the large number of people who think that they "need" 16GB of RAM when in fact they are just getting a small to medium performance boost from it. You can see a concrete example of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP1_4wek4nI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP1_4wek4nI The 16GB Macbook Pro is "using" more memory than the 8GB model to run the exact same tasks.
    • avalys 6y ago
      The M1s have 8 GB standard, 16 GB is a $200 upgrade. The parent is stating that 8 GB is actually fine and that people will be paying to upgrade to 16 GB unnecessarily.
      • jrockway 6y ago
        Ah, makes sense! Thanks for clarifying.
• liamcardenas 6y ago
  I know very little, so perhaps someone could enlighten me. But I am curious how Apple Silicon will be for machine learning. When Apple releases a MacBook Pro with 64GB of unified memory (assuming they will) — won’t that be amazing for machine learning? I am under the impression that GPU memory is a huge factor in performance. Also, is there any way that the neural engine can accelerate training — or is it just for executing trained models faster?
  • _delirium 6y ago
    I wouldn't expect it to be particularly competitive in training large models. It's an integrated GPU with 8 cores, and the "neural engine" has an additional 16 cores. The kinds of discrete GPUs (mostly Nvidia) that people use for deep learning have more like 5000+ cores. I think Apple is aiming more at either training small models, or running pre-trained models. For example Photoshop is starting to integrate neural filters, so NN inference performance can be important for some desktop applications.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • tachyonbeam 6y ago
      I think it's pretty clear they're aiming at inference only. Training models on laptops is never going to be competitive. Might be fun for prototyping small models in PyTorch/TensorFlow though.
      • Veedrac 6y ago
        No, they're aiming at training too.
    • aero-glide 6y ago
      Is it fair to compare cores like that?
      • terramex 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• peterfield 6y ago
  I guess the good thing for those of us who can't afford a new mac right now is that the used market will be flooded with recent models at a cheap price LOL.
  • yurishimo 6y ago
    This is true. I think picking up a now last gen Mac Mini as a HTPC would be sweet. Upgraded RAM could make it a home server beast. I don't see Apple abandoning the Intel support until at least Q1 2023, and even then, the types of stuff I would use it for in a HTPC setup would still be compatible well past then (unless some new video codec or something comes out that isn't compatible? Idk how those work).
• hpb42 6y ago
  I'm curious about the Neural Engine cores. What software use this? Why would I want to buy a Neural Network coprocessor in my machine, instead of using that money for a better cpu/ram/ssd?
  • timothyduong 6y ago
    Apparently Pixelmator uses it: https://twitter.com/tldtoday/status/1328757085769658373 https://twitter.com/tldtoday/status/1328757085769658373
  • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    The iphone uses it for image recognition on your photo library so your data stays local.
    • hpb42 6y ago
      > so your data stays local. That's very interesting. Thanks!
• victor106 6y ago
  > A task like editing 8K RAW RED video file that might have taken a $5000 machine before can now be done on a $699 Mac Mini M1 or a fan-less MacBook Air that costs $999 That’s insanely great. Maybe I am exaggerating but Apple’s M1 might be the best innovation in the tech industry in the past 5 years.
  • person_of_color 6y ago
    Even more than k8s?
    • sooheon 6y ago
      Debatable, but for personal computing there is no contest.
  • jandrese 6y ago
    The RAM limitation on the first gen M1s makes this claim a bit dubious.
    • macintux 6y ago
      https://www.diyphotography.net/this-700-computer-can-edit-8k-red-raw/ https://www.diyphotography.net/this-700-computer-can-edit-8k...
      • throw0101a 6y ago
        That's nice. But what does CPU/GPU horse power have to do with memory? If I want to spin up a bunch of VMs to do pre-commit test builds in clean environments, and each need RAM for the OS and user land, being able to edit a lot of raw video does nothing for me. I'm generally fine running macOS (or Linux), but sometimes I need to boot up Windows in a VM for specialized apps: how do I assign >16GB of memory to it if I only have 8-16GB of RAM? Even with fast storage I'm enamoured that I may need swap.
        • 6y ago
• paultopia 6y ago
  I bought a pretty heavily specced (not top of the line, but close) 16" MBP in April. Kinda kicking myself... and aggressively insisting to myself that the screen real estate matters a lot to me. Damnit.
  • totalZero 6y ago
    Don't kick yourself. Versus the MBP16: RAM is capped, USB-C ports are scarce, GPU is not discrete, software compatibility is still thin, and screen resolution is less. Not to mention you have better speakers on your machine. I have a top of the line MBP13 delivering in mid-December. I could cancel the order at any moment, but I'd rather have ports, software compatibility, and RAM. M1 may benchmark well, but it isn't an EMP that magically disables every Intel machine on the face of the planet. I'm excited to see what happens when Apple rolls out its own silicon for the higher-end MBP devices.
  • Betelgeuse90 6y ago
    Have done the same in December 2019. I'm telling myself I really need 2 external monitors, as that's what I use at home. The M1 machines only support one external monitor (even in clamshell). Not a lot of people seem to be mentioning this.
• Havoc 6y ago
  Exciting times ahead. I hope the rest catch up though. If Apple dominates completely it'll be carnage for competition
  • neogodless 6y ago
    I do think it is too early to count out the competition. To be sure, the Air and 13" Pro are ultrabooks, and this seems to be a great fit for the great performance being extracted while sipping battery life. On the other hand, it's not a foregone conclusion that higher performance systems will dominate the competition. For most Apple-focused users, this is a comparison between overheating Intel chips shoved into Macs, and these slick new M1 chips, and it's a no-brainer. And yes, the M1 does compete very well in several benchmarks on a per core/instruction per clock basis. But the higher end "many" core CPUs (especially outside the Intel universe cough AMD) with much higher TDP are still achieving much higher overall performance. Apple still has to catch up to them in those markets. And for many people, right now Apple systems just are not an option. Not until all software and games run without issue. Software is a near certainty - games remain to be seen, but Apple has not prioritized them in the past. (And while the M1 integrated graphics are great, they are not at all competitive with existing dedicated graphics, and will not be suitable for replacing gaming systems.)
    • alwillis 6y ago
      But the higher end "many" core CPUs (especially outside the Intel universe cough AMD) with much higher TDP are still achieving much higher overall performance. Apple still has to catch up to them in those markets. Did you see the AnandTech review of the Mac mini with the M1? The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets. What’s really important for the general public and Apple’s success is the fact that the performance of the M1 doesn’t feel any different than if you were using a very high-end Intel or AMD CPU. Apple achieving this in-house with their own design is a paradigm shift, and in the future will allow them to achieve a certain level of software-hardware vertical integration that just hasn’t been seen before and isn’t achieved yet by anybody else. And for many people, right now Apple systems just are not an option. Not until all software and games run without issue. Software is a near certainty - games remain to be seen, but Apple has not prioritized them in the past. (And while the M1 integrated graphics are great, they are not at all competitive with existing dedicated graphics, and will not be suitable for replacing gaming systems.) AnandTech's section is called "M1 GPU Performance: Integrated King, Discrete Rival" which should tell you what's up. Spoiler—it's more than competitive with dedicated graphics and certainly none of them can touch it when it comes to power consumption. And remember, this is the *low-end chip; wait until what we see in the next generation. Finally, putting theory to practice, we have Rise of the Tomb Raider. Released in 2016, this game has a proper Mac port and a built-in benchmark, allowing us to look at the M1 in a gaming scenario and compare it to some other Windows laptops. This game is admittedly slightly older, but its performance requirements are a good match for the kind of performance the M1 is designed to offer. Finally, it should be noted that this is an x86 game – it hasn’t been ported over to Arm – so the CPU side of the game is running through Rosetta. At our 768p Value settings, the Mac Mini is delivering well over 60fps here. Once again it’s vastly ahead of the 2018 Intel-based Mac Mini, as well as every other integrated GPU in this stack. Even the 15-inch MBP and its Radeon Pro 560 are still trailing the Mac Mini by over 25%, and it takes a Ryzen laptop with a Radeon 560X to finally pull even with the Mac Mini.
• emadabdulrahim 6y ago
  The only downside of the amazing new M1 MBP is that it runs WoW on max settings 60fps. And now I'm back into the world of Azeroth. Especially with the launch of Shadowlands. What the hell, Apple, I thought I was safe and immune from video games with my MacBooks.
  • bak3y 6y ago
    This is the first comment that's made me actually want one...
    • yurishimo 6y ago
      Tbf, WoW will run on just about anything... I remember playing it on an Acer (or maybe Lenovo?) netbook back in 2009/10. Checked it out from school right before Christmas break so I would have a computer at home for a month. In the article here they show Minecraft running at native res and 60 fps. No small feat nowadays considering draw distances that are popular now.
      • emadabdulrahim 6y ago
        It didn't run smoothly on my maxed out 2018 MBP 15". I was getting 25fps in bgs with medium graphics settings. And needless to say, the fans were always on.
      • mproud 6y ago
        It’s not just WoW and Minecraft. I’ve seen screenshots of Dota 2 highest settings running over 100 FPS. Borderlands 3, a graphics beast, at ultra settings, running about 30 FPS. Unoptimized. On a low-end Mac with an M1 chip!
      • lazyjones 6y ago
        It doesn't run on my 2015 iMac 27" with anything near even medium settings... That's with a Radeon R9 M380, 24GB memory, 3.2 GHz i5. So I find it hard to believe that it will run with max settings / 60 fps on the new MBP, despite the lower native screen resolution.
• koffiezet 6y ago
  I understand the machine is great or going to be great for most use cases. My mbp is my main workhorse, but as a freelance SRE "devops" guy, the Apple ARM platform won't be suitable for my job any time soon, if ever. Docker is not yet available - but even when it would become available, emulating virtualised x86 code is explicitly not going to be supported. That in many cases means pulling a docker image built in a ci/cd pipeline where a dev screwed something up and debugging it locally is no longer an option. If I wasn't freelance, I could probably get away with some cloud instance to run all my docker stuff, but I'm dealing with too many different environments, for clients with various different legal requirements making this simply 'not an option'. Too bad, because the machines look very promising for everything else. Development tools aren't there yet, but I expect that to be fixed pretty quickly.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    It'll be interesting what happens in a couple of years if server side gets more mixed with ARM as well.
    • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      Unless AWS starts selling their graviton CPU, whose going to create chips for the arm server market? The volumes are huge and the margins are tiny, which is not something Apple was ever interested in.
      • threeseed 6y ago
        > whose going to create chips for the arm server market Why not Microsoft and Google ? Amazon did. And they surely aren't going to let AWS/ARM run away without any competition in the cloud space.
      • timthorn 6y ago
        Ampere and Marvell have already.
      • jhgb 6y ago
        AMD could still revive the K12 and apply their Zen 3/4/5 experience to it.
• zarkov99 6y ago
  I am thinking about getting thing mostly to ssh into a linux server. I would like to run emacs on the server and have its display bounced back via X to the Mac. Is this practical? I tried Quartz on my wife's Mac but the fonts looked like crap.
  • ngai_aku 6y ago
    Why run emacs on the server instead of running emacs on your local machine and accessing the server via tramp?
    • zarkov99 6y ago
      I have a highly customized emacs setup that works best on the server.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• iJohnDoe 6y ago
  I’m starting to wonder if this is the reason we had some serious problems with macOS and iOS in recent months and years. Serious bugs and serious security flaws. The A-team was working on getting everything ready for M1. The B-team was working on the usual releases. If the M1 is as good as everyone says, then that means they had the best people on it.
  • vatican_banker 6y ago
    My guess is that the team working on M1 is a non-overlapping set with the team working on macos releases
  • coopsmgoops 6y ago
    I doubt the team designing the chips has much overlap with the OS team.
    • totalZero 6y ago
      I think the suggestion is that the best OS developers were allocated to producing M1-compatible OS rather than maintaining x86-compatible OS.
      • iJohnDoe 6y ago
        100% this, as well as Rosetta, etc.
• sunflowerdeath 6y ago
  This is not only Apple. All modern mobile ARM processors, ones that are used in Androids, too, they all are far ahead of Intel in TDP to performance ratio, almost by order of magnitude. Just make bigger ARM chips with more high-perf cores, and they will destroy Intel.
  • kllrnohj 6y ago
    Not even close to true. Apple's ARM processors are unlike anyone else's, and everyone else's ARM processors are not particularly impressive. The power/performance isn't really there, and scaling performance up is not linear, either. You can't just "make it bigger" and retain the same power/performance ratio you had. The 1W power draw that the 'big' ARM cores target, like the Cortex-A78, isn't even that special. You can run x86 cores at 1W/core all day long as well. How it performs at the power level is the question, but the ARM cores don't really perform all that well. See for example the slaughtering that is the 64-core Graviton2 vs. the 64-core Epyc Rome: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-graviton2&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-... (spoiler, the x86 chip has an overall performance lead of 50%, and they really aren't targeting that different of a power budget) But even the M1 isn't an order of magnitude ahead on power/performance ratio. It's the leader, but it's sure as shit not 10x faster for the same power draw.
    • hu3 6y ago
      It's not far, really. Android phones with Qualcom Snapdragon 865 scores better than an Intel i7 7700HQ (4 cores, 8 threads) on Geekbench on multi-core and ties on single core while using a magnitude less energy. While this i7 model is not new, it's not the "U" low voltage processor version. I could see Qualcom getting fancy and trying to scale their processors at 5nm. https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/oneplus-8 https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/oneplus-8 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-7700hq https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-7700h...
      • kevindong 6y ago
        The last time the i7-7700HQ was sold in a Mac was for the mid-2017, 15" MBP. The current gen (late-2019) base model 16" MBP uses a i7-9750H. Single core performance is ~17.5% better and multi-core performance is ~51.2% better than the 865. The numbers are still surprisingly close given that the Snapdragon uses significantly less power. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-9750h https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-9750h
• ytch 6y ago
  I'm curious that the A12Z DTK Mac mini shows moderate Geekbench score under Rosetta 2. Is this means some improvements are not M1-only, but already in Ax processor?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    A12Z has the necessary TSO hardware stuff, the remainder is that it is fairly fast itself and Apple did a good job in the Rosetta translator.
• anigbrowl 6y ago
  For those of us who just don't where MacOS is concerned, what are the prospects for Linux on an M1?
  • harpratap 6y ago
    Maybe better to wait for good ARM chips on a PC. Now that there is a demand for it, I'm sure some ARM vendor will step up if not Qualcomm
    • postalrat 6y ago
      There is some demand but even more demand for non-arm processors on PC.
    • zamadatix 6y ago
      Qualcomm has been at the Windows laptop market for a while and has yet to come out with anything nearly as performant. I'd like to see it but they've been behind for many years in the mobile space compared to Apple as well.
      • harpratap 6y ago
        It's the same what Apple did with wireless bluetooth audio. There were already companies making them but they didn't try their best. When Apple made Airpods, it defined them as a new category and every company started pushing their own take on it. Now we plenty of good options to choose from. ARM was typically making very conservative reference designs keeping PPA in mind but now that they have customers asking for a higher TDP chips on the PC side. And they are already making bigger chips like Apple's with cortex X1 - https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a78-cortex-x1-cpu-ip-diverging https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a78-cortex-x...
        • zamadatix 6y ago
          Apple isn't just now entering into this space with the M1 though, it's been this bad for 5 years vs Qualcomm already the change is now even the best power hungry x86 cores can't keep up with it. What Apple is delivering in the M1 continues to be 2 generations ahead of the Qualcomm's best in terms of performance an the +10% uplift on the usual +20% generational increase isn't changing that - Apple has been doing that level of improvement consistently every generation so Qualcomm can't "catch up" by doing the same in some generations. I'm generally not a fan of Apple as a company and own no Apple products but I've long acknowledged what they've been doing in mobile hardware has been miles better than what the competition has been doing - this isn't some sudden upset and entrance just a on-pace continuation of what has been going on for years. I only wish it was decoupled from their software.
• nazgulnarsil 6y ago
  Might be interested if Apple wasn't trying to upcharge me a cool grand for 2.7 more inches of screen real estate.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• alphachloride 6y ago
  What does it mean to be an 8-core GPU? 8-CPU I can understand. But I thought GPUs were supposed to have a lot more cores for parallelism.
  • Slartie 6y ago
    It means absolutely nothing. Because every GPU vendor has a different notion of what a "core" is. Some count the smallest parallel execution unit as a "core" and thus boast chips with thousands of "cores", some group these smallest units into larger units and count those as a "core", which results in smaller numbers of "cores" per chip. I would guess Apple is doing the latter. I don't think that it's possible to deliver the graphics performance the M1 is delivering with just eight "cores" in terms of smallest computational units.
    • rsynnott 6y ago
      Yeah; Apple claims 128 "execution units" and 24,576 concurrent threads (I assume something analogous to SMT going on there, though I don't know enough about GPUs to be sure).
• swalsh 6y ago
  Technology seems to swing like pendulum between running remote and running locally as technology evolves. Recently I purchased an RTX 3090, and between my Ryzen with 24 threads, and the 64 GB of memory I bought for a few hundred dollars it was really occuring to me how much power my PC has for really not that much money. I don't need to be spending so much cash on cloud services when my local machine has more than enough horses to do everything I need. I think the M1 is one more force towards the pendulum swinging back. I suspect that as developers port applications to ARM people will rediscover the benefits of native installations as new software starts to take full advantage of this new hardware.
  • tsjq 6y ago
    This time, thanks to "everywhere availability" convenience for consumer apps via phone, it might not swing that much towards running locally despite the so much powerful computing at not-so-high prices.
• cercatrova 6y ago
  I would love to see a 16 inch iPad running macOS with the keyboard case. It looks like it would be the best of both worlds.
• kaycebasques 6y ago
  Surprised no one else has said this: that title gave me a literal LOL.
  • mproud 6y ago
    When fans of a sports team revel about a new player or recent winning ways, they might proclaim “LEAGUE FUCKED” — like a “Get Rekt!” sorta thing. I think this is an “INDUSTRY FUCKED” moment.
• outside1234 6y ago
  This is what happens when you put actual talent into building a CPU. Not Intel or AMD talent, Apple talent.
  • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    Not sure its fair to shit on AMD considering their desktop and server CPUs are still leading the market by a long margin.
  • scep12 6y ago
    Is it purely a talent discrepancy or do you think there is a difference in culture that contributes to their differences?
• devwastaken 6y ago
  I see no mention of simd in these threads. The only thing that has made high data throughput possible is vector operations. What's the performance of libjpegturbo or hevc in software?
  • lern_too_spel 6y ago
    It supports NEON like most phone CPUs. The new thing for a desktop is sharing memory for the CPU and GPU with a much faster bus instead of having the GPU sit on a slower bus with its own fast memory, so if your workload can benefit from using the GPU, you don't have to worry about host to device transfer.
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      I can't find a number for it on M1 but I'm guessing a memory to SIMD register move is still a lot faster than faster CPU-GPU shared buffers, i.e. Even if it is a powerful tool it won't scale in the same way.
  • hrydgard 6y ago
    Apple CPUs have great NEON performance, so if those libraries have NEON paths, they'll scream.
• treve 6y ago
  I wonder how fast M1 feels compared to, say, KDE on a high-end Intel machine. Is it really that much faster than anything, or just faster than what people are used to with OS/X and Windows.
  • hu3 6y ago
    That's what I'm wondering. Perhaps they are used to thermal-throttled poorly-cooled under-performant screamingly-noisy machines like the mpb 16": https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an-external-monitor.2211747/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an... My colleague has a 4 year old dell laptop connected to 2 monitors doing all kinds of cpu demanding work while keeping his 100+ chrome tabs open. I never heard the darn machine cooler fans spinning.
• totorovirus 6y ago
  A moment when a tech giant can build a computer from bottom to top.
  • spear 6y ago
    Apple does use TSMC to build the M1 itself. So it's not quite bottom to top like the early computers up to the early to mid 90s, when a number of the workstation companies (eg. DEC, IBM, HP) still had their own fabs to make the CPUs.
    • samatman 6y ago
      Apple doesn't make anything physical. Like, nothing. They design the whole computer, from chip to OS, but they own no factories. Which is pretty remarkable, when you think about it. If you went back to the DEC era and said that the most valuable vendor of computers in the world would do no manufacturing in 2020, not many people would buy it.
• tlrobinson 6y ago
  I’m curious if/how Apple Silicon will compete in the server market. Apple certainly isn’t known for producing cost effective servers, but if they really posses this technology that leapfrogs commodity hardware they’d be crazy not to use it in every market possible, right?
  • Synaesthesia 6y ago
    That's what I was thinking. On the other hand they do have an amazing vehicle for selling high margin goods already.
  • rnmp 6y ago
    Well, they recently updated their services agreements to allow developer services to update OS on multiple machines free of charge. MacStadium is one of those companies that provides Mac servers. They wrote about it: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
• boromi 6y ago
  How far away (in years) are chips comparable from AMD and say ARM ( Microsoft SQ2 ) for Windows machines?
  • tachyonbeam 6y ago
    I think the biggest reason this has such a huge performance advantage is that the 8/16GB RAM is built into the chip. Modern CPUs are mostly limited by memory bandwidth rather than compute performance, and this has way more memory bandwidth than competing CPUs because of the tight integration. This RAM might also be clocked much higher than what we're used to, because there is no long bus to the CPU anymore. The downside of this SoC design, though, is that while you can fit 8GB or 16GB on a chip, it might be difficult to fit more. The 8/16GB limit might explain why this design is reserved to the smaller laptops for now, and they haven't replaced x86 in all of their lineup. If you want more RAM than that, then you would again be stuck with less memory bandwidth to your external RAM. You would maybe end up with a design where some applications are kept in the internal RAM and some in the external, or where your internal RAM acts as an L4 cache to the external RAM. It's not that difficult IMO for Intel or AMD to replicate this with an x86 design. They might not have to modify the CPU core and its caches that much, mostly the memory controller. How much time they would need though, I'm not sure. There's some probability they were aware that this was coming and already had something in the works. Otherwise, maybe one or two years?
    • thoughtsimple 6y ago
      This has been misreported. The RAM is on the same chip carrier as the SoC but not built into the same silicon die. The memory bandwidth is reportedly ~68 GB/s which is good but not exceptional.
      • tachyonbeam 6y ago
        How does that compare to the top Ryzen mobile chips?
• dirtypersian 6y ago
  I didn't really understand the TSO explanation given in this article and found it to be a bit hand-wavy. The article says to emulate the x86 TSO consistency model on an ARM machine which is weakly ordered you have to add a bunch of instructions which would make the emulation slow. I followed that much but then after that it doesn't really explain how they would get around these extra instructions needed to guarantee the ordering. It just says "oh, it's a hardware toggle"; toggle of what exactly? I could see them just saying no to following TSO for single core stuff and when running emulated code for single core performance benchmarks since technically you don't care about ordering for single core operation/correctness. That would speed up their single core stuff but then what about the multi-core.
  • Veedrac 6y ago
    > It just says "oh, it's a hardware toggle"; toggle of what exactly? A toggle that makes the chip treat all loads and stores from that thread as TSO.
    • dirtypersian 6y ago
      so you're saying somehow Rosetta2 is looking at an x86 binary and figuring out exactly which portions of the program rely on the TSO ordering for correctness and then dynamically switches to weak ordering for parts that might be able to do without? I don't really know much about the internals of macOS but figuring out when there are applications for example running on two different cores (since TSO is only really needed for multi-core use cases) that need to access the same memory and then applying TSO on the fly like that seems difficult. If that is what Rosetta2 is actually doing, that is impressive.
      • dannyw 6y ago
        No; it’s not explained very well but the M1 chip features hardware support for TSO which Rosetta2 uses. It’s really ‘Apple Silicon’ and not just ARM.
        • 6y ago
• ur-whale 6y ago
  PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.
  • EugeneOZ 6y ago
    Same here. I took my decision to leave macOS after their release of BigSur. It's absolutely, 101% unacceptable to me when someone else controls what program I can run on my hardware, and I should hope that their server will not go down. I still congratulate the team of Apple Silicone. Hope it will force Intel to create something similar.
    • hapticmonkey 6y ago
      They're adding an option to disable this in a future update. But I agree that it shouldn't have been forced to start with.
      • dingdingdang 6y ago
        That's fascinating/good-news, do you have a reference for that?
      • EugeneOZ 6y ago
        Hope so. Right now their "support" site says: "If you see this warning, it means that the app was not notarized, and Apple could not scan the app for known malicious software. You may want to look for an updated version of the app in the App Store or look for an alternative app."
  • oblio 6y ago
    Does "Linux run stable" on existing Macs? Not that I know of, 15 years after the introduction of Intel Macs. You might have to wait forever.
    • freetonik 6y ago
• choicenotchance 6y ago
  Sadly it can't run docker, and as a primarily backend dev, it's a huge problem for me as docker is a very important part of my workflow.
• CyberRabbi 6y ago
  These ppl are so drunk on the kool aid they don’t even realize that 80% of their experience is common to every new laptop purchase. In 1 year these “revolutionary” computers will be boring and slow again, especially when their batteries start to deteriorate.
  • jamil7 6y ago
    Do you really believe this is a common hardware release? There’s nothing revolutionary here? People love to hate on Apple which is fair for a lot of reasons but I think you have to give credit where credit is due. The M1 will push all laptops forward and force others to complete which is great for customers.
    • CyberRabbi 6y ago
      I didn’t say there is nothing different here, only that the tangible differences are marginal to the exaggerated good experiences people are reporting. Apple has not revolutionized how lithium batteries work and the power savings by the M1 are less than 100% improvement, so the claims about battery life are clearly exaggerated and mostly common to all new laptop purchases. Apple makes decent products but they make even better marketing.
• cable2600 6y ago
  Since the M1 is ARM based a lot of my friends joke that it is a Chromebook with MacOSX software on it. Which isn't exactly true.
• Labo333 6y ago
  I might have an explanation for the reduced RAM consumption thanks to the M1 chip: RAM compression (https://www.lifewire.com/understanding-compressed-memory-os-x-2260327 https://www.lifewire.com/understanding-compressed-memory-os-...). I'm using zram on manjaro and I see it as a trade-off between RAM and CPU power.
  • _a1_ 6y ago
    TBH this sounds like Windows '95 era "RAM doublers" like SoftRAM 95 :D
    • mproud 6y ago
      This is a nice retrospective on SoftRAM: https://youtu.be/8rxssVFeKr8 https://youtu.be/8rxssVFeKr8
• person_of_color 6y ago
  How does UMA help perf?
• smokey_circles 6y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of the thermal throttling comparisons. Apple completely fucked the pooch on the previous gen(s?) when it came to design. They don't get points for fixing an utter fuck up. That should have triggered a recall, imo. However, the performance of M1 looks hella solid, and kudos to them. I'm gonna stay with Linux because I'm comfortable in it, but innovation is never a bad thing. INB4 walled gardens and code signing: stop drinking the koolaid and do your own research
• torginus 6y ago
  I just realized thanks to this article, that the x86 memory-model emulation is not only available in the M1, but has been present going back to at least the A12 series. Apple has been planning this a long time.
• DarkmSparks 6y ago
  One of the things I've noticed recently, and especially since the CPU space started finally moving again is how much of a divide there now is between the computer literate, and the computer illiterate. It probably creates a social divide at least that which existed when the majority of people couldn't read or write, and is just as "not OK". Example of this in the first paragraph of this article: > For everyday users who just want to browse the web, stream some Netflix, maybe edit some documents, computers have been “perfectly fine” for the last decade. These kind of things now read to me like "for the everyday peasant, that just wants to go to swim in the river, seal the roof of their house and get to work on time, clay tablets and stylus's have been perfectly fine for the last century" Even the title screams this kind of thinking, computers are not black magic, any more than medicine or writing were magic or sorcery back when burning witches was a thing. Makes me a little sad.
  • bserge 6y ago
    The divide has always been there, it's just that "computer illiterate" people massively outnumber the literate ones and as such, are getting more attention. It's kind of like saying there's a huge divide between "house literate" people, who know how everything in their home is built and how to fix it, and "house illiterate" people who just want to come home, turn on the lights, use the shower, the oven and the bed.
    • DarkmSparks 6y ago
      Brazilian Favelas spring to mind. Yeah, like that.
      • bserge 6y ago
        Did you mean that in a negative way? The way I see it, favelas are more of a government problem, not enforcing rules and standards leads to people making up their own (just like Internet standards). Going with my analogy, someone who built their own house in the favelas is, in fact, "house literate". Their home might be sub-standard, but they can take care of it all on their own.
• kovacs_x 6y ago
  Imo release of M1 will be comparable to the release of the original iPhone, but for the Mac brand (in terms of profitability and long term returns). Just saying.
• ngcc_hk 6y ago
  I talked to myself these are all Apple fan boys. My 10 mac are fine. The old Mac Pro even run nvidia 1080ti. Can you m1 do it ? No. Wait fir 2nd gen at least. ... fighting.
• jwmoz 6y ago
  Can't wait to buy the M1 and feel the speed upgrade. Fast-forward 2 years later browsing the web is slow as hell, battery runs out in an hour, can't even CMD-TAB without lagging.
  • nrvn 6y ago
    Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Program expands so as to fill computer resources available for its execution.
    • em500 6y ago
      In indeed. My wife has a work laptop with an i7, 16GB Ram, fast SSD and 802.11ax network. Just starting it up in the morning and just going through Outlook email takes longer than it did 10 years ago on 2Gb Core2Duo laptops. It seems most of the hardware these days is used to run Windows/software updates and corporate security theatre malware.
• jayd16 6y ago
  So how long before AMD and Intel start packing 16GB of RAM on their chips? The M1 has what, 1.5x the bandwidth of the other top chips?
  • Tuna-Fish 6y ago
    Despite the confusing Apple terminology, the RAM on M1 is not on the chip, it's on the package. Similar things have been used in x86 laptops in the past, just find any laptop that uses LPDDR4.
• exoji2e 6y ago
  "iOS software uses reference counting for memory management, running on silicon optimized to make reference counting as efficient as possible; Android software uses garbage collection for memory management, a technique that requires more RAM to achieve equivalent performance." This statement is nonsense. Reference counting is typically used in garbage collection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_counting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_counting It is equivalent of saying "On iOS devices the memory efficient Chrome app can be used, but on Android phones a browser is used, which requires more RAM for equivalent performance."
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The first section of your wiki link compares ref counting vs tracing GC (Java).
  • jb1991 6y ago
    > It is equivalent of saying No, they are not equivalent. It is true that reference counting is a form of GC. However, Java's GC is not based primarily on reference counting. It is much more complex and, generally, does indeed use much more memory. Swift's reference counting is not much different than C++ shared pointers, except that it is all baked into the language. It is generally true that iOS devices require less memory to achieve the same things as Android devices.
  • pocket_titan 6y ago
    Looks like the comparison is between tracing garbage collection & reference counting, both of which could be said to belong to the broader category of "garbage collection" algorithms. I do agree tho that it's confusing
  • rsynnott 6y ago
    > Reference counting is typically used in garbage collection While you _can_ implement a garbage collector with reference counting, and in the broadest possible definition of 'garbage collector' you could call Apple's use of reference counting a garbage collector, no, what people typically call garbage collectors are not, today, typically primarily dependent on reference counting.
• raverbashing 6y ago
  > iOS software uses reference counting for memory management, running on silicon optimized to make reference counting as efficient as possible; Android software uses garbage collection for memory management, a technique that requires more RAM to achieve equivalent performance. Oh no crap Sherlock! Let me save this quote whenever someone wants to tell me all about how GC is much superior than reference counting. Yes tell me how a stop-scan-mark-sweep periodic process is more efficient than just keeping track of what you do.
• Toutouxc 6y ago
  ENOUGH ALREADY! The shipping date on the Airs is slipping past mid December here in Europe. I can't stay that hyped for that long.
• vermilingua 6y ago
  For those of us who are picking up M1 MacBooks as first time Mac users, is there some kind of Mac crash course for devs? What apps are useful, what familiar tools from Linux can we use, etc? I'm aware of Dash, which makes me suspect there are a bunch of other Mac-exclusive tools which will be useful.
  • kolinko 6y ago
    Most linux terminal stuff works easily on mac - all the vims, emacs and so on. For FTP, there is Transmit by Panic, which is quite neat. For web browsing, Big Sur's Safari finally works well (it's the first time I managed to do a switch from Chrome, after multiple tries). Time Machine backup is also awesome - I couldn't find anything working just as well for other OSs. There are also some neat system-wide tricks you may like: - you can set up a hot-corner in preferences to show the desktop. I have mine in bottom-right, that way if I want to move sth in and out of desktop, I grab it, do the hot-corner, and drop. - most file-editing apps have an icon next to a file-name in the window bar. you can drag&drop that icon to copy file etc. if you command-click the icon, the whole path to the file get revealed - you can drag & drop files to every open file dialog in the system. super-handy - home/end/pgup/pgdown keys are missing on the keyboard, but Emacs shortcuts work throught the whole system, e.g. Ctrl+A, Ctrl+E = home/end in every text dialog - command+option+shift+v = paste without style, if you want to paste something into a wysiwyg text editor as a plain text - command+shift+4 - screenshot of a part of the screen. also can serve as a pixel ruler, since it shows how many pixels you are grabbing - Cmd+Up/Cmd+Down - navigate within the filesystem In general, for me as a dev - the best thing about MacOS is how much of the stuff is built-in, and a ton of system features that are consistent through all the apps. That, and a linux-style console/filesystem :)
  • bysja 6y ago
    I found this guide to be helpful: https://sourabhbajaj.com/mac-setup/ https://sourabhbajaj.com/mac-setup/
  • FeloniousHam 6y ago
    Better Touch Tool [1] is a must have for customizing the touchpad and keyboard. I like Karabiner to convert the Caps Lock into a new meta key [2]. [1] https://folivora.ai https://folivora.ai [2] https://www.howtogeek.com/409904/how-to-turn-your-mac’s-caps-lock-into-an-extra-modifier-key/ https://www.howtogeek.com/409904/how-to-turn-your-mac’s-caps...
• jbverschoor 6y ago
  Did anyone find a review / benchmark of QEMU emulating x86 on ARM?
  • thoughtsimple 6y ago
    I've been trying to build QEMU but keep running into road blocks. Will work on it again today.
• throw93 6y ago
  Very excited about the performance of new chip. Although I would wait another year till popular apps start working reliably.
• kenneth 6y ago
  I do take slight issue with the section about RAM performance. The idea in the article is that M1 Mac runs software that uses reference-counting instead of garbage collection as its memory model (i.e. Objective-C and Swift software). Two issues… 1/ Sure, but that's also the case with with x86 Intel Macs. Still running reference-counting Obj-C and Swift software for the most part. So how is this a M1 differentiator? 2/ Also, Macs run plenty of software that mostly uses garbage collection, e.g. any Electron app (Spotify, Slack, Superhuman, etc.) is mostly implemented in GC'd Javascript. There's also plenty of software written with other runtimes like Java or implementing a GC. So this does nothing to explain why 8GB of RAM on an OS X device with an M1 chip is better than 8GB of RAM on an OS X device with an x86 chip from Intel.
  • roguelynn 6y ago
    Minor correction: Spotify isn’t Electron, it’s Chromium Embedded Framework.
• nercury 6y ago
  It's quite clear how this "magic" is possible. Weather you like it or not, the future is a "product on a chip". That includes everything: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, and assembly instructions for vendor-specific things like NSObject. This puts everything physically close together (efficient), eliminates all the protocol compatibility overhead (efficient), removes all the standards the company can't control (efficient). The downside, of course, that this will be the ultimate vendor lock-in, which is hard to compete with, and can't be serviced by anyone else. The upside is that the alternatives will always remain relevant.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    It's not a sustainable model. Apple relies on the rest of the market being open and interoperable for their products to be useful (even the fastest computer is useless without content). If every competitor turns to monolithic solutions, they all lose.
  • xphos 6y ago
    Yeah I was wondering forever to how that were emulating x86 faster than native x86 its because they brought ram internal. But the ultimate black box is a better word than vendor lock-in. If they are gutting all the common stuff I wonder what dragons are lurking. Like this is the kind of design change that introduces something like meltdown in my opinion. Maybe MacOS can hide these things but there is definitely some hardware issues there its to many moving parts for it not to be.
  • xadhominemx 6y ago
    Putting the CPU and RAM on the same die is absolutely not the future. Not only is it impossible to mix and match process technologies in that way, it would be extremely wasteful given the far greater numbers of metal layers on a CPU and the performance improvement would be marginal. The same is even more true with integrating CPU and NAND flash.
    • ericpauley 6y ago
      Pretty sure the M1 memory is not on the same die, just on the same "chip". You can see a separation in the teardowns and Apple's advertising materials don't show it on the die images.
• carry_bit 6y ago
  What does this mean for the future of CPU design? VLIW and other advanced designs never went mainstream in part because the AOT on install/JIT everything future never arrived. But with the success of Rosetta 2, has that future finally arrived?
  • Veedrac 6y ago
    If anything Apple has proven that the OoO power tax is mostly imaginary, so we'll probably just get more, bigger OoO for a while.
• dkarl 6y ago
  DHH tweet quoted in the article: You don't sit around thinking "oh, browsing the web is slow on my decked-out iMac", but then you browse with the M1, and you're like, DAMN, I can actually feel that +50%. I wish I could feel excited about this, but my first thought is that web developers probably have a huge wish list of things they're ready to unleash to eat up that 50%. I was expecting to get a nice 5-7 year lifetime from my early 2020 Macbook Pro. Maybe I should revise my expectations, especially if more and more desktop apps are going to be built on web technology.
• totaldude87 6y ago
  Damn, I knew these are fast (from reviews, from pros) , but I was happy with my mid 2012 MacBook pro ,and all its modularity, even if it doesn't open 100 tabs or open 7 simultaneous , or lasts for 3-4 hours max without charging. but Man, these "user" reviews are making me drive towards a purchase and its going to punch a hole in my wallet! looks apple has reinvented the chips / processors
• globalguy 6y ago
  How about when connecting an external monitor? My 2019 Mac Book Pro will get very hot after a few minutes and many people report the same.
  • thoughtsimple 6y ago
    The M1 Air is cool as a cucumber. I've tried everything in my power to heat it up, nothing works. The closest I've gotten is slightly warm when running the Cinebench benchmark.
• ramosu 6y ago
  I got tired of such reviews filled with so much bullshit.. These people forget about Pro users and still sees a laptop as an iPad with keyboard. Pro users need the machine to -heavy- work, and rely on compatibility (software and hardware). Also, I work 90% of the time on my desk with the power adapter connected. So battery is far below in my priority list. So far, MKHB was the only decent review I found. I suggest serious users to watch it.
• wffurr 6y ago
  I am weirdly obsessed with this. I am burning to see the next iteration of Apple Silicon devices with an M1X or M2 chip and more ports and RAM for higher-spec devices and new MacBook designs even lighter and smaller than the current Air (bring back the 11"!). I guess I'm just caught up in the hype and excited about movement in the chip design space after many years of Intel stagnation. Zen and the M1 are a breath of fresh air. Waiting to replace a 2014 11" MacBook Air until the story about Parallels support is clear and maybe new MacBook designs are available. I also have a 2013 Mac Pro trashcan-style on my desk at work. Until recently it was simultaneously available in the inventory system and marked as EOL. I'm not sure if the 2020 6-core Intel Mac Mini would actually be faster - maybe. I'm only a part-time iOS developer so I keep trucking along with the 2013 model.
  • kzrdude 6y ago
    You're not the only one - there's an apple silicon story on HN every day, so that says something. And I too look out for them. Just dreaming that M1 would be available in a different reasonable linux notebook.
• ThinkBeat 6y ago
  Such an impressive marketing launch. Regular marketing, paid reviews and a bunch of astroturfing. A standard Apple launch receipt. I will withhold my enthusiasm or judgment until it has been I'm the hands of real users for six months or so. In principle, I have never seen a Mac product that lives up to the hype. I might be harder to please I guess There are bound to be issues with Rosetta2 that will be found and hopefully patched. Same with the new OS. I predict some problems with hardware as well. To me this is common sense. This is a gigantic step. A gigantic release. Such events nearly always have issues. Which is why so many software developed work With continuous delivery. Though we might think this is how the development Took place internally. I do not know how many dev machines were handed out prior to the launch Like anyone I would like all the glitter and fanfare to be real and accurate. .
• seek3r 6y ago
  DHH did an entire marketing campaign for Hey.com around Apple being bad. Then he turns around and buys a Mac...
• corytheboyd 6y ago
  Call me dumb, but I didn’t realize they had done so much memory optimization to make the physical 8GB of RAM so effective. I saw a very much lower number than I expected and just assumed it wouldn’t handle memory intensive workloads well. As someone who develops web tech my entire life revolves around crushing RAM, now I think the M1 may actually result in big gains for my workload hrmm
  • joshstrange 6y ago
    Same here, I guess after years of the iPhone specs being lower than Androids when it came to things like RAM but still crushing Android phones should have clued me in. I figured that with 16GB max that the new computers would be a non-starter for me but from what I've seen I was wrong about that. Unfortunately the monitor limit IS a non-starter but I'll be first in line for the M2/M1S/M1Z (whatever they call it) in next year's new 16" MBP (assuming I can continue to drive all my monitors).
• jordache 6y ago
  Just don't quote anything from Dieter Bohn
  • HatchedLake721 6y ago
    why?
• WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  I'm amused by the praise. I've been a Linux user for the last 10 years. Last week I got an M1 Mac Mini to do some iOS development on. It feels fast, but not substantially faster than Linux. Safari is a bit snappier than Firefox, but that's about it. Was macOS on Intel really that much slower?
  • andrekandre 6y ago
    > Was macOS on Intel really that much slower? not really, except for maybe integrated intel graphics (switching monitors is the bane of my life) that being said, the same or better performance of a high-end "hair-dryer" macbook pro in the form factor of a fanless macbook air and price-point + having increased battery-life is the huge draw imo until now, we've never had that kind of high end performance in such a small, quiet and inexpensive form factor
• WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  Intel and AMD were really limited in how much they could innovate since they limited themselves to Windows desktop. And windows basically only runs on the amd64 architecture. Hopefully, they'll start being bolder now. The MS ecosystem has been an anchor for hardware (especially desktop/laptops) innovation for far too long.
• diveanon 6y ago
  I've seen lots of M1 benchmarks, but has anyone done a side by side comparison of what it is like to actually get work done on one? Take a conventional dockerized local dev environment and just start building stuff. How much time do you spend working around M1 arch issues versus building your app? This is the key factor that is keeping me from being an early adopter. I don't get paid to figure out how to work on a new chip architecture, in fact I pay a lot of money to not have to think about those problems at all.
  • elliottkember 6y ago
    Good questions. Docker doesn’t work yet. My node and rails apps work great. React Native works great. It’s weirdly fine. VSCode was slow for a bit, but I think it hadn’t synced my file exclude settings.