5 ms·

Maybe Samsung will manage an Apple M1 competitor.

by sliken 6y ago

lhoff 6y ago
Up until noe, they haven't even managed to build a competitor to the Snapdragon CPUs. But let's see what they are up to.
systemvoltage 6y ago
More than the hardware, I want a macOS competitor that doesn't require me to grow a neck beard or have a voice assistant built in.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  > macOS competitor that doesn't require me to grow a neck beard or have a voice assistant built in. What is genuinely so bad about Linux these days? Although I like playing with low-level stuff, I derive zero pleasure from OS-fettling and I just stuck Mint on my laptop - it's been basically perfect apart from a problem with the dual-boot setup which I think is an SSD problem waiting to explode. Half the time I read these complaints, I either see people who actually already have neck beards in denial, or people who are expecting Linux or Windows to be identical to macOS.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Everytime I install Linux, there is always something that's frustrating. Like the other day, I couldn't watch NYTimes video in fullscreen mode without Chrome crashing. Ok, so, I installed Firefox. Fullscreen video goes to my vertical monitor. No way to change this behavior. Desktop Linux is developed by people who love CLI. It's not built by people that try to address problems of common mundane people off the street. I'd rather use Windows than Linux for daily driver. Atleast UI will not freak out like in Ubuntu. Half the time I read people saying have you tried Linux Desktop, I either see people who are tasteless and love being nerdy with tmux environment, or people who are expecting others to be like themselves. As Linus Torvalds would plainly put "Desktop Linux sucks. It is the worst piece of shit attempt at Desktop OS". :-)
    - jdironman 6y ago
      Then we need to fund the developers working on this. Money makes things happen. Simple as that.
      - nine_k 6y ago
        This is truth, but not the whole truth. Beside money, you need somebody with a right vision at helm. Look at the direction modern Gnome goes. They have the money from Red Hat and Canonical. BTW systemd too was developed by salaried employees of Red Hat. Money makes things happen, but not always the nicest things.
        bserge 6y ago
        And there simply is no helm. Who do you donate to? Not that an individual donation would make a difference, anyway. There's now, what, 3 forks of RHEL? People are free to do what they want, of course, but this doesn't help Linux at all.
        Denvercoder9 6y ago
        > BTW systemd too was developed by salaried employees of Red Hat. For all its faults, systemd was a major step forward for a system to "just work".
      - systemvoltage 6y ago
        Definitely. I like the idea of open source quality Desktop OS, but not acknowledging issues with it is not helping.
      - skocznymroczny 6y ago
        I disagree. Even with money, there's too much fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem, and while choice is nice, the parts often don't play well with each other. What Linux needs is more big companies taking over and forcing their direction. Ubuntu and Fedora did a lot for desktop Linux, because they forced some controversial decisions upon the community, instead of being stuck in endless battle of supporting every legacy toolkit and supporting every fork that comes up whenever a controversial decision occurs.
- arvinsim 6y ago
  I sold my Hackintosh this year to upgrade. Since I didn't want to deal with setting up a Hackintosh again, I decided to go Linux for my development work after finding WSL2 unsatisfactory. I shopped around for Linux distributions and finally settled on Pop!_OS. I loved it. No fiddling needed and the user experience is the closest to MacOS I have gotten.
phkahler 6y ago
Using RISC-V.
bazooka_penguin 6y ago
Now more than ever they won't because they shuttered their CPU microarchitecture team. Mongoose is dead for good and they're using ARM's reference architectures, like Cortex X1 and A78.
mhh__ 6y ago
Interestingly, M1 doesn't have that much secret sauce in it - it's extremely wide and benefits immensely from avoiding the x86 tax on the decoder, with a few tricks up its sleeve. Apple have shown it's possible, so - although starting now isn't ideal - if Samsung have the wherewithal to do it they absolutely could. More difficult, however, would probably be selling it - I would imagine some HPC clusters would love it, for example, but for consumer products Apple can charge through the roof because their customers are used to paying pretty high prices for (sometimes better, sometimes worse) hardware. Apple's vertical integration also means they basically don't have to bother building an acceptable ecosystem around their new chipset - there's basically no documentation or vTune-style performance tools. It's also partly a question of priorities, but AMD still lag behind Intel even after decades in the game.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  What’s interesting is that even when emulating x86 they outperform AMD/Intel. That means the decoder improvements of doing a bunch of decodes in parallel (which x86 can’t do due to being CISC) aren’t the whole story. It could be that Apple just translates x86 code into fixed width to work around this or it could be other architectural improvements.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    The vast majority of instructions by a computer are executed in loops, if you perform the translation once it's an O(1) overhead in the ideal case. Intel and AMD both perform decodes in parallel, but not as wide as M1, but having such a large and complex decoder costs silicon and power. Taking RISC-V as an example, a fixed width frontend is a project for a student, a modern x86 decoder is probably millions to write and verify. I bet both Intel and AMD aren't exactly in love with x86 at the moment
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      > a modern x86 decoder is probably millions to write and verify I must be missing something, because it looks pretty simple as a segmented sum problem to me. A good example of parallel segmented sum is bishop / rook (aka sliding pieces) movement. https://www.chessprogramming.org/Kogge-Stone_Algorithm https://www.chessprogramming.org/Kogge-Stone_Algorithm This segmented sum / prefix sum / Kogge Stone is taught in carry sum adder class at the undergrad level. Sure, it's non obvious that it applies to parallel decoding but id expect this sort of thing to be a student exercise at the masters level.

Maybe Samsung will manage an Apple M1 competitor.

by sliken 6y ago

Maybe Samsung will manage an Apple M1 competitor.

Up until noe, they haven't even managed to build a competitor to the Snapdragon CPUs. But let's see what they are up to.

systemvoltage 6y ago

More than the hardware, I want a macOS competitor that doesn't require me to grow a neck beard or have a voice assistant built in.

mhh__ 6y ago
> macOS competitor that doesn't require me to grow a neck beard or have a voice assistant built in. What is genuinely so bad about Linux these days? Although I like playing with low-level stuff, I derive zero pleasure from OS-fettling and I just stuck Mint on my laptop - it's been basically perfect apart from a problem with the dual-boot setup which I think is an SSD problem waiting to explode. Half the time I read these complaints, I either see people who actually already have neck beards in denial, or people who are expecting Linux or Windows to be identical to macOS.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Everytime I install Linux, there is always something that's frustrating. Like the other day, I couldn't watch NYTimes video in fullscreen mode without Chrome crashing. Ok, so, I installed Firefox. Fullscreen video goes to my vertical monitor. No way to change this behavior. Desktop Linux is developed by people who love CLI. It's not built by people that try to address problems of common mundane people off the street. I'd rather use Windows than Linux for daily driver. Atleast UI will not freak out like in Ubuntu. Half the time I read people saying have you tried Linux Desktop, I either see people who are tasteless and love being nerdy with tmux environment, or people who are expecting others to be like themselves. As Linus Torvalds would plainly put "Desktop Linux sucks. It is the worst piece of shit attempt at Desktop OS". :-)
  - jdironman 6y ago
    Then we need to fund the developers working on this. Money makes things happen. Simple as that.
    - nine_k 6y ago
      This is truth, but not the whole truth. Beside money, you need somebody with a right vision at helm. Look at the direction modern Gnome goes. They have the money from Red Hat and Canonical. BTW systemd too was developed by salaried employees of Red Hat. Money makes things happen, but not always the nicest things.
      - bserge 6y ago
        And there simply is no helm. Who do you donate to? Not that an individual donation would make a difference, anyway. There's now, what, 3 forks of RHEL? People are free to do what they want, of course, but this doesn't help Linux at all.
      - Denvercoder9 6y ago
        > BTW systemd too was developed by salaried employees of Red Hat. For all its faults, systemd was a major step forward for a system to "just work".
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      Definitely. I like the idea of open source quality Desktop OS, but not acknowledging issues with it is not helping.
    - skocznymroczny 6y ago
      I disagree. Even with money, there's too much fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem, and while choice is nice, the parts often don't play well with each other. What Linux needs is more big companies taking over and forcing their direction. Ubuntu and Fedora did a lot for desktop Linux, because they forced some controversial decisions upon the community, instead of being stuck in endless battle of supporting every legacy toolkit and supporting every fork that comes up whenever a controversial decision occurs.
arvinsim 6y ago
I sold my Hackintosh this year to upgrade. Since I didn't want to deal with setting up a Hackintosh again, I decided to go Linux for my development work after finding WSL2 unsatisfactory. I shopped around for Linux distributions and finally settled on Pop!_OS. I loved it. No fiddling needed and the user experience is the closest to MacOS I have gotten.

phkahler 6y ago

Using RISC-V.

bazooka_penguin 6y ago

Now more than ever they won't because they shuttered their CPU microarchitecture team. Mongoose is dead for good and they're using ARM's reference architectures, like Cortex X1 and A78.

mhh__ 6y ago

Interestingly, M1 doesn't have that much secret sauce in it - it's extremely wide and benefits immensely from avoiding the x86 tax on the decoder, with a few tricks up its sleeve. Apple have shown it's possible, so - although starting now isn't ideal - if Samsung have the wherewithal to do it they absolutely could. More difficult, however, would probably be selling it - I would imagine some HPC clusters would love it, for example, but for consumer products Apple can charge through the roof because their customers are used to paying pretty high prices for (sometimes better, sometimes worse) hardware. Apple's vertical integration also means they basically don't have to bother building an acceptable ecosystem around their new chipset - there's basically no documentation or vTune-style performance tools. It's also partly a question of priorities, but AMD still lag behind Intel even after decades in the game.

vlovich123 6y ago
What’s interesting is that even when emulating x86 they outperform AMD/Intel. That means the decoder improvements of doing a bunch of decodes in parallel (which x86 can’t do due to being CISC) aren’t the whole story. It could be that Apple just translates x86 code into fixed width to work around this or it could be other architectural improvements.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The vast majority of instructions by a computer are executed in loops, if you perform the translation once it's an O(1) overhead in the ideal case. Intel and AMD both perform decodes in parallel, but not as wide as M1, but having such a large and complex decoder costs silicon and power. Taking RISC-V as an example, a fixed width frontend is a project for a student, a modern x86 decoder is probably millions to write and verify. I bet both Intel and AMD aren't exactly in love with x86 at the moment
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > a modern x86 decoder is probably millions to write and verify I must be missing something, because it looks pretty simple as a segmented sum problem to me. A good example of parallel segmented sum is bishop / rook (aka sliding pieces) movement. https://www.chessprogramming.org/Kogge-Stone_Algorithm https://www.chessprogramming.org/Kogge-Stone_Algorithm This segmented sum / prefix sum / Kogge Stone is taught in carry sum adder class at the undergrad level. Sure, it's non obvious that it applies to parallel decoding but id expect this sort of thing to be a student exercise at the masters level.