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If only there was a world where Apple would sell M1 chips separately from their walled garden.
by hesdeadjim 5y ago
If only there was a world where Apple would sell M1 chips separately from their walled garden.
- JiNCMG 5y agoWhy? Apple has always stated they don't want to be in an enterprise like market. It stifles innovation. While you can keeps adding features to your product you can never take away from it. Ex: x86 and Windows. Meanwhile Apple has removed entire CPU functionality from their chips since the release of the iPhone 4S. This was easy because they only had to deal with their own developers. This keeps them agile and able to change from 1 release to another.
- smoldesu 5y agoAlso accepted would be a world where they just add Vulkan support to their APUs already.
- WithinReason 5y agoHow about MoltenVK? https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
- smoldesu 5y agoIt's fine, but it's frankly silly that you're forced to translate a free and open graphics API into a more proprietary one. Compare that to something like DXVK, which exists because Linux users cannot license DirectX on their systems. MoltenVK exists simply because Apple thought "let's not adopt the industry-wide standard for CG graphics on our newer machines". Again, not bad, but a bit of a sticky situation that is entirely predicated by technology politics, not what's actually possible on these GPUs.
- bzzzt 5y agoMetal was released a year before Vulkan. Apple just didn't want to wait and decided to design their own better than OpenGL API.
- smoldesu 5y agoDirectX was released a decade before Vulkan, that didn't stop manufacturers from including support for both so the user could decide for themselves.
- pjmlp 5y agoYou mean the support that is only possible because Windows backward compatibility still supports the OpenGL 1.1 ICD that they rely on? Most of the time with crappy drivers that are a shadow of their DirectX ones?
- jamespo 5y agoWith this gpu performance you’d think Apple might like to take advantage for gaming.
- pjmlp 5y agoThey already do, all middleware engines that actually matter, already support Metal. Additionally iOS and Apple have much better tooling for Metal than plain DirectXTK/Pix, or that toy SDK from Khronos (that Google also uses on Android), if we compare vendor tooling.
- smoldesu 5y agoSounds like you don't need any help then, enjoy your 50-75% performance hit playing (a scant few) games through DirectX -> Vulkan -> Wine/Crossover ($30) -> MoltenVK -> Metal!
- pjmlp 5y agoThe games I care about enjoy native Metal and DirectX, and when I code anything graphics I don't use Khronos stuff, only on the Web, where there is no other option. Any game dev gems have basic examples on doing an API loading layer. Vulkan is mostly a Linux thing, and even the Switch has its own native API, NVN, it is not Vulkan nor OpenGL on the driving seat. Here enjoy, https://www.ogre3d.org/ https://www.ogre3d.org/
- dwaite 5y ago> It's fine, but it's frankly silly that you're forced to translate a free and open graphics API into a more proprietary one. Thats exactly what every graphics API has done, because the underlying chip architecture is never free and open (and often, is neither). If the issue is that you are targeting a proprietary intermediate API rather than bare metal, that is also how Nvidia's drivers work.
- tinus_hn 5y agoIs what is possible with Metal possible with GL though? Both in performance and features? They didn’t build Metal just to be contrarian.
- my123 5y agoA fully compliant Vulkan implementation for M1 would come with very surprising performance cliffs for a developer. One of them: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1244 https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1244
- WithinReason 5y agoAnd also potential optimisations that are not possible in other GPUs: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/gpu_features/understanding_gpu_family_4/about_tile_shading https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/gpu_features...
- monocasa 5y agoThat's pretty common for TBDRs. The tile is rendered into a fixed size on chip buffer, and the driver has to split the tile into multiple passes to fit all of the render target data for nutty amounts of data coming out of the shader. PowerVR works the same way (completely unsurprisingly).
- zamadatix 5y agoIt'd be surprising if an architecture had 0 such surprises and did everything Vulkan allows without any special performance considerations vs another architecture.
- fulafel 5y agoSee this comment on that issue: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1244#issuecomment-775527537 https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1244#issueco...
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoWell, number one, why would they? Apple makes money by getting consumers and locking them into their unicorns and rainbows ecosystem where everything is perfect which makes consumers comfortable spending boat loads of money, not by selling commodity hardware. Ecosystems with great UX and paid subscriptions plus a 30% cut on all transactions are far more profitable than the margins you make selling commodity hardware. Just ask famous phone manufacturers like Siemens, Nokia and Blackberry why that is. That's why SW dev salaries are much higher than HW dev salaries as the former generates way more revenue than the latter. That's why Apple doesn't roll out their own cloud datacenters and instead just gets Amazon, Microsoft and Google to compete against each other on pricing. Apple only rolls out their solutions when they have an impact on the final UX, like designing their own M1 silicon. And number two, selling chips comes with a lot of hassle like providing support to your partners like Intel and AMD do. Pretty sure they don't want to bother with that. Before they start selling chips I would rather they open iMessage to other platforms to eliminate the bubble color discrimination.
- IgorPartola 5y agoI agree with you right up to how exactly does the M1 chip affect the final UX? A different keyboard, screen, touchpad, etc. all make a difference but why does the chip make a difference?
- ArgyleSound 5y agoPower efficiency for one.
- IgorPartola 5y agoWas there nobody else who made power efficient chips?
- JiNCMG 5y agoNot in the x86 arena. Every time Apple gets involved with a CPU developers (Motorola, IBM, Intel) their needs splits from the developers desires. This time they decided to go on their own (well after years of doing this for the iPhone). Note: They have been involved in the ARM CPU market since the days of the Newton.
- snvzz 5y agoNo worries. Competition is coming. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SiFive-P550-Successor https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SiFive-P... Should be roughly M1 performance, but on RISC-V.
- rmadriz 5y agouffff who knows when that is coming and when are we going to be able to buy regular laptops from e.g. Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc with that. By the time that happens, Apple may already be on their third, fourth? generation on M1. Which is going to much much much faster than M1.
- snvzz 5y ago>Which is going to much much much faster than M1. Will it really? It isn't a given. They might bring amazing progress, or not. Ultimately, it doesn't matter all that much if it isn't available to third parties. It's not as if everybody else is sitting on their ass. SiFive's not a fat company, their research budget is tiny, relative to the likes of Apple. And yet, they're coming up with competitive cores. Things are so much easier when not restricted by a shitty ISA (x86). I have taken a look, and I really like RISC-V; I find it better than ARM.
- phkahler 5y agoM1 is WAY faster than a cortex A78.
- bla3 5y agoThe Pi has much better performance per dollar, which is a metric that's important to some people too.
- mirekrusin 5y agoWhy? They gave "it's possible" proof. They rip benefits of doing it first - all good. Now it's time for competition to pick it up, possibly improve on it or fade away Intel style.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoOr alternately one where some Windows / Linux manufacturer could match Apple for all the innovations in the M1 Macbooks. I'm not an Apple fan but I'm envious of what they've accomplished and wish I could run Windows and Linux on similar hardware. Other folks are starting to get there but only from the mobile device direction, e.g. Tensor. Maybe I should look closer at what Microsoft has done with ARM Surface.
- smoldesu 5y agoIt doesn't help that Apple bought the entire manufacturing capacity for 5nm silicon from TSCM right before the chip shortage hit. I think the next few years are going to get very competitive though, and I'm excited to see how Intel and AMD respond.
- taf2 5y agoHow is Amazon able to product their arm chips for aws? Assuming those are not the 5nm?
- smoldesu 5y agoThere's still 5nm silicon for sale, but just not at TSCM (the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world). Companies like Samsung are just now getting around to mass-producing 5nm, and afaik there were a few domestic Chinese manufacturers who claimed to be on the node too. As for Amazon specifically though, I've got no idea. They're a large enough company that they could buy out an entire fab or foundry if they wanted, AWS makes more than enough money to cover the costs.
- jeffbee 5y agoThe "walled garden" comes with a C and C++ toolchain, python, perl, awk, sed, and a Unix shell. It is not, in any way, a "walled garden" in a universe where words have shared meaning.
- aftbit 5y agoIts a walled garden when you're not allowed to leave or bring your friends in, no matter how nice the stuff on the inside is.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoExactly, I cannot believe the Hacker News crowd are penalising you for correcting OP on not knowing that the walled garden metaphor specifically refers to the App Store, which is not an issue on MacOS.
- robbedpeter 5y agoNo. That might have been where you first saw the concept applied, but a walled garden is a commercial ecosystem that is deliberately closed to foster a sense of value and exclusivity, usually in spite of no technical reason for it. Walled gardens are inherently anti consumer market plays that make things worse for everyone except the people milking money from the idiots paying into the walled garden.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoWhat part of MacOS is a walled garden? I can use any Bluetooth or USB device with it. I can install Linux on it. I can compile my own code on it. I can download applications from any source I please and install them.
- monocasa 5y agoI'm hoping Alyssa Rosenzweig's fantastic work documenting the M1 GPU will let us write native Vulkan drivers even for MacOS. I believe she's been focusing thus far on the user space visible interfaces, so a lot of that work should translate well.
- Rovanion 5y agoThey won't. Their margins on the services side are obscene so getting people into that ecosystem is worth much more than the sales of some processors.
- Shish2k 5y agoMaybe they could make their own SBC, just an M1 and four USB-C ports… Apple Pi?
- pengaru 5y agoI'm sure there's a not so distant future where Broadcom ships a 7nm (or smaller) SoC that finds its way into the Raspberry Pi series. It's not like Apple has a meaningful moat around state of the art silicon. And that's a Good Thing.
- jonp888 5y agoThat's a bit of an ironic comment Broadcom chips are not available on the open market and they won't sell to you unless you are an enormous company(or have a "special relationship" as RPi did). Effectively you can only buy one attached to a Pi.