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What? None of that makes any sense. There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machin

What? None of that makes any sense. There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. The M1 and M2 chips are proprietary to Apple and so be it; the Asahi folks are allowing us to run Linux on them at full acceleration. What’s not to love?

smoldesu 4y ago
> There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsmcs-entire-5nm-production-capability https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA. > What’s not to love? You sound like the people preaching the Nouveau drivers right now. "we reverse-engineered this proprietary GPU and got it working at 50% speed and 3x power consumption, what's not to love?" Nvidia's first-party drivers are far-and-away the more popular (and faster, more power-efficent, more well-supported, etc.) option. What's "not to love" is the fact that we're cheering for someone doing thankless and redundant work that wouldn't exist if the multi-billion dollar corporation dedicated a couple engineers to Linux support. You can't even consistently control the brightness on these machines more than a year after they've launched, it's obvious that there are significant problems WRT reverse-engineering the hardware.
- gigatexal 4y ago
  “ > There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA.” AMD and Nvidia and Apple are going to be buying from the new plant. Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company. Given what is possible and what’s possible is what you can control and what you can control is what you do, so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened. What’s easier? Getting apple to make like Intel and have a Linux division? Haha. So they took it upon themselves and that effort is laudable nay it’s worthy of lots of praise. Heaps of it. The Noveau argument is a false flag. Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side. I just don’t understand what people want? Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on. Instead people would rather whine and moan or write apology pieces about hardware that sucks in comparison. Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison. Give me a 14 inch MacBook Pro with 32GB or ram and Asahi Linux any day of the week.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking in the CPU space, and Apple being closed about everything isn't helping. If you want to see open, have a look at Microsoft Research. Apple is nowhere near that. FOSS people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to support them.
    - gigatexal 4y ago
      “ Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking in the CPU space,” Competition is lacking because Intel fucked up. Apple bet big on power sipping performance and it’s paid off. Why should they “help” the industry out when they’re so far ahead? They also have no incentive to spend billions on R&D only to open it up to competition. That makes no sense. They’re not a platform like Microsoft is. MS wants an open platform hardware wise so they can sell more licenses of Windows. They’re different business models. Surely you see that? “ FOSS people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to support them.” Of course. And nowhere was I saying “FOSS” folks to support them just celebrate the work of your fellow hackers doing the equivalent of reverse engineering some Empire tech for the Rebellion. Does that metaphor work for you?
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        > Competition is lacking because Intel fucked up. And now it's Apple's turn to fuck up. The M2 isn't even 20% faster than the M1, it's like a Skylake situation all over again. > Apple bet big on power sipping performance and it’s paid off. Apple bet big on the 5nm node (bought the exclusive rights to use it) and it paid off. Your marketing copywriting doesn't mean anything if you don't back it up with evidence. > They’re different business models. Surely you see that? They both make hardware. Shouldn't they both get held to the same standards, to encourage healthy competition? They certainly have the financial means to do it. I think your technical perspective on this situation is horribly maligned, you should spend more time researching the technologies Apple used rather than repeating the words from their announcement event.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company. ARM is a proprietary ISA. To use it, you have to pay ARM money. It's literally their entire business model, I'm not sure how you could miss it. > so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened Yep. It's a damn shame too, that's what everyone is saying in this thread. Apple has billions of dollars and they're letting volunteers do their work for them. It's a depressing waste of human effort, considering how Apple has the proper implementation specs available internally. It's undeniable that Asahi's development pace would be faster if they had rudimentary help from Apple engineers. > Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side. That's also a false-flag since Apple's firmware interface is undocumented. Plus it's also fairly outdated because Nvidia's GPUs have been shipping with firmware interfaces for years (since RTX 20-series). Think where they could get if they had open source kernel modules. And you can have that, on any recent Nvidia card. > Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on. They get shit on because they're wasting their time. It's been 2 years and you still can't adjust the brightness on these machines, not because they're incapable of it but because Apple never documented the control interface for each model. Apple has this info, they just withhold it from the community because of how horribly sensitive it is. Real security issue, yunno. It's really tragic to consider all the engineering hours lost trying to figure out how Apple's hardware works. It's been 2 years since the M1 was released and it still doesn't have the same level of Linux support as a HP or Lenovo machine would have on Day-1. > I just don’t understand what people want A Macbook with Linux on it? Preferably one that doesn't suck. > Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison. And nobody ported Linux to the previous Macbooks because they also sucked. It's entirely besides the point, though.

smoldesu 4y ago

> There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsmcs-entire-5nm-production-capability https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA. > What’s not to love? You sound like the people preaching the Nouveau drivers right now. "we reverse-engineered this proprietary GPU and got it working at 50% speed and 3x power consumption, what's not to love?" Nvidia's first-party drivers are far-and-away the more popular (and faster, more power-efficent, more well-supported, etc.) option. What's "not to love" is the fact that we're cheering for someone doing thankless and redundant work that wouldn't exist if the multi-billion dollar corporation dedicated a couple engineers to Linux support. You can't even consistently control the brightness on these machines more than a year after they've launched, it's obvious that there are significant problems WRT reverse-engineering the hardware.

gigatexal 4y ago
“ > There’s been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging wafers. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node. > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA.” AMD and Nvidia and Apple are going to be buying from the new plant. Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company. Given what is possible and what’s possible is what you can control and what you can control is what you do, so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened. What’s easier? Getting apple to make like Intel and have a Linux division? Haha. So they took it upon themselves and that effort is laudable nay it’s worthy of lots of praise. Heaps of it. The Noveau argument is a false flag. Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side. I just don’t understand what people want? Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on. Instead people would rather whine and moan or write apology pieces about hardware that sucks in comparison. Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison. Give me a 14 inch MacBook Pro with 32GB or ram and Asahi Linux any day of the week.
- amelius 4y ago
  Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking in the CPU space, and Apple being closed about everything isn't helping. If you want to see open, have a look at Microsoft Research. Apple is nowhere near that. FOSS people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to support them.
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    “ Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking in the CPU space,” Competition is lacking because Intel fucked up. Apple bet big on power sipping performance and it’s paid off. Why should they “help” the industry out when they’re so far ahead? They also have no incentive to spend billions on R&D only to open it up to competition. That makes no sense. They’re not a platform like Microsoft is. MS wants an open platform hardware wise so they can sell more licenses of Windows. They’re different business models. Surely you see that? “ FOSS people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to support them.” Of course. And nowhere was I saying “FOSS” folks to support them just celebrate the work of your fellow hackers doing the equivalent of reverse engineering some Empire tech for the Rebellion. Does that metaphor work for you?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      > Competition is lacking because Intel fucked up. And now it's Apple's turn to fuck up. The M2 isn't even 20% faster than the M1, it's like a Skylake situation all over again. > Apple bet big on power sipping performance and it’s paid off. Apple bet big on the 5nm node (bought the exclusive rights to use it) and it paid off. Your marketing copywriting doesn't mean anything if you don't back it up with evidence. > They’re different business models. Surely you see that? They both make hardware. Shouldn't they both get held to the same standards, to encourage healthy competition? They certainly have the financial means to do it. I think your technical perspective on this situation is horribly maligned, you should spend more time researching the technologies Apple used rather than repeating the words from their announcement event.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company. ARM is a proprietary ISA. To use it, you have to pay ARM money. It's literally their entire business model, I'm not sure how you could miss it. > so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened Yep. It's a damn shame too, that's what everyone is saying in this thread. Apple has billions of dollars and they're letting volunteers do their work for them. It's a depressing waste of human effort, considering how Apple has the proper implementation specs available internally. It's undeniable that Asahi's development pace would be faster if they had rudimentary help from Apple engineers. > Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side. That's also a false-flag since Apple's firmware interface is undocumented. Plus it's also fairly outdated because Nvidia's GPUs have been shipping with firmware interfaces for years (since RTX 20-series). Think where they could get if they had open source kernel modules. And you can have that, on any recent Nvidia card. > Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on. They get shit on because they're wasting their time. It's been 2 years and you still can't adjust the brightness on these machines, not because they're incapable of it but because Apple never documented the control interface for each model. Apple has this info, they just withhold it from the community because of how horribly sensitive it is. Real security issue, yunno. It's really tragic to consider all the engineering hours lost trying to figure out how Apple's hardware works. It's been 2 years since the M1 was released and it still doesn't have the same level of Linux support as a HP or Lenovo machine would have on Day-1. > I just don’t understand what people want A Macbook with Linux on it? Preferably one that doesn't suck. > Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison. And nobody ported Linux to the previous Macbooks because they also sucked. It's entirely besides the point, though.