6 ms·
M1 Macs may lag behind
- spullara 3y agoThis seems obvious. Older processors are worse than newer processors with more features.
- ggm 3y agoNever use siri, rarely use spotlight beyond app file names completion to launch. On my fourth or fifth Macbook pro over 15 years having been a thinkpad person before that. I'm not interested in an ai assistant, it's an overclocked terminal to SSH onto bigger boxes and a word processor. It runs emacs plenty fast.
- pahn 3y ago…well, if it runs. Because all these predictive-auto-whatever features also break things: Eg., I have a bug in Apple Mail [1], which basically breaks "entering text into a computer using a keyboard" – a problem I would have thought was solved some 70+ years ago, but alas, here we are… [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255409297 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255409297
- pastacacioepepe 3y agoDid you really need a Macbook pro to be just an overclocked terminal? Seems like a waste to be fair, could have used a $500 refurbished ThinkPad for that.
- Lio 3y agoI’ve just returned to a MBP from an XPS13 running various flavours of Linux. I’d suggest that there’s lots of little things you miss on a refurbished Lenovo vs an Apple Silicon mac. Eg better battery management, better screen handling, better Bluetooth handling. None of them was a massive problem for me hut it’s that kind of fit and finish to the OS I missed. For now anyway I’d rather pay extra for a Mac.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y agoThe screen and battery life is better than any Thinkpad offer you can find. That extra $500 is well worth. I used to love my Thinkpad x260, now I can't stand it.
- nottorp 3y agoDon't forget the trackpad that's actually usable. For my current work project, I use a Mac Mini mostly to ssh into various boxes running Linux, both x86 and arm. The docs and comms are on the Mac though. Funny enough, the mini stays at 10 W (it's a M2) while the x86 box under my desk idles at 20 W with no monitor connected...
- lproven 3y agoI am typing on an M1 MacBook Air. Lovely screen, lovely battery life. It is a work laptop. My own are Thinkpads. I prefer the Thinkpads for most things. Cons of the MacBook: Terrible selection of ports, terrible trackpad (no middle click as standard, right click is unreliable and needs a clumsy gesture which fails more often than it works), AWFUL keyboard, zero repairability or upgradability. I would not wish to spend my own money on one of these things. I am not saying you are wrong. I am merely saying what you value is not universal.
- netsharc 3y ago[flagged]
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoThis snarkiness was completely unwarranted.
- Dalewyn 3y agoI think it's proper criticism, since even the article as a whole doesn't actually say anything we didn't already know. "M1 might (will) be inferior to M2 and M3 for 'AI' workloads." No shit Sherlock, hardware obsolescence in a nutshell. The least the article could then do is explain itself for unenlightened readers.
- nottorp 3y agoNot really. The article has about one line of hypothesis ("left behind" for "AI tasks"). The other 99.95% is background. Besides it uses "AI" so it looks like an attempt to join the current gold rush/religion. Edit: Hey, I asked ChatGPT to rephrase the parent comment "in a way that will bring me upvotes on Hacker News". Here's what I got: Ah, the article seems to delve into the details of integers and IEEE-754 floats; perhaps providing links for those topics would be more efficient. But I understand, the author might be aiming to meet a specific word count!
- croes 3y agoLinks change, websites change.
- IshKebab 3y agoThis doesn't sound right. The argument is that it's ISA doesn't support bfloat16 but the neural engine does support float16. They seem to think bfloat16 is a better format which isn't really true. float16 is better, it is just more expensive to convert to/from float32.
- Zetobal 3y agoUm...mate it doesn't support it that's not about preferences of XYZ it's just about the missing feature.
- IshKebab 3y agoNot sure what your point is. The neural engine supports a better half format. You can use that.
- oasisaimlessly 3y agoThere is no "better"; it is a tradeoff.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wt__ 3y agoYou may disagree with the post, but don’t dismiss the blog or the author, as I genuinely think it’s one of the best technical Mac blogs around (also he makes lots of useful free utilities to download). I bought a refurbished M1 Mini and don’t use Siri etc either, mainly concerned about performance of text searches/analysis in the likes of FZF, Jetbrains software and so on. Haven’t heard the fan once yet.
- giljabeab 3y agoFor most people an M1 is a means of accessing websites, even as a developer my dev machine has become a gateway to virtual machines and I could do the same thing on a 2008 MacBook Pro. For a few who use ML features of apps like photoshop there may be more of an occasional wait time, but it’s not like rendering a video is it, it’s 10 seconds vs 15 seconds.
- pavlov 3y agoWouldn’t most of the compute be on the GPU anyway? So the specifics of the ARM instruction set implemented on the CPU cores don’t matter very much. Maybe the M2 GPU is also better at bfloat16, but the author admits to not having researched this. So I wouldn’t make any far-reaching conclusions based on this one difference in the CPU instruction set.
- miohtama 3y agoMacs have Neural Engine, a separate chip from GPU, for AI workloads https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-unveils-m3-m3-pro-and-m3-max-the-most-advanced-chips-for-a-personal-computer/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-unveils-m3-m3-p...
- adrian_b 3y agobfloat16 is not used for graphics, where FP16 is appropriate, so all GPUs that are new enough to support 16-bit floating-point numbers support FP16. For bfloat16, there exists only one application, ML/AI, because it is the only application that can tolerate a so low resolution in numbers. AFAIK, the first device that has provided hardware support for bfloat16 was the Intel Cooper Lake CPU, which was launched in Q2 2020. AMD has added bfloat16 support in Zen 4, in 2022. If any GPU has added hardware support for bfloat16, it must be a model launched in 2020 or later. Support for bfloat16 is much more likely to be provided by dedicated ML/AI accelerators.
- corsix 3y agoSome compute might be on the AMX units (dedicated matrix multiplication coprocessor, closely attached to the CPU, distinct from both ANE and GPU). They gained bf16 support in M2.
- 2024throwaway 3y ago> Use Spotlight, Siri, word completion, or any image processing tools, and you’ll be benefitting from them. The first things I do on a new mac are disable spotlight in favor of Alfred, and completely disable Siri. Writing this from a M3 Max. Oh shucks, I guess something about floating points will make me sad some day.
- jbverschoor 3y agoTry raycast. It’s actually a lot better than Alfred unfortunately
- 2024throwaway 3y agoI only use Alfred for the clipboard history. Raycast looks like a nightmare unfortunately.
- vin047 3y agoTried raycast but realised you can’t customise the GUI the way you can with Alfred – I have Alfred set up so it only takes up a minimal amount of space in the top corner of the screen (ala Spotlight pre-Yosemite). Submitted feedback to the team but they were pretty dismissive about it.
- lycopodiopsida 3y agoIt is not, the whole "stateful app in a launcher" paradigm is very clunky and slow in practice and it can't handle files and incoming text in any meaningful way. But hey, they have an AI and subscriptions! This is what happens when you take VC money.
- timeon 3y agoIf one could combine Services/Automator with Spotlight there wouldn't be need for Alfred. ...one can dream.
- keyle 3y agoTldr. MX... > M2 > M1.
- kybernetyk 3y agoI don't give a flying f about """AI""". It's the XML of this decade. Still haven't seen any actual use case for it (other than generating spam content for the web). At least with Bitcoin you could buy drugs ;)
- bethekind 3y agoXML of the decade is a good way to put it
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cpursley 3y agoAI is great at parsing and classification. Use it in a specific feature in our product that would be impossible to do with manual regex/parsing - saves hundreds of man hours a year. It’s also been immensely useful for software development work - I find myself reaching for AI over docs more often these days due to its ability to understand context.
- Dalewyn 3y ago"AI" is literally a marketing term for what we used to call algorithms, macros, etc. until very recently. Nothing fundamentally new is happening, just that what was largely confined to businesses and enterprises before has been adapted to become accessible to every man. >I find myself reaching for AI over docs I sincerely hope you read the documentation regardless to verify you aren't hallucinating. At best you'll just get the compiler mocking you, at worst you might find yourself responsible for a 737 MAX.
- cpursley 3y agoOh, I still end up in the docs and have them open all the time. I don't generally use it for AI code completion. Maybe what's needed is just better doc search (that understands context and intent).
- davedx 3y agoBitch I have unified memory
- amimetic 3y agoI assume RAM will also be a major constraint for on device ML; most Macs still default to 8GB (with absurd bumps in price to upgrade) so I'd guess some very high percentage of Macs sold in last 2 years are going to be quite bad for any major new software stuff Apple release in 2024. That is assuming they even are supported at all; if Apple follow their iPhone playbook they might just release the new stuff on late 2024 Macs.
- saberience 3y agoI think the author doesn’t realize that 99.9% of people with an m1 Mac don’t care at all about running local ml workloads. The people that do care about running local ml workloads have either a workstation with an NVidia card, access to virtual machines on the cloud with NVidia processors or some Apple computer with an M2 Max or similar processor. Put simply, this isn’t a big deal at all. Most people are not ml power users and most people are using their Mac for web apps via a browser, local office apps, and something like zoom or slack. Also, as an aside, Siri is mostly useless and I’ve never met anyone who uses it regularly. So whether it needs ml processing or not is irrelevant.
- weikju 3y agoCounterargument: most people are not running directly the ML workloads, agreed - however Apple implements them as features of the OS (like the new GPT powered text predictions). So it WILL affect the regular users over time as new features are not made available for M1 users.
- candiodari 3y agoThe only reason you want to use bfloat16 is to train "compressed" models. Best inference performance tends to be at 4 bith quantization (and many people are trying to make it go down, even to 1 bit, and with sparsity, actually below that) So this just doesn't matter. Ironically, memory speed is what matters. And that's exactly the point where the M1 actually beats even the M3.
- weikju 3y agoThanks. I was going to rebut your point but I re-read the article and while one of the headings seem to rebut it, the actual content does not contradict anything, so I'll agree with your argument :)
- fmajid 3y agoI have a M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB of RAM and the ability to run LLMs like LLaMa2 locally thanks to the unified memory architecture was a big factor. Just because you don't have a use for it doesn't mean everyone else is as blinkered as you. As soon as the M3 Ultra lands, I am getting one, preferably with 256GB RAM.
- toyg 3y agoShocking! New machines are ever-so-slightly better at doing new things! OMG Is this what people have to tell themselves these days, to stay on fashion-driven upgrade cycles...? "Mate, I absolutely need a new mbp, what if Siri starts using a LLM and it gets 0.000001 second slower at replying that it didn't understand what I'm saying?!?” I wish these bloggers weren't so keen to go along with FOMO-stoking vendors.
- mahrain 3y agoWould there be a market for USB-C plugin "ai accelerator" hardware? Running something like a neural net chip the likes of Axelera, Hailo?
- fmajid 3y agoWell, Google's Coral.ai TPU in USB dongle form factor is constantly sold-out.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kalleboo 3y agoI was curious to see how they were going to get me to upgrade from my M1 Pro. I still don't see a need to replace this thing in the foreseeable future.
- ppetty 3y agoInteresting. People with older hardware might not be able to run new software or process data at the same speed or efficiency as people with the latest hardware.
- peddling-brink 3y agoFascinating indeed. If I’m understanding the implications, given enough improvements to new hardware, the old hardware might seem slow by comparison.
- huac 3y agobfloat16 mostly matters for training stability, not for inference. M1 is inefficient for training any reasonably sized model and most inference efforts target 4-8 bits, even.
- jacobgorm 3y agoIEEE 16-bit float is supported on the M1 and is generally all you need for AI inference.