7 ms·

>The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in

• jjtheblunt 2y ago
  https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linux-on-the-ipad https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linux-on-the...
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• turtlebits 2y ago
  The fact that Apple put a fast chip in a limited device doesn't detract from their engineering ability.
• gumby 2y ago
  > Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? Since I carry a laptop and an ipad, the lighter the better (I use them for different things, and often in concert). That MacBook Air is so powerful and so light that I sometimes have to check my bag to make sure I haven’t forgotten one or both. That’s definitely worth it to me.
• entropicdrifter 2y ago
  Asahi Linux runs great on all of the M-series Macs
  • awesomepeter 2y ago
    I think my M3 isn't supported yet and won't be for some time
  • Rinzler89 2y ago
    Yeah, on the Macs, not on the iPad though which is what my comment as talking about, that the M4 chip is just wasted there and only for the flex.
  • treyd 2y ago
    There's a lot of long tail issues with peripherals that still need to be worked out, to be fair. Sound wasn't enabled until fairly recently because they were still testing to ensure the drivers couldn't damage the hardware.
    • evilduck 2y ago
      To be fully fair, that's the status quo for Linux on hardware that didn't ship with Linux support as a selling point. I had issues with Intel Wifi 6 hardware compatibility on a Lenovo laptop within the last year or so. On 3 different x86 laptops with fingerprint readers, I've never been able to get any of them to function in Linux. One one of my laptops, the sound works but it's substantially degraded compared to the drivers for Windows on the same hardware. Another supports the USB4 port for data but won't switch to DP alt mode with it, though it works in Windows. On the other hand, my Steam Deck shipped with Linux and everything works great. Linux not supporting your hardware perfectly is just the nature of the beast. Asahi on Apple hardware meets [very low linux user] expectations.
• dagmx 2y ago
  That’s a very narrow definition of “useful” and one I’d say is rather focused on yourself? Why is Linux the arbiter of what is “useful”? Why would it still be a benchmark flex if it was on macOS, an Os where millions of people do professional work everyday? And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well?
  • thebeardisred 2y ago
    I'll attempt the best interpretation of the comment. Installing Linux would allow for general purpose use of the device (in a freedom sense). This increases the "utility" of the device and lowers the bar for extending its functionality.
    • zitterbewegung 2y ago
      You can run iSH on the device for Linux (somewhat limited). It’s on the App Store https://github.com/ish-app/ish https://github.com/ish-app/ish
      • effie 2y ago
        Can you get real root that way?
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    > And why is the iPad just a “Netflix machine” when tons of people use the iPad for professional creative use cases as well? For my family, the iPhone and other Apple devices are the ultimate productivity machines. The App Store, fantastic. Why? Because they are (rightly) terrified of installing apps on Windows. Or any “computer.” They’ve been burned too many times, warned too many times. Unless it’s Microsoft Office, it doesn’t happen. “Programs” are a threat. But apps? Apps don’t hurt you. iPhones and iPads turn on every day when you want them to, they act predictably, it feels consistent in a way a laptop is not. As for the speed of the chip only being useful for “consumption” - technology advances. That A10 Fusion powered iPad from 6 years ago stings to use now, even though it was plenty comfortable at the time. 5 years from now, nobody will regret an M4.
• pantalaimon 2y ago
  > The world's most powerful CPU maybe the most powerful / watt - desktop CPUs like the 9950X are still way more powerful.
  • qwytw 2y ago
    M4 still has a 10% higher Geekbench single core score than the 9950X.
    • SkiFire13 2y ago
      Do note that the M4 is built on TSMC's 3nm process while the 9950X is built on the relatively older 4nm process. This has been the case for the earlier Apple ARM processors too, as Apple made deals with TSMC to get priority access to the newer processes. In the end as a user you get a slighly faster machine, but that doesn't mean that's all thanks to the CPU architecture. Apple's also has lower memory latencies by virtue of being a SoC design. Memory speed is increasingly becoming the bottleneck compared to computing power. However this is done at the cost of other features, like repleacable/upgradable RAM and CPU, which the other desktop processors support. This is not to say that one is better than the other, but there are surely tradeoffs involved.
      • qwytw 2y ago
        > end as a user you get a slighly faster machine You don't, though. Unless you only care about single core performance and/or power usage. Apple's chips are not even close to AMD/Intel value wise when it comes to MT performance on desktop. The $6,999 Mac Pro somehow losses to the $400 14700K (of course you still need a GPU/etc. but unless you care about niche use cases i.e. very high amounts of VRAM, you can get a GPU equivalent to the M2 Ultra for another $300-400 or so)
      • gumby 2y ago
        > Do note that the M4 is built on TSMC's 3nm process while the 9950X is built on the relatively older 4nm process. That helps (perhaps a lot, hard to say), but note that moving your design from 4 nm to 3 nm pitch isn’t as simple as recompiling your Verilog. So this is still a significant engineering achievement. Apple is chasing a different design point from the desktop folks: low power and optimized more for single core workloads. Works for them but not of course for everyone. The Mx machines aren’t SoCs in the sense a MediaTek part is: the main chip has a lot of integrated functional units, yes, but so do the Intel and AMD design. They do have multiple dice in a single package though. Personally I don’t lose any sleep over the non-upgradability of RAM or mass storage. I started computing when you could add instructions by adding wires to the backplane, and later by writing your own microcode; you could build our own IO devices and wire them into the machine. Gradually we have had more and more integration, and RAM and mass storage are just the latest to go…and in exchange we get better performance and reliability. I don’t hear people complaining that they can’t upgrade their disk drive’s write cache, or CPU’s cache for that matter. This is the way of the world.
• runjake 2y ago
  It's not just a benchmark flex. I have been using Linux since 1992, for many or most of those years on both desktop and server. I am currently more productive while on an Apple Silicon Mac. I would venture to guess that for most people, they would be more productive on a Mac or an iPad versus Linux. Pedantry: To my knowledge, there was no M3 iPad.
  • effie 2y ago
    > I would venture to guess that for most people, they would be more productive on a Mac or an iPad versus Linux. Why is that? Because of different UI? Guessing, since you're comparing hardware(Mac/iPad) with operating systems (Linux distributions)...
  • Rinzler89 2y ago
    The question from me was whether the M4 makes iPad users more productive vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was, not if the iPad itself make you more productive than Linux or window s. And since people keep bringing up the M4 as the yardstick in discussions on generic X86 and Qualcomm chips, then my productivity metric for comparison was also meant in a global generic way, as in the general purpose compute chips like x86 and Nvidia have unlocked new innovations and improvements to our lives over decades being able to run code from specialty aerospace, CAD, earthquake prediction, to protein folding for vaccines and medical use because you could run anything on those chips from YouTube to Fortnite to mainframes and supercomputers. What similar improvements to humanity does the M4 iPad bring when it can only run apps off the AppStore compared to M3, most used iPAd apps being YouTube and Netflix? As long as the most cutting edge MX chips are restricted to running only Apple approved AppStore apps because Apple is addicted to the 30% AppStore tax that they can't charge on their laptops running MacOS/Linux with the same chips, then they're relatively useless chips for humanity in the grand scheme of things in comparisons with X86 and Arm who make the world go round, power research and innovation because they can run anything you can think of despite scoring a bit lower benchmarks.
    • runjake 2y ago
      > The question was whether the M4 makes you more productive on the iPad vs the M3 iPad or whatever the last chip was This same question applies to any other computing platform upgrade. So far, the hardware for most common platforms far out-scales the majority of use cases. Nonetheless, tech must and is advancing, regardless. Every platform is releasing newer and faster versions, and only a tiny fraction will make use of that power year over year. As to the rest of your comment, I see what you're saying, but those are your opinions. However, the vast majority of the user base would probably disagree with you, because they are not technical people. They are productive on these closed platforms. they have different workflows than you or I. I'm not very productive on these platforms. These are consumption devices for me. I need things like a development toolchain and a command-line interface to be productive. By and large, non-technical people are Apple's target audience, not technical people. In raw numbers, these people outnumber technical people by an order of magnitude. This dinosaur (me) recognizes that what constitutes a computer has evolved and shifted away from what I think of as a computer. And this shift will further continue.
• ben_w 2y ago
  No year will ever be "the year of Linux on the desktop", despite that phrase being so old that if I'd conceived a child when I first heard it, I'd be a grandparent already. The fact that you can't imagine a device being useful until it can compile the Linux kernel etc., that you dismiss it as a "Netflix machine", says more about you than about Apple.
  • 0x457 2y ago
    > the year of Linux on the desktop It already happened: Windows + WSL2. Windows is the best linux distro.
    • Rinzler89 2y ago
      Eh, yes and no. Windows kernel plus it's backend features for security, emulation and virtualization, which enable things like WSL2 and backwards compatibility to work are great, but they're hampered by a crap front end with news, ads, web search in start menu, and dark patterns everywhere being forced down your throat like OneDrive holding your files ransom in the cloud if you don't pay attention or the failed push for the CallBack feature with unencrypted screenshots, or Windows Explorer being slow as shit due to it now running JavaScript code for some reason. All in all, I'm moving away from it to linux, as I don't like the direction Microsoft is taking, and learning to fix the rough edges of Linux will serve me better in my career than trying to keep up with and fight the dark pattern frog that Microsoft keeps boiling slowly. Mutahar on YouTube did a review of a leaked copy of Windows 11 Chinese Government edition which is Windows 11 Enterprise with everything non essential stripped out of it: no AI, no telemetry, no OneDrive, no ads, no news, no Edge, no media player, no web search in star menu, no defender, nothing, just the kernel, drivers, window manager and explorer, that's it, kind of like lightweight linux distros. If Microsoft would sell that to us consumers I would buy that in a heartbeat. But no, we get the adware and spyware version.
      • 0x457 2y ago
        So on my main PC I have Windows 11 and NixOS. I don't remember the last time I've rebooted to linux. Simply because, thanks to home-manager, my terminal experience is identical between nixos in WSL2 and nixos on bare metal. But yeah, Windows 11 was a bit of a downgrade compared to Windows 10 in terms of how much needless shit has been added to it. > learning to fix the rough edges of Linux will serve me better in my career than trying to keep up with and fight the dark pattern frog that Microsoft keeps boiling slowly. Yes, but pretty much everything desktop related is completely useless in non-desktop use-cases. I'd rather go back to macOS. "fun story": couple weeks ago I had to do something that was not possible in WSL2 due to how esp32 devboard I had worked. I've decided to add linux vm to my freebsd server, and passthrough usb controller that conveniently was plugged in (unused). Simply because I knew that the moment I reboot to linux I might get sidetracked into fixing my linux on desktop instead of working.
• monocasa 2y ago
  To a degree, that makes sense. Due to the end of dennard scaling, most high end raw compute makes more sense as more but simpler cores, and has for a long time. For instance the blue gene supercomputers made of tons of pretty individually anemic PowerPC 4xx cores. For battery powered devices, race to sleep is the current meta, where once you have some bit of heavy compute work, you power up a big core, run it fast to get through all of the work as quickly as possible, and get back to low power as quickly as possible.
  • hajile 2y ago
    Because clockspeed ramps power exponentially, there’s a limit to how high you can clock before the cost of racing outweighs the savings of running a short time. I believe I’ve read that Apple’s chips run under 3GHz unless their job runs longer than 100-150ms. I suspect that’s their peak race to sleep range.
    • monocasa 2y ago
      Clocks aren't the only way to race. Powering up the massive core with it's over a dozen pipelines, massive reorder buffer, etc. is another way. This is they way Apple has chose to focus on.
    • oasisaimlessly 2y ago
      > Because clockspeed ramps power exponentially It's not exponential; P = C V^2 f, so power is something between O(f) and O(f^3), depending on how voltage scaling works. It follows that efficiency (energy per instruction) is something between O(1) and O(f^2).
• sitkack 2y ago
  I run Linux in a VM on my M1 mac all day long. That VM was the fastest Linux instance I had anywhere. Faster the my 5950 and way faster than anything in cloud. Your can't using it is your choice.
  • Rinzler89 2y ago
    Sir, in the comment you're replying to, I was talking about the iPad here, not the Mac where you can indeed use most of the M chips potential while on the iPad you can't do that.
    • sitkack 2y ago
      Look at such a fruitful branch of the conversation that you created! Did you think that would be an option when you bought it? Don't answer.
    • jonas21 2y ago
      Do you not expect Apple to use the M4 in the next round of Mac refreshes?
  • g_p 2y ago
    Out of interest, I assume this was an arm64 build of Linux? Which hypervisor or VM software did you use?
    • seabrookmx 2y ago
      Not OP, but likely lima or colima if working with containers.
      • spockz 2y ago
        Is Lima or Colima so much better than docker desktop for Mac these days? In what respect, the performance?
        • seabrookmx 2y ago