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The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

i see no reason why that'd be the case. on the scale and power envelope of a desktop processor the instruction decoding should be largely negligible, and the other semantics differences may be nasty to deal with but not some constant drain on performance characteristics.

people keep saying this and it keeps being not true

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The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?

ratbert90 posted:

I have been saying for years that a desktop sized Arm processor with a decent TDP would crush rival x86 offerings and now I am excited to see if my claims are true. I hope they are.

depends on the microarchitecture and the soc. cavium thunder cpus have been disappointing. qualcomm parts have so far been lousy in comparison. amazon graviton 2 (cortex x1) are competitive with intel server chips. apple’s will crush them.

silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

i see no reason why that'd be the case. on the scale and power envelope of a desktop processor the instruction decoding should be largely negligible, and the other semantics differences may be nasty to deal with but not some constant drain on performance characteristics.

Wait, I'm confused. Are we thinking that the Apple ARM desktop chips are going to be better because of the ISA, or because of improved computer chip design, or because Apple can design to a different set of constraints than a computer chip company and can better work to optimize the system the CPU is used in (e.g. The Management's earlier post on how Apple's iPhone chips are big honking dies when compared to the competition)?

Or is it a little bit of all 3?

edit: I gave credit to The Management, when the point was brought up by EIDE Van Hagar

silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jun 25, 2020

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

silence_kit posted:

Wait, I'm confused. Are we thinking that the Apple ARM desktop chips are going to be better because of the ISA, or because of improved computer chip design, or because Apple can design to a different set of constraints than a computer chip company and can better work to optimize the system the CPU is used in (e.g. The Management's earlier post on how Apple's iPhone chips are big honking dies when compared to the competition)?

Or is it a little bit of all 3?

i were specifically doubting that the isa would help much, apple may very well do a much better job though, and with intel messing everything up i don't find it very unlikely that apple will crush them in their target design envelope.

i figure the management has a better idea about the realities as well, but does not prevent me from my failure of imagination thinking that the isa details can't be too big a deal compared to e.g. normal incompetence.

BobHoward
Feb 13, 2012

The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull

FAT32 SHAMER posted:

I would have thought NDA’s last longer than that

françois gives no fucks about :decorum: much less NDAs, he was well known in many computer enthusiast forums while he was still with intel

(for trolling the poo poo out of amd fans, mostly. he was the Intel Numba 1 superfan, absolutely loved playing the heel)

the fact that they broke him enough that he's airing the dirty laundry is telling in and of itself

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

he said apple found more bugs in their chips than intel did :thunk:

silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost
How provocative of a statement is that really? Is that like extremely extremely bad, or just bad?

For some kinds of products which are probably less engineered than a computer chip, it is not that unusual for the users of the product to better understand how to use the product than the manufacturer.

silence_kit fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jun 25, 2020

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

ugh, they quote him with the word "citing" and he was most certainly saying "sighting"

BobHoward
Feb 13, 2012

The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull

silence_kit posted:

How provocative of a statement is that really? Is that like extremely extremely bad, or just bad?

For some kinds of products which are probably less engineered than a computer chip, it is not that unusual for the users of the product to better understand how to use the product than the manufacturer.

in computer chips it's real bad

it's acceptable if apple finds some of the bugs. not because as the user they've got greater insight, but because testing something as complex as a modern cpu is fantastically hard and there will always be corner cases that you won't find with your own tests, which can never cover everything.

but they should cover a lot. it's not acceptable if apple is finding most of the bugs. as intel, that means either your testing people were underfunded or done hosed up. if i remember the rumors from around skylake times correctly, it was probably bad management trying to cut costs

BobHoward
Feb 13, 2012

The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull
one thing nobody's mentioned yet as to why apple can succeed with this: process tech

aside from testing, the other thing intel has hosed up royally on is process tech. they used to poo poo out new nodes like clockwork, but that all went boom with the 10nm node. they've been on 14nm for ages.

intel 10nm parts are finally out in more than trivial quantities, but they are unlikely to ever transition all product segments to 10nm, it's basically a failed node and they're trying to push to keep 7nm on track rather than throwing more money into the 10nm bonfire

meanwhile, tsmc has been shipping 7nm for quite some time. tsmc nanometers are not the same as intel nanometers but it is likely that tsmc7 is better node than intel14

and apple is probably going to ship their first ARM macs with chips built on tsmc 5nm

never discount the role of process tech, it was as much a factor in apple switching to intel back in the oughts as anything else

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
there were a lot of things driving the ppc to intel transition, but wasn't one of them ibm basically telling them to take a flying leap, because the weren't interested in developing the platform in the direction apple wanted?

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

infernal machines posted:

there were a lot of things driving the ppc to intel transition, but wasn't one of them ibm basically telling them to take a flying leap, because the weren't interested in developing the platform in the direction apple wanted?

right, they had no more mobile processors basically

FCKGW
May 21, 2006

hobbesmaster posted:

he said apple found more bugs in their chips than intel did :thunk:

I work for a company that supplies parts for apple and they are by far the most stringent and pickiest of the customers and always find new poo poo that needs to be fixed.

big shtick energy
May 27, 2004


The Management posted:

there are some parts that are great and some parts that are terrible. when i see Apple executing amazing things like this arm transition i am jealous and wish i was a part of it. then i remember converging half a dozen releases per year and not having time to do anything other than put out fires, and i remember why i left.

i mean i think about "art through adversity" and wonder if maybe that kind of thing is essential to producing good stuff? like I don't want to believe that tons of stress and yelling and long hours is required to produce good poo poo, but the real world doesn't provide a ton of good counterexamples.

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

i think that is mostly down to the definition of what is "great", i think we tend to undervalue things which are achieved with seeming ease.

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?
intel tests with linux and windows. macos does things differently in some cases and exposes bugs not exercised by those systems. apple does *a lot* of work debugging these issues because intel support is terrible in every way.

the transition to arm was inevitable. it may have been pushed forward by intel’s recent fuckups, but not by much. they’ve been thinking about it for years, and this is much more aggressive than the transition plan i last heard.

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?

DuckConference posted:

i mean i think about "art through adversity" and wonder if maybe that kind of thing is essential to producing good stuff? like I don't want to believe that tons of stress and yelling and long hours is required to produce good poo poo, but the real world doesn't provide a ton of good counterexamples.

“real artists ship”

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

The Management posted:

“real artists ship”

please don't post your timb/steve fanfics

qirex
Feb 15, 2001

“real artists get creeped out by toxic tumblr teens”

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

The Management posted:

“real artists ship”

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

infernal machines posted:

there were a lot of things driving the ppc to intel transition, but wasn't one of them ibm basically telling them to take a flying leap, because the weren't interested in developing the platform in the direction apple wanted?
iirc, the issue was that apple needed a mobile (low power) version of the g5 (because 90% of their sales and margins were in powerbooks) but they were the only ones asking for it. moto/ibm were concentrating on bigger clients, which included ibm and all three of that generations gaming consoles. tiny little apple (which still looked like it could go out of business at any moment) couldnt get ibm or moto to invest the resources into making laptop chips for a single small-volume vendor that was having trouble keeping its doors open

so stebe shrugged and went with the company that did make p deece mobile processors

Binary Badger
Oct 11, 2005

Trolling Link for a decade


I believe another issue at the time was speed..

From what I recall, Steve had actually gone on record saying they'd soon ship 3 GHz G5 machines because they were promised that speed on the roadmap.. when Steve pressured IBM for faster chips, the best they could do was 2.7 GHz.. when pressed further, their response was.. give us some more money?

They had already done the groundwork to shift macOS to Intel and that was one of the items that stuck in Steve's craw, Steve said full speed ahead on the Intel changeover.

"Stupid IBM, yew made me look bad"

Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Jun 25, 2020

SRQ
Nov 9, 2009

Binary Badger posted:

I believe another issue at the time was speed..

From what I recall, Steve had actually gone on record saying they'd soon ship 3 GHz G5 machines because they were promised that speed on the roadmap.. when Steve pressured IBM for faster chips, the best they could do was 2.7 GHz.. when pressed further, their response was.. give us some more money?

They had already done the groundwork to shift macOS to Intel and that was one of the items that stuck in Steve's craw, Steve said full speed ahead on the Intel changeover.

"Stupid IBM, yew made me look bad"

they legit did tho "where's the 3ghz g5" was egg on their face for years.

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
apple purchases mdm services provider, presumably still has no interest in providing an mdm services interface to anyone outside of education markets

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?
now that I have time for typing, here’s the deal with arm64.

most people think that ARM publishes a spec for instruction set, makes a reference core, and charges clients licensing fees. that was the case a long time ago. today, ARM is also a contracted architecture research team and standards body. they are paid by big clients (Apple, Qualcomm, amd, etc) to develop and extend the ARM instruction set to the clients’ needs.

ten years ago arm was contracted to make a 64-bit ISA. the purpose of that ISA was for high performance arm cores. three years later, arm64 was publicly announced the same day as the iPhone 5S was announced (and a compiler and an os). Apple had been manufacturing production chips with an arm64 cpu for months prior, while ARM still didn’t even have synthesizable masks of their own 64-bit cores available to customers to begin integrating. this is because arm64 was designed to fit apple’s microarchitecture designs. it is in many ways the Apple instruction set, made to order.

it is very different from the 32 bit variety, which had some complicated instructions and was much better at power saving and compact code than performance. in particular, arm64 is designed to enable hardware to extract maximum parallelism. it does this by simplifying dependencies between instructions so they are easy to calculate and resolve, separating complex instructions into more, smaller operations that can be parallelized, reordered, and restarted, and avoiding design decisions that cause pipeline stalls. for Apple, this accomplishes a more complex goal than pure speed. it allows them to build a giant core that is extremely parallel but runs at a low clock rate. this means high performance but relatively lower heat, perfect for a constrained device like a phone.

Binary Badger
Oct 11, 2005

Trolling Link for a decade


Right around the time of the PPC to Intel migration, Apple acquired P.A. Semi, which was a company whose engineers previously helped develop the Opteron and UltraSPARC processors.

The majority of them stayed on with Apple and Steve himself said they would help fabricate the chips they needed to drive the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



Binary Badger posted:

They had already done the groundwork to shift macOS to Intel

iirc it was some guy who was doing it skunkworks style until it was ready to show to steve

HAIL eSATA-n
Apr 7, 2007

apple should hire someone that understands how to keep a processor from throttling

Jimmy Carter
Nov 3, 2005

THIS MOTHERDUCKER
FLIES IN STYLE
from what I know there's also the part where the amount of memory bandwidth is just absurd these days. I think someone mentioned it up-thread, but the fact that you've got dedicated accelerator cores means that you can offload a lot of what would normally be CPU-intensive things, so we're probably just a few years away from having a dedicated javascript accelerator module because why not

HAIL eSATA-n
Apr 7, 2007

because JavaScript is a curse

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?

Jimmy Carter posted:

from what I know there's also the part where the amount of memory bandwidth is just absurd these days. I think someone mentioned it up-thread, but the fact that you've got dedicated accelerator cores means that you can offload a lot of what would normally be CPU-intensive things, so we're probably just a few years away from having a dedicated javascript accelerator module because why not

apple had the TBI feature added to arm64 specifically for objective C and JavaScript

well why not
Feb 10, 2009




macOS 16.1 comes with a node_modules dir out the box

SRQ
Nov 9, 2009

Carthag Tuek posted:

iirc it was some guy who was doing it skunkworks style until it was ready to show to steve

From what I remember myself it was ported since day 1 (Next was intel after all) and effectively ready for whenever Steve was willing to dedicate the resources to expand xcode and such to allow developers to build for it. That is to say, he could have done his demo in 2001 if he wanted to- that existed.

What I personally wonder is if OS9 was ever ported to Intel or if earlier builds are in a vault somewhere. Mac OS 10.1 on a like, Pentium 3 with a Rage 128 sounds hilarious.

Plorkyeran
Mar 22, 2007

To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

HAIL eSATA-n posted:

apple should hire someone that understands how to keep a processor from throttling

i don't think "attach a heatsink and a fan" is very complicated when you have the luxury of being a half inch thick instead of a quarter inch

SRQ
Nov 9, 2009

I blame Intel for that partially and it's possible Tim does too, the timing seems too coincidental.
Like Intel has been straight up lying about TDPs for years and Apple engineers might have been stupid enough to think the shipping units wouldn't be as bad as the samples they had- or Intel gave them specially binned samples.

eschaton
Mar 7, 2007

Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Carthag Tuek posted:

iirc it was some guy who was doing it skunkworks style until it was ready to show to steve

nope, it was a dedicated team and its existence was well known internally for years

the parts that weren’t well known were how well it really worked, the specific Intel plans that would make it advantageous to switch (Core Duo), and that rosetta was a thing that not only existed but worked extremely well

eschaton
Mar 7, 2007

Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

SRQ posted:

From what I remember myself it was ported since day 1 (Next was intel after all) and effectively ready for whenever Steve was willing to dedicate the resources to expand xcode and such to allow developers to build for it. That is to say, he could have done his demo in 2001 if he wanted to- that existed.

this is pretty much correct (though i386 was NeXT’s sixth architecture, after m68k, power (IBM NEXTSTEP 1 port), i860 (only the lowest levels, for the NeXTdimension card), and m88k followed by ppc (NeXT RISC Workstation)

quote:

What I personally wonder is if OS9 was ever ported to Intel or if earlier builds are in a vault somewhere. Mac OS 10.1 on a like, Pentium 3 with a Rage 128 sounds hilarious.

there was a port of the nanokernel and 68K emulator to i486 around the same time as the Mac on RISC m88k and then ppc work; RISC won out I think because lots of people (correctly, for a while) didn’t think Intel could keep up

SRQ
Nov 9, 2009

eschaton posted:

this is pretty much correct (though i386 was NeXT’s sixth architecture, after m68k, power (IBM NEXTSTEP 1 port), i860 (only the lowest levels, for the NeXTdimension card), and m88k followed by ppc (NeXT RISC Workstation)


there was a port of the nanokernel and 68K emulator to i486 around the same time as the Mac on RISC m88k and then ppc work; RISC won out I think because lots of people (correctly, for a while) didn’t think Intel could keep up

PowerPC was a great bet from 1994-2000 and collapsed hilariously quickly once IBM gave up on desktops lol.
I have heard of star trek but nothing was ever released from that so I assume it never went past testing builds. Given the time frame, it seems plausible there was an attempt to port OS9 to Intel (Or at least make Classic work on Intel) because it would have been implausible to launch Intel in 2000 even if Steve wanted to without that sort of compatability.

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



maybe it was safari or itunes on windows? there was some former apple guy who posted a thing on a blog website about doing some sort of secret port and not telling steve until it worked or something

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infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
was it internet explorer on mac?

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