Still great news. While I don't particularly care for Apple, I must admit that their M1 chips are impressive. With rumors about M1X / M2 and so on, and computers with more ports and such, it's an interesting option. Sure I'd love to see other ARM-based laptops with similar performance, especially for emulating x86 software which we probably will need to for a while longer.. But as it stands, it seems to be 1-2 years before we even have something competitive on the market. Would consider an M1 if/when the hardware is supported, so great to see some progress.
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More Progress Is Made Understanding Apple's M1 GPU, Working Towards An Open Driver
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I find it baffling that there are always some people who get really upset because they think that Apple intentionally breaks OSS support or cripples OpenGL/Vulkan performance when the easiest explanation is that they simply do not care about OSS or whether something outside of their ecosystem breaks.
Regarding the lacking hardware features: In the end, the goal of all GPUs is the same so they certainly provide some way to do it in an efficient fashion. The question is not whether or not it can run stuff people do with Vulkan. Vulkan is just a way of telling the GPU what to do. Same goes for Metal. The question is how easy it is to translate the intention phrased in Vulkan to something the M1 understands.
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Originally posted by phoronix View PostFor all the visible hardware features, it’s equally important to consider what hardware features are absent. Intriguingly, the GPU lacks some fixed-function graphics hardware ubiquitous among competitors. For example, I have not encountered hardware for reading vertex attributes or uniform buffer objects.
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Originally posted by ezst036 View PostWhat affect will these missing features have on potential gaming performance?
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Originally posted by GruenSein View PostI find it baffling that there are always some people who get really upset because they think that Apple intentionally breaks OSS support or cripples OpenGL/Vulkan performance when the easiest explanation is that they simply do not care about OSS or whether something outside of their ecosystem breaks.
The M1 is not such a beast of performance or whatever when you consider its price (and when you run something on it other than just Apple benchmarks) and compare it with other offerings at the same pricetag, so why bother making your own hardware when there already are equivalent or better choices out there?
Because that's the only way to keep the ecosystem closed enough.
Take for example old Windows-only GDI printers: it was a whole different story. In that case the goal was to make a printer cost less than its ink cartridge, so almost no RAM, almost no CPU, almost anything onboard: just the bare minimum to talk to a Windows-only GDI driver. It took reverse engineering to have those paperweights somewhat working outside of Windows, but the hardware maker didn't get in the way on purpose, they just targeted a specific market that wasn't Linux users in order to cut production costs.
Apple is different. They think different, you know. They think how to keep their users from using anything non-Apple.
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Originally posted by lucrus View Post
Their "ecosystem" is their invention and they designed it the way it is exactly to keep others outside, it's not only casual lack of support for this or that OSS. Their "ecosystem" includes many "features" that are at best useless to the end user, but they're there nevertheless because they help keeping the thing hard or impossible to hack (in the positive meaning of the term).
The M1 is not such a beast of performance or whatever when you consider its price (and when you run something on it other than just Apple benchmarks) and compare it with other offerings at the same pricetag, so why bother making your own hardware when there already are equivalent or better choices out there?
Because that's the only way to keep the ecosystem closed enough.
Apple is different. They think different, you know. They think how to keep their users from using anything non-Apple.Last edited by GruenSein; 19 April 2021, 10:43 AM.
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Originally posted by GruenSein View PostI find it baffling that there are always some people who get really upset because they think that Apple intentionally breaks OSS support or cripples OpenGL/Vulkan performance when the easiest explanation is that they simply do not care about OSS or whether something outside of their ecosystem breaks.
Regarding the lacking hardware features: In the end, the goal of all GPUs is the same so they certainly provide some way to do it in an efficient fashion. The question is not whether or not it can run stuff people do with Vulkan. Vulkan is just a way of telling the GPU what to do. Same goes for Metal. The question is how easy it is to translate the intention phrased in Vulkan to something the M1 understands.
As for Apples ARM based hardware I don't see them breaking stuff on purpose, I see them breaking stuff to reach goals. The complete deletion of 32 bit support is a perfect example. This allowed them to achieve goals that likely included elimination of a lot of circuitry related to 32 bit support with th end goal much lower power usage. This shouldn't surprise anybody because they where telegraphing the elimination of 32 bit hardware for years at WWDC. In the same manner they pushed developers really hard to adopt API's knowing that underlying hardware would change. They actually said so in at least a few WWDC videos. So anybody complaining about changing hardware from Apple simply hasn't been paying attention or simply can't digest the information being feed to them.
Apple does a lot of disgusting things but frankly they haven't had a problem when it comes to hardware. They literally told developers that hardware will be changing.
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Originally posted by stingray454 View PostStill great news. While I don't particularly care for Apple, I must admit that their M1 chips are impressive. With rumors about M1X / M2 and so on, and computers with more ports and such, it's an interesting option. Sure I'd love to see other ARM-based laptops with similar performance, especially for emulating x86 software which we probably will need to for a while longer.. But as it stands, it seems to be 1-2 years before we even have something competitive on the market. Would consider an M1 if/when the hardware is supported, so great to see some progress.
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