Apple Silicon On Linux Now More Capable For Gaming With Latest Mesa + Steam On FEX

[sophisticles]

1. Never trust manufacturer benchmarks. Check 3rd party benchmarking sources.
2. Faster on CPU benchmarks than the base-level chip from 2 generations ago? Oh geez, so amazing

M3 and M4 are faster CPUs, and even the higher end M2 chips crush Qualcomm chips in GPU benchmarks. Let alone the newer generations.

Reread the post I was responding to, he claimed that Apple's M series CPUs were miles ahead of Qualcomm's, I showed him they are not.

[ssokolow]

I have a Mac Mini 2012

You have my sympathies. That's too new. ;P

[t.s.]

- You can replace, with reballing even the SSD and RAM.

Who would reball it for you? As for almost every x86 or even arm one you can just pop up and replace the ssd. And it's not just end there. You still have to reflash it or doing something-something to make it work. As for RAM, how can you reball the unified RAM from the SOC?

- ..I don't know about any Mac SSD to die on wearing out.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252982868?sortBy=rank

[AKSF_Ackermann]

Who would reball it for you? As for almost every x86 or even arm one you can just pop up and replace the ssd. And it's not just end there. You still have to reflash it or doing something-something to make it work. As for RAM, how can you reball the unified RAM from the SOC?

You aren't replacing the ram, since the config is stored in SoC fuses, but replacing the ssd is very much doable. And while it is unlikely that people will bother with that in america, in china or eastern europe you can easily find people who will swap out iphone nands for much less than apple storage premium. And while i haven't personally checked if they do macs, if they do iphones - they probably will, it's basically the same thing but with more chips.

[Alexmitter]

And since quality build of macs is almost always better than any other computer of comparable price, they last longer.

Someone has been blended by shiny metal.
Their cooling solutions are well under spec, even cheaper solutions often decide to also cool their chipsets and apple famously don't.
Beside that they are also very known for driving their voltage regulators all around their bords very hard and always on the edge of spec which is a big no no.

Overall their machines are the finest crafted milled aluminum outside and the board design of a cheap Acer 250$ class machine but with even worse cooling.

[Alexmitter]

how can you reball the unified RAM from the SOC?

The "fancy" "revolutionary" Unified RAM is simple off the shelf RAM soldered directly on the PCB where the CPU die is bonded to. Nothing special, just shorter wires between CPU and RAM which gives you a little more tight timing.

[oleid]

Fine, I will be the guy that says it: these people need to shift gears and stop trying to bring Linux to the Mac.

They come off as the same type of people that squat in other people's property and refuse to leave, it's a trespass mentality, like they are doing it out of spite,

What they should be doing is working on getting Linux to run perfectly on Qualcomm's Snapdragon, because honestly, if one wants Linux on ARM for the desktop, Qualcomm is where it's at.

Unlike Apple, Qualcomm is also actively working on bringing an ARM optimized GLIBC and since Qualcomm is actively supporting the effort, maybe the Asahi team could secure official sponsorship for an Asahi on Snapdragon distro.

That to me is the better play than this nonsense.

Troube is: there is no hardware available with snapdragon & bright display (say: >= 600 nits without HDR). If you need this (i.e. if you work on a train), and want a reasonable resolution (resp. pixle density), there is little available except Apple -- sadly.

[V1tol]

By that time those devices will be unusable, too slow for everyday use, battery would need replace, ssds will be on their way to death. 8 GB models are pretty much obsolete even today. You can not upgrade ram or ssd on those devices.

People use old devices not for heavy everyday tasks but for something else - like me for file servers or etc. 8 GB with 128 GB SSD will be enough for simple web surfing and Youtube watching for a long time.

Apple says it cares about environment there are millions of their devices floating around only because of their icloud lock. Other then that they are pretty much usable but apple makes sure second hand market is minimal so that people are forced to buy their new devices. Even repairability is at minimum and too costly when it comes to apple. Even if you buy 2 shiny new iphones and swap their internals they won't work.

You are writing about environment care but just before you literally said "those will be unusable, throw it away". That's suspicious.
iCloud lock - what is this about, stolen devices? I know hundreds of people with Macs and it never happened to any of them.
About SSDs - what horrible things you should do to them so they will be on their way to death? I have my first SSD - Intel 320 with 64 GB bought in 2013 still usable today. Heck, none of my SSD I bought in last 10 years died. Probably because I never bought cheap ones like OCZ or whatever. My friend still rocking 2015 MacBook Pro, changed two batteries there but SSD is still in good condition.

[mrg666]

Beyond impressive, what an achievement! So many translation layers seamlessly working together and all open source. WOW!

I think this is the future realized today for universal computing, even binaries are not isolated on their hardware anymore.

[mrg666]

It has Vulkan, so it is already better for gaming than macOS



They are preparing for the close future when those devices will be considered obsolete by Apple. And since quality build of macs is almost always better than any other computer of comparable price, they last longer. And missing operating system support is the biggest roadblock here and installing alternative OS prolongs life of the hardware by a lot.

I have a Mac Mini 2012 with last real 4 core 8 threads i7 x86 CPU for them - newer ones had only 2 core 4 threads tops except for 2018 model (which was already too late to buy). Last supported OS was Catalina from 2019 (yes I am aware about Legacy Patcher). In Apple world nobody cares about supporting OS older than 2 generations so on this machine I can use maybe Firefox and couple of outdated apps. But, I can easily install Windows even without Bootcamp there or any Linux (since it is not a MacBook it has very little "unsupported" hardware). Now this beast works as silent and relatively performant file server (it can have 2 2.5" disks inside), home assistant gateway and torrent downloader - only thanks to people who years ago added quirks and workarounds for this specific hardware "nobody needs except under macOS".

Not just Mac. This can be such a useful ability for any ARM system.