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

[Venemo]

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

There is no need to insult the developers in this manner. There is clearly a demand for running Linux on those chips, and they are doing a fantastic job. I'm very proud of them.

What they should be doing is working on getting Linux to run perfectly on Qualcomm's Snapdragon

They actually are also working on getting Linux run on Snapdragon, too. For example, there was an XDC presentation about getting ray tracing working on the new Qualcomm chips. That is also a very nice achievement. If you have a laptop with a Snapdragon chip, you too can contribute or if you're not a dev you can also just enjoy running a decent open source driver.

The two projects are not mutually exclusive, both exist in Mesa and both are in pretty good shape.

[robclark]

Nobody here cares about your zen5 laptop. Apple's laptops are arm. The laptops that qualcom are known for shipping are arm.

Maybe you should go back and read again what I wrote. The yoga 7x is not zen5.

As far as I know qcom is still shipping off-the-shelf ARM cores from ARM holdings with little to no modification. These cores are not optimized for speed, nor can they take advantage of the M1's unusual memory interface for high bandwidth and reduced power consumption. There was some talk about qcom trying to assemble a team to develop competing high-spec ARM cores of their own, but I haven't yet heard of anything significant coming from it.

The oryon cores in the snapdragon x1 SoC are not designed by ARM ltd.

[Developer12]

I stand corrected. I've read far too many things which partly assigned responsibility for its performance to the specialized offload engines, but then that might have been "performance in the context of long battery life".

I do remember reading that Apple Silicon benefits from being able to have a wider instruction decode pipeline than x86 chips thanks to ARM's fixed-length instructions, so I wonder how Qualcomm's decode pipeline compares.

As far as I know qcom is still shipping off-the-shelf ARM cores from ARM holdings with little to no modification. These cores are not optimized for speed, nor can they take advantage of the M1's unusual memory interface for high bandwidth and reduced power consumption. There was some talk about qcom trying to assemble a team to develop competing high-spec ARM cores of their own, but I haven't yet heard of anything significant coming from it.

[ssokolow]

No, I'm not, and you can't read.

The CPU is fast because the CPU is fast. The GPU is fast because the GPU is fast. It's that simple.

There's no special app code for accelerators, the GPU and CPU simply execute more instructions per second than any hardware qcom has ever built.

I stand corrected. I've read far too many things which partly assigned responsibility for its performance to the specialized offload engines, but then that might have been "performance in the context of long battery life".

I do remember reading that Apple Silicon benefits from being able to have a wider instruction decode pipeline than x86 chips thanks to ARM's fixed-length instructions, so I wonder how Qualcomm's decode pipeline compares.

[Developer12]

That's not been my experience.. comparing a few benchmarks that I could run on my yoga 7x (x1e-78, so not the fastest sku), it's still generally faster than the zen5 that phoronix posted, and more importantly for me, _much_ faster at compiling stuff, and should get better when LLCC and DDR scaling land. Battery life is decent, not _yet_ as good as windows (some things to sort out to hit the lowest power states.. but still quite good compared to my previous x86 laptops). Tests I've seen on windows still put it ahead of LL and much ahead of zen5.

Nobody here cares about your zen5 laptop. Apple's laptops are arm. The laptops that qualcom are known for shipping are arm.

[Developer12]

I think, in a twisted way, they're saying that Apple Silicon is fast because Apple has the power to push app developers to code their apps to take advantage of the on-die accelerators and Linux apps will just run on the regular CPU cores.

No, I'm not, and you can't read.

The CPU is fast because the CPU is fast. The GPU is fast because the GPU is fast. It's that simple.

There's no special app code for accelerators, the GPU and CPU simply execute more instructions per second than any hardware qcom has ever built.

[robclark]

Qualcomm laptops are garbage. The battery life is shit. The CPU is shit. The GPU is shit. Take your dumpster-fodder qcom laptop and go home.

That's not been my experience.. comparing a few benchmarks that I could run on my yoga 7x (x1e-78, so not the fastest sku), it's still generally faster than the zen5 that phoronix posted, and more importantly for me, _much_ faster at compiling stuff, and should get better when LLCC and DDR scaling land. Battery life is decent, not _yet_ as good as windows (some things to sort out to hit the lowest power states.. but still quite good compared to my previous x86 laptops). Tests I've seen on windows still put it ahead of LL and much ahead of zen5.

[ssokolow]

Man, you have no goddamned clue what the fuck you're talking about. "Oh YeS mY oS mAkEs My CoMpUtEr FaStEr"

I think, in a twisted way, they're saying that Apple Silicon is fast because Apple has the power to push app developers to code their apps to take advantage of the on-die accelerators and Linux apps will just run on the regular CPU cores.

[Developer12]

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.

Qualcomm laptops are garbage. The battery life is shit. The CPU is shit. The GPU is shit. Take your dumpster-fodder qcom laptop and go home.

[Developer12]

The MAIN thing that makes those chips that good is mac os. When you remove it from an equation and install linux you end up with crippled laptop that is barely usable and will never come close to mac os on that hardware. Many things will never work on them and apple may suddenly even block you from booting linux on their devices.

Man, you have no goddamned clue what the fuck you're talking about. "Oh YeS mY oS mAkEs My CoMpUtEr FaStEr"