Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-m1-chip-platform-control-1178210/

by _gtly • 6 years ago

232 348 6 years ago

throw0101a3• 6 years ago

¿Porque no los dos?

Tepix6• 6 years ago

It will be interesting to see how long Rosetta-2 will be supported. macOS 10.15 took away 32bit apps, which was a sizeable chunk so clearly Apple is willing to alienate some of its users in the name of progress and slimlining.

Bud5• 6 years ago

Is that even a serious criticism? Users had about ten years of warning before 32-bit went away. The real impact of that on real users is minimal.

_ph_• 6 years ago

Yes, there were warnings, but what can I as a user do about it? I am impacted by 32 bit going away and I cannot do anything about it. That is why I am running Mojava instead of Catalina. On the bright side, whenever I am going to buy a new Mac, the ARM processor effectively doesn't cause any additional troubles on the compatibility side, and that was probably the reason for Apple to kill 32 bit with Catalina.

Doctor_Fegg• 6 years ago

There are some non-trivial apps used by real users that are 32-bit only, in particular the pre-subscription versions of Adobe Creative Suite.

terramex5• 6 years ago

Users had about ten years of warning before 32-bit went away.

Citation needed. I remember 32 bit being deprecated just 12 months before its support removal and there were no signs earlier. I just had to recompile my apps to x64, but some 3rd party tools I use never got an update and my 2013 Macbook will stay on Mojave forever.

fredoralive• 6 years ago

A quick look at previous transitions shows...

Classic Mac OS support (both 68k and PPC): OS X 10.0 was released March 2001, dropped with 10.5 released October 2007. So about 6 years, 8 months.

PowerPC Mac OS X app support: First Intel Mac January 2006, support dropped with 10.7 in July 2011, so 5 years 5 months.

32 bit iOS app support: iPhone 5S with 64 bit CPU released October 2013, 32 bit app support removed in iOS 11, September 2017, so 3 years 11 months.

32 bit Intel app support (and Carbon framework): Mac OS 10.5 was first to allow 64 bit GUI apps[1], in October 2007, 32 bit support dropped in 10.15, released October 2019, so 12 years.

I'd probably count this nearer to the first three than the kinda drawn out 32 bit to 64 bit Intel transition, so perhaps about 4 years?

[1] There was limited 64 bit support before in 10.4.

hehetrthrthrjn4• 6 years ago

Keep in mind that there is a much larger installed base of Intel machines than any of those other transitions. Apple is unlikely to want to alienate so many people. It will take several years for the percentage of Intel Mac users to fall under 50%.

I see Intel support continuing for closer to 10 years.

bsdubernerd• 6 years ago

I was on the last PPC during the ppc->x86. My experience on it was that after a year it was starting to be hard to find new releases containing a ppc build already, and those who did very frequently were poorly tested. Although OSX releases continued to support ppc, at the user level it was pretty clear I was on a dead end. Even on the OSS front I had to rebuild for PPC frequently myself, as more often than not the x86 build was the only one available.

akmarinov2• 6 years ago

At WWDC they said they're starting a transition period that'll last 2 years.

So I expect them to drop support in 1.5 years

Tepix6• 6 years ago

No way. Rosetta-2 was introduced as part of the transition, why would Apple sunset it so quickly?

jb19913• 6 years ago

This is an in accurate reading of the word “transition“.

Cthulhu_4• 6 years ago

Transition of their hardware, so in two years all their devices will be Mac silicon. Probably. I think the Mac Pro may not migrate, given that it uses server grade hardware and Mac's silicon is not there yet (I think / assume / I'm probably wrong)

nathancahill• 6 years ago

Maybe it was Intel that had platform control all along.

throw0101a3• 6 years ago

With Intel there at least was AMD as an option:

* https://amd-osx.com

* https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-hackintosh-syste...

my12311• 6 years ago

With Arm, maybe Hackintoshes that will be worth it (for VMs at least) will be possible in the future. If Windows 10 on Arm succeeds... to make that hardware widely available. SBCs do not count.

(there's technically nothing preventing you of running macOS arm64 on non-Apple hardware in a VM)

socialdemocrat7• 6 years ago

Yeah... because nobody else makes ARM compatible chips.

x86 is not an open ISA. For all practical purposes nobody besides intel and AMD can make x86 chips.

Pretty much anybody can ask ARM to get a license to make ARM chip.

Sure Macs have special chips in addition but that is true for their intel offerings as well. You have never been able to just plop an AMD chip into a Mac so it is not like that choice ever meant anything to consumers.

neogodless2• 6 years ago

Intel never had platform control. They had market control.

While they often had superior hardware compared to competitors, they had so much influence in the market that they could maintain market dominance even when the hardware wasn't superior.

joshsyn• 6 years ago

Always one guy who shouts about control and submission. Don't like it don't buy it?

yipbub• 6 years ago

They're shouting at you not to buy it!

newbie5782• 6 years ago

I bet there were people like you back when slavery was legal.

If you don't like slavery, just don't buy slaves. Nothing wrong with that, right? YoU hAvE oPtIonS aS a CoNsuMer.

Veen• 6 years ago

It is in extremely bad taste—not to mention ludicrously inaccurate—to compare your premium laptop ecosystem options with chattel slavery.

resynth1943• 6 years ago

I bet there were people like you back when slavery was legal.

It still is.

Go research Apple's relationship with Foxconn.

submeta• 6 years ago

This is a shallow argument that is repeated over and over again. - For those who invested a lot in hardware, software and know-how on Apple platforms, cost of change is holding them back from quickly jumping to other platforms. For them, Apple is a quasi monopole. For me personally, it would take quite some time changing platforms, and I am already planning on doing this, but it will take time.

More importantly, Apple is a huge player that shapes the structure of the industry towards a vision that lacks any kind of freedom for its users. An end game where its users are just consumers, void of any freedom to do what they want with their hardware. This is not a bright future Apple is painting: Some sort of Utopia that we can take part of by giving up freedom, by accepting Apple's rules 100% or leaving their territory.

I can understand that what Apple does appeals to many users. I still recommend Apple devices to my retired parents and to friends who do not want to fiddle with their hardware. But that folks here on HN are defending Apple's practices is way beyond me.

rfvrgvegbegn• 6 years ago

It's like saying

"I like my polluting car, if you don't, don't buy one"

"I like my t-shirt that has been manufactured with slave labour, if you don't, don't buy one"

Can we stop with this naive "Let me buy one, if you don't like it don't buy it" ?

This puts your immediate personal comfort over the common future of computing, technology, freedom, privacy, economy and more.

valuearb13• 6 years ago

Wow what a bunch of non sequitors.

Someone polluting the air impacts your life, someone choosing a different computer does not.

Is someone in a third world country building goods for first world consumers “slave labor” or improving their standard of living by “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps”. Methinks an accurate discussion is far more nuanced than you really want to have.

pentae3• 6 years ago

It was a masterclass in duping really.

Step 1. Design the enclosure/thermals for a much lower TDP ARM chip, causing the Intel chips to thermal throttle and run hot as possible burning your lap and roasting your palms for years

Step 2. Introduce the new powerful ARM chip which now runs much cooler and faster in the same enclosure

Step 3. Profit!

Worked on me, I just ordered mine

ramraj07• 6 years ago

That would hold water if people only compared it to intel Macs. Last I saw, most decent reviews compared it also to other mobile intel processors, so who exactly is in the group that's duping you?

pentae3• 6 years ago

Don't get me wrong it's an amazing chip, but the Intels were never given a proper chance on the previous machines especially the MBA. If my previous gen machine wasn't a toaster I wouldn't be upgrading

zuhsetaqi• 6 years ago

As if. Intel clearly failed to deliver what they claimed. That’s the reason why we had to deal with such overheating issues not only with MacBooks

pentae3• 6 years ago

I don't think it was Intels fault that they decided not to run a heat pipe to the fan on the previous gen MBA

quantummkv• 6 years ago

How is that a dupe? A dupe would be if the M1 chip was worse than Intel. If Apple can design a chip for those constraints and Intel can't, it's Intel's fault and problem

username90• 6 years ago

It's Intel's fault but it is a problem for all of us. It isn't good when a company gets too big in too many areas and tightly couples everything.

yoz-y• 6 years ago

Dupe is not a good word, but maybe disingenuous? Apple is touting silence now, but had the thermals of intel MacBooks been better they could be way less of hairdryers too. Apple could have also introduced better power controls for Intel Macs (now everybody runs Turbo Boost switcher).

iMac Pro has shown that they can do better with same enclosure, I wonder if they could have done something with MacBooks too. They would probably have to sacrifice a few millimetres of thinness but I think the decreased noise and throttling would be more noticeable.

That said, I don't believe there was any master plan behind this. They just originally prioritised thinness and battery size over everything else. With M1 they can have their cake and eat it too.

Edit: Also they could have ditched Intel for AMD a generation or two ago and also improve on performance per watt.

square_usual2• 6 years ago

While the point of Apple Silicon is undoubtedly for Apple to have more control over their ecosystem, this article doesn't make that point very well. For example:

However, there’s a clear nudge for developers to publish their recompiled apps to Apple’s store.

That doesn't make any sense. Where is the "nudge" coming from? The article doesn't make any argument for how that works, given that you can share universal binaries outside the App store. Apple Silicon isn't changing anything that would "not so gently nudge" developers into the App Store.

Similarly, old apps only compiled for x86 being compatible in the future is... not really about control. PowerPC apps aren't compatible with intel Macbooks; that's just an inevitable outcome of switching the ISA. There's nothing about platform control in that.

ratww• 6 years ago

That doesn't make any sense. Where is the "nudge" coming from?

I had the impression that the person that wrote the article believes that Universal Binaries are an AppStore-only feature.

square_usual2• 6 years ago

They mention a couple of lines before that you can "share or submit [them] to the Mac App Store", so they seem to be aware that you can share Universal Binaries.

formerly_proven• 6 years ago

In one of the older threads someone asked whether you'd eventually be able to run Linux on this, and someone responded that this would be annoying to do, since there aren't any docs. Is that actually true? The Apple A SoCs don't boot random kernels, so I would think the Apple M SoC does not, either, and requires bootloader/kernel to be signed by Apple, just like iPhone firmware.

my12311• 6 years ago

They can be configured to boot other operating systems, see https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma....

Someone3• 6 years ago

From that page:

“Review the following security options:

Full Security: Ensures that only your current OS, or signed operating system software currently trusted by Apple, can run. This mode requires a network connection at software installation time.

Reduced Security: Allows any version of signed operating system software ever trusted by Apple to run.”

⇒ it appears ‘other’ still requires OSes signed by Apple, but it allows you to run an OS even if Apple has no longer trusts it. Or am I misreading that?

So, there might be Apple-signed Linuxes, but I wouldn’t hold my breadth for that.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

As soon as you have kernel-level code execution ability you can "chainload" either u-boot or a Linux kernel directly. But yeah, the biggest problem will be the lack of documentation - for example the good old classic iPod had iPodLinux, but never got real traction.

The new M series? Probably Apple themselves will allow booting other OSes, but I would not count on any official support in getting stuff running.

terramex5• 6 years ago

Bootloader/kernel signing can be turned off, there is even GUI for that if you turn off SIP first. Is it just like a jailbroken iPhone/iPad, but straight from Apple and without losing warranty.

Tepix6• 6 years ago

No, you cannot turn off the signed bootloader requirement just by using the GUI. You need to run csrutil in a terminal after booting into macOS recovery.

Multicomp• 6 years ago

At some point in the not too distant future, old x86 applications will cease to run on Macs, as emulation support won’t run forever

One thing I can credit Android some, and Windows a lot (even 10 with all its manifold privacy and user-hostility problems) with is that they are backwards compatible.

exceptions to every rule, etc., but I can run all old versions of Android apps on an Android 11 phone, same for Windows programs going back to 1996 or so with few tweaks, and can squeeze that back to 1993 if I fuss and cuss and so on.

yes, this is arch to arch emulation, but the idea od taking that feature away in ~4 years vs Android's best effort continued compatibility or Microsoft's compatibility layers is a cost/benefit that I apparently disagree with Apple decision makers on.

akmarinov2• 6 years ago

True, that's a good thing, but that's also where you get a lot of the cruft that slows things down.

For example Apple no longer has to support OpenGL and it can just cut out relevant hardware on the SoC level, leaving more room for other things.

On the smartphone front, Qualcomm can't do that, since it sells its chips to a broad base that have variable requirements.

I guess it's a tradeoff.

terramex5• 6 years ago

Apple no longer has to support OpenGL and it can just cut out relevant hardware on the SoC level, leaving more room for other things.

Just for everyone who is scared by this statement - macOS on Apple Silicon still supports OpenGL and OpenCL, but it is emulated on top of Metal now.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

There is a cost to that though, the reality is Windows has become rather bloated because MS can't let anything go. It doesn't help that they have never been able to say no to anything and everything getting included.

eganist• 6 years ago

because MS can't let anything go.

To be clear, this isn't really up to them. It's what market forces have dictated.

Tons of old corp apps exist all over the place that necessitate this level of backwards compatibility.

Cthulhu_4• 6 years ago

That said, they are moving in a direction; they've stopped trying to make IE work in favor of a rewrite, keeping IE around for older apps.

Honestly wouldn't be surprised - actually I AM surprised this isn't a thing yet - that they would run older Windows apps in a VM / emulator. Actually they may already do this but I'm just not aware of it.

One thing they have been doing is turn Windows into an evergreen operating system (together with Edge), so that few people will still be running older versions of their operating system.

vagrantJin2• 6 years ago

..rather bloated because MS can't let anything go.

Ah. This comment seems off the cuff and not well thought out.

I think you may be underestimating the scope and scale at which Windows OS operates[0]. Outside of cool techie agencies and SV type companies, the default OS for any organization from churches to charities to governments to schools, the world over, is Windows. MacOS may be sleek and shiny apex predator but our world would grind to a halt, an absolute standstill if WindowsOS suddenly got wiped. It's not a whale. It's the ocean itself.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

socialdemocrat7• 6 years ago

It is always a trade off. Prioritizing backwards compatibility does not come for free.

One result I see from this is that MS keep creating new APIs whole old ones languish in obscurity.

On Macs in contrast Cocoa is part of a lineage all the way back to the 1980s. I can still use Objective-C skills I learned even before macOS X was released.

The same cannot be said for Windows. Nobody in their right mind writes Win16 or Win32 apps today.

So ironically the backwards compatibility MS offers it users come at the expense of backwards compatibility for developer skills.

When you ban breaking changes in an API you also stop that API from modernizing and staying relevant.

andrekandre2• 6 years ago

So ironically the backwards compatibility MS offers it users come at the expense of backwards compatibility for developer skills.

im not sure this follows necessarily: whats to prevent ms from say, writing a wrapper that packages up said legacy apps and supplies the libraries they need, so they can keep running and ms can still dump thier old frameworks and stop supportimg them in newer os's?

basically, what im saying is, for legacy apps, they can be "bottled up" and still run on newer systems without harming developer compatibility and modernizing (wine proves this imo)

but maybe im missing some important detail...

pjmlp7• 6 years ago

We surely do write Win32 applications, which is one of the reasons why UWP failed and now Project Reunion is bringing the best parts of UWP into Win32.

.NET 5 was also only released for Win32, Linux and macOS, UWP will get an update only later next year, if ever.

amelius• 6 years ago

Not being backwards compatible is a huge pain, but Apple can (somehow) afford to put that burden on developers.

IshKebab• 6 years ago

but I can run all old versions of Android apps on an Android 11 phone

Mostly. They've done a pretty good job of maintaining backwards compatibility but it isn't perfect. E.g. there's no way to access the old hardware options button anymore. You also get a warning popup if you try to run old apps.

I just tried running an old app I wrote and it freaked out a bit with the layout, jittering all over the place initially. But other than that it mostly worked.

valuearb13• 6 years ago

I started developing iOS apps for iOS 5, and me my first apps still run on iOS 14 unchanged. Not sure what you are on about?

lern_too_spel• 6 years ago

32 bit apps don't run on iOS 14.

tbodt• 6 years ago

They added 32 bit x86 support to Rosetta apparently just to get CrossOver to work. This could be a reason for them to never remove Rosetta. Maybe they'll just remove the x86 userland.

Pesthuf• 6 years ago

I also think the marketing was genius. NOT labeling that graph they showed did exactly what they wanted. It was impressing the non tech people and the tech people ALL kept talking and talking about it - because it wasn't labeled.

Apple's marketing is brilliant. It really gets the kind of people who think they are too smart to be marketed to AND the normies, all in one message.

jchw• 6 years ago

I consider myself a tech person and was immediately intrigued by the claims. Because I thought Apple could do it. And, after getting the Mac Mini in my hands as the only Apple computer in the house, I can mostly confirm it is quite astounding.

Maybe adding to the mystique helped some sales from curious people; it would help explain why benchmarks have been kept quiet and vague for the most part, even though they are very impressive.

I’ve witnessed single core performance on this device that I have not seen before and likely would need overclocking to hit if it can be done. For some workloads, it’s truly something.

Even thinking about it, I do expect some of this move was about performance, especially performance per watt. I doubt any other mobile processor is holding a candle at the moment. The control grabs, I think, might be secondary.

vvwvvwvvw2• 6 years ago

I was wondering why Gamer Nexus (a very rigorous YouTube review channel) didn't sent a M1 device, while those Apple fanboy channels got it. Probably the dude would've torn the M1 performance claims apart.

my12311• 6 years ago

Because those outlets never get Macs usually, and it isn't what they cover.

Note that a laptop chip also isn't a gaming product, for obvious reasons.

Tade04• 6 years ago

Because the GPU there is okay-ish, but not amazing - not really suitable for gaming.

JoshTko• 6 years ago

Gamers Nexus audience is very niche - PC enthusiasts. Apple has a much larger demo that they are targeting.

bfgoodrich4• 6 years ago

Non tech people didn't care. Tech people could read the many details that Apple provided on specific performance claims.

And to be clear, the presentation claimed "this is a fast mobile processor that's very efficient". Both claims have been very soundly proven. So I'm not sure why they would attempt the deception you seem to be implying. There was simply no need.

The M1 release is fascinating because never have I seen such a frantic effort to dismiss something in the face of overwhelming evidence that it's a pretty great thing. Eh.

dangus2• 6 years ago

And yet, the reviewers’ real world tests show that the unlabeled graph wasn’t a lie.

Here’s a labeled graph from Anandtech, scroll down to “Apple vs Intel Top Performance”

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

Apple’s unlabeled graph wasn’t a lie. Early reviewers confirm that the performance from a fanless, body-temperature laptop with 15+ hours of battery life is downright mind blowing. There is nothing else like it on the market.

Marketing only gets you so far. This product speaks for itself.

cinbun8• 6 years ago

I don't understand why exerting better control over hardware + software would mean we are being duped. A more cohesive experience provided by Apple can only be a win for them and their customers.

dandellion• 6 years ago

As long as your interests align with Apple's, yes. But if they stop being aligned you basically have no control. So it's a double edged sword, it basically comes down to personal choice.

socialdemocrat7• 6 years ago

As long as there is an escape hatch which macOS has. The key problem IMHO with iOS is not the AppStore but the lack of an escape hatch.

Running something from outside the AppStore should be an option. It could be a switch or toggle you could turn on with a warning.

Tepix6• 6 years ago

One example is the right to repair that Apple is fighting.

throwaway1290132• 6 years ago

I don't understand why exerting better control over hardware + software would mean we are being duped

So much for "Hacker" news.

spijdar4• 6 years ago

  > However, that marginal improvement hardly seems worth upsetting the entire Mac OS developer and consumer software ecosystem.

Really? This entire article is really dismissive, but this line especially struck me. I'm not convinced the M1 chip is some strange alien tech bypassing the laws of physics, but it seems clearly superior at its specific niche (single processes with an emphasis on low power usage, using fewer cores but massive L1I and L1D caches with a shared L2 cache).

Architecturally it looks like they're sacrificing expandability and raw multiprocessing power (like massively parallel database server multiprocessing) for a single minded focus on laptop chips. Why would it be surprising it'd excel in that domain?

The author also makes the confusing suggestion that M1 is a ploy to get developers to publish to the App Store because ... Xcode produces fat mach-o's? Maybe I'm an idiot here, but all those third party apps are also made with xcode. Where is the correlation with the app store? Sure, apple has been pushing the app store, but how does "apple silicon" specifically push devs there?

If there's anything apple has done to discourage 3rd party distribution, it's through Gatekeeper and strictly requiring notorized executables. If they wanted to make non app store distribution even less appealing, they could only allow notorization through the app store, or change the default to "only app store" ... Oh wait, they did that. On Intel.

Apple has always had complete platform control. They've done a lot of crappy things -- but this article tries to dismiss the M1 for pretty absurd reasons IMO.

Bud5• 6 years ago

The author clearly and obviously has no clue about M1. Calling its performance a "marginal improvement" is laughable. The entire article reads as a desperate attempt to distract people from the obvious advantages of the M1.

I'd be desperate too if I were trying to pretend Android is a serious competitor performance-wise when the CPUs are 18-24 months behind and the gap is still widening.

eertami• 6 years ago

I'd be desperate too if I were trying to pretend Android is a serious competitor performance-wise when the CPUs are 18-24 months behind and the gap is still widening.

I open WhatsApp on an iPhone XR. It launches instantly.

I open WhatsApp on a five year old Oneplus. It launches instantly.

Honestly who cares unless you have some niche use case or play mobile games. Having a class leading CPU isn't an advantage if it offers an indiscernible performance increase.

What I do care about though is having a respectable battery life and useful features like a headphone jack. A brand new phone (iPhone SE) should not have worse battery life than a phone from 2015 with its original battery that cost half its price.

calyth2018• 6 years ago

It might be a marginal improvement for some apps running on Rosetta 2.

Benchmarks from relatively trusted sites, such as Anandtech, suggests that strong native performance on most benchmarks, and at least competitive, if not slightly better, when emulating.

The article is a bad argument to a conclusion that we already know, something that they can already do without putting out their own chips.

socialdemocrat7• 6 years ago

Having worked as a mobile app developer primarily on iOS, I quickly learned that many Android fans has an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder. My Android developer co-worker has to use every opportunity given to rant about how superior Android was and how terrible iPhone was. Not to mention how downright evil Apple was.

apecat2• 6 years ago

I've noticed the same thing.

I admittedly do have an obsession with ranting about Android, but I find that there are fewer reasons to rant than five years ago. So I rant less.

As the Android platform has improved over the years, I find that the main reason I don't want people around me to use Android is the ridiculously short product lifecycle of many Android phones, and the risk of non-techies using unpatched devices.

I honestly think Apple's recent 5-6 years is unsustainable, but the three-year(?!) promise that seems to be a best case for Android is just obscene.

Someone at work said it's partially due to SoC manufacturers not providing drivers for new Android kernels for very long, but I might have misunderstood.

ls65536• 6 years ago

many Android fans has an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder

I've also found many Apple fans have an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder, but my anecdote is about as pointless as yours here.

There are also plenty of people in both "camps" who just want a device to go about their business and, as is their choice, don't care much beyond "what costs less" (however they might define that), or what their friends/family use or recommend, or maybe just what fits a very specific use case of theirs.

I've used both types of devices, and there are some things Apple/iOS does better and some things Google/Android does better, and certainly some things neither does well. The specifics of that will always be a subject of disagreement depending on who you ask.

perryizgr82• 6 years ago

As an android user, I hate that iPhone users put up with insane bs that Apple does. They normalize abusive behavior and that spreads to the Android ecosystem too. Which hurts me. Case in point: headphone jacks

tjpnz• 6 years ago

I'm an Android user but also have an iPhone for work purposes. There's nothing I find particularly delightful about either platform and I can't fathom what would motivate someone to be an Android or Apple fanboy.

The reason I've stuck with Android has got very little to do with the software.

rsynnott5• 6 years ago

Architecturally it looks like they're sacrificing expandability and raw multiprocessing power (like massively parallel database server multiprocessing) for a single minded focus on laptop chips.

I don't see that there's any hard evidence they're doing that; there's no obvious reason that they can't just shove in more cores for an M1X or whatever (very much Intel's approach these days, say), and they're not (at least technologically) married to the on-package RAM thing.

spijdar4• 6 years ago

Actually, they might not be able to.

Everything comes with a cost when you're working in silicon. You can add more cores, yes, but to do so, you either must make each core smaller, or increase the maximum distance between two cores.

This is important, because the longer the distance, the harder it is to maintain e.g. cache coherency between all cores. There's a physical limit to the speed electrons travel, and you have to account for that.

Intel's designs rely on pretty teeny cores with small L1{I,D} caches and small private L2 caches on a ring bus topology, with the iGPU on one polar end, and the system agent/memory controllers on the other ends. [0] [1]

Zen takes a slightly different approach, using individual ICs with four cores on a single IC complex, sharing a single, relatively slow L3 cache, with small private L2 caches per core. The "chip complexes" are contained on a carrier chip which takes care of PCIe and the memory controller, similar to Intel's system agent, but farther from every core. [2] [3]

Apple has instead opted for all the cores to, instead, share a single large L2 cache, with enormous L1 caches. Both the GPU and CPU appear to have point-to-point connections to the memory controller and to the other peripherals.

Because they use 1) large caches and 2) squash everything together, they've managed to achieve ridiculously high memory bandwidth with teeny L1 latency.

For example, while Intel's latest uarch requires 5 CPU cycles to read L1D cache, M1 can do so in 3 cycles. Zen requires either 4 or 5 cycles.

There's no free lunch here, and I doubt they could maintain this same architecture while adding many more cores. They're missing the interconnects and necessary silicon to do so, and adding it would add latency and/or shrink existing caches. The design seems to be predicated on being small with minimal distance between components.

Caveat emptor, I'm not an engineer, this is all idle speculation.

[0] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/thumb/c/cf/coffee_lake_over...

[1] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/5/53/coffee_lake_die_%28oct...

[2] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/a/a7/amd_zen_ccx_2_%28annot...

[3] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/7/75/amd_zen_octa-core_die_...

selykg• 6 years ago

The author also makes the confusing suggestion that M1 is a ploy to get developers to publish to the App Store because ... Xcode produces fat mach-o's? Maybe I'm an idiot here, but all those third party apps are also made with xcode. Where is the correlation with the app store? Sure, apple has been pushing the app store, but how does "apple silicon" specifically push devs there?

App Store has smart deploy features so it only sends you what you need. So maybe that's it. But still.. it's a pretty weak argument.

auganov• 6 years ago

Never owned an Apple product and generally don't have too great of an opinion of this ecosystem.

But the M1 MacBook Air is perhaps the first Apple product that really caught my attention. A fan-less (without overheating issues) ultrabook with crazy batter life outperforming every comparable offering out there for $1,000. Pretty much the best deal on the market, unless you have specific issues with it. Which in my case is the keyboard. And general dislike of the ecosystem, but I already see it as completely locked down, this one being more so doesn't change anything for me. If it had a trackpoint and a few more keys I would get it despite hating the platform.

my12311• 6 years ago

Those butterfly keyboards are no longer shipped, they reverted to their prior designs.

segfaultbuserr3• 6 years ago

generally don't have too great of an opinion of this ecosystem.

+1.

Pretty much the best deal on the market, unless you have specific issues with it.

For example, if you try Linux or BSD, and you'll find none of the peripherals works, and the community reverse engineering efforts will take years before getting basic functionality, and even then, the battery will only last for 2 hours and nobody besides Apple knows how exactly the power management mechanism works, thus PM will forever be broken. I learned my lesson the hard way on Windows tablets.

There was a time when "non-x86" is automatically developer/hacking-friendly (ancient examples are SPARC, MIPS, and those ARM Chromebooks were probably the last examples...), now the landscape has changed. I always want to use a non-x86 machine as my desktop, but perhaps it's time to abandon this idea.

barbacoa• 6 years ago

AMD was originally going to release a desktop ARM CPU along with the x86 ryzen. The crazy part was they were meant to be pin compatible. AMD abandoned the idea due to complications and to focus on ryzen instead. We were so close to ARM desktops, probably wont see one for another 8 years.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-sk...

mightybyte• 6 years ago

As a counterpoint...I've been using Mac laptops for 10 or 11 years after having grown up staunchly anti-Apple and previously using Linux for some years. I will not be buying an M1. I was already about to ditch Mac after the escape key debacle, but they realized their mistake and lured me back this year. Well, no more. I'm not willing to support the vendor lock-in and privacy invasions with the recently discussed ocsp phoning home.

Sorry Apple, this is a bridge too far. I'm out.

socialdemocrat7• 6 years ago

People who don’t use Macs keep saying it is completely locked down but that has never been my experience. Windows feels far more locked down to me. It is much easier to use Unix software on Mac than on Windows. File formats tend to be easy to read. On Windows there tends to be a lot more binary formats aimed at keeping the competition out.

Mac software is usually easy to install. In PC there is all sorts of authentication and verification. Digging up a long license key for the OS is not a thing on Mac.

thih9• 6 years ago

Today, similar pricing and innovation issues have reared their head with Intel.

I’d also add difficulties with coordinating releases.

It will still be difficult, but should become easier.

Veedrac• 6 years ago

Apple is about platform control.

Apple Silicon is about performance and efficiency.

A friendly, open-hardware Apple would have moved to their own chips too, though they'd have documented their GPU, and a walled-garden Apple without a competitive laptop chip would have locked the system down anyway, as, in fact, they were doing on Intel.

segfaultbuserr3• 6 years ago

Apple is about platform control. Apple Silicon is about performance and efficiency. [...] A friendly, open-hardware Apple would have moved to their own chips too

Well said. But is it even possible to separate them anymore? What if they are practically both sides of the same coin? Apple uses its platform control to finance the development of Apple Silicon, which in turn strengthens its platform control. In an alternative universe, will the open-hardware friendly Apple even have the resources to develop a top-performance Apple Silicon (as seen in this universe) to begin with?

I'm afraid that x86 vs ARM has become a "pick your poison" game, unless a serious competitor to Apple Silicon emerges... Well, if someone can show me that Linux or BSD runs perfectly on Mac w/ Apple Silicon with working periphrases and not-too-bad power management before the end of 2022, I may change my mind and buy one...

my12311• 6 years ago

Apple Silicon Macs aren't any more locked down than x86 ones.

Hopefully, the GPU and such will be reverse engineered, that's a lot of one-time effort that might take a year or more the first time but will be easier for future gens.

Tepix6• 6 years ago

Now that the T2 chip has been hacked, that statement is no longer true.

my12311• 6 years ago

I'm part of the checkra1n team, and I can tell you that the difference doesn't really matter. We can do anything that we need on Apple Silicon macs, and will show something when we are ready.

* you don't need to hack the SEP for anything here (consider it as a glorified TPM), and the AP is can be unlocked officially.

weego• 6 years ago

Yeah and don't be duped by the cost savings and reliability of SpaceX, they just want control.

Product development is about control in some form.

If Apple have genuinely just make a decades leap in performance then you just look at the trade offs.

I'm not sure why I'm still typing, the article is such child-like faux insightfulness.

Cthulhu_4• 6 years ago

Weird comparison, SpaceX is not consumer hardware and few people make their living off of their services.

m4rtink• 6 years ago

Also SpaceX is much more open than about any old school space launch company - and some new ones! (Blue Origin is secretive on the Apple level.)

coldtea11• 6 years ago

Don’t be duped by performance, Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

Yes. That's the biggest benefit, and another reason I'm buying it (on top of great performance for my NLE apps). I want the Mac to be it's own platform, and be under Apple's control and vision. If it's also made foul-proof and air-tight, so much the better.

I don't want another lowest common denominator OS converging on the same point.

If I didn't want platform control I'd buy some OEM device...

That doesn't mean I approve of any and every restriction. But I'm ok with a "walled garden" -- better than an open garden full of junkies and garbage. Some of the best Japanese gardens and so on I've seen had walls around them...

Of course an open garden that's beautifully maintained, respected by those in it, etc, would be even better, but that's hardly the case in real life, so that's where curation and walls come in.

To me this brings me to the Amiga and Atari and Acorn and other alternative platforms of my youth. I don't want everything to be amd64 and Windows or the nth Linux distro.

In any case, Apple doesn't force anyone's hand, if anything they make it more difficult to buy their stuff (more expensive, targeting the expensive end of the market, only 10% market share at best, different OS and now different CPU than the rest of the market, etc).

sneak9• 6 years ago

The problems with this are more societal ones than technical or practical: It is impossible, for example, to install most popular apps for macOS without identifying yourself to Apple (and by extension the US government and military intelligence). You can't use the App Store (even for free apps) without an Apple ID, and you can't get an Apple ID without a phone number. (In many countries, you can't get a phone number without a government ID.)

Similarly, if you wish to publish apps widely, you can do so with unsigned ones, but users won't ever figure out how to run those.[1] If you want your app to be widely used, you must ID yourself to Apple, who can deny/censor at will (or under state (or Hollywood) compulsion).

It builds a world in which it is impossible to easily build or distribute tools that the state really doesn't want distributed or used, because Apple is too large to deny them their demands.

I think the phrase used is "turnkey tyranny".

Anonymous publishing is essential to the preservation of a free society.

Imagine if there were one company who could remotely disable printing presses, or televisions/radios.

For those of you who aren't yet worried about this possibility of state compulsion, I ask you this: Dubya is to Trump as Trump is to x? It's not a matter of if these remote censorship tools built by Apple will be used to abuse human rights en masse, but instead a matter of when. Apple is already compromising their crypto due to requests (not compulsion) from the federal police—today.

[1] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/unsigned.html

coldtea11• 6 years ago

The problems with this are more societal ones than technical or practical: It is impossible, for example, to install most popular apps for macOS without identifying yourself to Apple (and by extension the US government and military intelligence).

For those kind of problems, I agree. But I think they should be solved in the political and legal level, not some technical fix.

If you can't trust the government, if the government wants increasingly more data, the government should be curbed by protests, voting, and so on. The apps not talking to the vendor is just a band-aid. They can still get your moves from your phone, your searches from Google, and so on.

And, in any case, Tor is not a substitute for democracy.

It builds a world in which it is impossible to easily build or distribute tools that the state really doesn't want distributed or used, because Apple is too large to deny them their demands.

We shouldn't allow the state to have a say on this, like we shouldn't allow censorship.

(Of course, many tech people, are all ok for censorship, as long as it happens to the right, that is bad, guys, e.g. those peddling "fake news" -- with the state or the Zuck guaranteeing for them what are "real news", like the WMDs and other establishment truths).

spijdar4• 6 years ago

The problem with this line of thinking regarding Macs is, well, there are just so many good alternatives to Macs.

Now, it is worth giving consideration to the possibility that Macs will become so much better than the competition that they could become like iPhones, and develop more of a stranglehold over people's lives.

As it stands now, and in the immediate future, I don't see this as a valid concern. There are just too many good alternatives, if your concerns are limited to the above.

(now, I wish open hardware became way more prevalent -- not PC open, but open source with libre firmware. I'm concerned that window is permanently closing, as the market is consolidating on very literal monopolies with highly restricted firmware. Almost every company I'm aware of is now using Synopsys IP for their DDR4 PHY trainer -- a CPU which has direct access to memory, and writable, signed, encrypted firmware...)

gigatexal• 6 years ago

Well said. I don’t have anything to add other than I, too, am all in on the “it-just-works” of Apple.

_up• 6 years ago

Can you leave these beautiful Japanese Gardens once you decided to enter or are you getting jailed there? Because you can't just leave Apples ecosystem unless willing to switch devices+ecosystem of course.

coldtea11• 6 years ago

I've used Apple for 16+ years. I can leave at any moment.

Most apps I use are cross platform (Adobe CS, Cubase, Resolve), others are web based (Gmail, Basecamp, etc), my music is on Spotify, videos on Netflix and Prime, and my peripherals all work.

Because you can't just leave Apples ecosystem unless willing to switch devices+ecosystem of course.

Well, I buy new laptop every 4-5 years or so. So if I want to move, I can always do so. If in a rush, I can always sell the old laptop in the first or second year too - with the added benefit that Macs keep their resale value better.

danaris3• 6 years ago

"Switching devices+ecosystem" is leaving the garden. There's really no other possible way to put it in that metaphor. You're not jailed.

The only thing keeping you there is your own desire to retain the things that are...inside the garden. The Apple software. The services. The user experience.

The one thing I can see being upset about is losing access to the software you've purchased. But switching to Apple (or even Linux) from Windows/Android means giving up exactly the same things. That's not about a "walled garden": it's just a consequence of the fact that software has to be written, or at least compiled, for a particular platform, and significant extra effort has to be expended to make it functional across platforms.

appleflaxen2• 6 years ago

The Ben Franklin quote that

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

seems particularly apt, here.

Rhetorically: how much do you care about privacy as an issue? Because this is the trade you're making, and you should do it with your eyes open.

I personally don't think the trade-off is worth it, but I also really really hope I'm wrong.

My biggest cause for concern is the long history of the USG collaborating with megacorporations to control people. It's super scary as we reach the point with technology where every person can be identified fully, and is essentially "always on". You can argue that you can unplug, but the cost of that option is so high when society is dependent on it that it rapidly becomes impractical.

coldtea11• 6 years ago

The Ben Franklin quote that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." seems particularly apt, here.

On the other hand, I'm a European, could not care less for Ben Franklin (or the Founding Fathers for that matter), and don't consider them some great sages of the centuries. Nor is their word gospel.

I say that because I see such supposed "deep" quotes all the time, as if a simplistic proverb-like statement settles a complex real world situation...

Not to mention that the quote is used out of context [1].

Safety is always temporary -- there are no long term guarantees in history. And we all give up all kinds of essential liberties for safety - that's part of living in a society. We pay taxes, we allow ourselves to be taken to prison if we break one of 1000000 laws, etc.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou....

swiley3• 6 years ago

Apple's walled gardens don't solve the maleware problem. People get code Apple doesn't approve of onto their platforms all the time.

What these things do make more difficult is community maintained software, which is what made the platforms you feel nostalgic about so nice.

socialdemocrat7• 6 years ago

Yeah let us stop using Anti virus software on PC because it doesn’t stop every virus. It is never about elimination but minimization. Reality is that macOS and iOS both have much smaller malware problem than competing platforms.

coldtea11• 6 years ago

Apple's walled gardens don't solve the maleware problem.

It reduces it to the point of being a non-problem.

People get code Apple doesn't approve of onto their platforms all the time.

Only if they put it there themselves. 99.99% of those "Apple viruses" one hears are just trojans.

And if you stick to the Mac App Store and trusted sources (Adobe, MS, etc), you get close to zero malware, with the ocassional "missed it at Mac App store review" exception that gets stomped on soon.

I think this is enough:

https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/mobile-security....

dalbasal• 6 years ago

This is the very definition of off topic and tangential but...

Walled garden is a rich metaphor. You can contrast a walled garden to a community garden as you did. That's about controlling who comes in.

Anyway.. the "garden" part has is rich too. What's the contrast to garden? Wilderness? I think what makes a garden is being artificial. The gardner makes the garden. Everything in the garden is natural and the garden itself is inevitably an ecosystem. But, if the gardner abandons it, the garden will quickly evolve into something else. In that sense, the garden is an moderately unstable state being maintained by a gardner.

Besides biodiversity, that's my way of quantifying wildness. What will happen if people leave? How different will it be? I think that's why we associate forest so strongly with wilderness. The forest will remain a forest. The amount of tension between what a garden is now and what nature would like it to be.

sradman• 6 years ago

It is not ALL about platform control. ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture gives us full day battery browsing/video-playback using the efficient IceStorm cores as well as very competitive performance benchmark results using the FireStorm cores.

Apple's System-on-a-Chip provides additional value-add (e.g. unified memory). Vertical integration of silicon does expand Apple’s walled garden but I’m not convinced this is the driving force.

masklinn2• 6 years ago

Apple's System-on-a-Chip provides additional value-add (e.g. unified memory).

Both AMD and Intel support unified memory on their igp (and AMD at least is working on dGP unified memory).

klelatti3• 6 years ago

What Cupertino really wants more control. First over the development roadmap and inner working of its silicon. With in-house processors, Apple can drive integrated imaging, machine learning, and security features in the direction it wants.

This is the real point about control - not about forcing anyone to use the App store which may or may not happen but could have happened with Intel CPUs too - and its about building more capable machines. The speed is in part as a result of that control.

And I don't think anyone is being duped.

socialdemocrat7• 6 years ago

The truth is somewhere in the middle, so while this article has some good points it is too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking.

I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan horses.

This isn’t just hype. We know for a fact that this is a much smaller problem on iOS than Android. I am happy that Android exists as a choice for users but let us not pretend there are no trade offs.

It is a bit too conspiratorial to think Apple control is all about some dictatorship fetish. It is a choice Apple makes to improve user experience at the expense of flexibility.

romanoderoma5• 6 years ago

Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan horses.

I don't intend to sound dismissive, but this line of thinking has a name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism

newsclues• 6 years ago

Does that not apply to the State and government?

czzr• 6 years ago

It also has another name:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience

matwood5• 6 years ago

Or pragmatism. At some point it's better and easier for users to offload some of these decisions to someone else. I don't want to test every piece of food I buy at the grocery store for poison, the same way I don't want to have to deep dive into every app. And yes, I know the system is not perfect, but I'm talking about the general system here.

jackpeterfletch2• 6 years ago

The fact that Apple stopped requiring dev licenses to sideload code onto iOS devices makes me think that their effort to ensure that "typical users" install signed apps on macOS, really is about security and experience.

I think its funny that most people here wouldent trust a website with no certificate, but for applications the idea seems to be considered abhorrent.

jrochkind1• 6 years ago

Most people don't put much stock in "EV" certificates though, which to me would be the equivalent of the signed app, sort of, as it demonstrates that the person you are talking to is a specific known legal entity, sort of like demonstrating the app you are installing came from a specific known legal entity.

The "ordinary" certificates we use just are meant to prove the website you are talking to is the authorized owner of the domain you mean to be talking to... I'm not sure if there's really an analogy with installing apps, that kind of cert is I think maybe meant to protect against a kind of attack only relevant to network communications, not app installs.

gameswithgo2• 6 years ago

Requiring apps to be signed is what most of us complainers WANT instead of having a store lockdown and rules about what programs we can run on our computers.

watermelon02• 6 years ago

Apple still requires paid dev license for some entitlements, and manual approval for a few of those, such as CarPlay.

holstvoogd• 6 years ago

It always seems like some sort of deflection tactic. Shouting how bad apple is, while using a device practically owned by google.

Hamuko2• 6 years ago

Google allows third-party app stores and most of the source code for Android is out there in the open. I don't know how Google "practically owns" your device considering Apple asserts a much more complete control over your device.

Cthulhu_4• 6 years ago

I'm pretty neutral about it myself; on the one hand, you give up a bit of control and freedom over your hardware. But on the other, 99% of users have no need for, or cannot be trusted with that freedom.

I mean I've worked with Windows for multiple generations of the operating system, and once the internet became a thing it was just complete shit. I had a side job fixing computers for people, and it was always adware, viruses, etc messing things up.

That was caused by an insecure operating system on the one hand - which can and has been fixed by core operating system mechanics - but a big factor was both freedom and lack of expertise from users. They're easily tempted by e.g. "install this browser bar for dank discounts" without understanding the consequences. They may not even really register what's going on because so much is going on.

99% of users need to be protected from themselves. And developers need to work with that.

Apple has already proven how a closed ecosystem is ultimately beneficial for the consumer - how many security incidents has the iphone had, ever? I can't think of ANY to be honest, outside of the odd scummy app slipping through that is a bit too liberal with user's data. But they have never compromised a user's system. Mobile banking apps became a thing while I was an app developer, and that would never have flown on an unconstrained system. Pretty sure they had a lot more trouble with the Android version as well in that regard.

Tl;dr, 99% of users will never know any better and will not care, they just want to hit install and for things to Just Work.

nickjj• 6 years ago

I mean I've worked with Windows for multiple generations of the operating system, and once the internet became a thing it was just complete shit. I had a side job fixing computers for people, and it was always adware, viruses, etc messing things up.

Windows 10 isn't perfect but it's a much different time than multiple generations ago with Windows 95 / 98, XP or even 7.

Back then you could visit a site and end up needing to format because of a virus, even if you were very much into tech.

Nowadays even if you disable Windows Defender and any active AV tool, it's pretty unlikely you'll get yourself to the point where you need to format due to a virus or some adware.

This is speaking from the perspective of someone who has been using Windows since the mid 1990s.

matwood5• 6 years ago

Agreed. Apple could be lying, but they (top executives) have stated multiple times that the mac is not an iDevice. They have also stated they have no plans to only allow installs from app store, and they understand the value of tools like brew etc...They are what makes the mac popular with developers.

This could all change, but until it does articles like this feel a lot like FUD. Additionally, completely dismissing the M1 as a 'marginal improvement' shows a level of anti-Apple that is clearly clouding the authors judgement.

mfer• 6 years ago

If Apple changed on this the press and customer sentiment would be terrible. Oh so terrible. I'm sure they are aware of that.

Word of mouth is the best form of advertising. If you're most vocal work of mouth folks turn than this would be bad for sales.

oarsinsync• 6 years ago

Apple have a history of denying anything until it's ready, and then they flip the script. While the article is clearly biased, it would be foolish to believe that Apple is a company that doesn't change course, going as far as total U-turns on public statements, as long as it's in their interests to do so.

They are what makes the mac popular with developers

Developers believe that they're Apple's priority when it comes to hardware, especially the Mac, in large part due to the perfect intersect that was the MBP for many years. That tide already turned in 2016 with the new keyboard, followed by the touch bar. Like the joke that the 'S' in IoT stands for security (the joke being there is no S, and there is no security), there is no 'D' for developer in MBP. Apple have been consistently clear that 'professional developers' are not the primary target of their 'Pro' lineup across the board.

Someone else made a comment on this forum that got my attention recently, that we're all so used to being courted as customers by (mostly free) services that we've forgotten that we're not always the target customer. Similarly, developers are only welcome in Apple's ecosystem if they play by Apple's rules. Like we've seen with the App Store, Apple will frequently alter the terms of the deal. All you can do is pray they do not alter them any further.

None of this should diminish the extraordinary results that can be delivered by the M1. That is amazing.

AnthonyMouse4• 6 years ago

Additionally, completely dismissing the M1 as a 'marginal improvement' shows a level of anti-Apple that is clearly clouding the authors judgement.

Is there somewhere I can find some evidence that it isn't a marginal improvement?

Apple timed the release perfectly to create the impression that it was more, because its obvious competition will be Zen 3 laptops, which are right around the corner but not actually out yet. So then you get benchmarks comparing it to 14nm Intel processors based on 5-year-old technology, and 10nm Intel processors with half as many cores as the M1 because Intel's 10nm yields are so bad they can't make high core count processors, and Zen 2 laptops when the Zen 3 ones it will actually be competing with in a couple months are expected to be 20% faster. And Zen 3 desktops, which the M1 loses to badly on multi-threaded tests, but is competitive with on single threaded tests -- as expected, since modern mobile processors actually have single-thread performance which is competitive with desktops in general, but manages to amaze anyone who doesn't know that.

Which isn't to say they've done a bad job. Making something which is even competitive with modern x86-64 processors is no small feat. But the fanboys are making it out to be some kind of coup when it does, in practice, appear to be a marginal improvement. And we still don't even have many real-world benchmarks because most of the real-world applications haven't actually been ported yet.

gameswithgo2• 6 years ago

I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store

Of course there are things that suggest this, such as, that is how iphones and ipads work, and its become increasingly difficult over time to do it on a mac.

moepstar• 6 years ago

As in what, having to RMB -> Open ?

In what way was it made "more difficult" than that?

What exactly suggests it is "becoming (even?) more difficult"?

jsgo3• 6 years ago

Hope so, but Apple implemented the wholesale Metal Only (not Metal Only unless you run a command in terminal) update which killed off using Nvidia cards for those of us who bought MBPs for eGPUing Nvidia cards. Considering Apple hardware doesn’t have a Nvidia option and people like me are probably niche to bring their own GPU (even though CUDA exists), it’d be highly unrealistic to think that Nvidia would rewrite their drivers for Metal because the affected users has to be quite small.

I hope you’re right, but personally, I don’t trust Apple to allow me to do what I wish anymore.

dhruvmittal• 6 years ago

Possibly naive question but does anyone know if CUDA is supported on the new M1 macs? I think I heard on a podcast last week that eGPUs would no longer be supported, but I can't find a reference.

sixothree• 6 years ago

Isn't it still an open question as to whether M1 Macs will support discrete graphics cards at all?

rsynnott5• 6 years ago

And in any case there's no reason they couldn't do that on Intel if they wanted to. IIRC there was some Windows variant back in the day that did this on Intel. Windows 10S, possibly?

perryizgr82• 6 years ago

They couldn't do that on intel because if they made it too draconian people would just install windows. Now people are locked in tight.

josefresco• 6 years ago

I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan horses.

Sorry but I had to LOL (combined with grey-haired head shaking). I've been a "technologist" for over 25 years. Every time some corporate entity or government body adds similar "security" they trot out this same cliche line. "Oh no no no it's not so we can CONTROL you, is so we can PROTECT you". Yeah, sure buddy.

0goel0• 6 years ago

We know for a fact that this is a much smaller problem on iOS than Android. I am happy that Android exists as a choice for users but let us not pretend there are no trade offs.

Android is not a choice for iOS users, it's not a seamless switch. The solution as I see it is that apple could still very well protect users from "trojans" but have an opt-in for 3p app installation. A button that says "I want to install apps from anywhere, I know the risks".

If I pay for the hardware, as a customer, I should be able to do whatever I want with it. With the iPhone, it feels like I'm renting rather than owning. I worry that's the direction apple is taking Macs in with the M1.

evgen• 6 years ago

The problem with this 'I know the risks' approach is that it is often put out there by people who do know the risks but these people are massively outnumbered by the huge mass of people who have no idea about the risks but will gladly install from Bob's FlyByNight App Emporium if it means they will get a "can't lose" video poker app or a chance to win a free Fortnite skin and please be sure to click OK to all of those security warnings thanks so much for your bank details...

If you want a different ecosystem there are choices available to you. Why exactly are you complaining when it is clear no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to use Apple products?

drieddust4• 6 years ago

My wife was an apple fan until she bought an iPhone and got locked out when she forget the password. Apple support refused to cooperate despite repeated cries of help.

M1 feels like a stepping stone in the same direction on laptops.

Personally it feels wrong to pay for a device someone can lock you out of and then refuse to unlock. It's like paying ransom without getting kidnapped.

valuearb13• 6 years ago

Why did she put a passcode on it if she didn’t want it to be secure? You can use an iPhone with no passcode at all.

Blaming Apple for “locking you out” when you were the one who locked the door and lost the key is silly.

chillaxtian• 6 years ago

Apple Support cannot do anything if you forget the device passcode, there is no back door. Best advice I can think of is, is ask her to restore an iCloud backup, after erasing the phone.

bromonkey• 6 years ago

I mean that sucks for your wife, but what prevents literally anyone else from impersonating someone and unlocking a device? There are very good reasons that Apple does not "cooperate" in theses situations. Passwords are not supposed to be bypassed by third parties.

rootusrootus4• 6 years ago

As someone who had their bank account compromised by a successful social engineering attack on the account representatives, I'm okay with Apple giving us a technical solution that even they cannot break. It's up to me to remember the key, of course, but I like knowing that even Apple can't break into my device if they want.

haolez• 6 years ago

It's a trillion-dollar market. Of course the incentive is there to monopolize and monetize app installations.

gchamonlive• 6 years ago

I would expect Apple to support third party repair and right to repair itself if what they had in mind was to improve user experience.

Maybe those are two things separate, hardware post-purchase support and software user experience, but I can't as a consumer separate those two.

throwaway1290132• 6 years ago

too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking
It is a bit too conspiratorial to think Apple control is all about some dictatorship fetish

So much for "Hacker" News.

iSnow2• 6 years ago

The knowledge that the switch to closing the system is there has a decidedly chilling effect, Apple doesn't even need to flick it. But if you buy a ARM-Mac, you should know that it could be turned into a sealed iDevice any time.

That said, the M1 is one damned good chip. And the Macbooks are hands down the laptops with the best feel and build quality.

sneak9• 6 years ago

I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store.

It is already exceptionally difficult to distribute apps produced outside of their developer program.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

If nVidia/ARM manages to put out a chip that competes with Intel (doesn't even have to be as fast as the M1) and have Windows on-board, it's probably over for Intel

(Of course, unless they engage in some unfair competition, but I think the price difference will be so big it won't matter)

jmull• 6 years ago

What is it about Apple that makes people’s brains turn off?

Apple silicon doesn’t change anything about Apple’s mac app store. Microsoft would need to release a native version of Windows, not Apple. He has a point with Rosetta 2, that it will very likely disappear (years from now), though that would affect software that isn’t being actively maintained (most of which failed to make the transition to x64 already). And suggesting a switch to AMD instead is just non-sense.

I guess writing stuff like this about Apple is cynical way to boost page views.

jb19913• 6 years ago

It’s a general problem with the overall, wider polarization of modern culture. Whether it’s politics or tech, people really really really love to take sides in our world today, it it seems to have a blinding effect on perspectives and logic for many people on both sides of the argument.

matsemann• 6 years ago

It's good that one has the enlightened centrists to tell everyone that both sides are equally bad, at least.

jackpeterfletch2• 6 years ago

Craig Federighi make a statement the other day that made it seem like Windows ARM Natively supporting the M1, without virtualisation, was very much in Microsofts court.

nottorp2• 6 years ago

Apple has been screwed by CPU manufacturers 3 times already, or do you think they changed architectures because they were having great fun doing that?

In the past 3 years I've seen more and more people asking not for an Arm Mac, but for an AMD Mac. Because AMD is again cheaper and faster than Intel.

But it appears Apple can now afford to build their own CPUs that are better and lower power than either AMD or Intel. Not to mention PowerPC, which is still around in some form at IBM :)

It's a no brainer for them. No one can screw them over now except themselves.

matwood5• 6 years ago

In the past 3 years I've seen more and more people asking not for an Arm Mac, but for an AMD Mac

I've seen the opposite. The people asking for an AMD mac were always thinking of it as a stop gap. Ever since the iPhone/iPad A series chips started blowing the doors off of benchmarks, people have been clamoring for a mac with a higher tdp A series chip. Now that the M1 is out, we can see why.

rsynnott5• 6 years ago

Apple has been screwed by CPU manufacturers 3 times already

Arguably 4. Motorola abandoned m68k (at least as a desktop route; variants lived on for a very, very long time as an embedded thing). Then Motorola largely abandoned PPC, leaving IBM as the only desktop-y manufacturer. Then, unsurprisingly, IBM fell behind with it. And now Intel.

nottorp2• 6 years ago

Sounds right. I was counting PPC only once.

drej• 6 years ago

There's a huge green quote: "Apple has confirmed that Boot Camp support isn’t coming to Arm-based Macs."

And it comes right after the same sentence is uttered in the article... and is followed by "unless".

All in all, pretty weird form of journalism.

tannhaeuser2• 6 years ago

Yes Apple is about platform control and monetization, and they're pretty good at it. They want you to buy-in into their ecosystem and stay loyal; even developers of iOS and Mac OS apps have to open Apple dev accounts (and the process of rolling out an app on the App Store is ... byzantine). They keep off copycat and privacy-invading apps that way, and their customers love that aspect of their platform (I even use a cheap iPhone to get away from the mass surveillance devices called Android phones).

Apple's Silicon is a great success AFAICT, when Intel has just stagnated for years now. I love Apple innovations like that, and I think Apple Silicon is in principal orthogonal to the lock-in aspect so far, apart from the fact that there won't be alternative O/S on Apple Silicon due to lack of drivers; now of course, Apple could soon extend the ARM ISA in proprietary ways.

However, as much as Apple produces shiny consumer laptops (despite their naming, I don't consider MBPs as "professional" devices due to lack of options), I'm probably staying away from Mac OS, because professionally I need to run (mostly) F/OSS apps such as compilers, databases, middlewares, VMs/containers, and backend tool chains. I also believe their notarization thing will kill F/OSS on Mac OS which makes it useless for me. And Apple has to take the piss here, as F/OSS is what Mac OS (Mac OS X) is built on, and what made it even remotely acceptable in 2002/3. If you're a developer of non-Mac OS, non-iOS apps, expect Mac OS to stop being an option even more so than it is already.

efficax• 6 years ago

I don't consider MBPs as "professional" devices due to lack of options

Counterpoint is the 10s of thousands of "professionals" (like me, senior software engineer at a Company You Know) who use them....

tannhaeuser2• 6 years ago

You got me wrong; I didn't mean to insult Apple users. What makes a notebook "pro" is having options for display, ports, memory, mass storage devices, docking, etc., plus the supply and delivery chain that go with it. Also, for eg music production, things like stable interfaces, timings, and apps to base larger investments on. When I bought my Powerbook, it came with a PCMCIA slot (that I used for a third FHD display), exchangeable battery, memory, optical storage, wired networking in addition to WLAN, commitment to support for Java development, POSIX certification. Many of these things may be uneccessary today, but MBP prices haven't changed or have even increased since. The MBP doesn't even have a std keyboard layout without touch bar and ties its design aesthetic to a glossy screen/screen-top. Feels like a rip-off to me even if I personally can afford it.

Edit: and there's nothing "Pro" about the lack of perspective for both S/W development and music production on Mac OS

victorbstan• 6 years ago

Yours dearly, the competition.

blackrock2• 6 years ago

To be honest, do most people even know or care what CPU Apple is using for their Macs?

I’m assuming that people buy Macs for the software platform from Apple.

I have a few Macs, and I never had any intention to install Linux on it.

But admittedly I only used my Macs as a toy. I eventually gave up on it, since it didn’t do what I needed it to do.

karmakaze• 6 years ago

There are other benefits to the architecture change. A strong motivation is that profit margins can be increased by using more efficient in CPU size/speed, battery size, and amount of RAM to deliver the same performance compared to x86 Macs. Rather than pass these savings to consumers Apple can bank the difference. And the consumer wins with smaller/lighter devices and longer battery life. Expect that macOS will continue by adding background processing limit permissions etc.

valuearb13• 6 years ago

MacOS is not iOS because a Mac is not a phone. Craig Federeghi has spoken about the differences multiple times recently, repeatedly saying they aren’t changing MacOS to be more like iPadOS or iOS. They use the Mac too, and need its separate use case.

They got 20 hour battery life just by switching to Apple Silicon, they aren’t going to hobble Mac apps with any significant restrictions to try to eek out a few hours more.

taylodl• 6 years ago

Surprise, surprise - Apple wants to control the end-to-end computing experience on their Macs the way they do on their iDevices thus allowing them to differentiate themselves in a commodity market. Why wouldn't they do that?

dangus2• 6 years ago

This article has decent points but is definitely just sort of coming from the perspective of being completely unfamiliar with the Mac platform.

Worrying about the App Store taking over on the Mac is misguided. The Mac has never forced the App Store on anyone and the Mac App Store doesn’t even seem to be particularly popular.

“Emulation” (it’s not emulation) is apparently this big problem, except that early M1 Macs show faster Rosetta performance with still-better battery life in many cases.

And yes, Rosetta won’t be around forever, but we have been here before. It wasn’t a problem going from PowerPC to Intel either. If the authors at Android authority ever used a Mac they’d already know this. Anecdotal, but I can’t think of a single pre-Intel program that was lost to the Intel transition that I was using at the time. All the developers checked the box and recompiled, and the dinosaurs like Adobe eventually trudged along.

For those of us who actually used Macs back in the PowerPC days and earlier, there was no such thing as Hackintosh or Boot Camp. The fact that those are going away is essentially inconsequential, especially now that the Mac platform is vastly more popular than it was in 2006.

Why would I want to run Windows on my Mac? It’s been a shitty experience anyway, because even in Intel-land the hardware has been heavily macOS optimized including things like fan and power control. The trackpad driver on Windows was always worse, for example. And again why would you want to run Windows when you spent all this money to not run Windows? It doesn’t make sense especially since so many programs (e.g. 1Password) have their best versions on Mac.

valuearb13• 6 years ago

When they repeatedly used the word “emulation” instead of translation in the article I knew they hadn’t done their homework.

TazeTSchnitzel• 6 years ago

If you look at Intel's mediocre-at-best improvements over the last few years, it makes perfect sense that Apple want to move to their own silicon. They also could have moved to AMD, but they probably started thinking about this move before Ryzen happened, and given Apple already make great chips for iPads, it's no great stretch to put them in MacBooks too.

Sure, it gives them more control, but they already had the ability to exercise platform control on x86. They could have disabled Boot Camp etc on the T2 chip Macs if they wanted to, it's not about the CPU.

barnacled3• 6 years ago

This is obviously about control.

Apple's MO with every _smaller_ supplier has been:

1. Set up office down the road 2. Poach top engineers 3. Come up with some excuse to cancel use of supplier and integrate in house.

The media and fanboys are remarkably complicit, coming up with excuses for apple's behaviour and giving very favourable coverage.

In this case, intel are too big for this trick to work and apple already have loads of ARM talent so it makes perfect sense to transition.

I wouldn't rule out apple trying on the whole 'we don't need a license' thing any more with Nvidia but it's probably unlikely given their size.

I worked at imagination technologies who was bankrupted by Apple doing this technique and whose GPUs are still used by them so I saw this and people's remarkable lack of attention on the incredibly consistent pattern of control first hand.

While all of this is obviously true, I actually think it's great that intel and AMD are receiving some serious ISA competition and it will net benefit non-apple consumers too long run.

Congrats to apple for pretty impressive technical work but I do wish more would see apple for the ruthless control freaks they are.

At the end of the day I think rather mundanely it's really more about money than anything else.

klelatti3• 6 years ago

That's very sad to hear. Could you explain how close Apple's GPU is to Imagination's and why Imagination wasn't able to protect their IP?

barnacled3• 6 years ago

Their GPU _is_ imagination's GPU in my opinion. Heavily customised (they had a full ARM-like license to do so) but the fundamentals are all the same. Apple claimed that they'd completely reinvented a GPU that didn't rely on any hardware IP owned by IMG whatsoever, provided no evidence of that and recent phones have bug-for-bug compatibility (as far as I heard form a friend who ran some tests).

I can't tell you 100% that it's not an entirely new GPU that was somehow completely reinvented from scratch but I can tell you I think that's highly unlikely.

Imagination couldn't protect their IP because they couldn't afford the lengthily court case that would ensue.

Note by the way Apple have quietly started licensing IP from IMG again, long after striking ~75% off the stock price and resulting in them being acquired by a private equity firm...

zepto4• 6 years ago

Google Play Services is all about platform control.

pdimitar• 6 years ago

<rant>

Even if everything the article claims is true, the open-source / libre software and hardware communities had at least 20 years to come up with a better model. So far, they have failed.

Is it such a crime for a corporation to try and prioritize their users' identities safety and produce a variant that tries to compromise between monopoly and convenience?

I fully recognize the possible dystopian futures here, mind you, and I am as distrustful towards corporations as most techies. But after being a commercial programmer for 19 years, I can't seem to find other agents who did better than Microsoft and Apple in this area. We all know the memes about them and I'll concede that 90% of them are true.

But could somebody -- or something -- else do better? So far the answer seems to be "no", and that's the reality we are living in. What does it say about us if we are denying it?

And don't get me wrong. Give me the same (or little less) performance on a 100% libre hardware and software and I'll switch tomorrow, even if a mere 13" laptop with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD costs $5000. I will, I kid you not. But there doesn't seem to be any choices that come close to Apple's laptop ergonomics, quality of screens, and (mostly) integrated and polished experience. And don't get me started with "if you do this bucket list of 37 tasks then Brand+Model laptop is very close to a MacBook". Truth is, there is nothing like a MacBook. I wish there was, but especially with release of the M1, there really isn't.

</rant>

floatingatoll3• 6 years ago

This article leaves two billion-dollar market opportunities on the table: Online testing and multiplayer gaming^.

Apple’s recent announcement of a web authentication API includes if your system is booted in fully secure mode^ an attestation that the OS is in secure mode, crypto-signed by the secure kernel whose own signature is by Apple.

This provides something that no desktop/laptop today can provide: certainty that the user isn’t tampering with the operating system to try and cheat. The entire stack, from hardware to UI, is signed and verified to have integrity, and modifying any component of the stack will result in the “secure” attestation being withheld. So instead of having to deal with insane anti-cheating spyware and kernel extensions and system monitoring, testing software and multiplayer game modes can simply require you to be in secure mode to login.

This is available today, immediately, if anyone were to implement it. Of course no one has yet, because no one is thinking of the iOS and macOS platforms as tamperproof computing for the Internet world, and so Apple’s quiet announcement of this in a technical API footnote has gone unnoticed.

Apple will probably always let you shut off anti-tampering on macOS with reboots and terminal commands, and then you can tamper to your heart’s content, but they will never allow your system to attest that it’s in tamperproof mode to third-parties, and that crypto signature can’t be spoofed since the Secure Enclave is involved in generating it.

This ‘tamperproof’ market opportunity is worth billions of dollars, and Apple made it there first. I can’t wait to see what happens when all the industries that suffer undetectable tampering today realize this.

^ Multiplayer FPS developers have had little incentive to develop for Metal prior to now, but Apple Silicon has the capability to easily unseat 5950X/GTX3090 as peak PC gaming performance for a tiny fraction of the cost and heat. Someday the Apple TV will get an Apple Silicon chip that can run FPS games using Metal at 4K/60/HDR, which should noticeably alter that cost-benefit equation.

^ I believe this is signed-sealed OS partition, SIP enabled, kernel extensions disabled; though I may have missed one or two bits.

nayuki• 6 years ago

What about this scenario?: A gamer wishes to cheat. They run the game on an unmodified, tamperproof, attested computer as per your description. Then they attach the HDMI output to a video capture card on a secondary computer, run some artificial intelligence software, and send back automated commands using a USB mouse and keyboard. Given that this kind of attack/circumvention is possible, are you sure that an attestable computer is a worthwhile goal?

floatingatoll3• 6 years ago

Yes, because unlike today, that’s not a software-exclusive attack that can be sold online without shipping a physical product.

(Games can also trivially enable HDCP to defend against that sort of attack in the majority of cases where it’s even possible to construct it at all, setting aside the chances of successfully asking a neural net to decode a game’s video signal and cheat effectively — and since the entire stack is attested secure, cheaters can’t use hacked video drivers that spoof HDCP, either.)

floatingatoll3• 6 years ago

See also today’s parallel discussion about Microsoft Pluton providing remote attestation in exactly this manner for Azure cloud servers and, eventually, all consumer x86_64 CPUs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25192681

mlindner• 6 years ago

A website that's got "android" in the site name is saying false things about Apple, what a surprise. There's nothing in Apple M1 that is about platform control any more than x86 in Mac was about platform control. They could have locked down the x86 Mac and prevented you from installing other OSes trivially, but they didn't. In fact they already allow you to install other OSes on Mac, if those OSes had support for the M1.

Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

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