Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

https://wccftech.com/apple-m4-adopts-armv9-run-complex-workloads-efficiently/

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

164 237 2 years ago

wccftech.com

capl2• 2 years ago

Hmm, I was thinking of buying an M3 Pro 16” this summer, but maybe I should wait then

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

Apple’s tempo is so regular that this has been a problem my entire adult life.

I’ll buy a little later. I’ll buy a little later!

capl2• 2 years ago

Hehe yeah, same when I think about it… I guess best thing to do is buy on launch and update every 2-5 years.

wombat-man• 2 years ago

Yeah, feels like if you don't buy in the first few months you might as well hang on for the next one.

a-french-anon• 2 years ago

The way to exit that loop is to convince yourself that the next one will bring a truly lasting difference. Which is why I'm still waiting for GDDR7 GPUs with my 4GB RX 480.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

That's why my desktop CPU is 11 years old.

MrFantastic• 2 years ago

I've had several devices fail right before the new model was released.

So frustrating.

vundercind2• 2 years ago

I just only buy every fourth or fifth whatever it is. Usually the previous model, too, when I do, sometimes used or official-refurb. Works great.

yardie• 2 years ago

I'm still on a i7 MBP because everytime I think I'm ready to update the next one is announced.

0_____0• 2 years ago

These machines are great. I still use my 2015 rMBP as a secondary. It's a little slow now but a couple years ago I was still running Solidworks (in Bootcamp) on it with minimal issues.

gtirloni• 2 years ago

Besides maybe battery life (which is a huge win), anything you'd benefit from the M's? I only had a 2008 macbook so I'm curious.

opan• 2 years ago

If you care about Asahi support, an M1 or M2 would probably be better short-term anyway.

lowbloodsugar• 2 years ago

I've got a top spec i9 MBP and my same-price M1 Max blows it out of the water, while being vastly cooler and lasting forever on battery.

grecy• 2 years ago

I just upgraded from a mid 2014 MBP to a used M1 air.

It is much, much faster, silent, and I use it for days without power. Editing 4K video is not just possible, it is a non event.

tedivm• 2 years ago

I wait until the new release, and then look at the refurbished store to get a discount on the last generation model. I do this every four years or so.

a13o• 2 years ago

I do this technique too, and it's a great time for it. The OLED screen on the new iPad signals that Apple devices are moving to a better panel. If you've been waiting for the right time to move off an Intel Mac and onto a SoC Mac, it's now. Pick up a refurbished M2 MacBook. They're in the sweet spot for support, power, and cost.

The next one will probably have an OLED screen; so if you wait til then, your refurb M1/2/3 will be on Apple's short list of devices they don't want to support. (And you might have panel FOMO.) Or you'll have to pay the premium price for the latest model.

rkuska• 2 years ago

That’s actually a nice side effect of all the *rumors pages. The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products. I keep on using my previous products while saving money and planet and being excited about what future holds.

repelsteeltje• 2 years ago

The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.

Spot on!

Back in the nineties, Intel managed to push competing RISC architectures (UltraSparc, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC) out of the market using nothing but promises that Itanium was going to blow them all out of the water.

And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.

sitkack2• 2 years ago

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

usefulcat• 2 years ago

The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.

For myself, I like to think of it as applied procrastination. I could buy that new thing I want today.. but something better will come along in time, so I can afford to put it off a while longer yet..

thisislife2• 2 years ago

The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.

You may have heard of the 5-minute rule - "Will doing this take me less than 5 minutes? If the answer is yes, do it now." An adaption of that to reduce impulse purchases is - "Do I really need this product right now? If the answer is no, don't buy it."

tonyarkles3• 2 years ago

And on the flip side I am generally hesitant to buy first-release Apple hardware. Over the 20 years I've been buying Apple kit I've generally found it to be exceptionally robust but newly released hardware has had enough bugs (either hardware or OS) that I just sit back and let other users find the issues first. But I do simultaneously have the same issue: if WWDC is coming up within a month or two I'm not going to be buying any hardware because there's a good chance that something new will be released or the hardware I was going to buy is going to get a refresh or a price drop.

throw0101d• 2 years ago

this summer

In recent years the MBP line has been updated towards the end of the year (Oct/Nov) or early (Jan):

* https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro_16

So if you can 'limp' along towards the autumn/winter/Christmas, then it's probably worth the wait to get the M4 (or pickup an M3 when the price presumably drops to clear inventory).

andy_ppp• 2 years ago

I just bought a second hand M2 Air in perfect condition and it feels faster than my M1 Max in a really beautiful body for travel. I’m not certain it matters that much anymore to be honest. What are you using it for?

zorrn2• 2 years ago

This is so real. I have this exact problem... but I think I'm just buying a? refurbished MacBook Air M2 13"

pmontra2• 2 years ago

Osborne effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

deergomoo3• 2 years ago

Since the move to Apple Silicon you are realistically never more than 12-18 months away from a new chip generation in a MacBook. An M1 is still plenty good for the vast majority of workloads, especially if it's an M1 Pro/Max/Ultra.

Actually probably the best thing to do is wait until the M4 machines launch then bag a good deal on a clearance M3.

rbanffy8• 2 years ago

The next ones to get M4 will probably be the Mini, the Studio, and the Pro. iMac and MacBooks got an M3 refresh, but the other desktops have M2s now.

alwillis2• 2 years ago

For those with MacBook Pro FOMO, do not read about the rumored foldable 18.8-inch screen MacBook Pro running on the M5 coming in 2026 [1].

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/23/18-8-inch-foldable-macb...

JulianWasTaken• 2 years ago

Without anything but a skim, surely there is no way a MB Pro ships with a virtual keyboard, that is pure torture.

cjk2• 2 years ago

Kill me with a blunt spoon before I take on a foldable touch screen.

yumraj• 2 years ago

The rumored price is enough to make me not worry about those.

threeseed• 2 years ago

macOS does not support touch input.

It would require the biggest UI redesign in the history of the company to ensure every input control is at least a centimetre away from anything else.

And would require every Mac developer to absorb the cost for major updates to their apps as well.

This would almost certainly be an iPad.

jascination• 2 years ago

I just bought a refurbished 16in M3 pro, no regrets at all. There's always a new one around the corner, it's really just about whether your setup achieves what you need it to.

Look at real world differences between M2 and M3, it's not a massive jump at all.

I do cross platform app development and the machine is excellent for that. Glad to have it now rather than waiting months for a slightly better system

meindnoch2• 2 years ago

So binary sizes are going to double?

phkahler2• 2 years ago

> So binary sizes are going to double?

If you're already supporting 2 arch it will only increase by 50 percent to support a 3rd ;-)

georgeburdell• 2 years ago

IME Mac binaries are much smaller than Windows for your average third party software. I don’t know why.

Hamuko• 2 years ago

The most impressive I've seen has been four-arch support in a single bundle: PowerPC, 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86 and ARM64.

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

And you'd like to think the binaries are still not the largest component of an app contributing to the file size. But who knows these days.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 2 years ago

How so?

fl0ki2• 2 years ago

This is more like supporting AVX512 than a whole separate architecture. If you have to target both old and new devices from one binary, you do a runtime feature check and call the corresponding code.

That is certainly more code, but not double. You only need it for the parts of the code that are both (a) bottlenecks worth optimizing and (b) actually benefit by using the new instructions.

rbanffy8• 2 years ago

And, in modern desktop software, code is a tiny bit of the total size of the application - visual elements tend to occupy a lot more space than code.

hajile6• 2 years ago

ARMv9 is just ARMv8.5 with 4 extra extensions. It's not a complete overhaul like the ARMv7 to ARMv8 change was.

It's more comparable to x86 chips with AVX-512 and chips without AVX-512. 99% of your code is the same, but the compiler will generate SSE, AVX, and AVX-512 variants and choose the correct one based on the CPU.

201984• 2 years ago

Are there any extensions that ARMv9 is required to have? I'm looking through the reference manuals and those 4 extra extensions are all marked as "OPTIONAL" for ARMv9.

Aaargh203182• 2 years ago

The most incredible thing about the new iPads is that even with the crazy fast M4 chip MS Teams manages to crawl to a halt. Clearly it takes all the engineering skills of the largest and most valuable software company in the world to make text entry go at about 1 fps on a chip as powerful as the M4.

akmarinov• 2 years ago

That's usually what cross platform at an enterprise company at scale gets you

chongli3• 2 years ago

MS Teams is by far the worst piece of software I’ve ever used. It is ungodly slow and it just gets slower the more you use it.

I believe it is actually hitting the server to update the online/away status light for every single message in a conversation. If you turn off all the status update stuff in the settings then the software speeds up dramatically. Another thing you can do is find the folder where it caches everything and just trash the entire thing. Somehow, they’ve managed to make caching slow everything down rather than provide a speed up.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

treyd• 2 years ago

Why is that not at least done asynchronously? I thought part of the whole narrative of shipping these new terrible pieces of software as standalone Google Chrome instances was that it makes it easier to spawn async JS workers for background tasks and whatnot?

beanjuiceII• 2 years ago

hmm I use teams daily all day for work and don't have these issues, maybe your org messed something up?

nunez• 2 years ago

If you think Teams is bad, then you haven't had to endure Google Chat.

lostlogin• 2 years ago

Have you tried ‘New Teams’?

It’s exactly the same but then you can have to open twice and drain your resources much quicker.

heroprotagonist3• 2 years ago

Every character you type results in some sort of hit to their telemetry server. It will include the actual letter you typed, if you or your org are not configured to be in EU. With their EU configuration option (pulled from server every launch) it will only report the fact that you typed _something_.

Now if that's not fun enough, their telemetry also covers mouse movements. Go ahead and watch your CPU as you spin your mouse in circles around the Teams window.

For extra fun, block their telemetry server and watch Teams bloat in RAM, to as much as your system has, as it keeps every action you take in local memory as it waits for the ability to talk to that telemetry server again.

If you're going to block their telemetry its best to fake an accept via some mitm proxy and send back a 200 code.

I do not know exactly how much this applies to iPad version, compared to their desktop apps. Mobile offers both more and less data possibilities. It's a different context.

Aaargh203182• 2 years ago

I’m in the EU and should have the EU configuration.

The problem mainly occurs when I mention someone in a reply to a thread. Once I type @<name> the text input just slows down so much I can type much faster than it can render the text.

zorrn2• 2 years ago

Do u have a source for this?

aaomidi3• 2 years ago

This is so stupid. They are the sender and receiver of the messages. They can backfill their telemetry using batch processes offline ffs.

SllX2• 2 years ago

So they’re running a keystroke logger and masquerading it as “telemetry”? That should be outlawed. It’s not a drafts feature, it’s not an online word processor, it’s just a straight up keystroke logger.

yegle• 2 years ago

Your description is so absurd that I can't tell if it's real or a satire.

Please tell me this is a satire piece...

spamizbad• 2 years ago

No clue why they're even doing this and not just sampling after the fact. There's no way they are gleaning anything useful that they couldn't more efficiency (and anonymously) capture.

Salgat• 2 years ago

Is the telemetry really that big of a load? Having a persistent connection and sending data over it is pretty standard for games going back decades, even AOL instant messenger had this feature for typing.

mft_• 2 years ago

LOL, you wanna try it on my ~2 generations old Core i5 corporate laptop. Sometimes, the first steps of drawing the calendar view are roughly the same speed as me drawing it in Paint.

Maybe someone should normalise giving developers crappy laptops to develop on.

(Has anyone done a deep dive into Teams to explain what on earth is going on? I mean, if VSCode can be fast despite its underlying architecture, surely something could be done about Teams?)

pmontra2• 2 years ago

Do companies using Teams have a choice of using something else or are their C*Os and IT departments married with Microsoft? If the latter, they'll use whatever Microsoft throws at them, even if it doesn't work.

phkahler2• 2 years ago

> Maybe someone should normalise giving developers crappy laptops to develop on.

Then the developers will complain the hardware is unusable to do their job even though that this was a supercomputer back in the day. Then you say "No, it's the software please fix it."

intelVISA• 2 years ago

Weird, a statically built ELF that supports TLS1.3 + HTTP1.1 is like ~30kb, all you need is Emacs as a UI and you have Teams 2 at 1.0e-5% resource usage.

deergomoo3• 2 years ago

Yup, my work machine has an older i7 (2021-era maybe?) with 32GB RAM and between Teams, Slack, "new" Outlook, Jira, WSL, driving a 4K display off the piddly integrated GPU, and a VPN that involves every packet doing a transatlantic roundtrip whenever I want to connect to an internal service, everything is just dog slow. And the fan noise—my god the fan noise.

Some days it makes me extra motivated to make the code I write fast and efficient; other days I want to give up entirely.

lynguist• 2 years ago

This actually I don’t get and don’t stand behind.

Would you give a professional smith a low quality hammer? Would you give a chef a blunt knife?

Why do corporations give out garbage hardware to their smiths and chefs (+ enforce their use via policy) ?

rkangel• 2 years ago

Teams on the desktop has improved with their "v2" client. It's not the world's fastest piece of software, but I find it to not be embarrassingly slow now (on a reasonably specced machine).

One as to hope that the same perfomance lens will now be turned on the mobile apps.

meindnoch2• 2 years ago

The wonders of web development.

jandeboevrie• 2 years ago

Try Pidgin with the excellent ms teams plugin: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams - less than 100mb ram usage and notifications that still work after an hour. Only for (video) calls you need to open teams..

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

That's the power of Javascript!

MarkSweep• 2 years ago

What’s the modern form of “what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”? “What Tim giveth, Satya taketh away”?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

ko27• 2 years ago

It seems that M4 was overhyped. Almost of all of the performance improvements, in Geekbench for example, comes from new instructions that most apps won't use, and even if they do they might end up using the faster GPU/NPU for those tasks.

https://twitter.com/toniievych/status/1788596920627118248

talldayo• 2 years ago

Technically, Intel has its matrix extensions (Intel AMX), but Geekbench does not support it.

Lmao, and people say Geekbench isn't biased towards ARM

ribit12• 2 years ago

Geekbench supports Intel AMX and AVX-512. This is all in GB documentation.

dragonelite• 2 years ago

Makes one wonder has the apple miracle mostly been first the transition to ARM and having access to TSMC highest end nodes before the rest even comes into the picture. But im glad new competition is coming from qualcomm x elite and Huawei with their Kirin and Ascends chips. Hopefully ARMsrace will be more interesting to follow than the x64 race between intel and AMD.

hajile6• 2 years ago

Oryon was designed to compete with M1 then the clockspeeds were ramped up to compete with M2. M3 clearly beat it out and M4 has only furthered that lead.

Oryon will still probably beat x86 designs massively in performance per watt which is pretty much the most important metric for most people anyway (as most people use laptops).

EDIT: your username `dragonelite` is quite interesting. You joined 2019, but the coincidence is fascinating.

sgerenser2• 2 years ago

It’s a decent, but not revolutionary improvement. Yes, most of the gains outside of SME are coming from clock increases not IPC. I don’t know if I would call it overhyped, more like misunderstood.

ribit12• 2 years ago

No, per-clock performance improvements between M3 and M4 range from 0% to 20%, this is ignoring the two subtests that benefit from SME. That Twitter post is moot. GB results show high variation, it is easy enough to cherry pick pairs of results that show any point you might want. You have to compare result distributions. There were some users on anandtech forums who did it and the results are very clear.

alberth2• 2 years ago

I truly never understood why Apple deprecated Bitcode.

It was a super great idea because it allowed recompilation on the App Store to take advantage of new instructions.

sgerenser2• 2 years ago

SME is very specialized, right now no compiler (that I know of) is really able to take general-purpose code and output optimized SME. So for these instructions at least, bitcode wouldn’t be of any benefit.

plorkyeran• 2 years ago

Bitcode did not allow recompilation to take advantage of new instructions. They dropped bitcode because they never actually managed to do anything with it other than the armvk7 to arm64_32 recompilation, and that required specifically designing arm64_32 around what was possible with bitcode.

Updating apps to use new vector instructions is far more complicated than upgrading to a new compiler version and having it magically get faster.

astrange6• 2 years ago

Autovectorization doesn't work without extreme levels of handholding, so the optimization idea was basically a myth.

ribit12• 2 years ago

They have not adopted ARMv9. This is still ARMv8, but with SME.

axoltl• 2 years ago

Yep, the binaries are all arm64e.

saagarjha10• 2 years ago

This doesn’t really say much

hajile6• 2 years ago

ARMv9.0 is very similar to ARMv8.5 (9.0 supersets 8.5 with SVE2, TME, TLA, and CCA), so it's not a massive deal. SME implies v8.7 which is basically identical to v9.2 except for those couple extensions previously mentioned.

I wonder if there is licensing at play though. Apple may have gotten a really great licensing deal on ARMv8 that they wouldn't be offered for ARMv9.

skavi6• 2 years ago

Does anyone have insight into why arm CPU vendors seem so hesitant about implementing SVE2? ~They seem~ *Apple seems to have no issue with SSVE2 or SME.

Edit: Only Apple has implemented SSVE and SME I think.

ribit12• 2 years ago

My guess is that Apple is simply not interested in some of the ARMv9 features. They are not eager to implement SVE and the se Ure virtualization features are probably not that relevant to them.

rmccue• 2 years ago

From what I’ve read previously, Apple has a special licensing deal already as they were part of founding Arm, although I don’t know if there’s any details on exactly how that works.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

So finally MTE enabled?

saagarjha10• 2 years ago

Apple’s chips have been MTE enabled for a while, it’s just turned off

astrange6• 2 years ago

No, it has PAC and I think BTI but not MTE.

alberth2• 2 years ago

Can someone ELI5 the significance.

saagarjha10• 2 years ago

Apple added some standard vector processing instructions

awill• 2 years ago

What's so shocking about this? The Arm Cortex X2 which launched 2 years ago has ARMv9

eyelidlessness• 2 years ago

Why do you assume anything is supposed to be shocking about this?

javawizard• 2 years ago

I'm guessing GP meant something more like:

What's so newsworthy about this?

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

And what does arm reference design has to do with completely custom core?

saagarjha10• 2 years ago

I do find it amusing that journalists never go beyond Twitter for discussion on this because this was all being confirmed on Mastodon days before any of the posts in the article

zarathustreal• 2 years ago

Thing is, normal people don’t really like interacting with the kind of person that would have jumped over to Mastodon. Zeal is insufferable most of the time.

saagarjha10• 2 years ago

Well, unfortunately, the kind of person who is an expert on SME is on Mastodon. So if you're writing an article on it, you should probably go to them instead of tech influencers who recycle content on Twitter.

joshstrange2• 2 years ago

I’m fairly certain that staying on (or joining) Twitter shows just about the same amount of “zeal” as leaving for Mastodon/BlueSky/Threads. Or put another way, I find people on Twitter to be insufferable.

It’s not a secret that a large portion of actually technical people (not tech influencers) left Twitter for Mastodon. So the people on Twitter may be more polished turds but are turds nonetheless.

Full disclosure: I still use my Twitter for customer support because that’s all it’s good for at this point IMHO. I also don’t regularly read mastodon but it’s where the people I care about are and when I post (rarely) that’s where I do it.

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40465451 they have not switched to armv9. So I am curious what they were confirming?

saagarjha10• 2 years ago

SME and streaming SVE. In fact I was going to include “…and nobody seems to have good evidence of ARMv9 support” but I figured my comment was enough as it was ;)

johnklos• 2 years ago

ARM really could've come up with better numbering / identification. I suppose it's ARM, emphasis on v, then 9, to differentiate it from ARM9, such as ARM9E-S?

Apple's M4 has reportedly adopted the ARMv9 architecture

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