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Beyond the M1 hype and why the fairy dust needs to settle.
- Thread starter Kung gu
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I wouldn't use Windows for school if it weren't for WSL. I'm willing to bet the rate of Windows use has increased and will continue to in the next decade among students, if not even more so among nominally nix-exclusive developers.
IMO Homebrew is meh (seriously Apple just make peace with GPL), I also prefer window management on Windows (and by this I mainly mean minimization with previews integrated into the taskbar's icons, however I enjoy the consistent App Menus in Mac OS), IME Apple updates have broken more work-related bs than I've experienced in Windows 10, too.
Sure sucks the Windas (laptop) hardware gets smoked rn lmao
IMO Homebrew is meh (seriously Apple just make peace with GPL), I also prefer window management on Windows (and by this I mainly mean minimization with previews integrated into the taskbar's icons, however I enjoy the consistent App Menus in Mac OS), IME Apple updates have broken more work-related bs than I've experienced in Windows 10, too.
Sure sucks the Windas (laptop) hardware gets smoked rn lmao
The capability is literally baked into the OS:
How to install GCC and GDB for WSL(windows subsytem for linux)?
I need gcc to compile a c code and unable to install gcc on wsl. I tried sudo apt-get install gcc but it doesn't work. This is the error. hack@DESKTOP-VMQA3JB:~$ sudo apt-get install gcc Reading p...
PowerShell puts bash to shame. String commands together, yup. Now, I hate PowerShell’s syntax, but feature wise, it has no competition.
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The capability is literally baked into the OS:
How to install GCC and GDB for WSL(windows subsytem for linux)?
I need gcc to compile a c code and unable to install gcc on wsl. I tried sudo apt-get install gcc but it doesn't work. This is the error. hack@DESKTOP-VMQA3JB:~$ sudo apt-get install gcc Reading p...stackoverflow.com
PowerShell puts bash to shame. String commands together, yup. Now I hate PowerShell’s syntax, but feature wise, it has no competition.
Agreed. Powershell is my most used shell on both my Mac and Windows machine. The really nice thing is, that you can pipe objects instead of only strings like in bash.
Take instance "ps | where { $_.CPU -gt 100 } | sort -property CPU"*. Both Pipe operators forward objects, so you can directly access object properties for both the where-cmd and sort-cmd.
Now compare this to bash, where you need to pipe the ps output to something like grep.
*This is just for illustrative purpose. Don't try this on Mac.
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You started off talking about "software professionals". Now it's CS students. Yes, we know, Macs are popular in US Education, always have been - it's one of Apple's niches. That's not "software professionals" or even developers as a whole.
It's curious why Microsoft started off down the "API layer" route and then switched to VM. I guess that the compatibility of running a kosher Linux kernel outweighed any performance advantage of an API layer - or maybe there wasn't any advantage? Thing is, I think VMs are part of the furniture - now most serious CPUs have hardware virtualisation support - and not something to be stigmatised...
Yes. Personally, I don't need a bleeding edge GPU, but do need something better than the lowest-spec Intel integrated graphics on the Intel Mini. The deal-breaker for the M! Mini, for me, is that it only supports 1xDP and 1xHDMI display, plus the ridiculous cost of upgrading the RAM and SSD to something reasonable. Also - and this is where the M1 hype comes in a bit - while it is incredible that the M1 performance in an ultra-miniature low-power setting is even comparable to an Intel Mac (and the GPU blows the Intel iGPU out of the water), that doesn't mean that it is a good upgrade for an Intel iMac with a half-decent discrete GPU. At the end of the day, the M1 is really designed for the MacBook Air.
I'm hoping that the M1x/M2/whatever will offer a more substantial CPU and GPU performance boost over the existing Intel Mac desktops - and that it will show up in a desktop Mac with more substantial base specs, without Mac Pro-style "luxury car" pricing. If it does I'm prepared to be open-minded on the whole PCIe slots/expandable internal storage thing - but Apple still have to prove that they can and will deliver on that. (For other customers, they're going to have to show how Apple Silicon scales to Mac Pro-like 512G+ ECC RAM and multiple GPU levels...)
...for hobby work, maybe, but for professional use the cost of a few Linux instances is trivial - cloud providers make their money when production stuff goes to scale... and, as I said, for web/server development it makes sense for your development machine to have the fat pipe to the internet and proper IP.
In the past, it has always been an advantage to have everything local, and I never went to a demo without a local server set up on my laptop (lest someone had forgot to book WiFi for the conference room) - but these days, if your network goes down then you're basically humped 'cos that's all of your documentation and software repositories offline, hot-and-cold-running WiFi and 4G is de rigeur for meetings (assuming that we're going to have face-to-face meetings again) so times are changing. I suspect even the "Oh Noes!!! Security!!! If I put stuff in the cloud I'll be fired!!!" line is going to change to "Oh Noes!!! if I take stuff off the cloud and store it locally I'll be fired!!!" as companies sign off all their compliance and security duties to cloud providers.
My reason for mentioning MacOS containerisation was that it would provide some benefit for having your development machine running Unix - a lot of web development work wouldn't care if it was running in a Darwin sandbox or a Linux sandbox, and you save the overhead of a VM. Once you end up using a Linux VM anyway that takes another bite out of the advantages of MacOS over Windows. But, as you said, only a minority of web/server developers are ultimately targeting MacOS, using a Linux VM lets you go that extra mile in simulating your target environment and - as I said - efficient VM support is a must-have for any development system these days.
Sure, but it sucks at running x86 containers, and while x86 is still dominant, you're likely to have to support both architectures for the foreseeable future. Whichever you choose for your development hardware you're going to need access to the other - be it physical, cloud-based or (slowly) emulated. If you're developing for ARM64 servers you presumably have access to ARM64 server hardware... I'd love an ARM home server with a bit more clout than a Raspberry Pi, but whether its worth paying the price of an M1 Mini I don't know.
Don't get me wrong - I'm enthusiastic about Apple Silicon, but it's important to get the advantages in perspective.
Back when the first versions of NT were released, it shipped with a POSIX compatibility layer. I guess they thought they could just dust that off. One advantage to that approach is RAM. WSL can run on any Windows 10 machine or VM. For WSL 2 you need at least 8GB of RAM and be able to run the Hypervisor (not always possible in VMs).
Once you need a public IP address that other people can connect to then yes, you should be running your work load on a public cloud (for security if nothing else). But for initial development, I would rather just run Docker and Kubernetes on my local workstation.
There is no doubt that the cloud providers are better at InfoSec than most internal IT depts.
I believe that currently the optimal development target is a Linux Docker container running on Kubernetes. I can do that on a Mac just as easily as I can on Linux and still use software like MS Office. Even .NET Core development is well supported on MacOS.
I am not developing for ARM servers currently but AWS already offers ARM64 VMs and Azure and GCP will be following them. For now though x86 Linux is still the main cloud platform which is why I bought a 2020 27" iMac last year.
You obviously don't know the functionality of Powershell, nor it's capabilities. Perhaps you should take some classes and you will change your mind. All dev's I know, use it extensively. I use it extensively because it's so flexible. If you don't like it, that's fine, but if you don't know what it can do and say you don't like it, then that's just plain stupidity.
This is so true and made me laugh. It is already true in our business for end users and dev's. The hardest part is tracking in case something does happen.
All for naught as anyone can take hundreds of screen shots or video with their phone, or built in screen capture on the computer. Sure it's slow, but doesn't stop the bad ones.
Security wise, no one solution is absolute, which has been proven, so it doesn't make any difference where it lives.
In the corporate world, I cynically suspect that it's not so much about preventing actual security breaches as making sure that, when the auditors arrive, all of the appropriate compliance logs and paper trails are in place to prove that all of your security theatre is present and correct... I'm sure cloud providers can provide really impressive, 100% tick-list compliant, reports & lists of their security accreditations... and if AWS or Azure get hacked then that's their (insurers') problem.
If someone leaves a USB stick on a train or gets their laptop stolen, then chances are it's sitting safely in a lost property office, or smashed up and deep-sixed in the nearest river, but you don't know and what can you do...? whereas you can change their cloud password in a jiffy, tick box, issue resolved as per item 134b on the Risk Register, between "office struck by asteroid" (action: procure office space on alternative continent/planet) and "uniquely talented chief software engineer falls under a train" (action: recruit new uniquely talented engineer). That may not be the real risk (vs. someone bribing an employee to take some screenshots) but it's what managers have nightmares about.
It is about preventing security breaches. The largest threat is theft of IP. Security wise that's why USB is disabled and business laptops have multiple passwords for UEFI, TPM, Anti-Theft, Security Chip, Encryption, 2FA, etc. No IP can be downloaded to laptop, only viewed for a predetermined amount of time. All other documents are watermarked and password protected. All connections are recorded by SIM.
At the moment Alyssa is poking around in the command buffers containing the shaders. As far as i see it, there is not even a complete disassembler for shaders yet and only a vague idea how these shaders are sheduled. Thats very early work - in particular compared to how long it took for Freedreno and Panfrost to become even only somewhat stable.
But hey, nothing is impossible per se
Really good progress on the graphics driver:
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part III
rosenzweig.io
Still early days but that’s big!
Really good progress on the graphics driver:
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part III
rosenzweig.io
Still early days but that’s big!
Oh, that's cool! Maybe there is hope after all.
There has never been no hope. It's not the first time Linux DEVs write drivers for devices that are not documented. Sure, it will take time. But once the foundation is done things will get easier even for future Apple Silicon.
Well, I mean "more hope". The thing is, I never doubted that this stuff can be reverse engineered, just that it can be made into something more than an academic/hacking exercise. But it indeed seems that these GPUs are straightforward enough so that a driver does not have to take care of too many corner cases (which was my main concern).
Yeah but that worry was and is unjustified looking at the past track record of GPU development on Linux. In addition, Apple GPUs being derived from PowerVR GPUs (yes, they are very different though) makes things a tiny bit easier. Looking how far things have come already I guess we could see something usable by the end of the year. From then on, it will only get better.
Why would it make it easier? Besides, the only things Apple took from PowerVR are some fixed function hardware (TBDR stuff, compression etc.). Their shader pipeline is 100% custom and couldn't' be more different from PowerVR.
Compare the PowerVR 6 documentation (the shading unit overview starts at page 9) and the reverse-engineered Apple GPU shader architecture (https://dougallj.github.io/applegpu/docs.html).
All I can tell you is that my M1 Mac mini is the best Mac I have ever owned. I love it, it does everything I need and it never seems to get hot. I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard the fan come on, even when playing World of Warcraft for an hour.
I don’t regarded as hype at all, these machines are fantastic. I would never go back to an Intel Mac now. Your mileage may vary, but I think you’re underestimating the M1, and I think you are going to be shocked as the years go by and we move from one generation to the next. We’re only at the beginning of this.
Same for my MacBook Pro 13. These are amazing and I now never touch the 16. The one recent time I did I was shocked on how hot, slower, and cumbersome it is.