Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Apple doesn't really have to worry about competition too much for a long time, even if Intel and AMD get comparable watt/power levels for laptops, Apple isn't going to be using them for their products anytime soon. And people using Macbooks aren't likely to switch to Windows/Linux machines, even if there is a 20% better CPU.

But really we've only had 2.5 released cycles so far. Not much to go by.

View on HN

I might be a very small minority but I'd personally switch back to Linux in an instant if there was something comparable to the M series hardware

Asahi linux has most things working, except the accelerated GPU. Just in the last week or so a triangle was rendered, so progress is has been made.

Sadly while apple has 128 bit wide memory on the low end (66-100GB/sec on the mac mini and mba), 256 bit wide (200GB/sec), 512 bits wide (400GB/sec), and 1024 bits wide (800GB/sec). Nothing wider than 128 bits looks to be coming to standard laptops or desktops in the non-apple world. I don't really count HEDT chips like the threadripper pro, since they are very expensive and very limited, and burn many 100s of watts.

Asahi Linux is, for me, the most interesting thing going on in Linux these days.

Agreed. I'd likely have a studio today if the GPU port worked, but unless it comes out RSN I'd likely wait for the M2 based studio to come out. The chip has other magic inside as well. I'm hoping Linux continues to implement support for the MatMul instruction (not just vector multiplies), 16 trillion op neural engine, various encode/decode video accelerators, etc. I've heard vague references to compressed swap to help make the most of limited ram (m1 limit was 16GB).

What package manager/distro will Asahi Linux be using/basing off of?

It's based on arch, but there are already people who ported the necessary changes to nix and something else I can't recall. The idea though is that once things get upstreamed, any distro will work.

Perfect, looking forward to when it's stable.

Massive memory bandwidth is for GPU, so not matter unless you utilize iGPU.

I disagree, Anandtech tested the M1 max (409GB/sec bandwidth), and the CPUs managed 224GB/sec with the faster cores, and a total of 243GB/sec with fast and slow cores.

Sure that's quite a bit less than 409GB, but there's other major parts of the chip like the GPU, video codec acceleration, and neural engine.

Seems pretty unique and useful to me, not everything fits in cache.

That's true that CPU core consumes massive available bandwidth on AT's test, but it doesn't mean that such bandwidth is used for real CPU usage. I don't oppose memory bandwidth is meaningful for total SoC including iGPU/ML/Video parts.

Asahi Linux is running well enough to be usable for lots of things.

However, no screen brightness control, no sound or YouTube currently. And there's some page size weirdness that means Chrome/Electron (?) is not usable, so no VS Code.

If you can live with that, it's so nice having Linux on the M1 hardware.

YouTube is the acid2 test of the modern web. I had a laptop that didn't hardware accelerate youtube, and it ended up as a headless server.

I'm considering getting an M2 Air even though I very much don't like OSX.

Despite the exciting news and I'll definitely upgrade my intel MBP to either M1 or M2 in the future, I doubt my personal workflow will change: Linux for development, Mac for productivity and maybe some (lightweight) development, Windows for gaming and gaming only. While Apple probably wants to steal existing user base from Windows, on productivity uses maybe, I don't think they're planning to drag people from Linux on development workloads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com