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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone at Microsoft is starting to have an inkling of realization that ARM is not what makes the Mac good.

Apple's custom ARM chips is definitely one of the things that does make Apple better. Low power, low/no noise, and high performance.

Your sentence makes as much, arguably more sense if you erase the word "ARM".

ARMv8 was developed in order to make those chips. Something else could work but wouldn't be as good.

the ARM chips are, to a large extent, what enable that.

Why does it matter what instruction set the chips support?

The main difference between x86 and ARM is that x86 is slightly harder to decode because instructions can be variable-width. But I have never heard of instruction decoding complexity being a particularly important bottleneck.

You've never had to rub a bag of frozen peas all over the bottom of your x86 Macbook Pro because it was overheating and you had an imminent zoom meeting you could not miss.

AMD doesn’t have that problem, though, so is it a problem with x86 or Intel? I would bet that Apple’s CPU team could get great results with a free hand on x86, too – probably not quite as good but close.

The last few generations of x86 MacBooks were exceptionally bad implementations in this regard, and some of the better thermal behavior of the Apple Silicon MacBooks are things that they could just as easily done with an Intel CPU, if they had felt like it. For example, the Intel MacBooks was extremely eager to ramp its power consumption to the max, while the ARM MacBook slowly increases clock rate, one step at a time, such that it only hits max power after a long time of sustained demand.

I think that might have been Intels doing. They were on 14nm for 5 years or so, with each new 14nm release pushing the power budget and squeezing slightly more performance out of any corner they could find. I assume the CPU ramping was just another part of this approach. If the CPU ramps up faster it will seem fast to users and it’ll look faster in short benchmarks like Geekbench.

Those chips were designed and fabbed by Intel, not by Apple/TSMC respectively. That’s the relevant difference, not the instruction set.

The instruction set has only moderate impact on the chip’s frontend, and no impact on the backend. Most design decisions are unconstrained by the choice of instruction set.

Memory ordering is also different.

Are you suggesting that ARM isn't a large contributor to those things being possible? Genuinely curious.

What makes you think it is a large contributor?

The ISA is, according to people far more knowledgable than myself [0], not a significant factor in regards to performance and/or power efficiency on modern CPUs. That's also why both AMD and Intel haven't done a bad job keeping up with Apple on the efficiency front, AMD since the 4x00u series and Intel now with Luna Lake. Nowadays, the OS not having downright broken sleep [1] is what keeps Macbooks slightly ahead, though then again, MacOS makes up for that with other bugs.

Cause of that, if one is willing and able to go for a well supported Linux distro, they can in my experience get good battery life regardless of ISA. Essentially, whether on a Macbook with Asahi or a modern x86 notebook with either Linux or an aggressively managed/fixed Windows install, you'll do well. Personally lack the skill for the latter though, my Surface remains scolding hot whilst sleeping even after a fresh install, but c'est la vie...

[0] https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...

[1] https://www.spacebar.news/windows-pc-sleep-broken/

High performance doing what? Everyone in high-performance computing is using Linux, my dude. Unless you're a studio who needs specific Mac workflows, or maybe you're doing LLM work?

Great perf-to-watt, but absolutely locked down so you can't do anything meaningful in the embedded space. I'm not over here mounting a max specced Mac Mini just to get that perf-to-watt.

We're using low TDP x86-64 when we need that.

building Ardour (.org) from source:

16 core Ryzen Threadripper 2950X: 9min

M3 macbook pro: 4min

Pretty meaningful when your life revolves around building Ardour.

Sure, but isn't that just comparing an obsolete CPU against a state-of-the-art CPU? I can't see attributing that to the ISA.

A scratch, optimized build of Ardour on a Ryzen 9 9950X takes 1m51s.

the machine is less than 4 years old!

anyway, the point was about the obsolesence or other of the ISA. It was about the claim that various versions of apple silicon are no good for performance, only for perf-per-watt or some related variance.

2018 vs 2023 CPUs targetting entirely different segments.

Oh, I suspect they target exactly the same segments. The expectations of those segments have moved, however.

I agree with your second point, but misstating the age of a 6-year-old CPU as 4 years old will tend to throw off the equations, considering how fast this field moves. I would also note that the Zen/Zen+ CPUs were truly awful. Ryzen and EPYC did not have a good implementation until Zen 2.

Better nowadays. Previously Macs were widely laughed at as constantly having a generation or two (or more) older CPUs and GPUs, particularly for the price.

Thats not what I remember. Towards the end of the Intel era it really slowed down, but before that I felt that Apple was routinely releasing new macs with the latest Intel processors.

Would be happy to be proven wrong. Got some good examples?

You are right, it's the terrible docker experience that really seals the deal. Or the fact that to run Linux you have to rely on a small group that is trying to will it into existence without any support from Apple.

And next to no support from upstream kernel devs

What exactly is MSFT doing for Linux support on Snapdragon Elite X machines?

Qualcomm is merging patches into the upstream kernel directly

To quote OP:

> I wonder if anyone at Microsoft [...]

Qualcomms, as far as I can tell, imperfect [0] efforts are independent of this discussion.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Disabling-X-Elite-GPU

Right, I know, I guess my point was that MS doesn't need to do anything directly since Qualcomm and the various device manufacturers are contributing instead.

They were asking what MSFT was doing in response to the previous commenter talking about how Apple is doing nothing to help with Linux support. Apple is both the OS maker and the device manufacturer in that case. In the case of the Snapdragon chips, the manufacturers are upstreaming support into the mainline kernel.

> Or the fact that to run Linux

Most people don't care about that (if you look at it the other way around running macOS on PCs these days isn't that easy either and it will only get worse). Just don't get a Mac if you want to use Linux?

Docker is pretty painful certainly, though. Windows seem like a much better option if need to develop for Linux.

Asahi Linux is pretty nice though.

Isn't the fact that people use mac despite all that testament to the fact that there's a good reason they're doing so? Like it or not, Apple hardware is top-notch, it integrates well with the software, and it's hard to get both anywhere else.

As always, it's a testament to the power of Apple marketing rather than the product itself. Apple has never been anything special compared to its competitors.

Comments like this are a way to instantly kill your credibility. Let's go back to 2012 and compare laptop trackpads and then see if we can pretend that your comment isn't hyperbole.

Not that I agree with them, but you gave a really bad example. Typing this from an M1 MBP and I would take any laptop trackpad I've ever had over it, even pre 2012. Because this thing is inferior at basic tasks like dragging or shifting from right to left click. Partially because it lacks no physical mouse buttons, and partially because it's implementation of such a scheme is just worse than every other laptop I've had. The laptop begs for a standalone mouse, but Apple in its infinite practically did not include a USB A port for the purpose, further complicating life.

As someone who really cares about a good trackpad and owns a Magic Trackpad 2, I never understood people who put Apple ones on pedestal. It's macOS that had good trackpad handling sooner than other OSes/DEs; their hardware was always comparable to other laptops from the same class. The only thing they actually differentiated in was haptic feedback, and it's mostly just a gimmick unless you happen to care about making tactile clicks as quiet as possible.

Sure, if you bought some shitty cheap laptop you got a shitty cheap trackpad on it, but that's hardly surprising.

They have a lot of nice window dressing, like excellent touchpad gestures. Until the Snapdragon chips launched they slaughtered everyone else for battery life and power-per-watt on laptops.

But it's certainly true that a lot of their prestige just comes down to brilliant marketing. What else could get businesses to buy laptops with non-replaceable batteries and storage and non-upgradeable RAM that need to be trashed every 3-6 years?

> What else could get businesses to buy laptops with non-replaceable batteries and storage and non-upgradeable RAM that need to be trashed every 3-6 years?

Most PC laptop vendors? The part you’re missing is that businesses usually plan to refresh devices every few years anyway, and since the service life on a Mac is 5-10 years this just isn’t a limitation most people hit whereas weight, lower performance, and worse battery life are something you notice every day.

I'd really like to know how many businesses are replacing storage and RAM. Most of the ones I've worked for, they just buy the business Dell Latitude and never touch to storage or RAM. Everything for the business is in O365 or sharepoint or drop box.

Well you have made it instantly clear you have no idea what you're talking about

Not necessarily. People waste money on things for all sorts of _bad_ reasons. And Apple in particular has curated a group of people who buy without asking questions, and many among them knowing nothing of the specs or performance of the system. Not to discredit those who have good reasons, but I don't think that has much to do with the success of Apple.

They have much more support than that. Apple may not be willing to provide direct assistance (and I wish they would) but they have designed the system such that it's not locked down nearly as much as an iOS device. To the point that on ARM64, one may add a second OS without losing system integrity on one's primary OS.

Docker on macOS doesn't have the same underlying system support as on Linux, which is where Docker originated.

The Docker experience on macOS is also marred by the fact that Docker Inc. appears to have limited interest in their Docker Desktop offering, whereas a third-party alternative like Orbstack provides a much better experience.

There is some truth in that -- if x86 can achieve the same battery life and heat management as Apple silicon, barely anyone would care about ARM for Windows/Linux. AMD has made leaps in CPU efficiency in recent years, but that was still not enough. Your uncle probably couldn't understand or care about x86 or ARM. They want a performant, fanless laptop with long battery life, and it seems that such a (mainstream) laptop still does not exist in the Windows world.

Not /exclusively/ ARM, but having their own silicon is helping more than hurting. Personally, and along the lines I think you're getting at, I think Microsoft is in a weird spot of trying to hold on to legacy compatibility for longer than they should and taking some UI gambles that aren't paying off ("again", if you count Windows Phone). Maybe their own chips would help, but that alone isn't the dealbreaker.

Although ARM brings better performance and battery life to Mac, without the support of the software ecosystem and Apple's deep integration of hardware and software, ARM architecture alone is not enough to make Mac stand out.

Recently, Docker was exposed to many bugs with Arm64

I mean, as the other member of the Wintel ecosystem, they have to believe Intel is wholly to blame for it failing apart, right? Evidence be damned.

Dang Intel CPUs, terrible battery performance when paired with an OS that just randomly cranks the CPU up every couple seconds for no user-serving reason.

Let's be fair here, Intel CPUs have terrible battery life under every OS.

Eh, play around with powertop a bit, things aren’t so bad in Linux.

That can get it to be okay, if you put some effort in and get lucky with the manufacturer, but it's still worse than basically anything else that's modern and supports Linux.

On my system looking at it right now, I only see wireless consuming much power. Everything else is below 100mW. I can’t really blame x86 for the wireless power consumption (maybe Intel more generally though).

Possibly, but how much time do you need to spend getting closer to the out of the box macOS experience? If it’s more than an hour or so you’re paying more to have an involuntary hobby.

That seems sort of beside the point. The existence of not-power-hungry Linux installs indicates that there’s something Microsoft could do about the problem.

For me, I like a convertible laptop which I cannot buy from Apple for any amount of money as far as I know. If I could have gotten a fully unlocked iPad I probably would have gone for that, but they don’t seem to exist. Yet, at least! Here’s hoping.

It actually would be nice if Microsoft would figure out their part of the mess, because that would give people the ability to trade money for battery life.

Doesn't help that there's a ton of different hardware vendors that likely have their own ACPI bugs, effectively making good power management impossible.

No really, I have a Chromebook with a 1215u and de battery life is pretty decent, in the other hand my 1255u laptop with windows not so much...

I think Chromebook throttle the CPU frequency to a low level to make it run at a sweet spot where there is enough performance but not much heat.

Saying that as someone who installed Linux on a Chromebook with 1215u. (Don't do that)

I do that with other AMD machines as well. I always throttle CPU to base frequency unless I really need max performance, which has not happened yet.

I think that's just what I Intel or AMD should have done in the first place -- lower both the base frequency and max turbo frequency to the point that the fan does not even turn on in most workflows.

I suspect that they want to look good in benchmarks, so they set max turbo frequency very high. But that doesn't matter in 90% of the workflows.

Good point actually, wanted to install Linux on it because Chromeox is very restricted, why do you say I shouldnt?

Now that you are interested, I'm happy to share more.

For context, I got this exact machine https://www.ebay.com/itm/134571642124 at $174, and did it because I wanted a cheap, 15.6" laptop with an accurate & high resolution screen that is more useful than an iPad Pro. A refurbished machine of this model almost perfectly fits those requirements. I installed Linux (Mint) because lots of things like window management and VPN are cumbersome on ChromeOS, and I want very little to do with Google. I didn't install Windows because memory is limited (8GB) and the experience wouldn't be good, but if it had 16GB I would have done that instead.

Issues I have run into:

* Keyboard layout

   * Apparently Caps Lock and Esc keys are going to be a problem. And if you have a remote session where the remote machine has Caps Lock and Esc swapped, it would be a mess. As a (vscode) vim user, I ended up doing Ctrl+[ for Esc. (If I spent more time on it I probably would have figured it out)

    * Also apparently, F11 and F12 keys don't exist, and it can be painful for debugging.

    * You need to properly map F1-F10 as well.

* Audio issues -- there is a chromebook-linux-audio project that enables audio on chromebooks, and I know other people have successfully used it for this model but on a different distro. The project clearly says it does not support Ubuntu, and it indeed didn't work for me. Not that I need or care about audio on this machine dedicated to programming, but missing audio can be annoying at times when you need it.

* Power management. I don't know if it's bad for this model, for Mint or bad for Linux in general, but it's annoying. I think I have properly throttled the CPU via auto-cpufreq, but sometimes the fan runs crazy when nothing is happening. (Granted, that happens on well-supported Windows laptops as well, and I don't know why.) Then something is weird with suspend ("sleep") -- even after setting things up so that closing lid = suspend, after doing it, the laptop goes out of battery within a few hours. I have to manually suspend every time I am done to preserve battery.

Basically, I am seeing a number of issues with using the machines, some specific to Chromebooks, and some that may or may not be associated with Chromebooks specifically. I know it is always a bumpy road to use Linux on laptops, but this is rougher. It's probably not worth the effort, unless you really want to do that, like in my case. Or to put it this way -- if I didn't intend the machine to do lots of development work and I want to be in the Google ecosystem, it would have been a perfect machine otherwise.

And it didn't occur to you to use just the Linux parts of ChromeOS? As in the Linux dev VM with Wayland passtrough. Firefox runs fine (including touchpad gestures) as does pretty much everything else.

It is okay, until is not. Funny enough WSL integration with Windows seems better the Chromeos one, mostly because the security model of the latter I think.

What do you mean, exactly?

(not the person you replied to)

Window management is very weird: try running vscode in crostini. Title bar is empty. I think there is a workaround that ... shows two title bars. Here you are. I didn't want to waste time on that. And I don't remember exactly what happened, but I can never arrange the windows the way I want. I am not talking about something as good as Microsoft Windows with all the regions and snaps, just something at native MacOS or a desktop Linux distro level. No you can't. Especially if you have an Android app open as well.

If you want to connect to VPN, you may need to go to play store and use an Android app for it, which probably doesn't support keyboard very well. I am talking about something as basic as using tabs.

I vaguely remember Firefox on crostini was not a great experience but I don't remember why. Firefox in Android is a big no-no for Chrome OS. Horrible tab management and there is no keyboard shortcut support.

You regular linux command may or may not work.

That's just some of the issues I had.

My experience with WSL isn't great, having spent many hours on it, mostly due to poor IO performance and weird bugs. But I would love to hear more about others' experience.

Especially the VPN was the biggest drawback for me. But a lot of commands wont just work, like lscpu or any other related to hardware.

Oh boy that a lot of problem. Guess it was not a good buy after all :(.

Thank you for all the info!

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