jdb8167

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jdb8167
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  • Apple Silicon 13-inch MacBook Pro nearly as fast at machine learning training as 16-inch M...

    jdb8167jdb8167
    cloudguy said:
    mcdave said:
    cloudguy said:
    Also - and I have mentioned this in the past - the Intel Core i5 in the MBP is a quad core chip. Comparing it to the octacore Apple M1 chip is apples versus oranges (pun not intended).
    The M1 only has 4 performance cores with the efficiency cores running at around 20%. It would be totally fair to compare it with a hyper threading quad core x86 CPU and unfair to compare it to one with 8 performance cores.

    FYI, macOS is a UNIX variant. There’s more to UNIX than Linux.
    The efficiency cores ... run at 20%? No. In the M1's big/little arch, the Firestorm cores run at 3.2 GHz and the IceStorm cores run at 1.85 GHz. So yes, it is perfectly valid to compare 4 3.2 GHz and 4 1.85 GHz cores to a hexacore chip, especially since that hexacore chip is going to have to be throttled precisely because of the lack of efficiency cores (which also happens if you merely have 4 performance cores with no efficiency cores as is the case with the Intel Core i5 that also gets beaten by the big/little octactore Qualcomm Snapdragon 865). Intel states that they are going to adopt the big/little architecture with efficiency cores in 2021. Knowing them lately, that means 2023. 

    While macOS "starts with" FreeBSD ... it veers off into its own direction, particularly in that macOS has a hybrid kernel vs the UNIX monolithic one. And for the record, even FreeBSD technically isn't UNIX. It is UNIX-like and compatible but there are differences. It is fair to say that FreeBSD is a lot closer to UNIX than macOS is to FreeBSD. So since it is twice removed from UNIX - and is significantly different from FreeBSD - then calling macOS "a UNIX variant" is challenging. My point is that benchmarking hardware running Linux is better than benchmarking hardware using Windows. (And it is a lot easier to replace Windows 10 with Ubuntu desktop than it is FreeBSD.) 
    Nevertheless the IceStore cores are measured to be about 20-25% of a FireStorm core. You haven't fallen into the MHz myth have you? IceStorm cores are not just down clocked FireStorm cores. The efficiency cores are designed for a different purpose than the performance cores, it's in the name.

    Unless Apple hasn't kept up with certification, macOS/Darwin is officially a Unix. Not sure what you are trying to say, but macOS isn't Unix like, it is Unix.
    watto_cobramcdave

  • Apple has stopped providing standalone updaters in macOS Big Sur

    jdb8167jdb8167
    Have they worked out the bugs for Big Sur yet? I haven’t downloaded it as of yet. 
    There are bugs with installing on external drives and running Big Sur on an external boot drive. I can't get it to work at all on my M1 MacBook Air. But Big Sur seems pretty solid for day to day use. Better than Catalina in my opinion. 
    mwhiteRayz2016watto_cobra

  • Parallels 16 for Apple Silicon M1 Mac launches in beta - minus Intel OS support

    jdb8167jdb8167
    commentzilla said:
    So fairly useless at this point without Windows for ARM and absent of so many things that made it useful before.
    If Microsoft makes it legal to use Windows on Arm in a VM on macOS then this will be very useful. Right now QEmu works with WoA and testers are saying the latest win32/win64 translation/emulation is reasonably fast on the M1. I'm not involved with the Windows Insider program and have no real interest in Windows but I've used QEmu, vftool, simpleVM, and Docker to run Linux and they all seem to work just fine. I'm just waiting on information on how to boot Big Sur in a VM and my virtual machine needs are met.
    watto_cobra

  • Apple has stopped providing standalone updaters in macOS Big Sur

    jdb8167jdb8167
    Isn't the App Store download equivalent to a combo updater? Maybe I'm missing something. Once you download the installer you can save a copy and reuse it. Along with the content caching, it doesn't seem like this is that big of a deal unless I'm missing something. You can also use the App Store download to create a bootable recovery disk if you need to distribute to users to update on their own. The real problem is for those users who have very slow or severely expensive internet. I don't see any way to avoid downloading the 12 GB installer.
    watto_cobra

  • Facebook says it hopes proposed EU rules 'set boundaries' for Apple

    jdb8167jdb8167
    This should give the regulators in the EU pause. If Facebook wants the data that the EU seems to be promising from Apple to competitors shouldn’t that be all the evidence they need that data sharing is a bad idea. Unfortunately, I don’t expect the EU to get this at all.
    longpath