jdb8167

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jdb8167
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  • Intel-based MacBook Pro is Intel's latest anti-Apple campaign target

    jdb8167jdb8167
    lkrupp said:
    ajmas said:
    Intel drops the ball, AMD picks it up and Apple decides they'd go with ARM. Intel is now in the process of doing damage control.

    Apple on the other hand never targeted gamers and has always been a joke for gamers. Deprecating OpenGL and leaving it in a seemingly unmaintained state does not help the game developers who do want to port to macOS. On the other hand, while this is a barrier for a certain number of game developers, that iOS has a healthy selection of games, may mean there is a chance that these games will be ported to macOS. Also, I wonder how many Apple users simply turn to a console for the gaming experience?
    And to me gamers have always been a joke, a tiny, minuscule market niche of people with questionable social skills. sort of like the gear-heads of the 1950s and 60s with their super chargers and Holley 6 packs trying to outdo one another on the street.
    From: Global-PC-Games-Market-Analysis-2015-2019
    The global pc games market was valued at about $27.73 billion in 2018 
    That is one big niche. I can still understand why Apple doesn't care since even moderate share would still be just a blip for them but it is pretty big nevertheless.
    Beatsapplguywilliamlondonwatto_cobra

  • Spectre comes back from the dead to haunt Intel chips

    jdb8167jdb8167
    InspiredCode said:
    jdb8167 said:
    I know that Apple's Arm CPUs use micro-ops but I don't know anything about if or how they are cached. The caching of micro-ops is the source of this vulnerability. In general RISC CPUs have much simpler decoding so it is possible that micro-ops aren't cached at all or the cache structure is much simpler. Someone with more knowledge of Arm CPU Architecture should chime in.

    Edit: And apparently SMT (also known as hyper-threading) is involved. Since Apple's ARM SoC cores don't use SMT, it looks like they are safe from this.
    The memory model of ARM makes these types of attacks more difficult. Micro-ops are fixed length and shouldn’t require much caching unlike Intel/AMD. This is also one of the main reasons M1 has such amazing single threaded performance since it isn’t limited by the decoder. The x86 ISA should die already.
    I was reading as much of the white paper as I could understand without doing further research and my conclusion is that even if the M1 is using a micro-op cache, the authors are using the x86 ISA complexity as a way of detecting micro-op cache hits and misses. That complexity isn't there in the M1 or any Arm RISC system. I won't say this attack is impossible on Apple Silicon but as you say, it would be more difficult--probably much more difficult. Add in that 1 or their two attacks is via SMT, I think ASi is probably pretty safe from this.
    lolliverchia

  • New Magic Keyboard brings Touch ID to all M1 Macs

    jdb8167jdb8167
    Bad cursor key design unfortunately. I'm not sure if the Touch ID outweighs the bad keyboard design. I type my password 20 times a day when my M1 MacBook Air is in clamshell mode. Tough call. Why didn't they do the magic keyboard cursor key layout. Blah!
    williamlondon

  • Parallels Desktop 16.5 released with native Apple Silicon support

    jdb8167jdb8167
    mfryd said:
    Conceptually, there is no reason why we can't run Windows 10 on Apple Silicon based Macs.

    In the old days of PowerPC based macs, we had SoftPC and SoftWindows.  These software packages allowed one to run the Intel version of Windows, and Intel Windows software, on a non-intel Mac.   These product emulated the Intel architecture.

    I think there is a market for virtualization software that runs on an Apple Silicon Mac, and emulates an Intel processor.


    The only Apple Silicon native x86/x86-64 emulator that I'm aware of is QEmu. I've run Ubuntu 20.04 on a generic x86-64 VM on my M1 MacBook Air and it is very slow. In my assessment, useably slow. It takes many minutes to start up and clicking anything takes several seconds for a response. Even just moving a window has a lag of 2 or 3 seconds before you see the window drag start.

    That isn't to say that someone couldn't improve the QEmu x86 emulator or write a better one but that is probably man-years worth of work that probably hasn't started. One thing that I noticed is that even though I allocated 2 or 4 cores to the emulator, it pretty much only uses one. That might be a low-hanging fruit for someone to approach improving the performance.

    Right now, the only emulator is not going to be fit for the purpose of running x86-64/AMD64 software on Windows for normal use. Ubuntu is almost certainly more efficient in resources than Windows 10 is and it is really not usable.
    elijahgmuthuk_vanalingam

  • Parallels Desktop 16.5 released with native Apple Silicon support

    jdb8167jdb8167

    hodar said:
    So, basically Parallels remains a waste of money for anyone who bought an M1 Mac.

    Rehash MY user case; which is probably a significant number of user cases.  Why did I buy Parallels?  Why pay $$ for this program?

    So, I can have the CAPABILITY to boot, and run WindowsXP, Windows 7 and Windows10 disk images, and either run programs on my Mac that are not available outside of the Windows environment, so I can play old games I purchased before I switched to the Apple ecosystem, and so I can play more games (emulation mode, which is surprisingly good) on my Mac, and play online with my friends who use PC games.  Open Parallels, run any version of Windows I chose, launch Steam and play online games with my friends (games that are not available on the Mac.

    For work, Excel on Windows has the capability to allow me to write scripts in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA); for reasons I don not understand, these advanced libraries are simply not available for the Mac community.  So, while my Excel workbooks have ~60,000 lines of VBA to allow it to link into the corporate database and dateline quality assessment info, I cannot do the same thing with my MSFT Office license for Mac.  So, I have 2 different licenses.

    Now, I have no choice but have multiple computers at home.  Because programs that USED TO work flawlessly, no longer function at all.
    Most of your x86 and x86-64 software should work on Window on Arm through Microsoft’s compatibility software. It works like Rosetta 2 does on the M1. The biggest problems are that you can only get WoA through Microsoft’s early access program right now. No one knows if that will change and Microsoft isn’t saying much of anything. Also, x86-64 compatibility is currently only through the fast-track updates.

    Until Microsoft allows sales of WoA, I wouldn’t buy an M1 to run Windows software in Parallels. It’s nice that Parallels for the M1 exists though.
    dysamoriawatto_cobra