It is not. According to [1] M1 GPU can run "up to 25000 threads".
Comparing raw numbers between vendors is always tricky, but it looks like Apple's "cores" are more like Nvidia's 'Streaming Multiprocessors' (SM's), of which their cards have between 14 and 100.
M1 seems to perform similar to their older, mid-end desktop cards (1050 Ti has 6 SM's and M1 matches it in benchmarks).
> It would be if they take some effort to support it.
Oh, definitely. But the Linux (or alternate OS) fans are not really on Apple's radar. OTOH, they do a good job of keeping some core binaries up-to-date, like zsh and Vim, and they did appeal about getting good compile times during the M1 release event, so they consider POSIX users part of their target market.
“We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]”
I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they know what you want and need better than you.
It's really kind of tragic that so much incredible research and engineering work goes into creating new hardware like this only for it to be locked into one particular company with very tight constraints on target audience, income bracket, and technical limitations. Think how incredible it would be if everyone could use this new silicon.
It is, in fact, already used by everyone, because it's an evolution of the chipset in basically every smartphone in the world with widely divergent target audiences, income brackets, and technical limitations.
I don't know that that's a fair comparison. Just because it's an ARMv8 chip doesn't mean it's directly comparable to what's in smartphones. (I assume you aren't comparing it to Apple made chips for iPhone specifically, since then it wouldn't be true that it's in "basically every smartphone in the world".)
In particular, this is the first 5nm chip to be widely available, and by most accounts on performance it competes with top of the line hardware at a small fraction of the power use. Most existing ARM chips are designed for the very-low-power market, e.g. in phones, not to be used in a high performance laptop.
If there's a Dell or Thinkpad laptop with an ARM chip that's comparable, by all means, let me know.
AFAIK you are correct. Apple has completely redesigned their own ARM chip. It has the same instruction set (or a superset of the instruction set) as what runs in a cellphone, but the design is completely different from say, Qualcomm chips.
I guess, but the "whole concept of the machine" that I'm typing this on was to run Windows... 7 (I think?); that's a completely artificial limitation, as shown by running Ubuntu on it years after the hardware went out of support.
I'm not sure what the problem is, then. You have a device that does what you (or the GP) want, which is to install any operating system, tinker, etc.
Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate the industry to the point that you literally will not be able to turn on your current machine and use it?
> Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate the industry to the point that you literally will not be able to turn on your current machine and use it?
I know you're joking, but I actually kind of am...
Apple has a tremendous amount of industry influence, just see removal of the headphone jack.
macOS deprecates support for Macs that are 5-7 years old with every release. I put Linux on them when new macOS releases no longer support them, and they're perfectly good machines afterwards.
When macOS deprecates support for these ARM Macs in 5-7 years, Linux isn't an option for them unless Apple puts in a lot of work to support a mainline Linux kernel on their hardware. Apple has said they won't support running other operating systems on these ARM Macs unless they're virtualized.
>When macOS deprecates support for these ARM Macs in 5-7 years, Linux isn't an option for them unless Apple puts in a lot of work to support a mainline Linux kernel on their hardware.
Why would Apple need to "put a lot of work in"? Apple doesn't support Linux on 86 either. Third parties did the Mac Linux ports for 86, and will do them for the ARM Macs.
The only thing Apple needs to do is to not lock the ARM Macs from booting another OS, which is very easy to do -- Apple doesn't need to invest lots of work to run Linux on ARM Macs, just needs not to prevent it.
> Why would Apple need to "put a lot of work in"? Apple doesn't support Linux on 86 either. Third parties did the Mac Linux ports for 86, and will do them for the ARM Macs.
Because ARM SoCs are fundamentally different than 32-bit and 64-bit x86 machines. The prime difference is the lack of an enumerable bus that even some ARM servers have, but are missing in ARM SoCs.
I bought an x86 Mac when they were first released and I was able to boot an Ubuntu live CD when I got it. No work was needed to get a mainline kernel running on a x86 Mac, but work was needed to support things like Apple's SMC and cameras etc.
> The only thing Apple needs to do is to not lock the ARM Macs from booting another OS, which is very easy to do -- Apple doesn't need to invest lots of work to run Linux on ARM Macs, just needs not to prevent it.
This is not true. Given the lack of an enumerable bus, someone will need to either fork the kernel and hardcode addresses for hardware, or someone will need documents to build out the DeviceTree. If hardware doesn't conform to existing standards, which nearly every ARM SoC follows their own, someone will need to do further work port the kernel to the machine. All the special deviations from standards that Apple baked into their hardware either needs to be documented accurately, or Apple needs to put the work in to get mainline Linux running on their SoCs.
This is a general problem in the ARM SoC and Linux space, and is not unique to Apple's SoCs. There are millions of ARM SoCs that are either stuck on old kernel forks because vendors never put the work in to get mainline Linux to support their SoCs, or they will never run Linux at all, ever. I don't even think all of the Raspberry Pi models have mainline support yet, and those that do only have it because of the work put in by the RPi Foundation, which has access to some vendor documentation, but I don't believe all.
To get an idea of the scope of the problem concerning Linux support on ARM SoCs, check out this presentation[1].
Right, the point is that it didn't use to be that way exclusively and now it is, so the new machines are more restrictive than previous Macs, which also ran macOS.
In fact macOS itself is more restrictive nowdays than it used to be.
No, not necessarily. Renting just implies you're not the owner and need to follow someone's rules, (that of the actual owner), in order to make use of the rented item.
'Purchasing' a Kindle book or video on Amazon is also renting for example and yet it does not mean you have to continue paying and yet you don't own the copy as Amazon's going to decide how you're allowed to consume it and if they're going to let you keep it[1][2].
I don’t think purchasing a computer is the same thing as buying a movie from Amazon. The computer is always gonna be yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, even if Apple has made it very difficult to do so. But there are lots of objects in my house that would fall under that category as well, but I consider myself as their owner.
I prefer for the class of device the Air fits into (travel, work laptop) to have a nicely curated nix machine with working drivers out of the box. Apple has continued to improve on this by making this product class faster, more battery efficient, and* cheaper.
There is a massive marketplace for tinkering on computers, from Arduinos to multi-GPU ML rigs. Trying to optimize for both classes of things seems like a foolish endeavor, especially when Linux users represent such a small fraction of the desktop market.
I hear this all the time from people "drivers working out of the box", but I've been running Linux machines for a decade now, and I've run into very few issues comparatively speaking. My work makes me use a MacBook for work, and it has a lot of significant bugs that are not getting fixed. The trick with Linux is to use a popular distribution. The one thing I will fully concede is that Linux laptops have poor battery life.
Hopefully it's not just secret apple sauce that makes these powerhouses, and other chip makers make arm based processors soon enough giving us the choice we deseeve. (given gravitons similar performance bump this is likely the case)
It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.
Actually I had a Mac mini with the touchpad and the damn thing disconnected three times a day. All my input devices have wires now and the stick out of the right places.
Touché. But seriously, most people who want to run Linux on Mac want to do it because they like Apple's laptop hardware. If you want a compact Linux desktop then a NUC should probably serve you just as well. Or at least, this was the case while Apple was still using Intel chips. If Apple Silicon lives up to expectations then I suppose there could finally be a compelling reason for running Linux on a Mac desktop.
To be clear, I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be any good reason for wanting to run Linux on a Mac desktop. But desktops are already a niche product for Apple, and people who want to run Linux on Mac desktops are arguably a tiny niche within a niche.
I realize Federighi's reply seems to rule out Linux, but the context of the question seemed to be with respect to Boot Camp and Windows. My take is that Apple doesn't want to continue to invest in Boot Camp, especially since Microsoft apparently isn't willing to license ARM Windows for this use case.
It's not clear to me that the new Macs won't allow booting Linux if the Linux community can figure out how to do it. The number of folks booting Linux on Mac via Boot Camp has to be really tiny.
> It's not clear to me that the new Macs won't allow booting Linux if the Linux community can figure out how to do it.
Mainline Linux support requires a lot of work from vendors. Check out the ARM SoC Linux market for an abundance of examples of this problem. Many of the devices will be forever stuck an old kernel fork and will never run a mainline kernel.
Yeah, agreed, but my take isn't that Apple is going out of their way to prevent it, just that they have no interest in spending any resources on it. Some conjecture here about what will be possible:
But you can disable Secure Boot and boot whatever OS you want, so unless there's some other hardware gotcha it's not like someone couldn't get Linux running if they wanted to put the time in (which is a big if, considering there's no UEFI-ish helper like on the Windows ARM devices).
There are quite literally millions of ARM devices out there that will never have Linux support, and millions more are being produced each year.
When it comes to ARM SoCs, Linux requires vendor support to get it running. If you want mainline kernel support, that requires even more work that many vendors just aren't providing.
A locked bootloader is just one issue to overcome for Linux support. A lot of the real issues come down to the lack of an enumerable bus on ARM SoCs, along with a lack of drivers.
Without vendor support from Apple to support Linux, these devices will be like the millions of iPhones and iPads that don't run Linux and will never run Linux.
Most ARM SoCs that are sold explicitly as mini Linux computers also have this problem. Many of them are stuck on old kernel forks, because vendors didn't give the proper support their SoCs needed to run a mainline Linux kernel.
tl;dr: For Linux to be a viable option on Apple's SoCs, Apple needs to put in a lot of work to explicitly support Linux. Without that vendor support, you will never be able to download a Linux ISO and install it like you can on an x86 Mac.
You’re misunderstanding that quote. Apple has never claimed they won’t support booting something else (in fact, there are ways to enable this by removing signature checks); they were just explaining how their demo works.
You’re likely to hit the common problems porters face with putting Linux on an arbitrary ARM SoC. These chips have lots of integrated components on them, requiring device drivers that may not exist for Linux. Take the custom Apple developed in house GPUs for example. Good luck finding any kind of Linux device driver for those, open source or not. It gets even worse for things there isn’t even an external equivalent of, like the neural engines.
Even if Apple does nothing to stop you running whatever software you like on the device, you’re still likely to be out of luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising folks have a good run at it, but it’s likely to be a massive undertaking.
I can pretty much guarantee you that trying to run anything other than macOS on Apple's silicon is going to be an exercise in frustration. You will presumably be able to run an Arm build of Linux in a VM--given that Apple has demoed this--but if you want native Linux, I'm not sure why you would pay a premium to possibly get a bit more performance on a laptop while probably having various support issues.
If you want to use Linux for the tools, then just use a VM.
But if you want full control over your hardware... Apple isn't the way to go. I'm not even sure what the "OS of our choice" means when we're talking about a custom-designed SoC. The amount of reverse-engineering required to get any other OS to work would be staggering, no?
If you want to run a custom OS natively, you need to buy a laptop with a commodity chip, not a custom one. Fortunately, there are tons of them.
I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.
Apple's hypervisor technology runs natively on the M1; Linux running on that will be faster than Linux running on anything else you can buy for the same amount of money.
They showed Debian running on Apple Silicon during the WWDC keynote nearly 6 months ago.
Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries, and have a better keyboard (I have one from a different OEM, but same ODM design). They also have user upgradable memory and storage - I am running with 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD at a total cost (with upgrades) of less than what Apple is charging for their base 8GB/256GB MacBook Pro.
I expect a future “M2” to maybe take the performance crown, but AMD isn’t standing still. Cezanne has Zen 3 cores, which should boost IPC by about 20%, and Rembrandt should get to 5nm and have RDNA2 graphics.
Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries…
1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life.
2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most CPU and GPU-intensive apps are going to run faster on the M1 than on your machine. Even x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2 on an M1 Mac may run faster, since those apps are translated to native code on the M1.
3. Mac's SSD is probably faster; it's essentially a 256GB cache for the processor.
4. The Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps too.
5. If done right, Linux compiled for the M1 will likely run faster on an M1 Mac than it does on a machine like yours, especially if Apple provides a way to access certain hardware features.
We’ll have to see what happens but expect these machines to be pretty popular with users, even those who need to run Linux when that the distros are updated.
We shouldn't forget that the underpinnings to all of this is Darwin, the BSD-derived Unix layer which is already running natively on M1, including the compiler and the rest of the toolchain.
> 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not going to get 20 hours of battery life in real world usage on the M1 either. The early tests show about 10-12h, which is the same as my (and many other) laptops under regular usage.
> 2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most CPU and GPU-intensive apps are going to run faster on the M1 than on your machine. Even x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2 on an M1 Mac may run faster, since those apps are translated to native code on the M1.
Now it feels like you're just regurgitating marketing talking points. Can you tell me what "unified memory" even is exactly? Is it zero-copy support, because AMD has had that on its APUs since... 2013 or thereabouts. Is it LPDDR4 on a pop package, because all that means to me as an end user is I can never upgrade my memory and that I'm limited 16GB of memory (which I regularly go over - I am using 19GB of RAM right now just with browser tabs open). As for performance, we already know from the early testing that the M1 under-performs 8C Zen2 for heavy MT workloads like compiles and renders, so ... what are you saying exactly, somehow running software via emulation/translation will magically make that faster?
> 3. Mac's SSD is probably faster; it's essentially a 256GB cache for the processor.
Again would you simply assume that a Mac's SSD is "probably faster"? It in fact is not. The 256GB SSD on the M1 MBA was tested at 2676MB/s reads, my value NVMe SSD, a $200 2TB ADATA SX8200PNP does 2917 MB/s on my laptop. As for SSD as cache - what are you talking about? L2/L3 latency is typically about 10ns latency. NVMe latency is typically on the order of hundreds of microseconds, roughly 10,000X slower.
> 4. The Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps too.
Poorly, but I mean, but surely this irrelevant to Linux performance?
> 5. If done right, Linux compiled for the M1 will likely run faster on an M1 Mac than it does on a machine like yours, especially if Apple provides a way to access certain hardware features.
Which hardware features? This is rhetorical. I know this is just hand-waving.
> We’ll have to see what happens but expect these machines to be pretty popular with users, even those who need to run Linux when that the distros are updated.
> We shouldn't forget that the underpinnings to all of this is Darwin, the BSD-derived Unix layer which is already running natively on M1, including the compiler and the rest of the toolchain.
Darwin/macOS may be POSIX compatible, but it is not production compatible with Linux. Like lots of other devs, I've used Macs in the past (for many years) and you always run into compatibility issues small and not so small until you're either running either a completely parallel devchain via Homebrew or MacPorts, or in a VM. Honestly, WSL these days is a more Linux-friendly dev environment than macOS. But then again, it's even easier/better to run Linux and Docker these days.
The early tests show about 10-12h, which is the same as my (and many other) laptops under regular usage.
Here's an early test that’s quite different from what you described. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts your laptop can't play fullscreen, 4k/60fps video for 20 hours using only the battery:
In fullscreen 4k/60 video playback, the M1 fares even better, clocking an easy 20 hours with fixed 50% brightness. On an earlier test, I left the auto-adjust on and it crossed the 24 hour mark easily. Yeah, a full day. That’s an iOS-like milestone.
Another one:
Just 17% of the battery to output an 81GB 8k render.
Eh, the laptop I'm using at the moment has a 15.6" display and 91Wh battery and is less than 100g heavier and about 1mm thicker than the 13" MBP. It's also 500g lighter than the 16" MBP. Lots of other properly tuned modern x86 laptops can perform similarly. For example the 14" 1.48kg 18mm 56Wh battery HP EliteBook 845 G7 manages >12h on NBC's wifi websurfing test: https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-EliteBook-845-G7-review-AMD...
> This isn’t how memory works :/
Fair point that free might not be the best way to measure things, I have more tabs open now but still not doing work (obviously), so let's compare:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 65328424 26679236 31393956 1165140 7255232 36284812
Swap: 67108860 3197072 63911788
With totaling per-process shared/private memory (I uses memstat.sh for this). And the total I get is: 18.37 GiB - lower, but actually not so far off.
This is only with a two browsers (a few hundred tabs) and some resident electron apps open, mind you. Before upgrading (w/ 16GB memory) I was often hitting swap, and now I'm not. But if you don't ever need >16GB of RAM, lucky for you I guess.
Yeah this. Imagine if we had the same hardware but designed for linux, I'd pay a premium for that.
Although hardware specific software from Apple is probably a big part of that draw too. I don't think we're ever going to see Linux prioritize a certain hardware and put in the effort to make it integrate as well as macs does.
I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly.
Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.
Even assuming Apple released the specs so you could port Linux to M1, on top of the usual laptop driver issues around the trackpad, wifi drivers, and video drivers, you also have to deal with the Secure Enclave. Without that, you are stuck with either a non-encrypted drive or running drive encryption on the CPU which is likely going to kill many of the performance gains from using the Mac hardware. Likewise, without the Secure Enclave, you lose fingerprint auth.
Not anti-Linux by any means, but dropping Linux on the M1 isn't going to get you the same performance or battery life by any means. You are far better just going with a laptop which was designed to be Linux friendly to start with.
> Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.
I can assure you that you didn't have to do that for quite some time and it's not that which people are looking for.
- Am looking for a system that lets me run any damn thing I want without pipups, blocks, firewalls, warnings, requiring signed binaries etc.
I am looking to run and develop for the same environment I end up deploying on.
- I want a system that has native docker support, systemd and makes updating the whole system or installing pretty much anything as easy as one terminal command.
- It's important for me to trust my system; where I know no single entity has more power over the machine than myself and no secret upgrades I didn't desire are going to be pushed my way.
- There's no telemetry in my ideal system, certainly not at the system level and patched out at the app level where possible.
- I want a system that is open, configurable, respects the four freedoms and is community ran.
macOS cannot give me this, no matter how "fundamentally BSD" it is. I value the freedom that free software gives that no closed-source BSD ever could.
IMO, the BSD/Darwin stuff isn’t the problem, but rather all the recent additions that are just super invasive/restrictive/bloated - Gatekeeper and trustd, that in my experience often (not just when OCSP is down) chewed through CPU often for example. IMO, even a few years ago (when I mostly switched off from Macs) the LaunchDaemon/Agent situation was getting totally out of control, as were notifications and updates (worse than Win10 even).
> I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly.
This is the reason I initially started using macOS more than a decade ago.
However, I've been told that I'm the wrong kind of user by Apple fans whenever I criticize Apple for transforming macOS from a pretty Unix into a locked-down App Store appliance.
The BSD parts of macOS are getting old and crufty, and are being locked out and overridden by Apple's proprietary and significantly-undocumented layer. For an example of this, check out how networking is done on modern macOS versus how networking is done on a BSD or Linux.
> Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s
Linux has gotten much better, and the problems of the 90s and 00s have vanished for my use case.
These days, at least to me, Linux is the pretty Unix that just works that macOS used to be.
Well... That's why I have a ThinkPad, that is certified on Linux. (So your prejudice is dated)
I'm literally trying to figure out how to install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command.
So... No. It has massive issues with developer friendliness. New OSX stalls with bluetooth mice and randomly locks my keyboard(MBP 2020). The only thing I can commend OSX on - battery life on a MacBook and nothing else
I've never used another BSD, but the reasoning for my 'I prefer Linux' complaint could I think equally be said to conclude almost any non-Mac Unix - my primary concern or annoyance is configurability.
Sure, it has a 'nice/well integrated GUI', but I'm not allowed to choose a different one. Good luck configuring the one they give you for different machines without lots of pointing and clicking. (Yes I know about `defaults write`, I tried to maintain a script to configure everything that way and similar for several years, things change every version, and it's a mess even when it works. It's not how they want you to do it, and it shows.)
I think part of the aversion is that we're seeing a generation come into being that doesn't understand that Unix > Linux.
The way that for Windows people Unix was "other" and bad and scary. Now we have legions of programmers who were brought up on Linux, and now think of Unix as "other."
Having had the fun experience of compiling a fairly heavy UI application on Unix, they all seem pretty "other" to me. Solaris didn't do anything weird, so it was maybe the only non-other. HP-UX had something really weird with linking and I feel like it was lacking some shell commands that were fairly standard. AIX did something strange with shared libraries and their error messages were decidedly non-standard, although they all had unique code at the beginning so at least it was easy to search for problems. I think AIX was the only one for which malloc(0) = 0, all the others at least produced a valid pointer. I can't remember what the problems with Irix were, I think it was just that by 2008 Irix was just old so getting an up to date compiler was troublesome. Linux was just as "other" compared to the rest, but it was increasingly full-featured. Solaris kept up for a while.
And admining them was definitely very different aside from the basic shell commands.
Isn't this pretty much an impossible ask, though? The hardware is great largely because Apple have invested so much in developing a custom SoC. But as a result, you can't easily run a generic OS on it. It's not like Apple just need to bridge the Linux jumper on the motherboard. Supporting Linux would require Apple to maintain millions of additional lines of code, and either hold themselves hostage to decisions made by the Linux kernel team, or maintain their own fork of Linux (which, aside from being based on BSD, is essentially how we got to Mac OS in the first place!)
Actually it would only require Apple to release internal documentation. There are enough Linux nerds to write all the drivers. Graphics will probably be the hardest.
"Only". It would probably be easier for them to maintain the Linux drivers themselves than to thoroughly document every feature of the SoC.
It's not just about individual drivers though, it's about the surrounding kernel infrastructure and the whole desktop experience. For example, getting instant suspend/resume working on Linux is not (I'm fairly sure) just a matter of writing a driver for a particular bit of hardware.
They don't need to anything new. What they already have is enough. Their own software engineers could handle it fine. It's good enough for people who want this.
There are people who have clean room implemented entire nvidia drivers. Without doc. We can manage fine with whatever incomplete doc Apple allready has.
It's been a few years since I used Linux so forgive me if I'm off base here. But last time I used Linux with Nvidia, you had the choice of using FOSS drivers with mediocre performance, or having closed source drivers that performed on-par with Windows.
Have a TCP stack with synflood protection? (The mac stack was copied from FreeBSD in 2001, before syncookies/syncache were added, and not meaningfully pulled since)
Indian here. I just use the 3GB/day plan + 50GB top-ups when required. I get a constant 40-50Mbps.
My monthly average is around 100GB. Internet cost is around $8 for 55 days. 50GB top-ups cost an extra $4.
