[HN Gopher] M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with S...
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M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari's
experimental WebGPU
Author : brrrrrm
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-03-03 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jott.live)
(TXT) w3m dump (jott.live)
| sxp wrote:
| What WebGPU API is this using? If I try on Chrome Canary after
| enabling WebGPU under `chrome://flags`, I get an exception on the
| `device.createBindGroupLayout` call because "required member
| entries is undefined". The API call on the demo page doesn't seem
| to match the spec at https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#GPUDevice-
| createBindGroupLa...
|
| If I change to code to refer to `entries: ...` instead of
| `bindings: ...`, I get further, but it fails on a missing
| `createBufferMapped` function. Firefox nightly just crashes at
| this stage.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| it's Safari's WSL API, which doesn't work on the other
| browsers. There's a bit of a debate about the API (Spir-V vs
| WSL/WHSL), you can find some context here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022962
| remoquete wrote:
| In 1996 you needed 1,600 sq ft of supercomputing hardware to
| reach the same mark.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red
| zimpenfish wrote:
| The M1 MacBook Pro gets just over 1TFlops.
| best: 1022.61 gflops [numthreads(2, 16, 1)]
| compute void main(constant float4[] A : register(u0),
| constant float4[] B : register(u1),
| device float4[] C : register(u2),
| float3 threadID : SV_DispatchThreadID) { [...etc...]
| jeffbee wrote:
| There must be some quantization happening here for us to both
| get the same gflops to 6 significant digits.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| I looked into this in the past: it's the timing API (and the
| fact that I'm not running that many iterations of the
| kernels). Browsers restrict the resolution to prevent side-
| channel attacks
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The only thing that upsets me about Apple's M1 performance is
| that I don't think it's going to get any better from here in
| terms of real everyday speed.
|
| The phenomenon of everyone being blown away by the M1's
| performance is based so much on the fact that developers haven't
| built a lot of software on it yet.
|
| Engineers all over the world will "figure out" how to take this
| fast hardware and make it feel slow again.
| tdsamardzhiev wrote:
| Electron blows my mind every time I open Activity Monitor. How
| on the Earth does Spotify manage to use 2GB RAM and 48 threads
| for a music player?!
| leokennis wrote:
| In general, yes, a new laptop hits its peak performance on day
| one. Software is most often written to perform well on the
| "median machine", and today's top performing computer is
| tomorrow's bargain bin underachiever.
|
| However, the M1 is a huge leap forward. It gives you a maybe 3
| year head start on all other computers.
|
| So no, in a few years it won't be as revolutionary and fast as
| it is today. But I think it's safe to say you can expect an M1
| to last you a good few years longer than a similarly priced
| Intel based laptop you can purchase today.
| shakezula wrote:
| Yeah I don't really understand what the parent comment is
| trying to say. They wouldn't have this argument if it was a
| new processor from Intel or AMD, just seems like the point is
| moot - developers will _always_ utilize available resources,
| it doesn't mean that the pursuit of more efficient resources
| is not worthwhile.
| uyt wrote:
| This is just the unfortunate consequence of devs not bothering
| to optimize something if it runs fast enough on their own
| machine. Stuff that is just on the edge of human perception
| (100ms or so?) might become a few times slower on an older
| machine and become noticeably laggy.
|
| I think there are now more tools to help with phenomenon. For
| example for web dev, chrome has a built-in cpu/network
| throttler so you can simulate a low-end device.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 1023 gflops on the M1 mini using the kernel in the blog post,
| although if I let it run some more it discovers an 8-way unroll
| that's a bit quicker (1073).
| gerry_shaw wrote:
| Ridiculous comparison but 4 Gflops on a 2017 12" MacBook....
| Looking forward to an upgrade this year.
| nknealk wrote:
| I just upgraded from a 2017 12" macbook to an M1 air. It's
| day and night in terms of performance across the board. I
| love the fanless design and the M1 air runs cooler than the
| 12". Also the keyboard is much better.
| nodesocket wrote:
| This is promising as Deno made a recent announcement[1] of full
| WebGPU support.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26323600
| qeternity wrote:
| I usually avoid hype. But the M1 is just unreal. I was back in
| the office for the first time in months, and since getting my M1
| MBP...my overclocked i5 hackintosh with 4x RAM just disappointed.
| It didn't feel slow, but it stopped feeling fast.
| SXX wrote:
| Too bad it's also hit 200GBW / hour on SSD writes of my 16GB Air
| when swapping even though memory usage only went as high as 13GB.
| lunixbochs wrote:
| Wait do you have an easy repro for this that doesn't go over
| ~16GB total memory used? I'm not actually convinced it's caused
| by swap.
| SXX wrote:
| I do have repro for MacOS swapping even though it's can just
| be dropping filesystem cache. Obviously 200GBW / hours is
| when Windows VM is running and there is 5GB of swap usage,
| but again there is still plenty of unused memory.
| nindalf wrote:
| I'm a cynical bastard, but the M1 MacBook Air is the real deal. I
| don't recall being so pleased with a laptop in a long, long time.
| I'm yet to find something I could possibly gripe about.
| _gtly wrote:
| The one thing I'm concerned about are reports of potential SSD
| overwear e.g.: [1].
|
| 1. https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-
| ex...
| stu2b50 wrote:
| I think that's mostly FUD. It's just one tool that's
| reporting those reads, and the reality is that with modern
| storage hardware, the numbers they report can be very
| misleading because of additional layers between the OS and
| physical drive.
|
| In practice, I can't imagine the SSD load to be particularly
| worse than what the iPhones endure, and I have yet to hear
| anyone complain about their iPhone dying from their flash
| storage being overused.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| It's definitely not FUD, but it's probably a bug. I'm
| surprised at how many people are in complete denial that
| this could be happening and are assuming that people aren't
| understanding the tooling or something, instead of the
| obvious explanation, that it's actually an issue.
| SXX wrote:
| No it's not FUD and I can absolutely prove this to you.
| Just open Activity Monitor -> Disk and then watch disk
| writes. Then check how SMART report changes and you'll see
| it's exactly match what MacOS itself reports.
|
| MacOS is heavily rely on swap at least on M1 hardware for
| absolutely no reason.
| tamrix wrote:
| These comments are just too generic and lack detail. Be
| cautious of advertising.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Apple, one of the most recognizable brands in the world, pays
| people to go and tell the nerds at Hacker News that the
| MacBooks are good?
|
| That's way less probable than the machines being actually
| good. Which they are.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| And also trusts the nerds to not immediately post the email
| offering them this deal to their blog for the street cred
| immediately.
| LeanderK wrote:
| it's not a new account. The amount of praise is too much to
| pull off without being suspicious i think. A few fake
| accounts will probably just get accepted, but the more you
| use it the faster somebody finds something wrong is my
| reasoning.
| breck wrote:
| I was an Air user for 10 years (2010 - 2020). Got the M1
| MacBook Pro with TouchBar this time around and love it, and
| wouldn't go back to Air (but haven't tried the Air M1). Also
| got an M1 Mini and love that too.
| lostgame wrote:
| I have friends who have both due to being developers, and;
| honestly - performance between the two is staggeringly
| similar.
| kelchm wrote:
| Completely agreed. I've owned a lot of laptops and other
| devices... There's no question at this point that the M1 MBA
| has become my all time favorite.
|
| The only complaint I have is that you can't run two external
| monitors off of it, but I have no doubt that the next
| generation will address that.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| A lot of people will still prefer/need two monitors I'm sure,
| but if you haven't tried an ultrawide yet I would encourage
| you to. I would always pick an ultrawide over two monitors.
| function_seven wrote:
| Any recommendations on software to tile the display? One
| reason I like 2 screens is because things like maximizing
| or full-screening still leaves me with the other display
| for other windows.
|
| A single ultrawide would be way better, if I could count on
| having 2 virtual displays within.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle works great for me!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Spectacle App
| https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle.
|
| * Edit* Apparently Spectacle has been discontinued.
| trashcan wrote:
| Rectangle I think is very similar and actively developed.
| Chernobog wrote:
| While not a tiling WM, check if Divvy could suit your
| needs. You can set up hotkeys to resize windows to parts
| of the screen. The screen is divided into a grid.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| I use BetterTouchTool for this, it lets you set up
| snapping so dragging the window e.g. to one side will
| snap it to half the width, as well as setting up keyboard
| shortcuts. It can also do a million other shortcut type
| things which I barely scratch the surface of, cool app!
| trashcan wrote:
| Try Divvy. I mapped its hot key to option space and then
| you can just move the currently focused app somewhere on
| its grid.
| aminozuur wrote:
| Using a DisplayLink adapter, you can extend a second external
| display. Still silly these machines they can't do it out of
| the box.
| herpderperator wrote:
| Just be aware that DisplayLink uses the CPU to do this, so
| it will increase overall CPU utilisation, and you'll notice
| dropped frames occasionally.
| SXX wrote:
| I kind a like that I can run my primary display at 164Hz
| via dedicated Type-C to DisplayPort adapter. Too bad
| DisplayLink can't go beyond 60Hz on 2K screen.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Bingo. I do this. It's a little buggy every now and then,
| you lose unlock with Apple Watch and there is a small
| performance cost on one core of the system, but they just
| shipped a native driver too.
|
| Compared to my coworker's 10 core i9 build with over 64GB
| of ram, my base model Macbook Air builds our node app in
| half the time.
| [deleted]
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It's like that on the server side too with ARM64. Using AWS
| graviton 2 instances has been incredible--faster, cheaper, and
| just better in every way for most of my workloads. I think ARM
| caught nearly the entire industry flat-footed and asleep. It's
| going to be wild to see all the big PC and server
| manufacturers, the cloud providers, etc. scramble to have
| similar ARM offerings. I can't believe Amazon is a year into a
| solid v2 of ARM instances, while Azure and Google don't even
| have a beta or v1 on the horizon.
| vosper wrote:
| We're busy moving stuff AWS stuff to Graviton, too. I'm not
| directly involved, but my understanding is it's been all good
| (except that not every instance type is available with
| Graviton). We're going to save a whole lot of money (we spend
| several million per year on AWS) and as far as I know there's
| been no performance penalty or any kind of issue.
| chubs wrote:
| I would love to do the same, but i'm based on Lambda which
| i believe is x86-only (would love to be proven wrong!)
| jcims wrote:
| I'm perplexed at the hot/cold stories of the M1.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Me too, I ultimately ended up quite frustrated with the
| laptop. My suspicion is that it ultimately comes down to your
| comfort with MacOS and your workflow. I spent a long time
| trying to get my M1 Macbook Air to simulate my workflow on
| Linux, but it was never _quite_ there. Sure the thing is
| zippy, but it doesn't mean much to me without a proper
| package manager or open operating system.
|
| With that being said, I'm an old-school curmudgeon when it
| comes to computers. I'm hard to please, and I don't
| necessarily hold it against Apple that they didn't make "the
| perfect computer".
|
| As an aside, is anyone interested in an $850 8gb Macbook Air?
| Lightly used with only 70tb written to the drive.
| prewett wrote:
| I'm curious, what is your workflow?
|
| I'm asking because I'm assuming your real issues are with
| your stated reasons, since MacPorts is a "proper package
| manager" (being ported from one of the BSDs) and if you
| don't like that one, Brew is certainly popular. And I've
| never directly benefited from Linux being an "open
| operating system", since I don't write code that interacts
| with anything lower-level than the C API, but macOS' Darwin
| kernel and many of the binaries are open source.
|
| I'm kind of old-school (my intro to Unix was a DECStation),
| and I find macOS to be plenty Unixy. If I'm not using Xcode
| I'm using Emacs (in VI mode). I've never said "I wish I had
| <Linux feature>"; actually, it's been rather nice that my
| Wifi doesn't break, I don't have to deal with PulseAudio,
| it goes to sleep--and wakes up!--when I open and close the
| lid, the UI is unified, networking is easy to use, etc.
| However, if you run the Linux GUI applications on macOS
| it's a klunky experience, so you benefit from finding
| native applications. Also, Docker wasn't very pleasant, but
| that might have just been Docker; fortunately I've only had
| to use it for one project.
|
| As someone who loves the macOS + Unix experience, I'm just
| curious what workflow it doesn't work well with.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Well, I write quite a bit of GTK, and as you mentioned
| that's not necessarily a first-class experience on MacOS,
| which I expected and was fine with. It was quite a bit
| more frustrating to get the Rust toolchain working
| though, and from what I understand it will be a while
| before they iron out the issues on the M1. Another
| papercut. Then I had issues with binaries disappearing
| out of nowhere, similar to the aforementioned git
| disappearance. My Rust programs automatically were
| removed from PATH, and I still don't know what causes the
| issue. As for the package managers, I think Brew and
| Macports are both fine pieces of software, but they don't
| even come close to how robust and compatible something
| like pacman is. Working with the App Store is a
| frustrating experience, and I'd prefer to have all my
| software managed in one place.
|
| Maybe it's just different strokes for different folks,
| but I'd much rather just clone my dotfiles and have a
| Linux workspace up and running in ~10 minutes tops.
| Moving my workflow over to MacOS feels like trying to
| board a plane while it's taking off, and it doesn't bode
| well for my productivity when I can't rely on my tools
| even showing up in the first place.
| prewett wrote:
| My experience (as a user) is that GTK on macOS is
| functional at best, and I find it an unpleasant
| experience, so macOS is definitely not ideal for that. No
| experience with Rust, but it isn't the path the tools
| expect, for sure. I've never had a problem with PATH not
| working, maybe the new shell in Big Sur is mostly-but-
| not-quite like bash? You could try changing your shell to
| bash, if you haven't already.
|
| If you really want an apt-get (never used pacman) kind of
| everything-repository experience, though, you're going to
| be disappointed on any system that doesn't prioritize a
| centralized repository of software. In practice, this
| eliminates a commercial OS, and probably commercial
| software, since there's no effective way to get a central
| repository. The App Store is the closest, but then you
| get people complaining you're the gatekeeper, or you get
| a free-for-all like Google Play. I think Linux manages
| only because the number of people that use it are small
| enough that bad actors go elsewhere.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Well, hopefully you understand where I'm coming from
| then.
| prewett wrote:
| Yep, thanks!
| stu2b50 wrote:
| That doesn't seem to have anything to do with the M1,
| though? It just seems you're uncomfortable with macos. A
| new processor isn't going to change that macs run macos,
| and if you don't like macos, then you're not going to like
| the Mac.
|
| As a chip, the M1 is an absolutely amazing.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I mean, I mostly agree with you. It is an issue with
| MacOS, and the M1 is a pretty nice package for what it
| offers. If I could reliably run Linux on it, I'd be a lot
| more excited. Hell, if I could even drive my monitors
| with it I'd be mostly satisfied. I guess I'm just one of
| those "niche users" at the end of the day.
| jedberg wrote:
| At first I was skeptical, but I've seen nothing but good things
| about the M1. I'm now desperately waiting for the 16" M1. My
| 2015 Pro is starting to show it's age.
| zoid_ wrote:
| It all seems too good to be true, memory and ssd upgrades
| aside, the M1 devices seem to be fantastic value for money.
| Also waiting for a 16" M1, decided to order a mini in the
| meantime.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| It definitely is. I'm daily driving a Macbook Air,
| something which I never thought I'd say. Even beyond the
| CPU crunching performance, I'm not sure what part of it is
| causing this, but it's just so much smoother for a variety
| of misc things. I suspect either better coupling with the
| integrated GPU or the unified memory.
|
| But many little things, like the smoothness of the OS, or
| the way that the screen wakes from sleep instantly are just
| superior to my much more expensive, and power hungry
| desktop. Of course, my desktop can still cream it in a GPU
| workload but for programming, it's amazing.
| vmception wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if Apple excludes a random feature
| just because people won't need to buy again if they make the
| device people actually want.
|
| You see it in the iPhones and the variant SKUs, and Canon and
| Nikon also had been doing this when there wasn't competition
| eating their lunch.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| There are just going to be more and more pushes to turn
| your laptop into a subscription service. Pay apple $100/mo
| and always have the latest hardware sent to you on release,
| always have the latest version of the OS, always have a
| store you can drop off a broken laptop and walk back home
| with a perfectly working one that day no questions asked,
| etc.
| romanovcode wrote:
| Same here, really hoping the removal of the touch-bar is not
| a myth. MacBook with M1, good keyboard and no touch-bar would
| definitely be the best laptop on the market for a looong
| time..
| darklion wrote:
| Out of curiosity, if they kept the touch bar but as an
| addition to a row of function keys, rather than a
| replacement, would you still have an issue with the TB?
| dbt00 wrote:
| Personally I would rather it was gone. My fingers are big
| enough that they brush the edge of the touchbar while I
| type and volume/brightness/whatever just flaps endlessly
| while I'm trying to get work done. I have to use an
| external keyboard with that thing.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| For me, I think it's a novel concept, but it's rarely
| used in practice. I like having it as a scrub bar for
| video/audio apps or for fine-tuned volume control and
| it's nice for emojis. But other than that, I rarely
| interact with it.
| aminozuur wrote:
| I'm impressed by this minimal blogging platform. No author name,
| no link to the main page with other blog-posts. Just the post.
| Reminds me of telegra.ph. I like it.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| It's the demo website for Jott https://github.com/bwasti/jott
| beervirus wrote:
| It's minimal- _looking_ , but the formatting is broken without
| Javascript.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What's broken? It looks fine with noscript blocking
| everything.
| [deleted]
| beervirus wrote:
| Comparison screenshot, Firefox on Windows:
| https://i.imgur.com/NmToofC.png
| brrrrrm wrote:
| yea, I haven't spent too much time reducing the markdown
| rendering overhead (just pulled a library off the shelf).
|
| I basically just use this site to upload static text files.
| The same text can be rendered a couple ways (e.g. as hmtl,
| raw, as code with syntax highlighting)
| usui wrote:
| I like it too, but one thing that bothers me about online
| articles in general recently is the way they hide publishing
| date. If the date is there, then it's going to be purposely
| bumped across many years to generate more SEO clicks
|
| Too many times I have tried to look up more recent information,
| but the article content clearly shows that it was written a few
| years ago due to inaccuracy
|
| Without reading the article content, I haven't found a way to
| discern which articles are actually released recently. Google
| Search filters for time does not seem to work as well anymore
| as they have found a way around it, but Google Search quality
| going down the drain recently and I ranted about it in this
| post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26202941
| brrrrrm wrote:
| oh this is an interesting concern. Perhaps I should expose an
| endpoint to allow checking the "last edit" date of all notes.
| I'll need to think through the privacy/security concerns
| about that, though
| shakezula wrote:
| are you the maintainer of the platform? If so, props! I
| also dig the minimal vibe to it, it's a really interesting
| approach.
| asciident wrote:
| Unfortunately when I loaded it it had a major screen repaint
| about half a second during load. It would be more minimal if it
| didn't have that.
| spullara wrote:
| I saw that as well. I think it is loading a font.
| mbroncano wrote:
| iPhone 12 Pro - 397 GFlops!!
|
| Sometimes it's just hard to realize that we're carrying a super
| computer in our pockets ...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Sometimes it's just hard to realize that we're carrying a
| super computer in our pockets ...
|
| I mean, that's probably been true since forever. A "super
| computer" is only super relative to other machines from the
| same era. If you can compare between eras, you could probably
| call ENIAC a "supercomputer" and some early pocket calculators
| "a supercomputer [ENIAC] in your pocket."
|
| In other words "a supercomputer in your pocket" is marketing
| nonsense.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Not to mention the API and computing model of a supercomputer
| is vastly different to a phone.
| gnatman wrote:
| Twice as fast as the #1 supercomputer in the world 1994-1996,
| the Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel.
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(page generated 2021-03-03 23:00 UTC)