from Hacker News

Is Apple Silicon Ready?

by caiobegotti on 11/20/20, 8:24 PM with 192 comments

  • by loeg on 11/20/20, 9:00 PM

    Seems a bit dubious to claim M1 isn't ready for web browsers when all of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari have ARM-optimized green checkmarks. Vivaldi, Brave, and Microsoft Edge — who cares? Similarly, the "Finance" tab is 100% green checkmark and also says "Not yet!"

  • by bklyn11201 on 11/20/20, 9:34 PM

    In my small universe, this was the week of ARM. I submitted multiple PRs to OS projects to get ARM compilations working. I started moving AWS instances off of Intel instances to the new Graviton2 instances.

    I'm still surprised there isn't more server takeup of ARM considering the incredible power numbers. Cloudflare announced their current builds and it's all Epyc2 and no ARM. What about Azure and Google Cloud? Are ARM servers easy to launch and superior on a cost/performance perspective?

  • by glup on 11/20/20, 9:47 PM

    I totally thought this was going to be one of those static sites with a single answer in h1 fonts ("Is it snowing in San Francisco?" "No") but instead this is much more useful.

  • by yyyk on 11/20/20, 9:36 PM

    It's unfortunate that the middle status (warning triangle with a exclamation mark) has a green background rather than a yellow background like warning triangles everywhere else. Makes the table less clear.

  • by coryfklein on 11/20/20, 11:11 PM

    I've been through enough Mac upgrades by now to learn that I'm going to have a better time waiting for M2. I'm not really interested in jumping on this particular early adopter train. As a developer, who knows what random tweaks and system behaviors I rely on to get my job done, but that will be completely broken on a new Mac.

    I certainly am heartened by all the news about processing power improvements. I'll just join the rest of y'all young whippersnappers after you pay the early adopter tax for me.

  • by kowlo on 11/20/20, 9:01 PM

    Great idea, thanks for putting it together. Ordering by "Apple silicon optimised" doesn't seem to work as I expected it. Is it a bug?

    Great to see Office 2019 (not 365) works - was putting off picking up a license for that reason.

  • by ibraheemdev on 11/20/20, 8:59 PM

  • by gmaster1440 on 11/20/20, 9:02 PM

    Table suggests that Docker can run under Rosetta 2, but the Docker blog post that it links to suggests Rosetta is not enough. Can someone confirm if it’s actually possible to run Docker using Rosetta on M1 Macs?

  • by xeeeeeeeeeeenu on 11/20/20, 9:34 PM

    Beta software (like Firefox) shouldn't have got green checkmarks. It's not "ready" yet.

  • by anupamchugh on 11/21/20, 8:51 AM

    For Android Developers, running Android Studio on M1 Macs is turning out to be a nightmare. The UI is sluggish and gradle builds are drastically slow.

    Seems like JetBrains still needs to get their softwares ready for Apple Silicon: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2526

  • by mandragon on 11/20/20, 9:04 PM

    Unrelated to the link but related to Apple's CPU foray:

    Any thoughts or info on the security implications of a first generation CPU design? Is it safe to assume that a design focused on cutting edge performance may have compromised on security in some form? Does the fact that this is first gen indicate opportunity for hackers to discover low hanging fruit vulnerabilities possibly to the benefit of nation state or private actors?

    I feel like the long term path for silicon will converge on extreme compartmentalization of general purpose computing hardware inside chips, designed from the ground up to achieve physical process isolation purpose built per task, with highly secure hardware IPC all on a single high perf die.

    Interested to learn what Apple has done to build a "more secure" CPU design. edit: A quick web search yields relevant results on this topic already, e.g. work by Chinese based Tencent Security.

  • by acwan93 on 11/20/20, 9:38 PM

  • by chadlavi on 11/20/20, 9:06 PM

    isn't this more like "is this app ready for apple silicon"?

  • by alkonaut on 11/20/20, 11:25 PM

    I can only imagine the horror it must be to be maintaining mac x86 software that turns out to not work with Rosetta (Like some of the examples listed).

    I do windows desktop work and try to picture what would happen if our customers were suddenly moving to Win10 on Arm and expecting our software to work. We have dozens and dozens of third party binary dependencies, each of which could turn out to be the one that doesn’t translate. Not all of them could realistically be replaced or updated. The situation would basically be one where Microsoft had announced the death of our software and probably business.

  • by mpol on 11/20/20, 9:33 PM

    I would think the apps will come and get optimised. That is just a matter of chicken and egg, sometimes you just have to release, and go from there.

    What I am worried about is if the GPU is anything worthwhile. All the focus in the reviews is on the CPU, but the GPU seems where it mostly falls short. Not enough external screens for example, though that can be fixed in a newer generation. But is it faster than what Apple hardware included in Intel, with AMD graphics? Some people will feel the regression in speed and capabilities quite hard. I don't see much focus on that in media publications.

  • by xyst on 11/20/20, 10:44 PM

    It's amazing how fast applications are being transitioned to apple silicon. If this was any other company introducing a new architecture, I am sure adoption wouldn't have been this fast.

  • by brundolf on 11/20/20, 9:09 PM

    Very cool. Small suggestion: it would be nice to be able to filter by "all apps that have native support or work properly under Rosetta", and maybe also the inverse of that.

  • by tosh on 11/20/20, 10:09 PM

    this is a sheet for tracking game compatibility and performance (including FPS, settings, system specs and sources) that I set up yesterday

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3...

    first results are impressive, there are reports of games that were unplayable on the 2020 Intel MacBook Air that now run well on the M1 MacBook Air

  • by uvesten on 11/20/20, 9:40 PM

    Weird that node is listed as not running under Apple Silicon, since I've been running node 15 compiled for Apple Silicon without problems for a while now :)

  • by rudolph9 on 11/20/20, 9:33 PM

    Probably not but for better or worse, Apple is a big enough juggernaut that existing software that’s not ready it now has significant motivation to become ready.

  • by bigdict on 11/20/20, 9:58 PM

    Why is World of Warcraft listed under "Developers"?

    Actually…

  • by leoplct on 11/23/20, 4:30 PM

    I am using Postgresql (last version) and I am having a lot of table corruptions. I neved had this problem, only now that I switched to new Mac book pro.

    PG::InternalError: ERROR: could not read block 38 in file "base/84897/85294": Bad address

  • by penguin_booze on 11/21/20, 8:06 AM

    Aplogies for the meta: does anyone know/how do I find out what component library is used on the site? It looks to me some kind of material design flavor.

    Context: I'm after a flexible material-like table component for a personal project.

  • by GeneralTspoon on 11/20/20, 8:57 PM

    Very cool idea! Useful for evaluating whether or not to order a new MBP now or later.

    One minor bug - Sketch shows under all apps, but not under design apps (I thought it was missing altogether because I didn't see it under Design).

  • by rblatz on 11/20/20, 8:57 PM

    I got an SSL error on this page. This is the second time that’s happened today. And I can’t remember this happening on my phone in the past. Is this something on my end or are others seeing it too?

  • by suyash on 11/20/20, 10:09 PM

    Missing 'Java' under programming languages / runtime. Last I heard it's being worked upon.

  • by trixie_ on 11/20/20, 11:37 PM

    Constant software compatibility issues is what caused people to avoid WindowsRT.. depending on how soon Apple resolves these issues will determine if people stick with M1 or migrate to Windows 10. My company runs on Windows with lots of 3rd party domain specific windows apps. We use Mac laptops because the hardware is nice, but it's probably not going to be an option for us in the future.

  • by uxisnotui on 11/20/20, 9:36 PM

    Please add/track Figma :)

  • by tlrobinson on 11/20/20, 10:42 PM

    I’ll gladly let you fine folks sort out this mess, and I’ll check back in next year. Thanks!

    Seriously though, what’s the plan for Docker? Will all containers need to be built for ARM or will Rosetta 2 be able to run Docker in an x86 VM?

    Homebrew is my other benchmark.

  • by piazz on 11/20/20, 9:02 PM

    Anybody using it with VSCode? Appreciable perf difference?

  • by zachberger on 11/20/20, 10:36 PM

    Sorting on the columns with checkboxes seems broken.

  • by wgx on 11/20/20, 9:06 PM

    I wonder why Google didn’t get File Stream ready?

  • by retox on 11/21/20, 12:34 AM

    "High risk website blocked"

  • by hit8run on 11/20/20, 9:02 PM

    Can you tell me if Ruby is ready?

  • by Traster on 11/20/20, 9:02 PM

    I like the tick next to Firefox and you mouse-over and it says "Beta".

  • by musicale on 11/20/20, 11:39 PM

    They should probably differentiate between Rosetta 2 issues and Big Sur issues.

  • by amelius on 11/20/20, 11:44 PM

    A better question is: am I ready for locked-down silicon?

  • by EugeneOZ on 11/20/20, 10:39 PM

    Maybe not 100% yet, but it moves incredibly fast to this goal.

  • by jrlocke on 11/20/20, 9:14 PM

    Yes.

  • by johnklos on 11/20/20, 9:07 PM

    Silly title. Apple Silicon is obviously ready. Are these software packages ready is the question.

  • by Grustaf on 11/20/20, 9:24 PM

    Is this sponsored by spotify or why are they up at the top? How many people use spotify on a computer?

    In any case, the domain nam is incorrect. It should be “isitapplesiliconready”. The chips are clearly ready, it’s just that some developers haven’t recompiled their apps for it yet.

  • by everyone on 11/20/20, 10:02 PM

    Honest question. Why are people here so excited about this?

    What I've gathered via osmosis here about Apple silicon is. 1. It will only be in macs, you cant buy the chips or mobos to build your own machine. 2. Theyre very energy efficient. 3. Their performance is okish.

    Doesnt really seems earth shattering.. Like, if they were a super low energy alternative to the duopoly of amd or intel, that would be pretty cool. But if u buy a mac nowadays, its like a console with set stuff in it that u cant change or upgrade.. Now that stuff will be improved / updated in newer macs, does that not happen regularly anyway?

    EDIT: Several people saying the performance is amazing.. Can u link me to some benchmarks? The only numbers I can find are these. "In Geekbench 5, the A14X yields a single-core score of 1,634 and rakes in 7,220 in the multi-core test."

    These are very low scores, like, my desktop gets many times that.. My old work low/mid level laptop from 4 years ago had 3000 single core and 11600 multi-core score.

  • by DCKing on 11/20/20, 9:07 PM

    It really seems that nearly everything that's not a full native ObjC/Swift stack or is not a web browser (or based on one, like Electron) is not ready yet right now. It really seems Apple did not care enough to get especially golang and Rust stuff stable for their hardware release. I can't escape the impression that they didn't really shower the wider ecosystem in DTKs and software support, although I'd be happy to be proven wrong there.

    Oh well, at least Rosetta2 seems to be working really well - you will be able to run a lot of software you need rather well despite not to the fullest potential. The execution on Rosetta2 is really good and that's important. But I think it does go to show that the "Pro" in "Macbook Pro 13" does not mean all that much. At least not if they're going to ship with the majority of pro software not being native, many popular developer toolchains still months to be ready, and very limited I/O and RAM options. The Macbook Air and Mac Mini I fully get for the first releases on new hardware, but the Macbook Pro 13 really feels odd in this lineup if the word Pro is supposed to mean anything.

  • by nottorp on 11/20/20, 9:52 PM

    Can it virtualize x86 operating systems? That's when it will be ready.

    If you only use the latest version of <whatever javascript lib you're using> it's fine now, i guess.

    If you maintain legacy apps, you now need an x86 box. And then you have to ask yourself, why buy a Mac too? They need to fix that somehow. They have enough money to sponsor something based on QEMU, for example. They're just cheap.