Apple Silicon's Surprisingly Speedy SIMD

(twitter.com)

11 points | by markdog12 15 hours ago ago

9 comments

  • imwally 14 hours ago

    Why can’t I scroll on mobile Safari on this site? What in the world are we doing with websites these days where a user can’t even scroll?

    • ncr100 10 hours ago

      I don't know...

      .. Perhaps something about the same site being by the DOGE guys?

  • peesem 14 hours ago

    can people publish blog posts (and other things) literally anywhere else? especially now with nitter/xcancel/etc getting taken down

    • ncr100 10 hours ago

      Seriously, posting to the same site owned by the Creator of DOGE, who is ethically responsible for mass death now and future deaths too.

      Using the site supports him and his efforts.

  • capyba 15 hours ago

    I just don’t understand - Apple decided to implement a more capable SIMD instruction set and just … didn’t document it? SIMD is hugely important in anything remotely HPC related. My first gen apple silicon laptop still favorably competes against Intel’s current best, years later. Why would they hide such an advantage?

    • entrope 14 hours ago

      My guess is that it's not complete or stable or qualified enough for them to publish it as a supported feature. Maybe the power draw is too high and it triggers thermal throttling too quickly, similar to early Intel AVX-512? Maybe they are still sorting out how to have each process choose SVE vs NEON mode, so libraries using the other one don't cause a fault? (Note that this seems limited to M4 and newer CPUs.)

      I agree this is an important feature. I have very often wished that my Mac had wider vectors.

      • LoganDark 10 hours ago

        Maybe they were waiting to announce it until it's been supported for a while?

    • vsgherzi 14 hours ago

      Besides Apple who is doing hpc on Apple silicon

    • fwlr 7 hours ago

      Apple shipped their “Neural Engine” in lots of iPhones before publicizing or fully documenting it, could be part of their playbook.