Apple Silicon's Surprisingly Speedy SIMD

9 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by markdog12

9 Comments

imwally

8 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

5 hours ago

I don't know...

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

peesem

9 hours ago

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

ncr100

5 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

9 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

9 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

5 hours ago

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

fwlr

2 hours ago

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

vsgherzi

9 hours ago

Besides Apple who is doing hpc on Apple silicon