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What is your main OS (operating system) at home?

What is your main OS (operating system) at home?


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sarumbear

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Until you compare SIMD performance, that's what the Apple fanboys forget to show. Easy to get good cores when you free the transistor space used by 256 and 512 bit wide paths/units
I'd like to see dav1d benchmarks, for example, as it is well optimized both for NEON and AVX.

The performance/energy is still incredible, but I do wonder how much is due to their monopoly on TSMC's N5.
I don’t like to be called an Apple fanboy as I don’t even own a Mac but I enjoyed the ‘boy’ part I as I’m 71 years old :)

SIMD performance of M1 was not ground breaking, true. However, you must see the huge memory bandwidth increase of the M1 Max. Where M1 delivers around 70GBps, M1 Max reaches 400 GBps!

You don’t need to be CPU designer to expect that every benchmark will show much better results.
 

pjn

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Hey guys and gals, what is your preferred operating system at home?

Comments and stories how you have ended up in your current operating system are warmly welcomed. :)
Interesting thread - been using apple stuff since the Apple 2 - briefly thought about others, but then a chap brought a MacPlus into the lab. We gathered around... "Now that's a useful computer!" And 2 of us promptly bought one. It was 1/7 of my annual income.

But Apple has oscillated from "not very good" to pretty good" over the last 30 years. Always, though, the user interface has been better than most competition. Although it now has very stiff competition indeed and I tend to dread upgrades and envied windows users their backward compatible forever OS vs Apple's planned obsolescence. So locked into the ecosystem now that it would be very challenging to change. And Windows has become more like Apple with planned obsolescence in their software. I've dabbled with Linux occasionally but never much liked it, even though I'm fairly comfy with command-line stuff.

For audio? It makes little difference as far as I can tell, although Windows has more options (as always).
 

elvisizer

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"Moreover, the new chip does not outperform the Mac Pro and iMac models which are equipped with Intel's high-end 16 to 24-core Xeon chips."
geekbench doesn't do a good job of testing the 'uncore' blocks in the apple silicon. This result is what you would expect to see in that benchmark.
also don't forget the actual cores in the m1pro/max are the same as the m1's so perf per core should be pretty much equivalent between the 3. and that's exactly what you see in the single core results.
 

elvisizer

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The performance/energy is still incredible, but I do wonder how much is due to their monopoly on TSMC's N5.
a big part is how wide the instruction queue is on apple silicon- intel and AMD can't scale that the way apple can. apple's entire OOO instruction situation is wacky as hell really:
What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry. IBM’s upcoming P10 Core in the POWER10 is the only other official design that’s expected to come to market with such a wide decoder design, following Samsung’s cancellation of their own M6 core which also was described as being design with such a wide design.

Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs (Intel is 1+3) that is seemingly limited from going wider at this point in time due to the ISA’s inherent variable instruction length nature, making designing decoders that are able to deal with aspect of the architecture more difficult compared to the ARM ISA’s fixed-length instructions.
SIMD performance of M1 was not ground breaking, true.
when the worst thing you can say about a chip is that it nearly equals the other platform at half the power, you've got a damn good design! :)
 
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mansr

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geekbench doesn't do a good job of testing the 'uncore' blocks in the apple silicon. This result is what you would expect to see in that benchmark.
Uncore is an Intel thing. Other platforms may have something equivalent, or not.
 

Beershaun

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The poll seems to be off. It adds up to 153.3%
 

Berwhale

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The poll seems to be off. It adds up to 153.3%

1634770592136.png
 

Beershaun

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Sure. But the whole should still add up to 100% no matter how many times someone votes. The denominator needs to increment as well for each vote. Else we all just spin off into space the fabric of reality breaks down. Think of the children.
 

somebodyelse

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Sure. But the whole should still add up to 100% no matter how many times someone votes. The denominator needs to increment as well for each vote. Else we all just spin off into space the fabric of reality breaks down. Think of the children.
Not necessarily. "Percentage of unique voters who voted for this item" is different to "percentage of all votes cast for this item" when voters have multiple votes, and only the latter is sure to add up to 100%.. It should be better labeled though.
 

coonmanx

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WIndBlows is bloatware. I stopped using it years ago and have never looked back. I am on Ubuntu these days.

My son still uses Windoze for gaming.
 

Head_Unit

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Once upon a time we were renting a house with no spare room, and iMacs came out. Perfect! Even tossed it into the back of my 5.0 Mustang to zoom up to in-laws in Utah to write an MBA paper. So much less screwing around than WinDoze whatever of the time, I never looked back, especially after Service Pack whatever knocked back USB from 2.0 to 1.0, unfixably, on a number of our Lenovos at work.
 

coonmanx

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Oh good one! It seems better now, I use Win10 at work, but for home the Mac ecosystem is just too easy.
Oh God. Windows 10 had that terrible feature that forced you to do updates whether you wanted them or not. Did they ever fix that? Updates on Ubuntu are so much more controlled and easy.
 

coonmanx

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Fixed that for you :)
I have used different Linux versions and no matter which one I ended up with they always worked better than Windows bloatware. I usually do my updates from the command line and each time it is super easy. I used to used Mint. Have dabbled in Fedora as well. Not sure what my son has on his computer right now but he does use Windows for gaming stuff.
 

Head_Unit

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My main operating system is Homo Saipan neural wetware. It's still an alpha version, full of serious bugs but capable of great things.
For the beta version, they are working to eliminate audiophile beliefs in directional electrons, small wooden pucks, etc.
 
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Frank Dernie

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I started off writing software in 1971, I am disappointed in how personal computing went and how it is still going, personally.

When I was working I used PCs and Macs.

When I retired11 years ago I gave away my PCs.

Now Mac is a pale reflection of what I originally liked about it and I keep thinking I should go Linux but so far can't be bothered.
Instead I am using a computer less than I used to - much less, including going back to playing CDs.

I detest touch screens, though understand they are versatile for smart phones but prefer not to use anything where the principle control is via touch screens - which is increasingly a problem, even cars have them :facepalm:
 
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RichB

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Oh God. Windows 10 had that terrible feature that forced you to do updates whether you wanted them or not. Did they ever fix that? Updates on Ubuntu are so much more controlled and easy.
So you oppose forced vaccination against computer viruses :)

- Rich
 

Berwhale

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Oh God. Windows 10 had that terrible feature that forced you to do updates whether you wanted them or not. Did they ever fix that? Updates on Ubuntu are so much more controlled and easy.

Windows is installed on 75% of all desktop & laptop computers globally (Linux is deployed to just over 2% of desktops). How many of those Windows users have any understanding (or desire to understand) the need a particular update? How many of those users would prefer Microsoft to update their system automatically and not have worry about it?

There are some people who prefer to sevice their car themselves, which is great, but do these people go around complaining about the other 98% of drivers who take their car to a garage and pay a professional to do it for them?

In my experience, the biggest difference between Windows and Linux users is that the later are generally self selected. Self selection introduces bias and this is often very much evident in these Windows vs Linux discussions.
 
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