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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

(rosenzweig.io)
838 points alsetmusic | 4 comments | 27 Aug 25 01:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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rowanG077 ◴[27 Aug 25 03:37 UTC] No.45035207[source]▶
Honestly kind of heartbreaking to see her leave asahi Linux. She has done insane work building the vulkan driver from scratch. I wish her well working at Intel. If I ever buy an Intel GPU I can rest much easier it will work well on Linux. If she is working on the Linux driver stack that is.
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finaard ◴[27 Aug 25 06:27 UTC] No.45036071[source]▶
There isn't really anything left to do for her - everything missing (including work on the newer graphics chips) can be somewhat easily done by less talented people, building on her work.

She did the challenging stuff she cares about. One aspect of nerd brain often is that you can hyperfocus on challenging stuff, but can't get the motivation to work on stuff you don't care about - and even what would be a 20 minute task can end up taking days because of that. It's great that she has the self awareness to set goals, and step away once they're done.

I didn't have that in that age - and still sometimes struggle. I was lucky enough that my employer back then recognized my issues, and paired other people with me for doing the stuff I was not interested in, and now usually manage to load those issues onto other co-workers by myself.

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1. rowanG077 ◴[27 Aug 25 06:45 UTC] No.45036201[source]▶
M3, M4 and soon to be M5 are ready to be cracked open :). From what I understand they are actually different somewhat hardware wise. So it's really not like there would not be a continuations of this work. But of course it's natural to want something else after years of working on the project.
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2. finaard ◴[27 Aug 25 07:40 UTC] No.45036599[source]▶
Take into account that she's focusing on the 3D stack, not the overall hardware. Even with hardware differences there's a good chance it's not different enough to make it an interesting new challenge.
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3. zozbot234 ◴[27 Aug 25 08:00 UTC] No.45036737[source]▶
Given the features that have been advertised for the M3+ graphics and compute stack, there's rather a good chance that it is different enough to create big, new challenges for third-party support.
4. rowanG077 ◴[27 Aug 25 08:10 UTC] No.45036786[source]▶
Yes I meant the GPU specifically not the hardware in general. An example is the support for hardware ray tracing in M3 and beyond. In some now deleted french fediverse post Alyssa indicated M3 has a new architecture.