Top all-time · #3309
Kay Singh
Personal blog · singhkays.com · on HN as singhkayshardwaresystems
Kay Singh writes KAY SINGH, a personal blog at singhkays.com about hardware and systems. Since 2019, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “Apple Silicon M1 Power Consumption Deep Dive Part 1: Safari vs. Chrome”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Kay Singh's Blog
Most-linked posts?
- Apple Silicon M1 Power Consumption Deep Dive Part 1: Safari vs. Chrome5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-04-02
- Apple Silicon M1 Power Consumption Deep Dive Part 2: Local Playback4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-05-10
- Lord of War, Meet Lord of Tokens3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-01-08
- Spotify is killing the open podcast ecosystem (2020)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-04-20
- Apple Silicon M1: Black. Magic. Fuckery. (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-21
- It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-02
- Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-24
What Hacker News says?
The M1 already has VP9 acceleration in the “media engine” chunk of the SoC. https://singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-cons... Though Apple doesn’t super explicitly say that. As for AV1…well, we don’t really know yet. That’s deep in the weeds, and it’s entire possible the M2 does have accelerated decoding, but they just didn’t spell that out yet.
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-consumption-pt-2/
on “Apple Unveils M2”Submitted Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery as a story · 1042 points
HN discussionhttps://singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-cons... has a writeup of power consumption for certain tasks on the Mac Mini M1 (not written by me).
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-consumption-pt-1/
on “System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment”Submitted Spotify is killing the open podcast ecosystem (2020) as a story · 453 points
HN discussionNormally, you can specify GIF as a fallback as seen in this article https://www.singhkays.com/blog/detect-rolling-credits-video-... Even though the first preference is AV1, the 2nd, 3rd & 4th preferences are VP9, H264 and GIF which should play
Comment linking /blog/detect-rolling-credits-video-indexer/
on “It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video”Submitted It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video as a story · 321 points
HN discussionI'm running Chromium 73 on Debian 9 and AV1 examples also don't work. edit: I've downloaded first example[1] and video player won't play it neither. edit2: Firefox 66 works! [1] https://www.singhkays.com/blog/its-time-replace-gifs-with-av...
Comment linking /blog/its-time-replace-gifs-with-av1-video/media/scene1/av1_200k.mp4
on “It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video”Submitted Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened? as a story · 242 points
HN discussionFrom what I’ve read, with the M1’s unified memory and the ability to swap extremely quickly, it’s like the SSD is more of a cache, making the limited RAM much less of an issue— https://singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/
on “All-new iMac features the M1 chip”Submitted Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR 10-bit output as a story · 241 points
HN discussion> EVERY single modern laptop has a video decode IC that is optimized for mobile usage Mobile as in Laptop or Smartphone? Early Intel CPU requires 2W+ for AV1 4K60 content hardware decode. That is not in any shape or form "optimized for mobile usage" in my book when. A 500mW or 1W Hardware Decoding on SmartTV is not really "optimized for mobile usage" in my book. Or do you want to look at GPU Hardware accelerated Mot…
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-consumption-pt-1/
on “Every M1 Mac is due for a 2022 refresh with faster M2 chip, new designs”Submitted AV1 codec ecosystem update as a story · 160 points
HN discussion> They won't get there with reference designs from ARM. This nails it! I blogged about how the expected Geekbench scores for Nuvia were better than M1 - https://singhkays.com/blog/arm-cpu-faster-than-apple-m1/ Nuvia was aiming for the server space but Qualcomm probably saw an opportunity to leapfrog many generations of in-house design and catch up to A and M series chips from Apple. For reference - Qualcomm's upcomi…
Comment linking /blog/arm-cpu-faster-than-apple-m1/
on “Qualcomm to Acquire Nuvia: A CPU Magnitude Shift”Submitted Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams as a story · 76 points
HN discussionIt's not that bad. Lower than decoding VP9 with a software decoder https://singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-cons...
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-consumption-pt-2/
on “M1 Pro and M1 Max MBP owners complain of crashes playing HDR YouTube videos”Submitted Upcoming ARM Chip That's Faster Than Apple Silicon M1 as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> The usefulness of hardware acceleration for video decoding is highly debatable. No it isn't. There's a reason it's used on 99% of consumer devices. Hardware companies are generally not in the business of adding to the BOM cost for no reason. Linux alone is the outlier. > It's not always much more energy efficient, but it sometimes is, but less than you'd think, GPUs need power too "As you can see a GPU enabled VLC…
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-consumption-pt-2/
on “Linux kernel VP9 codec V4L2 control interface”Submitted How Spotify Is Killing the Open Podcast Ecosystem as a story · 4 points
HN discussion- re · 2025-10-01
It's unfortunate because there's plenty of good, technical, perfectly readable content in the author's blog archive from 2021 and earlier without the overwrought purple prose. https://singhkays.com/archives/
Comment linking /archives/
on “Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams” Submitted Safari vs. Chrome Energy Consumption in Apple Silicon M1 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy understanding is that the performance is based around Apple silicon being optimized for the NeXT/ObjC model of retain/release, which they got down from 30 nanoseconds on Intel to 6.5ns on M1 (14ns on emulated Intel). https://singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/#is-... IMO 8gb is still barely acceptable for most consumers in 2024, but not for any laptop that you'd expect to get more than say two years…
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/
on “Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models”Submitted Apple M1 Power Consumption Deep Dive Part 1: Safari vs. Chrome as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOne thing to remember though, is that the M1 chip is super optimized for macOS and perhaps these optimizations do not make it the best fit for any other os: According to John Gruber: > retaining and releasing NSObjects is so common on MacOS (and iOS), that making it 5 times faster on Apple Silicon than on Intel has profound implications on everything from performance to battery life. https://daringfireball.net/2020/…
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/
on “Linus Torvalds would like to use an M1 Mac for Linux, but”Submitted Apple Silicon M1 Power Consumption Deep Dive Part 1: Safari vs. Chrome as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIts strongest hold is definitely in Podcasting. Right now, thats basically all a podcast feed is, its an RSS feed. This is largely due to the hands off nature that Apple had with podcasting for so long, though Spotify[0] is trying to wrestle this control over the ecosystem in moving away from publishing an open RSS feed. Its very much alive in this way though, at least for now, and I think its important to recognize…
Comment linking /blog/how-spotify-is-killing-the-open-podcast-ecosystem/
on “Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?”Submitted AV1 Ecosystem Update: July 2019 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf this[0] is accurate and I'm reading it correctly, "Total Package Power Consumption over Time" indicates no more than 4W at any time (and often way less). Maybe someone can read it for me? A Ryzen 7000 U-series CPU by itself has a TDP (this is not power consumption but rather Thermal Design Power) of 15-30W. This seems to approximate power consumption. This[1] explores comparing the previous generation (6800U) to…
Comment linking /blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-consumption-pt-1/
on “The Framework Laptop 13”Submitted AV1 Video Encoders Ecosystem Update – June 2019 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted With Chrome hampering ad-blocking, here's a look at the “Other Chromes” as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The “Other Chromes”: A Chromium-based browser market analysis as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
