[HN Gopher] Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel
___________________________________________________________________
Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel
Author : signa11
Score : 224 points
Date : 2021-12-24 05:37 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unum.cloud)
(TXT) w3m dump (unum.cloud)
| MobileVet wrote:
| Ditto all the comments about swapping from 2019 MBP to 2021 MBP
| and being silent and powerful again.
|
| The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the line
| 2019 i9 would chew through battery on Zoom. I could barely get
| 1.5 hours... which makes the term 'laptop' a little silly.
|
| The 2021 can run long enough I don't pay any attention to the
| battery, which is the point of a laptop - mobile computing.
|
| General computing is even better, people didn't even bother
| bringing their power supplies to work anymore with the M1. They
| could go all day doing development and the occasional meeting.
|
| Power consumption and MagSafe are the hidden gems of the M1
| models imho.
| beeboop wrote:
| I never understood why zoom destroyed my work macbook pro's
| battery either. It was a max of about 90 min like you said.
| Seems ridiculous.
| MobileVet wrote:
| Right? How is video decoding not an optimized chip level
| operation on modern systems? It's network traffic and video
| decoding... it shouldn't required an i9 going full bore.
| wuunderbar wrote:
| There's two components to a Zoom call:
|
| - Encoding: your own camera input.
|
| - Decoding: decoding multiple streams of video.
|
| Your CPU needs to do work on each on these, and depending
| on what codecs are used (and whether your CPU supports it)
| hardware acceleration may or may not be supported.
| MobileVet wrote:
| For sure, appreciate the break out.
|
| I am just shocked that as big as Zoom is, they don't have
| an optimized client for MacBooks. I suppose the market is
| still far smaller than PC based systems... but come on,
| Zoom at el have the resources.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| We Linux users get crushed by zoom, meet, teams, etc. as
| well. They're all based on WebRTC and electron/chromium.
| We don't get hardware decoding or encoding because Google
| doesn't even want to attempt to support it. There are PRs
| for chromium going back 10 years.
|
| I'm surprised WebRTC wouldn't be hardware accelerated on
| macOS, especially considering the great lengths Apple has
| gone to to hide the hardware differences of the various
| machines behind CoreVideo, VideoToolbox, and
| AVFoundation.
|
| Edit - For macOS, it may come down to the fact that
| WebRTC, being a Google project, prefers to use the VP9
| codec. It doesn't look like Apple enables the use of
| hardware accelerated VP9.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Don't forget about the rootkit :-)
| st3fan wrote:
| For the "Copying Memory" test - isn't the page size on M1
| something non-standard? It may be worth it to also try 8KB and
| 16kB block sizes.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I'd really love to find out how much of the m1's performance is
| due to the advantage of having a custom architecture designed to
| make Apple's refcounting mania actually perform well. I.e.
| somehow run all their arm code in a way that emulates the M1
| instructions on a regular ARM chip with similar clocks, cache
| etc... probably very hard to do. Maybe you could patch a binary
| that came out of Apple's compiler to not use the new
| instructions? The atomics they use to do refcounting definitely
| have a measurable performance impact on x86.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There are no "special" M1 refcounting instructions, they're
| just ARMv8.1 LSE atomics made to go really fast. (You can
| confirm this pretty easily: objc_retain uses cas.)
| pja wrote:
| I think that's the OP's point? Apple optimised the snot out
| of their chip for the code they run.
|
| Vertical integration works, in other words?
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| Sure, vertical integration is nice, but why is it so hard -
| maybe even impossible, to achieve similar results without
| it? Windows is such an entrenched ecosystem with millions
| of PCs running it. The code running on most of them isn't
| complete blackbox. I find weird that Intel and AMD are not
| able, despite their cooperation with Microsoft, to achieve
| similar kinds of results.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Are there any 5nm CPUs available yet for x86?
| acdha wrote:
| This isn't a recent problem. Sometimes those companies
| work together but they often are at cross purposes
| because they each have different incentives whereas at
| Apple they all report to the same person.
| howinteresting wrote:
| It's a top-down versus decentralized, market-driven
| approach, with all the upsides and downsides of each.
| howinteresting wrote:
| AMD and Apple aren't playing on a level field currently.
| We'll see how well the 5nm AMDs with the 3d stacked cache
| perform when they come out next year.
| addicted wrote:
| More likely, being able to use a new architecture that
| isn't burdened with decades of legacy compatibility works
| better than an architecture that is burdened with decades
| of backward compatibility.
| acdha wrote:
| ARM isn't new and hasn't been a performance champ for
| most of the decades it's been around. The other ARM
| server implementations tended to be slower but better at
| perf/watt or perf/dollar -- Apple changed that with
| absolute performance wins as well. That suggests that
| it's more the execution by their team than an innate
| architectural advantage, esophagus given how many other
| cleaner architectures were wiped out by x86.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > somehow run all their arm code in a way that emulates the
| M1 instructions on a regular ARM chip
|
| The comment gave me the impression that the author may
| believe M1 has some special instructions for reference
| counting; it does not.
| fulafel wrote:
| That's not correct. Architecture generally refers to the
| ISA and the gp comment referred to special M1 instructions.
| cwizou wrote:
| Yep, I think it's interesting to note how slow x86 was in
| general with refcounting even compared to the PowerPC era.
|
| It's something that showed early on quite a lot when you
| compared what was considered light usage at that point in
| time (say open Word and a couple of Safari tabs), a G4 wasn't
| ridiculous in those scenarios compared to the first Core 2
| machines.
|
| While I'm sure the designers paid particular attention to
| those instructions, it's really x86 being a terrible
| instruction set than the other way around that create that
| particular refcounting gap I think.
| izacus wrote:
| Nah, most of the performance comes from:
|
| - Massive caches
|
| - Really really good power efficiency due to good manufacturing
| node
|
| - Massive RAM bandwidth
|
| - Very fast I/O performance of the builtin SSD
|
| It's a big, expensive chip to manufacture and it pays off with
| overall performance.
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| Does that first infographic retard anybody else? I feel dummer
| for having looked.
| nottorp wrote:
| Funny that everyone does benchmarks and goes ooh and aah at the
| bigger numbers. Or complains about apples to hazelnuts.
|
| How about this: I do NOT want a space heater on my desk or under
| my desk. I have a separate heating system thank you. Looks like
| the MxBlaBla chips can deliver good performance _and_ stay cool.
|
| Now if Apple would hurry with the MxBlaBla desktops... I don't
| need a new laptop atm.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I have the opposite complaint. I couldn't care less about heat
| or battery life. I want the fastest possible machine, period.
| And too many articles about M1 discuss heat and efficiency
| which I just don't care about.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I've been wanting to build a threadripper workstation for a while
| - or at least a top-tier Ryzen. My experience jumping from my
| loaded 2018 MBP (Core i7, Radeon, 32GB memory) to an M1 mini w/
| 1/2 the RAM has caused a paradigm shift in the way I think about
| computing.
|
| I abuse my machines too. I'm a freelance polyglot so on any given
| hour of the day I am working on Python, JS, design work, Clojure,
| Elixir, Ruby, scripting indesign, etc. One of the systems I
| operate runs millions of domain analysis operations a day and I
| tend to run a scaled-down version of the real system when
| developing. I do that for all clients, really.
|
| The MacBook Pro must essentially be viewed as a desktop. The fans
| are always on full blast. The disk access is slower so Docker
| container file system sync tends to suffer. It's not a terrible
| machine in and of itself, but once I "upgraded" the difference
| was night and day.
|
| My M1 Mini has 16gb of ram but is otherwise stock. Assuming
| native ARM execution for a container, Docker is significantly
| faster at most things. Everything is faster. Running an Intel
| build of VSCode is the only thing that has ever stressed it, but
| I've never heard the fan. Disk performance is very impressive for
| such a commodity-grade machine.
|
| We just deployed one in a client site to perform Adobe InDesign
| imposition "as a service" for an on-demand print factory. It's
| handling the work like a champ!
|
| As much as I'd love a new ARM MacBook Pro, the chassis is too big
| for me. Sounds petty, but the OG MacBook Air chassis is the
| ultimate mobile computer for me.
|
| So I think I'll hold off and wait until Apple unveils their Mac
| Pro replacement. If we extrapolate things out even just a little
| - it should be a monster.
| ksec wrote:
| Nitpicks:
|
| >How a DDR5-powered MacBook.....
|
| LPDDR5, which was correctly labeled later in the article. LPDDR5
| is not a variant of DDR5. Hence the title DDR5 powered is
| inaccurate.
|
| >Cores have massive L2 blocks for a total of 28 MB of L2.
|
| 24MB + 4MB. Only 24MB is shared between HP Cores. There is also
| an additional 48MB of System Level Cache on Max ( 24MB on Pro ).
| So in reality the cache difference on Mac system is the reason
| for most ( but not all ) of the performance difference.
|
| >Printing was done via the 5N TSMC lithography standard.
|
| _N5_.
|
| >Memory bus was upgraded to LPDDR5 and claims up to 400 GB/s of
| bandwidth.
|
| On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline
| claimed with both M1 _Pro /Max_. Agains this is probably
| nitpicking.
| masklinn wrote:
| > On Max only. _The Pro only has 200GB /s_. As the previous
| headline claimed with M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably
| nitpicking.
|
| That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop, probably more
| relevant is that CPUs are not able to come anywhere near
| saturating memory bandwidths on the Max: Anandtech tested the
| memory subsystem[0] and it caps out at around 110 per
| performance cluster (which you only need 4 cores to reach, with
| 2 cores already coming close: individual cores reached 102GB/s
| each), plus around 20 for the efficiency cluster.
|
| [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop
|
| It's about on-par with modern-ish dedicated laptop GPUs. The
| mid-range GTX 1060 mobile from 2016 does 200GB/s, a RTX 3070
| mobile from this year does ~450GB/s.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Sure, for the GPU that's just pretty decent, but the real
| advantage is the amount of bandwidth available tot the CPU.
| ac29 wrote:
| But its not available to the CPU. A couple posts up the
| chain has a link showing the CPUs are incapable of coming
| anywhere close to the full bandwidth of the memory.
| ksec wrote:
| Yes they are only really needed for the GPU. But then I dont
| want people to think M1 Pro has the same 400GB/s memory
| bandwidth as M1 Max just from reading the article. Again,
| nitpicking.
| cloudengineer94 wrote:
| Coming from an Intel Macbook user to migrated to the M1 Air and
| then eventually to the M1 Pro I have to say the current Apple
| Silicon Macs are excellent for productivity and casual use.
|
| But for anyone interested in gaming you either get a console or
| need another gaming rig.
| marricks wrote:
| Casual gaming is fine on them for me at least. Magic Arena or
| Civ5, performs well and totally quiet.
|
| I know this isn't most or even many gamers, but it's the gaming
| I did on my intel MacBook and it's way better on M1.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Might also be worth pointing out that there is no mention of
| "battery" in that blog post.
|
| The M1 Max is already a beast of a chip, and lots has been
| written on HN and elsewhere about how it knocks the socks off the
| competition. I'm not going to repeat all of the stuff that has
| already been written all over the internet.
|
| But the most impressive party piece of the new M1s is surely that
| they can knock the socks off the competition _whilst running on
| battery_ and can do so for a decently sustained period of time.
|
| All of the remotely viable competition I am aware of needs to be
| plugged into the mains at all times otherwise you get a very
| throttled experience.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Apparently the Asus Zephyrus beats it on a number of benchmarks
| by a large margin, but I'm not sure if those were just GPU
| benchmarks, and I'm not sure if those were on battery tests.
| Linus Tech Tips did a recent comparison.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| The Asus probably also runs hotter and requires more use of
| fans. And I doubt the battery will last as long on intensive
| tasks.
|
| A big part of the M1 performance per watt efficiency is the
| SoC integrated design. I'm no motherboard designer but I
| think it would be nigh on impossible to replicate it using
| discrete component systems (which I assume is what the Asus
| is).
|
| Will caveat my comment here with a note that I haven't looked
| at comparisons for a while, only around the time the M1 was
| launched.
| izacus wrote:
| It's always telling that these benchmarks are done vs. old
| Intel chips inside the Mac and not the current competitors
| like latest AMD Ryzen series.
|
| Apple chips still win, but nowhere near with the same margin
| as those breathless marketing posts are trying to advertise.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Only the majority of people getting M1s are upgrading from
| macs with those old intel chips, so they're also the most
| relevant to the customer.
| [deleted]
| ranjitcool1 wrote:
| e43gg34gg wrote:
| The new 12900HK from Intel beats M1 Pro in both single core
| performance and multicore performance:
|
| https://news.in-24.com/technology/414335.html
|
| TDP: 35 - 45 watt
|
| but of course, it's better to compare with 3 years old CPU, so
| the results will be much more impressive.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| > The Lenovo notebook with a Core i9-12900HK achieved 1878
| points in the single-threading run of Geekbench 5.4.3, and
| 12,058 points in the multi-threading test.
|
| > A 14-inch MacBook Pro manages around 1750 (single threading)
| or 12,600 points (multithreading)
|
| Higher in single-threaded only.
| e43gg34gg wrote:
| Yes, on this laptop, only single core is faster, but on some
| other laptops the overall performance of the intel CPU is
| higher:
|
| https://www.tweaktown.com/news/82364/intel-
| core-i9-12900hk-m...
|
| On this laptop it achieves > 13000 points in Geekbench
| Multicore.
| oq_pmg wrote:
| Anyone cares to share how M1s performs with virtualization tasks?
| Say Windows desktop or Linux cli?
| izacus wrote:
| Note that while people here are gushing over performance, it's
| worth mentioning that you need to run ARM64 virtualized OSes
| (both Windows and Linux) for it to work.
|
| Getting Intel x64/x86 VMs to work is... fun and they don't
| perform nearly as well as you'd expect from the gushing praise.
|
| So double check if your virtualization use-case actually is
| fine with running ARM guests.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Docker runs a linux VM and it destroys intel macbooks. I hardly
| notice it running on the M1. Flawless experience with minimal
| power drain.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| A coworker of mine is seeing their M1 performing about 2-4x
| slower than my Intel MacBook Pro where Docker is invoked. So
| YMMV
| acdha wrote:
| That sounds like they're running x86 containers. I use
| Podman amd it's very fast with ARM but notably slower when
| emulating x86 and there's at least one case where this hit
| a JVM race condition in some old vendor code which still
| uses JDK8.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm able to use arm containers for my work and it doesn't
| seem any slower than what I'd expect from native
| performance on my M1.
| acdha wrote:
| Ditto: slowness is my cue to rebuild the container for
| both architectures
| JyB wrote:
| Flawlessly.
| raarts wrote:
| Pretty good but note the M1 chip does not support nested
| virtualization. So you _can_ run Windows /ARM but you can't run
| Docker, VMWARE or VirtualBox inside that.
| kissiel wrote:
| I'm using vmware fusion to run ubuntu vms for my daily work.
| The virtualized 20.04 aarch64 is on par with my x64 desktop
| (5900x from amd). Surprisingly in both, ST and MT loads. The
| laptop never runs out of juice at the end of the day when I'm
| on battery. Also there's no perf. penalty for disconnecting the
| charger.
| [deleted]
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Is it worth getting the 14" MBP M1 Max or do you absolutely need
| 16" because of the wattage?
|
| The 16" seems really too big and heavy for me and I use 3090 for
| the GPU stuff.
| bitigchi wrote:
| Watch the latest Linus Tech Tips video about this.
| rbanffy wrote:
| What really impressed me in this was not the expected M1 to older
| x86 performance gap (that poor i9 must have been throttling for
| the whole benchmark while the fans were preparing the laptop for
| takeoff) but the fact you can get a much faster laptop with 4x as
| much memory for about the same price from Apple just a couple
| years later...
| tcmb wrote:
| The price given in the article is not correct though, the 16"
| M1 Max 64GB is actually 3.900 USD (and I presume this is before
| sales tax, I'm from a country where advertised prices include
| VAT).
| grumpyprole wrote:
| The Intel chipsets were limited for a long time in that they
| could only support a maximum of 16GB of LPDDR ram. Yet another
| reason Apple must have been frustrated with Intel.
| bnt wrote:
| Is there a reason Intel put that limitation in place?
| jiqiren wrote:
| Incompetence.
| qayxc wrote:
| Make that market segmentation instead.
|
| Intel intentionally limits consumer grade hardware in
| order to create distinct market segments - from
| overclocking to memory support and PCIe lanes.
| rbanffy wrote:
| True, but that kind of mismanagement is what caused
| Apple's migration to Intel in the first place. While it
| made sense for IBM, losing Apple made no business sense
| for Intel, as Apple was a valuable showcase partner.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Of the management maybe, but it's not like the Intel
| staff who managed to pretty much stay competitive with
| the cutting edge despite them being stuck on 14nm for
| years forgot how to design a memory controller.
| robert_foss wrote:
| Product segmentation probably
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Did I miss it or did the author fail to mention the most
| important variable of this comparison, specifically, the
| frequency at which the memory of the AMD server CPU was operating
| at.
|
| If you're doing memory benchmarks, why omit such essential
| details like memory frequency, as this can have a bigger impact
| here than the CPU itself?
| masklinn wrote:
| The entire thing seems incredibly half-assed e.g. they're
| testing a 64 cores CPU on single-threaded workload (literally
| the only mentions of threads is that they "disable
| multithreading"), they repeatedly harp on the server being
| "over 50k" but the CPU is 5 so I can only assume most of the
| 50k are in the
|
| > 1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory
|
| which you apparently need to... bench hashmap lookups?
|
| The mac's pricing seems pretty bullshit as well as the lowest
| price to get 64GB is $3500 (Max with 24 GPU cores, and a measly
| 512GB SSD), which does not qualify as "around $3000" in my
| books.
| jhgb wrote:
| Setting aside the fact that Threadripper is not really a server
| CPU, it tops at DDR4-3200 when it comes to memory support.
| Considering the custom build, it seems the most likely option.
| (As in, why would it use anything slower for no good reason?)
| glandium wrote:
| The Threadripper Pro has 1TB memory, which means it's likely
| ECC registered, which is slower at the same frequency, and it
| might not even be DDR4-3200 in the first place because it's
| rather new in ECC, and server hardware manufacturers like to
| use old stuff.
| ashvardanian wrote:
| Its configured with the fastest memory possible on the
| Threadripper. The exact specs and RAM stick models match the
| ones mentioned in the preceding article, I have linked below.
| We didnt include those, as we don't know the exact specs of RAM
| modules in MacBooks.
|
| https://unum.cloud/post/2021-11-25-ycsb/#our-toys
| carlycue wrote:
| Tim Cook grabbed the infinity gauntlet and said "Fine, I'll do it
| myself".
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I've always wondered, how much of the M1 gains comes from ALL
| components (not just the CPU but more importantly also the GPU,
| controllers, etc) on its SoC being fab'ed on the smallest
| industry node size that competitors can't use yet.
|
| It's not uncommon on x86 platforms for GPUs, memory controllers,
| etc to run on 1-2 generation old nodes while the CPU uses the
| latest tech.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| This is a key difference. The amount of power required to drive
| bond pad loads can be substantial and there's a major speed hit
| because you have to drive the larger capacitance of the load
| which only can be juiced with more power. Keeping it all on-
| chip is definitely a major factor because you have none of this
| sucking up power and speed (at the trade of power).
| Tagbert wrote:
| Sure, the fab size is part of the story, but we have also seen
| a general tendency for efficiency from Arm chips and the reason
| that they are used in mobile devices. Apple has also been
| willing to spend money on larger caches and wider buses in
| their SOCs to remove bottlenecks. Finally, Apple tunes the
| processor performance to optimize for processes that Mac OS
| uses a lot. That is possible because of their tight vertical
| integration and I have not seen on the more heterogenous
| Windows/Linux + Intel environment.
| [deleted]
| jeroenhd wrote:
| While the M1 is definitely impressive, Apple has been known for
| their lacking cooling designs and weird performance curves back
| in the Intel days.
|
| This comparison maybe Apples to Apples, but it's not really
| apples to apples. Modern Intel and even older Intel can bring a
| lot more to the table than the Mac Pro from a few years back
| could deliver because of Apple's design decisions. You could make
| the argument that you're just benchmarking Apple Macbooks to
| choose a platform to run macOS on, but then the datacenter CPU
| doesn't really add anything.
|
| If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU into the comparison, at
| least grab a modern Intel chip for your benchmarks. The 9980HK is
| from two years ago, back when Intel was already losing ground to
| AMD. The 10th, 11th and 12th gen processors made significant
| performance improvements since then (12900HK performing twice as
| well in some benchmarks compared to the 9980HK), at the cost of
| thermals and power usage.
|
| The M1 will probably still beat a modern Intel chip, but by a
| significantly smaller margin in terms of performance (battery
| usage, though, is a whole different story).
| throw8932894 wrote:
| On some intel CPUs charger included with Macbook does not not
| satisfy CPUs power consumption. So if you ran CPU on 100%, it
| will use battery to get extra power, and macbook will
| eventually die, after battery reaches 0%.
|
| This is not how you design "workstation". Macbooks are just
| toys.
| plantain wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| I've only ever seen this happen if you use the lower wattage
| charger from a 12" Macbook Air with a higher spec'd Macbook
| Pro.
| wincy wrote:
| I almost had this happen on my M1 MacBook Air yesterday. I
| used the included charger on my M1 MacBook Air a few days
| ago. I was watching The Witcher Season 2 HEVC 4K HDR (so
| the highest quality) on it and had Cura (3D printing
| software) on in the background. I had the notification
| "MacBook is not charging", since it was using power too
| fast apparently.
|
| Not sure if it was draining but the battery wasn't charging
| either. I closed Cura and it resolved the issue though, I
| went from 90% battery to 10% in about 2 hours though before
| plugging the laptop in.
| gerardvivancos wrote:
| It is easy to make my 2019 16" MBP consume more than the
| 96W that the included charger provides. Loading the CPU
| alone gets you close to that. Just add some discrete GPU
| work and there you go.
|
| In fact, since connecting an external display enables the
| dGPU, the consumption can increase enough to get you over
| 96W with the CPU alone
| can16358p wrote:
| Nope. The charger provided with 16" MBP (2019) can't
| delived the maximum required wattage to the MBP if
| everything (CPU, GPU, screen brightness) is at max usage.
| It's no issue for "everyday use" of most users, for sure,
| but for a pro machine...
|
| Stupid, but true.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| This happened with my 2019 16" MBP (i9 8-core 2.3GHz). No
| charger, including Apple's own 96W, was enough when doing
| something heavy like CPU video encoding.
|
| Last year I had to convert some blu-ray movies so I could
| stream them to my TV and it was common to go to bed with
| 100% and wake up at 20% or so. Throttling kicks in when the
| battery is too low, so I don't think it would shut down,
| but yeah, this was one of its flaws.
|
| It also overheats and throttles very quickly (~1 minute)
| even with a more aggressive fan curve or even fans manually
| set to run at 100%. This can be managed by disabling
| Intel's Turbo Boost or by using Monterey's power saving
| mode, but that's not something one expects to do on a "Pro"
| machine.
| brobinson wrote:
| This would happen on my late 2013 MBP using its original
| charger. Playing a CPU/GPU intensive game would result in a
| slow net draw from the battery.
| aemreunal wrote:
| While I don't agree with parent's declaration of all
| MacBooks being toys, that battery drain issue while being
| plugged in definitely did happen. Couldn't find a source
| for it just now, though. It used to happen on my 15" 2013
| MacBook Pro when it was plugged in and I was playing games
| (BioShock Infinite was one such game).
| richardw wrote:
| A non-zero percentage of the world GDP originates from work
| done on MacBooks, to differentiate it from most "toys". I
| don't have one so I'm not talking my (mac)book here.
| qeternity wrote:
| My desktop rig went from a recent overclocked i5 32gb ram
| hackintosh to an 8gb ram m1 mini when they first came out, and
| the performance was mind blowing. I also grabbed an m1 mbp at
| the same time, which demolished my previous intel mbp but the
| hackintosh comparison is the one that sealed the debate for me.
| I had a massive cooler installed and yet the m1 mini was easily
| twice as fast.
|
| I couldn't get my hands on the 16gb versions at launch, and for
| the first year they were still so much faster even when
| swapping 6-10gb but I am feeling the ram crunch a bit these
| days. I recently upgraded the rest of my team to the new 14
| inch pros with 32gb ram and I'll be grabbing one for myself
| when I have the time next year to do a time machine transfer.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU
|
| Do you mean CPU?
| klelatti wrote:
| > At the cost of thermals and power usage
|
| Isn't this the whole point? Sure if you give Intel a bigger
| thermal envelope it will do better than the M1 but that really
| is Apples to oranges.
| Redoubts wrote:
| Depends if you feel the thermal constraints are inherent to
| the form factor, or simply sloppy engineering.
| zamalek wrote:
| If your machine is perpetually sitting on your desk then that
| doesn't really matter. For personal use, power and thermals
| are only a serious concern away from your desk.
|
| My 3950x runs circles around the M1 work has me use. I use
| both for the same task. Apples to apples.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| But it's one of those things where you might change your
| behaviour or priorities if something becomes possible. In
| this case, having all day battery life on a laptop while
| also having maximum performance.
|
| Same way we started using laptops for all our work.
| Desktops are always more powerful in absolute terms and
| cheaper to boot. But most people don't even buy desktops
| for home use.
| zamalek wrote:
| > priorities if something becomes possible.
|
| A CPU isn't the only reason there is to use a
| desktop/fixed setup. While Apple has truly fantastic
| monitors, there's also the keyboard to consider.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Horse is a lot faster than a motorcycle if all you've got for
| fuel is oats, hay, and water.
|
| Adding in some gasoline would be apples-to-oranges.
| fossuser wrote:
| More like a Tesla vs a gas guzzling rocket car. Rocket car
| may be technically faster under optimal conditions - but
| everything else about it sucks.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| It's not clear to this reader which of Intel or Apple you
| mean for each of your examples.
|
| "Everything else about it sucks" certainly seems like it
| doesn't apply to either.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'd guess it's obvious to others (and probably you) given
| one in the example is a lot more efficient, but for
| clarity the M1 Max was the Tesla.
| klelatti wrote:
| Your analogy made perfect sense to me - I'm still trying
| to understand the whole horses and motorcycles thing!
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Something that does not perform well when operated in an
| environment it is ill-suited to: trying to run a
| motorcycle on oats. Or an Intel processor on a laptop
| that sacrificed adequate cooling for aesthetics. Or a
| Tesla in a place without many electric charging stations.
|
| None of these condemn the device, but do indicate the
| specific use case wasn't well thought out.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| It's down to brute force raw power and performance per watt
| nowadays. Apple mostly wins the latter but the former is
| inevitably going to kill demand for those climate unfriendly
| servers due to cooling and powering problems. We await the
| high end Mac systems with much interest.
| izacus wrote:
| Since those high-end Mac systems won't be able to run in
| datacenters, what's the point there? You're pretty much at
| the mercy of whatever Intel, AMD and other ARM
| manufacturers release.
| api wrote:
| Apple should license the M1 core architecture to someone
| to make server chips with it. They'd make some extra
| money and lose nothing... in fact they might gain since
| it would build market share around the architecture.
| sgt101 wrote:
| So obvious, and yet apple is worth $3tr...
| klelatti wrote:
| If the massive bandwidth shared CPU / GPU memory approach
| is optimum on the desktop for many workloads then one
| would think that there would be a sizeable market for
| that in the cloud - after all many desktop workloads
| (video editing) for example are moving to the cloud.
|
| Can't see it being Apple but feels like an opportunity
| for someone.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Because Apple wasn't interested in doing that some
| engineers left to found their own company doing Apple
| style cores for serves. It was called Nuvia. It was
| eventually bought by Qualcomm who decided to try to use
| those cores in Mobile despite the actual designs not
| being suited for that. I feel like I shouldn't just spill
| Charlie's scoop on exactly why[1] but it doesn't look
| good.
|
| [1]https://semiaccurate.com/2021/12/01/how-is-the-
| qualcomm-nuvi...
| ksec wrote:
| My suggestion it to watch the investor day meeting along
| with Ananadtech reporting on the issue. As usual not sure
| what Charlies is on about.
|
| >who decided to try to use those cores in Mobile despite
| the actual designs not being suited for that. I
|
| Not sure where that idea came from. It was designed with
| similar wattage in mind as current A15.
| klelatti wrote:
| > Mac systems won't be able to run in datacenters
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/pm/ec2-mac/
| adamcstephens wrote:
| These are seemingly MacOS only which doesn't really
| qualify for the vast majority of data center uses.
| They're here to build software for Apple devices and
| that's pretty much it.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| From that link, the use cases are:
|
| > Developing, building, testing, and signing iOS, iPadOS,
| macOS, WatchOS, and tvOS applications on the Xcode IDE.
|
| I thought it was more for when you don't have a choice
| (Apple forces you to) than general usage. Are things
| going to change?
| klelatti wrote:
| IIRC the MacOS EULA forbids anything else
|
| but ..
|
| When Linux boots natively on these systems that
| restriction will fall away.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Well not sure about your data center comment. But it has
| gotten those making purchasing decisions asking about ARM
| based and their alternatives. Apple doing ARM lends
| legitimacy to other ARM vendors where previously the
| topic could lead to ridicule.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Apple has been known for their lacking cooling designs and
| weird performance curves back in the Intel days.
|
| Isn't that at least partly because Intel over promissed and
| under delivered.
| starfallg wrote:
| The funny thing is that the Threadripper isn't even a DC/Server
| CPU, it's a workstation CPU. The whole comparison is undermined
| by the design choices.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| It's undermined by comparing a laptop to a $50,000
| workstation? In that it is unfair _to the workstation_?
| ashvardanian wrote:
| Sure, you can configure a cheaper server with just the
| hardware needed for this benchmark, this is just the
| fastest machine we have in our cluster RAM-wise, that has
| one NUMA node. That's why we added it as an extra point of
| reference. The core comparison is of course between two
| generations of MacBooks, as the title suggests.
|
| Plus, $3000 on Macbooks isnt going to exclusively to CPU
| and RAM either. You buy the whole system. I am not even
| sure if we can find out the price of the M1 alone. I guess
| it will be around $500 for the M1 SoC vs $6000 for the
| Threadripper, still a 12x difference, even if we keep their
| power consumption out of the equation.
| [deleted]
| zeusk wrote:
| In a way, yes. They use a 3995WX with 128 threads but the
| benchmark is single threaded?
|
| Also, 3995WX is definitely NUMA so their benchmark is
| skewing the results.
| ashvardanian wrote:
| This benchmark isn't single threaded, it utilizes all the
| physical cores found in the machine, 64 on Threadripper
| and 10 on Mac.
|
| See the source for details: https://github.com/unum-
| cloud/HashTableBenchmark/blob/00f94c...
| [deleted]
| ilogik wrote:
| according to rumours, the upcoming Mac Pro chips will have
| 2x to 4x the core count of the M1 Pro/Max
| starfallg wrote:
| Whether it is fair (or not) is a value judgement. All I
| said was that the comparison was done poorly.
|
| Those choices together with single-threaded memory-
| intensive benchmarks (esp. those sensitive to memory
| latency) is problematic because the whole point of using a
| workstation CPU like the Threadripper Pro is for multi-
| threaded performance with a wide memory bus (sometimes
| NUMA). And they make a big deal out of it, emphasising the
| $50k price tag to paint the M1 Pro/Max as some sort of
| "Dragon Slayer". If they did a more rounded comparison
| including stuff like kernel compile times, etc. then maybe
| they are justified, but as it stands it's just
| unprofessional.
| klelatti wrote:
| It would be utterly astonishing if the the MacBook
| outperformed the workstation on all benchmarks. The post
| doesn't claim that it does.
|
| The fact that the MacBook outperforms the workstation on
| some benchmarks is an interesting and, for some users,
| relevant datapoint. To point this out with full and
| detailed disclosure of the tests performed isn't
| unprofessional at all.
| ashvardanian wrote:
| Thanks a lot for support! It feels like some people
| forgot to read not just the title of the article, but
| also the subtitle...
| klelatti wrote:
| I genuinely thought it was one of the most interesting
| articles on the M1 we've seen. Thanks for your work in
| putting it together - any follow ups would be much
| appreciated.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The 3995WX is a 6 grand chip. Not cheap, but you don't need
| to pay 50k for a workstation if you're going to compare it
| to a Macbook. That 1TB of RAM will be a much more
| significant part of the cost of the machine, but you could
| never get that in an M1 Mac so the cost is a useless
| metric.
|
| I can't tell if these tests make use of multiple threads or
| not. I don't think they are, because the 128 threads should
| absolutely crush the 16 threads of the 9980HK.
|
| If it's not, Apple's flagship chips are sorely losing to a
| chip that's been optimised to bring multicore performance
| by sacrificing single core performance. It'd be like
| bringing an F1 car to a dirt track and measuring
| performance against a rally car, and still losing to the
| F1. That wouldn't bode well for an M1 Mac Pro at all,
| unless there's some serious GPU power hidden in there that
| an AMD GPU wouldn't be able to provide at a similar price.
| danachow wrote:
| > It'd be like bringing an F1 car to a dirt track and
| measuring performance against a rally car, and still
| losing to the F1.
|
| Huh?
| sschueller wrote:
| I found the i9 in macbook pro so severally throttled most
| likely because of heat that it underperforms compared to a 10
| year old high end i7. The i9 in that from factor is pointless
| IMO.
| afr0ck wrote:
| I have an Intel I9 workstation machine, I use it mainly for
| developement. Let me tell you something: it's the most
| horrible machine I've ever had in terms of performance (based
| on compiling a very large C code base).
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| I "downgraded" from a top spec Macbook Pro 2019 16" i9 9980HK
| with 64GB RAM to the new 14" M1 Pro with 32GB. Fans are at 0 RPM
| all the time, I haven't heard them yet. It compiles the same
| Android project without a sweat and with 0 RPM fan speed. The i9
| was hitting 100C and maximum RPM in the same use case and took
| maybe three times longer. And the new macbook was about 25%
| cheaper than the 16" I bought in 2020. It's a completely
| different league - worth all the money I spent.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Its such a nice experience to not hear fans or burn your lap
| with couch programming.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I did the same but to an Air 16gb. Much cheaper, mostly faster
| and doesn't have the quirks I had with the 16". I had it
| replaced 3x and it's was still shit; overheated and 3x just
| completely died... It was the most expensive computer I bought
| in since the 90s (Sun or SGI were more expensive) and it was a
| total horror show. Apple did give me new ones no problems but
| they never worked well for me; fans always on and burning so
| hot that it was uncomfortable to work on. This new air is
| really fabulous; always snappy and it does not heat up at all.
| It's actually a bit too cold.
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| A colleague is working on the same project with an Air 16GB
| and doesn't complain. It's crazy that it doesn't even have
| active cooling and can be used for serious CPU intensive
| work. The 16" model was a big Apple failure. I had to use it
| in clamshell mode with an external monitor because having the
| macbook open with an external monitor would make the macbook
| run a lot hotter and the fans would spin much louder all the
| time. That was a pretty well known problem with the GPU and
| they never fixed it (probably some HW issue).
| raihansaputra wrote:
| Apple messed up the PCB/config that the GPU will
| automatically run at 18W (full tilt) when an external
| monitor + internal monitor is used. The fix in the later
| OSes was just to lower the power limit at 15W. That 16" was
| a really nice laptop in form factor and physical experience
| (monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and especially the speakers),
| but the that GPU issue + Intel heat and energy profile
| makes it an annoying computer to use.
|
| I've transitioned to a 16GB M1 MBA too and it's a dream.
| CPU temps < 60C on dev loads on a hot day (I work outside).
| 16GB RAM means low swap usage (I used 8GB M1 MBA before
| this and it was still snappy except on the very limits).
| Still can drive a 4k monitor or mirrored Sidecar (with
| BetterDummy) without a peep. Building my work project takes
| the same time as the i7 16" MBP without the fan noise.
| marsouin wrote:
| Exact same issues, I just changed my MB Pro Intel core i9 16"
| for a M1 Max 16", it's the biggest technological jump I have
| ever seen and the M1 Max is even cheaper.
| Joeri wrote:
| The m1 air is the star of the show for me, because it is a
| machine that overdelivers to such a degree. I got one to
| replace my laptop, and to my surprise discovered that it
| outperforms my i5 9600K desktop, by a noticeable margin,
| without even getting warm. Also, it's really nice to finally
| have actual all day battery life. For the brief window that
| our offices reopened I would leave my charger at home and
| still have 20% to 30% left by the end of the day.
| eertami wrote:
| The 9600k is an entry level CPU from 3 years ago.
| Personally I don't think it is surprising that it gets
| matched by a premium modern CPU. I do think there's
| something wrong with your desktop however, because in raw
| benchmarks the difference between an M1 and 9600k is minor
| - and it should not be a noticeable speed improvement
| unless something else in your configuration is causing
| problems.
|
| Similarly, Intel's 1185g7 laptop CPU also goes toe to toe
| with the 9600k, with comparable performance to the M1
| (albeit with worse efficiency). But the efficiency isn't a
| bother personally as the 1185g7 laptop still lasts all day
| for my usage. I do have an M1 MBP and have used them side
| by side, and I'm not really sold yet. Admittedly part of
| the problem is the locked down hardware and lack of support
| for Linux - but in the mean time I'm always reaching for
| the Intel laptop and do not miss the MBP.
| wtallis wrote:
| > The 9600k is an entry level CPU from 3 years ago.
|
| It's not entry-level. It's the fastest 6-core part from a
| product line that included 2, 4, 6 and 8-core desktop
| parts. Every model in that product line that was better
| than the 9600k could only be described as high-end.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I don't think entry-level means what you think it means.
| Joeri wrote:
| Very much doubt the desktop has a configuration problem
| as it is set up the same as the laptop.
|
| I think the difference is down to the single core
| performance edge that the m1 has. In theory multi core
| benchmarks should dictate the performance you get, but in
| practice it seems a lot of things, even development
| tools, depend a lot on single core performance.
| dharma1 wrote:
| Absolutely! I have the 16gb Air m1 and a fully loaded 16"
| M1 max - the max is collecting dust most of the time. For
| most of my workloads the Air is nearly as fast, completely
| silent and super duper lightweight.
| [deleted]
| grishka wrote:
| I went from a 2012 retina macbook pro to a maxed out (except
| storage) 14" M1 Max. The performance difference keeps blowing
| my mind on a daily basis. One Android project I sometimes work
| on took ~45 minutes for a release build on the old one but only
| 11 on the new one -- and as it turns out I had spotlight
| indexing stuff in the background the whole time, and the SDK is
| still x86 so it runs through emulation. Fans do spin up
| sometimes but you have to try really hard to make it happen. On
| the old macbook the fans were spinning literally all the time
| and the CPU temperature has never fallen below around 60deg _on
| idle_. That part of the case above the keyboard was always hot
| to the touch, on the M1 it 's barely warm.
| charwalker wrote:
| Part of that is Intel cannot get to low enough wattage on
| their mobile chips to sustain anything more than a quad core
| for very long. AMD is beating them but ARM is in a league of
| its own after decade+ of mobile focused development.
|
| I'm excited to see how this changes x86 systems, mobile and
| desktop.
| xcambar wrote:
| I assume 2021 and not 2012, right?
| grishka wrote:
| No, I do mean 2012. The first ever macbook with a retina
| display. I managed to skip all those troublesome models.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| So a decade old MacBook is only 4x slower than the
| cutting edge one?
| treefry wrote:
| Not surprising as Moore's law had stopped applying to
| CPU. Assuming each year CPU gets 20% improvement, from
| 2012 to 2021 the latest cpu is 5x more powerful than the
| old one. Considering 30% performance loss for converting
| x86 instructions to ARM, 4x is a reasonable number.
| sudhirj wrote:
| For single core workloads, probably. Didn't we hit the
| clock speed cap around 2010?
| [deleted]
| greatjack613 wrote:
| There is a lot more in single core performance then just
| clock speed, in fact ipc is even more important then
| clock speed when it comes to single core computing
| bla3 wrote:
| Building a project isn't a single-core workload usually,
| though.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| You haven't seen most Android projects that have a
| massive legacy module that Gradle spends 5 minutes
| compiling and doing nothing else. Seeing those 7 lines
| say IDLE is a daily experience
| grishka wrote:
| Isn't C++ compilation mostly single-core-bound still? Of
| course it does compile as many files in parallel as there
| are cores, but it's not possible to compile a single file
| in multiple threads.
| khuey wrote:
| Yeah but most projects that have compile times long
| enough to care about have many source files.
| miked85 wrote:
| I'd expect a 10 year old laptop to be quite a bit slower
| than a new one, M1 or not.
| grishka wrote:
| I ran this build once again now making sure nothing heavy
| was running in the background. It took 11 minutes and 5
| seconds. The fans did audibly spin up and all CPU cores
| were 100% loaded (asitop output:
| https://i.imgur.com/OY36RVB.png). Here's the breakdown of
| how long each build step took:
| https://i.imgur.com/TcdfA4L.png
|
| Do keep in mind though that the NDK (which takes like 90%
| of the build time) is still built for x86. So the 4x
| difference is mighty impressive when you consider that
| you're comparing an old x86 CPU running its native code
| to ARM emulating x86, even if doing so via translation.
| sprite wrote:
| It will get even better once everything is arm native.
| Even the Java Sdk that comes with current version of
| android studio runs through Rosetta.
| grishka wrote:
| Hm, no, android studio itself runs natively, and the JDK
| I'm using is native too, from adoptium.net. Most android
| build tools (d8, r8, etc) are written in java so they run
| natively. Building the java part in any project is
| _really_ fast. Like, freakishly fast. 3 seconds to
| compile a thousand classes, WAT?!
| sprite wrote:
| Ahh that's awesome then. I thought the JDK that shipped
| with android studio was x86. I'll try the one adoptium.
| [deleted]
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear how your old laptop could improve
| after getting cleaned of dust and with fresh thermal paste.
| grishka wrote:
| I did clean it kinda regularly and did replace the thermal
| paste once. It stopped throttling when I put it on a stand
| to provide some airflow from below.
| secondcoming wrote:
| When I replaced the thermal paste on my Dell 7750 with
| Conductonaut Extreme my builds were no longer thermally
| throttling the CPU.
| ksec wrote:
| Do we have any thermal paste or other solution that works
| for 5+ years without degradation? ( I think I looked into
| this before but I forgot the answer )
| JyB wrote:
| Same experience with a M1 16GB. I have never felt such a jump
| in experience from a laptop to another. The M1 stays cold and
| silent and the battery lasts much longer, it's simply
| incredible. Even when I tried to throw games at it. It exceed
| my expectations.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| I skipped the fan entirely and went from Macbook Pro Intel I9
| to Macbook Air M1. Plenty of performance, much better battery
| time and size is more comfortable than the 14"/16".
| agency wrote:
| The battery life is wild. Watched a full length movie on a
| 14" M1 the other day and checked the battery... 95%
| malshe wrote:
| I have a 2018 MBP with i9. The fans drive me crazy. I remember
| once I was in a meeting with my PhD student who was sitting
| across from me. The MBP was on my desk in clamshell mode placed
| in between us. Suddenly its fans started and my student jumped
| from the chair because the fan noise was so intense. It's been
| more than 3 years and the fans are still noisy. Just to be
| sure, there is no lint inside it. I cleaned it just the last
| week.
| chrischen wrote:
| I also downgraded from the top 16" intel mac but to the 13 inch
| pro. I'm thinking I might keep it as it's almost as powerful as
| the new M1 with much much longer battery (new 14 inch battery
| is comparable with older intel macbooks).
| beebeepka wrote:
| Yeah,we know. But consider the this: your baseline is a shit
| laptop. Apple knew they were releasing a turd. Maybe even did
| so semi-intentionally because that would make new chips seem
| even better.
|
| My personal Ryzen 5800H powered Lenovo doesn't overheat and I
| haven't heard the fan I over a month despite doing all kinds of
| lightweight development and browsing on it.
|
| Meanwhile, my fairly expensive work issued 6 core Intel Xeon
| Lenovo from 2019 sounds like it's about to take off throughout
| most of the day.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| YMMV though, I briefly owned a 5900HS/3080 Zephyrus G15 and
| though it was indeed a powerhouse, it absolutely got more hot
| and way WAY more noisy than my 16" M1 Pro does now doing the
| same things, while overall not being as nice of a laptop (far
| worse screen, somewhat chintzy build, meh speakers, barrel
| power connector, huge power brick, bad battery life, etc).
|
| That G15 was better at some things than my M1 Pro is now but
| not by enough that I'd want it over the M1 Pro, even
| considering the price difference.
| leetcrew wrote:
| what kinds of workloads are you running? I bought the exact
| same asus laptop to be a portable gaming machine, but I've
| been surprised at how nice it is for normal laptop stuff.
| unless I'm playing a game or compiling a large project, I
| just leave it in "silent" mode and never hear fans.
|
| everything you say about the build quality is definitely
| true, but I couldn't find anything better that a) had a
| 3080/3070 and b) was actually in stock.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It was mainly gaming that would get it roaring, but
| compiling code among other things would spin the fans up
| a bit too. I didn't put it in "silent" mode except when
| doing light things like web browsing because it felt like
| a waste of the hardware otherwise with how silent mode
| downclocks and limits boost speeds.
| addicted wrote:
| This thread is really interesting to read because if the same
| thread had been made a couple of years ago, before Apple
| released its M1 laptops, it would have been filled with Apple
| fans who would be saying that the Intel MBPs were the best
| thing since sliced bread and that the users were doing
| something wrong.
|
| I think the only time Apple fans actually accepted that an
| Apple product was actually bad was the trashcan Mac Pro, and
| that was only because they went half a decade without
| upgrading it and they replaced a beloved design with one that
| was branded as a trash can.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| There is only a small percentage of users of products who
| can be described as 'fans' in the sense that they will
| defend the products even in the face of overwhelming
| evidence that they have problems.
|
| There is a much larger percentage of people for whom the
| world is not black and white, there is no picking of a
| 'team', and they will use whatever works for them or make
| do with what they have, moving between brands and models
| over time.
|
| Please don't push the 'Apple fans' narrative here. There
| are lots of us who are just trying to get stuff done and
| have civilised discussion, not engage in polarised mid
| slinging.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The last few years have been Apple fans pissed off about
| the terrible keyboard they threw in, the touchbar, and the
| notebooks getting too slim at the expense of performance
| and cost. I don't remember anyone hyping up the last-gen
| laptops.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Hmm. I find the interesting part of this thread is all the
| deny at any cost comments. Apple has created a
| power/performance tradeoff that is way off the charts from
| the performance path that Intel was on. The deniers keep
| saying there must be lint in the Intel machine, Apple's
| thermal design wasn't good, etc. There is plenty of hard
| data out there with respect to numerous Intel based
| machines. Intel cannot come close to the power/performance
| point that Apple is now occupying.
|
| Here is a different sort of data point. I have two Windows
| programs I need to run on my M1 Pro MB 16. One is an Intel
| binary and one has been recompiled to ARM. I am running
| them both under Win11 ARM on a Parallels virtual machine. I
| am getting better and more responsive performance than I
| ever did on dedicated Intel hardware. No noticeable fan
| noise or heat. It is really just a different beast than I
| have ever used before. Of course, native Mac apps are also
| much quicker.
|
| Here is another data point from my own machines. 2019 i9 MB
| Pro Geekbench single core score is 1024. x86 Geekbench
| single core on M1 MB Pro 16" (x86 emulation) is 1347.
| Native ARM Geekbench on Win 10 virtual machine running on
| M1 Pro is 1560. Native single core Geekbench on M1 Pro is
| 1734. Multi core is 12400.
|
| Look, Intel performance gains over the past decade have
| been incremental at best. It makes sense to be skeptical
| that Apple could change the rules like this. I suggest
| folks just get one of these machines and run their own
| benchmarks. Apple will give you a full refund, no questions
| asked for 14 days from the date you receive it. Don't just
| throw stones, try it yourself.
| billjings wrote:
| > This thread is really interesting to read because if the
| same thread had been made a couple of years ago, before
| Apple released its M1 laptops, it would have been filled
| with Apple fans who would be saying that the Intel MBPs
| were the best thing since sliced bread and that the users
| were doing something wrong.
|
| I work on an Apple laptop; all of my colleagues work on
| Apple laptops.
|
| Maybe what you say is true in the spaces you find yourself
| in, but in all the spaces I chat about these things
| (Android developer community) none of your claims are true.
| The general feeling about the last generation of Intel MBPs
| was initially one of relief that they didn't f** up the
| keyboard, and then slow dawning disappointment as we
| realized that the thermal design of the machine was
| abysmal.
|
| Up until this most recent M1Pro/Max iteration, things were
| getting so bad that many professionals I know were at least
| considering a move off of the Mac platform that most of us
| have been on for a decade or more. Many of us need to
| compile iOS code occasionally, of course, which means we're
| kind of stuck.
|
| The M1Max has completely changed all that. One of the
| senior engineers I know actually put together some
| benchmarking numbers of compile times, assembled a
| spreadsheet of every engineer with a pending hardware
| upgrade, and added up the numbers for a budget ask to buy
| every single engineer at their company a top of the line
| 64GB M1Max. The final bill added up to hundreds of
| thousands of dollars, and just putting it together took a
| lot of time for this person.
|
| It was approved!
|
| So yeah, there's some real turkey on the bone here. It's
| not all fanboy hype.
| matwood wrote:
| > Apple fans who would be saying that the Intel MBPs were
| the best thing since sliced bread and that the users were
| doing something wrong
|
| Maybe if you only mean the 2015 models, sure. But models
| between 2015 and the M1s were trounced by everyone, even
| Apple fans, for their keyboard issues and throttling the
| i9.
|
| I had a 2017 i7, and it was the worst Mac I ever owned.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Yeah, my Apple machine until June this year was a 2015
| MBP and people were willing to pay almost full price for
| it until the M1s came out.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I met with a coworker recently who has the intel macbook and I
| was shocked to hear the amount of noise coming out of the thing
| while just running the basic programs we need to run. It was
| even discharging while plugged in until they closed enough
| stuff and turned docker off. Meanwhile I haven't had any issues
| with the M1.
| sixothree wrote:
| Honestly, the thermals in intel macbooks were completely
| laughable.
| bouke wrote:
| I'm using TurboBoost Switcher Pro to battle this issue. It
| keeps the machine cool(er) and thus quiet(er). Combined with
| the VRM cooling mod, it is doable with heavy workloads.
| Battery life is still bad though and now the bottom gets very
| hot.
| kzrdude wrote:
| That sounds like a laptop full of lint though
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| It's unfortunately not. The CPUs of the 2019 16" Intel MBPs
| are right at the thermal wall, and after removing so much
| mass, the Macs have no way to remove heat other than
| cycling fans extremely aggressively.
|
| We hear almost nothing but complaints about them from long-
| time Mac users who are used to historically quieter
| devices. Under any load, like a few minutes of Zoom or
| Teams while connected to an external display, the fans are
| persistently and disconcertingly audible. It's become
| almost a meme in video conferences over the past two years
| when someone unmutes to speak and the fan noise overwhelms
| the noise suppression that you know they have a Mac.
|
| Display artifacts and connection issues to USB-C displays
| aren't uncommon on the 2017-2019s either, but it still
| sounds like a torture test when running two 4k TB3 displays
| or a single 5k on one. The M1s are the first Macs I've
| recommend to friends and family in almost a decade.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Brand new Intel 16-inch MBP will blast fans doing even the
| simplest tasks. A single Twitch live stream open in the
| background. Running IntelliJ. Docked 4k monitor. Especially
| in clamshell mode, the fans will ramp up and stay ramped
| up, and the top row of the keyboard will get so hot that
| the machine is unusable without an external keyboard.
|
| (I use one for work, it is terrible. And I used to have one
| for personal use, which I traded for a M1 Air)
| vmchale wrote:
| I'm on an M1 (8GB RAM) and it completes my Q/data science stuff
| faster than my desktop (through rosetta). I use it for fun
| mainly but wow!!
| phyalow wrote:
| I have a 16" M1 Max, fully loaded. The thermal profile on this
| thing is insane, here is a screenshot of the internals after
| being on for a couple of hours with a bunch of chrome tabs open
| https://imgur.com/a/yjXxdvJ its barely warmer than body
| temperature.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Doing something like code compilation would be a better test
| of thermals than opening a bunch of chrome tabs
| sosborn wrote:
| I don't know - there are websites that will make my 2017
| MBP generate more heat than the sun even if they are in the
| background.
| sersi wrote:
| I tend to be around 55-60 degrees... Still great though, my
| previous mbp from 2019 was around 90
| FpUser wrote:
| Bunch of tabs idling should consume no CPU. Why would you
| expect it to be warm?
| CSSer wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the share! I had no idea there were that many
| temperature sensors throughout the board.
| vmception wrote:
| Also note for anyone on the fence about being 1-inch larger,
|
| the 16 inch model is the same physical size as the 15-inch
| models and they removed a lot of bezel. the screen has the
| same camera/sensor notch as an iphone does, which allows them
| to extend the screen farther.
|
| full screen videos are letterboxed 99% of the time so the
| notch blends into. I don't play full screen games so can't
| tell if thats an issue. and it is in the OS top bar the other
| rest of the time.
| shukantpal wrote:
| The 16 inch is slightly larger. I had them both for a week
| when switching and stacked them on top of each other to
| check.
| vmception wrote:
| oh yeah you might be right, I had skipped the donglebook
| models and compared to the last pre-M1 model that had
| magsafe and an sd card port
|
| I had googled the size comparison before I purchased the
| M1 Max model and it helped move the needle for me, but I
| don't remember the source and we were likely comparing
| different models
| tomp wrote:
| Exactly. Same for me (except 16GB). I am programming all day
| (multiple IDEA projects open) and have probably 200+ tabs open
| in Chrome and Safari. Not a sweat.
|
| I keep saying, the best Apple advertisement are all other
| computers (and Windows/Android operating systems). It's like
| they're not even trying!
| cf100clunk wrote:
| These are good real world examples, and the other comments
| here in confirmation of the performance and energy benefits
| are pushing me towards Asahi Linux when it is good
| enough/close enough to be roadworthy. At that moment, Apple
| can have my money for an M1 Pro.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I'm guessing that even once Asahi is usable enough for a
| daily driver, it'll still take some time until the
| efficiency and battery life are comparable.
| sprite wrote:
| I went from a maxed out late 2019 to a maxed out M1 max (except
| ssd). The M1 is so much better it's almost crazy and I can
| finally use my 2 LG 5k monitors again without the machine
| coming to a crawl. In a lot of ways the 2019 was worse than my
| previous one which I believe was the 2017 model. Glad Apple
| finally listened to what people wanted and made a laptop that
| works, added some ports back in and got rid of the terrible
| Touch Bar.
| Ginden wrote:
| Though, i9 Macs were notoriously bad due to heat management,
| slower than i7 Macs in many applications.
| vaxman wrote:
| Suggest learning about Unified Memory Architecture (history,
| features and limitations) --not so much benchmarks of "$50K
| Server" from Armenia.
|
| TL;DR: If you're okay with the non-Windows world, there are few
| reasons (other than GPU performance) to buy new Intel or Chinese
| processors for consumer apps or professional bit-banging
| (image/video/audio/machine-learning).
|
| Likewise, there is NO reason to buy Apple SoC processors for
| mission critical IT (boxes that run backups, your CFO's
| workstation that still crunches the Board's spreadsheets or other
| client-side databases including QuickBooks) --those will all need
| to be on Intel Xeon processors with ECC memory and a battery/UPS
| until migrated to the Cloud.
|
| More than a year from now, I expect major Chinese manufacturers
| will release cheaper (RISC V based) UMA designs (which Apple is
| rumored to be exploring too) and more than two years from now, I
| expect Intel to release more expensive (Core based) UMA designs
| (for anyone wanting Windows). I think it is a foregone conclusion
| Microsoft will get into chip manufacturing (to diversify from
| Intel and Qualcomm and compete with Amazon and Google) too.
| rc_mob wrote:
| Anyone else having their M1 freeze sometimes?
| sgarman wrote:
| Yea. This article is about the hardware which is great. The
| freezes, memory leaks and bugs are from the software and the
| latest mac os software really needs more time in the oven. I
| can't use firefox any more because WindowServer will eat up
| over 100% cpu and start allocating ram and and never releasing
| it until a crash or restart.
| eternalban wrote:
| I have an Air M1 and it definitely hiccups once in a while. It
| is noticeable. I am guessing it is Rosetta related.
| [deleted]
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Am I the only one not seeing legends in the bar charts?
| Terretta wrote:
| Tiny, on top of the bars.
| ranguna wrote:
| In summary, apple made a better product than a two your old mac.
| 64 GB DDR5 M1 vs 16 GB DDR4 overheating i9 mac from 2019.
|
| This is indeed Apple to Apple, but not apples to apples.
| [deleted]
| howolduis wrote:
| "$50K" is so vague and not useful for comparison.....
| ben7799 wrote:
| I haven't seen an M1Max yet.. but I've had a ton of 15", 17", and
| 16" MBP models over the last 10 years at work. All have generally
| been maxed out i7 models up to the latest one which is an i9 I
| got about 3-4 months ago right before the ARM ones came out.
|
| I'm totally on board with the narrative that the MacBook Pro has
| been going downhill for a long time and going to ARM is the ray
| of hope. At least in the case of my i9 16" they finally fixed the
| keyboard but it's a ridiculous space heater and it's only about
| 2x as fast as the 2018 i7 it replaced on a lot of tasks, and
| that's probably only because I was RAM limited on the 2018 one
| and am not on the 2021 one. The fan drives me bonkers as it
| pretty much runs full blast all day while I'm working. Lots of us
| on our team have seen the battery draining while it's plugged
| into the wall.
|
| Some of these benchmark games miss the point, the user experience
| for a "mobile workstation" user has just been going downhill for
| a long time and these new machines are finally starting to turn
| that around.
|
| I've had as 13" M1 MBP since launch last year FWIW and have never
| heard the fan come on, other than the fact it has a Touch Bar
| it's just about perfect for a personal machine. It feels much
| faster than the i9 for most real world tasks and the battery life
| resembles a kindle more than a laptop.
| dainiusse wrote:
| I an very happy with Apple doing that, but also keeping my
| fingers crossed for Intel. This company slept for too long, but I
| still think it is critical to have. And with these butkicks I
| hope they are going to show what they have. Of course... it will
| take some time. But we need competition, tsmc shouldn't have it
| all
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