[HN Gopher] M3 CPU cores have become more versatile
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M3 CPU cores have become more versatile
Author : ingve
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-01-05 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eclecticlight.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (eclecticlight.co)
| pants2 wrote:
| Great investigation and data. While the M3 Pro looked pretty
| disappointing at first because of the loss in P core count, it
| looks like the huge strides have been made with the E core
| performance, so it's not the downgrade that one might think.
|
| I own a 16" M1 Pro for work and a 16" M3 Pro for play, and wow I
| can really tell a difference in both performance and battery
| life. It's a nice upgrade.
| als0 wrote:
| Battery life must be hard to compare because presumably the
| battery life on the M1 Pro must have degraded by about 10% by
| now, which is quite a significant difference in capacity
| compared to a brand new 16" MacBook.
| FlyingAvatar wrote:
| Yeah, my M1 Pro's battery has 525 cycles on it and has lost
| 16% of its capacity.
|
| (Edit: Actually, mine is M1 Max, FWIW.)
| lambdaba wrote:
| That is remarkably low, isn't it? I mean, saying this as an
| (ex) ThinkPad user :P. Did you take any special care with
| it?
| rsynnott wrote:
| How old was the Thinkpad? I used to expect a laptop
| battery to be borderline useless after 4 years or so, but
| my 2016 MBP is coming up on 8, and the battery is doing
| surprisingly okay. It reports 70% capacity, and that
| feels about right.
| lambdaba wrote:
| I can't say exactly, but it degraded remarkably quickly.
| Maybe someone else can chime in with a different
| experience, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as good
| as what I read from MacBook users, especially M-series.
|
| I got the ThinkPad brand new, and it was a relatively
| recent model.
| fragmede wrote:
| "Special care" on OS X is to use Al Dente.app, which
| limits the charge at 80% so as to not damage the battery.
|
| https://apphousekitchen.com/
| alphabettsy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they're rated for 1000 cycles. Idk if
| that's good or bad. Or what's expected to happen when
| it's beyond that.
| ahepp wrote:
| Where are you getting the cycle count?
|
| I have an M1 Air, I got it new and use it heavily. I see
| "battery health" is "normal" and "max capacity" is 90%, but
| I don't see a count of charge cycles.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm really wondering if I should push for an M3 upgrade from
| the M1 Max I have now; it is a 2021 model ...
|
| I'll probably hold out for the M4.
| Detrytus wrote:
| I just ordered M3 Max Macbook Pro, currently own M1 Macbook
| Air. The one thing that I found the Air lacking is running VM
| with Windows 11, which I need for work. All those translation
| and virtualization layers add up and CPU temp rises to 95
| Celsius sometimes, visibly slowing down. I decided I need a
| laptop with active cooling.
|
| If you have M1 Max, and a fan, then there's probably no point
| in upgrading.
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| Are you expecting significantly improved efficiencies when
| running Windows VMs with the M3 Max Macbook Pro?
| Detrytus wrote:
| That's pretty much the only reason I bought it. Other
| than the cool, "space black" color :-) Benchmarks look
| promising
| bombcar wrote:
| Are these Arm windows 11 or x86-64?
| rifty wrote:
| The P core drop is apparently kind of a downgrade for audio
| production. Some DAWs only use the performance cores and Logic
| is one of them. This means you can utilize more tracks with an
| M1 Pro.
| askonomm wrote:
| The M series macbooks are amazing machines. I don't want to take
| away from them at all, but I recently realized I can get the same
| power that a 3k Macbook pro has with about 1k when I build my own
| PC (excluding the screen), and with it full upgradeability making
| for a much better bang for a buck, and illustrating how
| ridiculous the MacBook prices are. I mean they charge $400 for an
| extra terabyte of storage, when I can get around 6TB for the same
| price.
|
| But, unfortunately you can't build your own notebooks that would
| remain compact and decent, so now I just use a cheap laptop as a
| thin client that remotely connects to my PC.
| com2kid wrote:
| For people wanting to do LLM work at home, a fully loaded
| MacBook has more memory available to it than anything else a
| consumer can buy. All in a laptop form factor (versus Nvidia
| GPUs).
|
| A small market, sure, but one they have on lock down.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Not to mention that this memory is also VRAM. You can have
| over 100GB of it, in an age where just 80GB of VRAM in a
| single card costs over $13,000.
| flir wrote:
| You can buy a lot of cloud compute instead of that extra
| memory though. (I haven't done the math myself, but I'd be
| curious if anyone has).
| pulse7 wrote:
| Wait for just 2 days, 17 hours and 18 minutes - and NVIDIA
| will give you (rumored) 96GB of RAM inside GeForce RTX 4090
| TI: https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/geforce/special-event/
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| There is no chance the 4090 TI is going to ship with 96GB
| of VRAM. And besides, it has no NVLink, so it's a stranded
| asset.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _I can get the same power that a 3k Macbook pro has with
| about 1k when I build my own PC_
|
| But not, as you acknowledge, a laptop.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| just ssh from a laptop then, you have 2k of a budget left
| haswell wrote:
| This highly depends on the use case and software involved.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| yeah but the best laptop to do this from might also be a
| used M1 Macbook Air...
| devwastaken wrote:
| While true, desktops are often difficult to carry around and
| use while mobile. It also doesn't have the benefits of macOS. I
| can get Linux desktops to be decent, but Mac feels and looks
| like a finished Linux desktop OS.
|
| Apple charges big prices for MacBook pro's because they know
| other corps will foot the bill, they're work equipment like a
| tractor. The significantly less expensive MacBook air is the
| choice if this isn't the case.
|
| I still love building PC's but honestly their main use now is
| either for server work or graphically heavy gaming.
| talentedcoin wrote:
| "Benefits" of macOS? What are they -- the pointless yearly
| updates? The OCD changes to chrome year after year? The
| declining stability?
| katbyte wrote:
| Polished os with *nix underneath. Osx is closer to Linux
| then windows is and imho more polished then most Linux
| desktop environments.
|
| I don't find the yearly updates pointless? They keep adding
| new things and it's also been stable for me for years.
|
| Also what do changes to chrome have to do with apple/osx?
| declaredapple wrote:
| Osx is very literally unix, and it's extremely polished
| compared to linux desktop environments out of the box.
| (yes I know some people have no issues with their linux
| desktops but I've used it over 15 years and it's NOT
| nearly as seemless as OSX)
|
| They're also extremely well sandboxed and have become
| increasingly more focused on security the last few years
| (in some ways annoyingly so).
|
| > Also what do changes to chrome have to do with
| apple/osx?
|
| Maybe parent meant chrome as in "OSX is focused
| continously updating it's shiny ui"?
| alphabettsy wrote:
| If you don't see any for yourself fine, but how does this
| add anything to discussion?
| JeffSnazz wrote:
| Well for one the keybindings have been updated from the IBM
| PC. Doing that on linux isn't impossible, but it would
| require an enormous effort across many codebases.
|
| I have tried for many years to match the productivity of
| macos on linux, and I can't. The mac (and I suspect the
| iphone) is just too predictable and reliable to abandon.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Wait, is it MacBook Pros or MacBooks Pro?
|
| Anyway, mostly agree otherwise. Actually, macOS looks hideous
| and confusing to me, but the level of integration with the
| hardware is something I envy from Linux-laptop-land (imo it
| works fine on the desktop, but Linux on laptops could be
| better), the build quality seems quite nice, and the
| ecosystem seems neat.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Pro is an adjective in the context of MacBook Pro and
| adjectives are not pluralized.
| tom_ wrote:
| The Apple branding App Store guidelines say:
|
| "Always use the correct Apple product names with the
| correct capitalization as shown on the Apple Trademark
| List. Always use Apple product names in singular form.
| Modifiers such as _model_ , _device_ , or _collection_
| can be plural or possessive. Never typeset Apple product
| names using all uppercase letters. "
|
| ("MacBook Pro" is one of the trademarks in the trademark
| l... oops, my apologies, Trademark List.)
|
| So I suppose the correct plural is probably "MacBook Pro
| devices", but Apple's branding department has no power
| over us as individuals posting here so we can say what we
| like.
|
| (I personally always went for "Macbook Pros")
| mattwad wrote:
| it was always mac for laptops, pc for desktop for me. I guess
| there's something to be said when the vendor owns all the
| parts, including the OS.
| DistractionRect wrote:
| I've been doing this since college.
|
| It just makes sense. You can build a desktop + a cheap laptop
| for half. I don't have to really worry about how what I'm doing
| affects battery life because it's consist as a thin client.
| It's cheap to replace if it gets lost/stolen/broken. It's
| cheaper to upgrade as needed, and I don't have to replace the
| whole machine when I do.
|
| I get all the portability of a laptop and all the power of a
| desktop, and money to spare.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| If you're price sensitive and don't care if you end up with a
| desktop, used M1 Mac Minis are in the $300 to $500 range. You
| don't have to spend 3K.
| askonomm wrote:
| I'm mostly interested in upgradeability and the cost of
| parts. With Macs I'll just have to buy totally new Macs every
| time to upgrade, but with a PC I can swap out RAM, SSD, GPU,
| etc however I want for a fraction of the price that it costs
| to upgrade Macs.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| the thing is though, that you can actually resell your old
| Mac when buying a new one. not like a pc that's basically
| worthless the moment you take it out of the store. the
| upgrading thing is kind of a myth since the new hardware
| coming out will often be incompatible with the old hardware
| you have..
| nightski wrote:
| It's most definitely not a myth. I upgrade a component or
| two every year around Black Friday. This same machine has
| been evolving for a decade and many spare parts have been
| handed down to family members.
| hajile wrote:
| Some stuff swaps out a little at a time, but something
| like the massive AM5 swap has you changing 3 of the 4
| most expensive parts (CPU, RAM, and Motherboard) of your
| machine at the same time.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Gamers like me have known this for ages. The reason I am in IT
| is that I save money and built my own desktop from parts. Even
| now its waaaaaay better in price to performance, you can freely
| have any peripherals you want, any x86 OS etc...
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| What you pay for is the form factor, the silence, the nice and
| cool temperatures, the battery life and the ability to actually
| use the damn thing without being plugged in. added bonus as a
| dev and a creator is the unified memory, hardware decoding for
| modern codecs line h265(something that is weirdly missing from
| nvidia gpu's) and of course the beautiful screen. if this stuff
| doesn't matter to you, then i agree it's a waste of money
|
| i recently bought my first MacBook ever (M3 Max) and all i can
| say is that this machine is liberating. I've been jumping from
| pc to pc every couple of years from Dell xps to razor blade,
| thermo nuclear piece of shit to a customized clevo 10kg brick
| almost taking off from the table running too many tabs in
| chrome. all i can say is that these new M chip machines are on
| another level, truly amazing.
| nightski wrote:
| I feel lucky I don't care about any of those things, it's
| nice just using a desktop with a large beautiful screen.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Sure, sure. Some pathetic 1080p monitor, or a monitor with
| ridiculous pixel density and an awful TN matrix. Some oven-like
| CPU and "turn off your heater" GPU. And, because you are
| talking about laptops (you are not comparing laptops to desktop
| computers, surely), it will be a 3-5kg monster. But cheaper,
| hurray!
| hajile wrote:
| Let's see
|
| * $450 -- 12-core Zen 4
|
| * $250 -- x670 motherboard
|
| * $130 -- 48gb RAM
|
| * $100 -- 1TB SSD
|
| * $170 -- 750w PSU
|
| * $130 -- case
|
| * $600 -- 3070 GPU
|
| * $80 -- CPU air cooler
|
| * $200 -- Windows
|
| * $100 -- so-so speakers, mouse, keyboard, etc.
|
| We're very close to $2200 if we go with solid, midrange stuff
| and don't include a monitor.
|
| The cost to apple self-repair guys for a 16" mini-LED display
| is $670 with Apple offering around $100 back if they'll turn in
| the old screen.
|
| If we add in $600 for the monitor cost, we're up to $2800 while
| the 16" MBP we compared to is actually $4000. The savings of a
| desktop are there, but they aren't what you make them out to
| be.
|
| If we look at a comparable laptop with good build quality like
| a Lenove Thinkpad, we're going to pay as much or more. For the
| same price, we'll have terrible battery life and our
| performance when not plugged in will drop off a cliff.
| robertjpayne wrote:
| This gets brought up every time someone talks about macOS and
| MacBooks.
|
| Another thing people don't take into account is the time and
| thus money saved not dealing with this crap.
|
| Building PCs from raw parts is annoying for heaps of people.
| Warranties are annoying, making sure all the parts fit together
| is annoying. You'll spend the extra cost in short order just
| making sure you have the right parts.
|
| Also resell value of MacBooks is very very good. When it's time
| to upgrade you typically are losing 20-30% of purchase price at
| around the 2-3 year mark. Where as PCs are hard to give away at
| times.
|
| Everyone has their own needs but Apples machines for me are a
| work tool, I need a laptop and nobody comes even close to the
| quality or peeper dollar spent in the form factor.
| sroussey wrote:
| Game mode runs stuff on E cores at high frequencies which might
| be mother way to test them.
| deagle50 wrote:
| I wish the e cores would ramp up before the p cores get loaded.
| Maybe we can use this mode when plugged in, if there were a way
| to manually toggle it.
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