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Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

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Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#481

Post by Fluorescence »

aurareturn wrote: post #427
Fluorescence wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their "main benchmark"? Stop making things up. It's no more than tragic fanboy addled fraud at this point. That three-year old press-release refers to SINGLE CORE Geekbench and not the defective multicore version that doesn't scale with core counts. Given AMD's main USP is core counts it would be an... unusual choice. AMD marketing uses every other product under the sun too (no doubt whatever gives the better looking…

The industry has moved past Passmark because it does not correlate to actual real world performance. The standard is SPEC, which correlates with with Geekbench. https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-... Every time there is a discussion on Apple Silicon, some uninformed person always brings up Passmark, which is completely outdated.

Enough. You don't know what you are talking about.

What's with posting 5 year old medium articles about a different version of Geekbench? Geekbench 5 had different multicore scaling so if you want to argue that version was so great then you are also arguing against Geekbench 6 because they don't even match.

https://www.servethehome.com/a-reminder-that-geekbench-6-is-...

"AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3995WX, a huge 64 core/ 128 thread part, was performing at only 3-4x the rate of an Intel D-1718T quad-core part, even despite the fact it had 16x the core count and lots of other features."

"With the transition from Geekbench 5 to Geekbench 6, the focus of the Primate Labs team shifted to smaller CPUs"

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#482

Post by hajile »

baq wrote: post #53
roscas wrote: post #4

RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast? ARM is great. Those M are the only thing I could buy used and put Linux on it.

Everything is RISC after it gets decoded. It isn’t 1990 anymore. The decoder costs maybe 1% performance.

In Haswell, 4.8w out of 22.1w for the core were used for the decoder for integer/ALU instructions[0]. According to this[1] analysis of the entire ubuntu repository, 89% of all instructions were composed of just 12 instructions (all integer/ALU).

From this we can infer that for most normal workloads, almost 22% of the Haswell core power was used in the decoder. As decoders have gotten wider and more complex in recent designs, I see no reason why this wouldn't be just as true for today's CPUs.

[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/cool...

[1] https://oscarlab.github.io/papers/instrpop-systor19.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#483

Post by olyjohn »

throwawaylaptop wrote: post #386
rollcat wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube. I've worked in video delivery for quite a while. If I were to write the law, decision-makers wilfully forcing software video decoding where hardware is available would be made to sit on these CPUs with their bare buttocks. I…

I run Linux Mint Mate on a 10 year old laptop. Everything works fine, but watching YouTube makes my wireless USB dongle mouse stutter a LOT. Basically if CPU usage goes up, mouse goes to hell. Are you telling me that for some reason it's not using any hardware acceleration available while watching YouTube? How do I fix it?

It's probably the 2.4GHz WiFi transmitter interfering with the 2.4GHz mouse transmitter. You probably notice it during YouTube because it's constantly downloading. Try a wired mouse.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#484

Post by alt227 »

mxey wrote: post #421
alt227 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further. This in turn means you cannot install new software as the applications themselves require the newer versions of the OS. It has been this way on apple hardware for decades, and has laid the foundation of not ever needing to provide backwards compatibility for more than a few years as well as forcing new har…

> Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further. A new major version of macOS comes out every year. The oldest Mac still supported by the upcoming macOS 26 is from 2019.

Wow, 6 years!

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#485

Post by alt227 »

commakozzi wrote: post #478
alt227 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further. This in turn means you cannot install new software as the applications themselves require the newer versions of the OS. It has been this way on apple hardware for decades, and has laid the foundation of not ever needing to provide backwards compatibility for more than a few years as well as forcing new har…

> Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further "oh a post about Apple, let me come in and share my hatred for Apple again by outright lying!" As stated already, macOS 26 runs on the M1 and even the 2019 Macbook Pro. So i think i know where you got the "3 new versions" figure, and it's a dark and smelly place.

Apologies I was under the impression that the major OS release was every 2 years, and so I equated 6 years into 3 releases. No need to be quite so rude when you could just factually correct.

However My parents 2017 Macbook pro can only upgrade to Ventura, which is a 2022 release. 5 years and that $2.5k baby was obselete. However rude you are about your defense of Apple, 5-6 years until software starts being unable to install is pretty shitty. I use 30 year old apps daily on windows with no issue.

Looks like defending Apple is the smelly place to be judging by your tone and condescending snark.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#487

Post by alt227 »

hollerith wrote: post #426
alt227 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further. This in turn means you cannot install new software as the applications themselves require the newer versions of the OS. It has been this way on apple hardware for decades, and has laid the foundation of not ever needing to provide backwards compatibility for more than a few years as well as forcing new har…

>Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further. This is false.

Apologies I meant 5-6 years, with a release every 2. Turns it its every year so I was wrong,

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#488

Post by brookst »

jayd16 wrote: post #384
brookst wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sure sounds more like the reality of a performance gap than the appearance of one.

The broader audience/apples to oranges bit is fair. We're not choosing apple hardware for server. x64 is still dominant on the server with some cheap custom arm chips as an option, no?

Sure, but that’s very different than the context f the original question.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#489

Post by alt227 »

nartho wrote: post #464
alt227 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That left Cubase for windows When I was at music college doing production courses, they exclusively taught Cubase on windows.

Yes, for a while that was the only "serious" option for Windows

Yes, and Logic Pro was generally looked at as 'My first DAW' in most studios I have been in.

Also Protools was available on Windows from 1997 and was used in many PC based studios.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#490

Post by veidr »

kwimajs wrote: post #480
veidr wrote: post #475

I don't give any fucks about battery life or even total power consumption cost; I just hate that I have some crap-ass Apple mid-range (for them) laptop with only 36GB RAM and an "M4 Max" CPU, and it runs rings around my 350W Core i9-14900K desktop Linux workstation, and there is essentially no way I can develop software (Rust, web apps, multi-container Docker crap) on Linux with anything close to the performance of m…

To be honest, I haven't done any research on this, but it's something that crosses my mind from time to time. My laptop has 32 GB of RAM and an i7-14700H processor, with Linux Mint installed. I'm more than happy with its performance, especially considering I bought it for a price that was very cheap for the market. I wonder what specs a MacBook would need to give me similar performance. For example, on Linux with 32…

I don't know for sure, either, but I suspect any recent Macbook with 16GB RAM would be a significant upgrade over 14700H.

I don't like macOS, so in recent years, I only use it on laptop (which for me is like, a few on-site meetings per year, plus a few airplane flights). What infuriates me is that my mid-tier Mac laptop for those use cases is now significantly faster than any Linux workstation I can possibly buy... and positively annihilates any non-Apple laptop machine on essentially every meaningful benchmark.

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