Do you think we will see devices with multiple M1 chips? I’m not familiar with the barriers to that sort of computing model
16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
171–180 of 529 posts
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#172I love everything about the move to Apple Silicon with the exception of the decision to put memory on-die or in-package (not sure how it is configured). They call it 'Unified Memory'. It makes a lot of sense but I don't know if they are going to be able to pack enough memory in there. A lot of folks are fixated on CPU performance lately (which is rad) but I think that there is a tendency to ignore memory. I have 32gb…
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Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some data-points comparing the M1 to a 3950X https://twitter.com/john_lam/status/1328754454930231299
It's missing KingOfCoders point of these comparisons being all within the Apple ecosystem. MacBooks infamously have cooling problems and macOS is precisely balanced for battery life on Apple hardware, not AMD Hackintoshes with no speed limits. What happens to these benchmarks if you jettison the Apple overhead entirely?
> MacBooks infamously have cooling problems and macOS is precisely balanced for battery life on Apple hardware
Mac Pros are not "precisely balanced for battery life", that's just nonsense.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can't get an M1 configuration right now larger than 16GB which is a table-stakes baseline dev requirement today. Everyone on my team has been using 15" MacBook Pros with 16GB RAM for the past 3 years. I suspect most developers run with 16GB of RAM just fine. I'm not arguing "16GB is fine for all developers everywhere!", but it's absolutely not a hard requirement. I suspect for a lot of us, the difference in per…
I think if you have a very specific role where your workload is constant it makes sense. I am an independent contractor and work across a lot of different projects. Some of my client projects require running a full Rails/Worker/DB/Elasticsearch/Redis stack. Then add in my dev tools, browser windows, music, Slack, etc... it adds up. If I want to run a migration for one client in a stack like that and then want to swit…
Update: Re-reading your above comment I realized I mis-read your post and though you were suggesting 32GB was table-stakes... which isn't quite right. Likewise much of below is based on that original mis-read.
I'm not convinced that going from 16GB to 32GB is going to be a huge instant performance boost for a lot of developers. If I was given the choice right now between getting one of these machines with 16GB and getting an Intel with 32GB, I'd probably go with the M1 with 16GB. Everything I've seen around them suggests the trade-offs are worth it.
Obviously we have more choices than that though. For most of us, the best choice is just waiting 6-12 months to get the 32GB version of the M? series CPU.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#175Nearly universal praise for the M1 versus it's predecessor but I don't see how this really changes Apple's position the way he implies. Their machines are still far more expensive than Windows and can't use high-powered GPUs like AMD/Nvidia. The people who choose PC, still have the same incentives to do so. For most users, the faster performance will probably not be very noticeable. The reduced power consumption is t…
> Their machines are still far more expensive than Windows
Which $1000 Windows laptop has this performance?
> and can't use high-powered GPUs like AMD/Nvidia.
Not relevant to all markets (particularly ultra bookish laptops, which never have discrete GPUs, but more broadly many people just don't need one).
I don't think it changes anything much immediately, but it's extremely bad news for Intel in the long run.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually feel like 16GB is pretty much the sweet spot. I've built a desktop PC recently and didn't bother with 32GB and haven't had any troubles. The only time I've run into limits is when I was doing things like running games and big IDEs at the same time which seems like a waste in any case regardless of how much RAM is available.
For me on windows, multiple virtual desktops, browser (chrome for work, ff for personal) IDE's and VMs (ubuntu running in wsl, and any docker containers) made 16gn unuseable for me And that's before I decided to boot up a game with all of the existing applications For me the £50 is well worth not having to care about pruning applications constantly!
I recently got introduced to great suspender here and Chrome with separate accounts doesn't use much resources because tabs get backgrounded.
Yes, you would still have to juggle if you really dont want to close your IDE, or lower judge how much RAM that docker container really needd, but also understand that OS’ and software allocate a huge portion of all available memory no matter what you have in the machine. Like you think you need 32gb for snappy performance and it is rational idea that all your processes absolutely need sequential memory blocks, but it isnt that true.
I honestly think you would just be smarter about your use of resources again.
With these benchmarks I am starting to lean more towards 32gb itself being the compromise. Simply because it doesnt cause you to budget resources, a luxury, but at the expense of these other benchmarks? And in the worst case we just have to wait a year or two before 32gb is offered in the M series package?
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps this will encourage programmers to write true native applications again instead of wrapping web scripting languages in a browser and calling it a day.
I'd say the opposite, this increases the speed of such apps to closer to what is now native speed.
I'm referring to the second point about memory that OP made. You know, having to allocate 700MB of memory in order to run an electron chat application.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you require Docker, the Apple Silicon machines are not an option, and won't be for at least a little while. https://www.docker.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-chips-and-docke...
Is it just me or are the current offering of M1 chips not developer machines anyway? They max at 16GB RAM. That's a huge limiting factor by itself. If they can work out Docker before 32GB memory MBP, then it seems fine.
It depends on your work. Since many developers are using cloud services for serious testing, an awful lot of people are just fine with 8GB for Docker + VSCode + Firefox/Chrome + Slack. There are people who need massive in-memory models or huge compilations but that’s far from universal.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to anandtech the memory throughput is off the charts at 68.25GB/s [1]. That's twice as fast as high speed ddr4 memory (DDR4-4000 at 32GB/s). In other words: they totally trounced and took it to the next level with regards to memory, because they can. If anything, memory control is their biggest advantage. Scaling the amount of ram won't be an issue. Increasing the bandwidth perhaps, but it'll still be way q…
FWIW the latest-gen consoles supposedly have memory bandwidth in the hundreds of GB/s. The PS5 supposedly reaches 448GB/s, and the XBX 336 to 560 depending on the memory segment.
It's the year of system-on-chip. It does show great improvements at the trade-off cost of no expansions possible once the chip is made.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#180Nearly universal praise for the M1 versus it's predecessor but I don't see how this really changes Apple's position the way he implies. Their machines are still far more expensive than Windows and can't use high-powered GPUs like AMD/Nvidia. The people who choose PC, still have the same incentives to do so. For most users, the faster performance will probably not be very noticeable. The reduced power consumption is t…
Given the build quality, screen, performance, and battery life- Apple isn't really premium pricing anymore. The Dell XPS 13 starts at 999, the Lenovo X1 carbon starts at 949- at equivalent pricing- and the new Air outperforms both of those.
HP x360 13 with Ryzen - 799 and you have a 2-in-1 that you can use at work and play recent games at home. Install Docker and run Linux if you like that option.