Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel in 2020 is IBM in 1980.
So in 2060 it will still be a huge company with $20B in revenue?
As soon as they switch to a services business.
16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
331–340 of 529 posts
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#332Earlier 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…
What kind of development are you doing? 16gb is OK for my needs at home running linux, but on the odd occasion I wish I had more. At work I find 32Gb is barely enough.
> What kind of development are you doing?
Sounds like folks never want to close an app. It could be a productivity booster if you want to spend the money and electricity, but is rarely a requirement.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#333I 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…
I'm afraid I lost the source, but this morning I was reading about some fairly in-depth Xcode benchmarks, the dev was saying that there was almost no hit in performance when it hit swap, and speculated that Apple might be getting ready to move past the concept of RAM altogether in a few years. Sounds a little bonkers to me, but the bus to the SSD is no joke
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of development are you doing? 16gb is OK for my needs at home running linux, but on the odd occasion I wish I had more. At work I find 32Gb is barely enough.
I would turn that around. What kind of development are you doing where you feel 32GB is "Barely enough"? Right now I primarily work on a very complex react based app. I've also done Java, Ruby, Elixir, and Python development and my primary machine has never had 32GB. More RAM is definitely better, but when I hear phrases like "32GB is barely enough", I have to wonder what in the hell people are working on. Even runni…
One data point: when I was consulting a year ago, I had to run two fully virtualized desktops just to use the client's awful VPNs and enterprise software. Those VMs, plus a regular developer workload, made my 16GB laptop unusable. Upgrading to 32GB fixed it completely.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chalking it down to ARM doesn’t cut it... other companies make ARM chips too, including Qualcomm. Most Android phones run ARM, and given they outnumber iPhones heavily you’d expect massive improvements. But this is better than putting Qualcomm’s best chip into the Mac.
Qualcomm spend their time and energy on gaining monopoly lock-ins via standards committees, not building better chips.
Qualcomm seems to be stagnating just like Intel at the moment, it will be a few years until high performance ARM chips come to non-Apple devices, unless Microsoft can strong arm them for their Surface line
I'm guessing the high performance ARM chips for non-Apple devices will be coming from Nvidia or Samsung in the future
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Exactly. I haven't been this exited about a chip in a really long time. Decade-long, probably. And I'm really hopping Intel manages to get its act together. Competition is great for everyone.
I'd make a bet on Intel not turning around without new leadership at least willing to fling a gravitationally-significant pile of money at TSMC in the short term and significantly improve their pipeline in the medium to long term. They're so far behind now they're basically betting on everyone else screwing up. It's not just their position, though, it's their rate of change... their chip releases aren't getting faste…
They need a Satya to replace their Balmer. Immediately.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#337The real competition is no longer Intel. Its AMD. Or if you're just buying Apple because you like them then there is no competition, you buy what they offer. I like fanless systems so I'll be watching Apple closely.
I can't help but chuckle whenever I read these comments on HN about how doomed Intel is. Intel just does this . Every now and then, they get so far ahead that the rest of the market just totally disintegrates, which allows them to screw around and juice up their margins while failing to actually innovate. Their brand is so strong it takes years for it to erode, even when they do suck, and when they have actual compet…
>> I can't help but chuckle whenever I read these comments on HN about how doomed Intel is.
I didn't say anything like that. Simply that if you want to compare performance to the best that is currently not Intel.
There is a lot of hype around this new apple chip and people claiming it's a performance king, but I seriously doubt that.
Even for mobile I'd like to see it compared to AMD APUs.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, this has little to do with it being ARM. 30 years ago ARM had a significant micro architectural advantage in performance per watt, but in this era of 10 billion transistor chips, that advantage has disappeared. x86_64 rationalized the x86 architecture and decode is such a small fraction of the power budget that it really doesn't matter anyways. What does matter, IMO: - assembling a killer team - 5nm process - hi…
I'm no expert, but the only big architectural differences are a massively larger decoder and a reorder buffer that's several times as large as x86 designs. If these are actually the reasons for the performance difference, and it's difficult to do these on x86 because of the instruction set, it seems to this amateur that ARM64 really does have an advantage over x86.
Couldn't Intel just come out with a new set of reduced-complexity instructions that run on a per-process basis based on some bit being flipped on context switches? Then legacy apps would run fine, but the new stuff would work too. This seems not that hard to address.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qualcomm chips are not that far behind Apple's, and Microsoft has Windows on ARM ready for a while now. Those performance advantage won't be there for long. I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64?
> I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64? Not much? People are acting like M1 destroys x86, but as AnandTech showed in the recent benchmark, M1 is trading blows with Zen 3 in single thread performance while having much larger core and process advantage (5nm vs. 7nm) thus being actually more expensive to produce.
The price of the 5950X is nearly the same as the Mac Mini. Estimates on actual cost of the M1 is around $75-100.
Re: 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
#340I 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…
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…
Isn't that just because all the memory is on the CPU?