Anecdotally I recently grabbed a M1 MacBook Air and it’s an incredible machine. I prefer it over my work issued 2019 pro. It could be that the MDM software has slowed down the pro, but overall the experience with the M1 is very good.
ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
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Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#12The M1 has 8 instruction decoders while every Intel processor maxes out at 4. This enables many more instructions in flight than on Intel. The M1 can process twice as many instructions per clock cycle than an x86 processor can.
4 x86 decoders, all modern x86 CPUs have micro-op caches that are wider than 4 and the retire width of the machines are 6 or greater. Saying it can process twice as many instructions per clock cycle is an incredibly incorrect statement.
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#13Was expecting a bit more than a handful of paragraphs and three tests from this article.
Ditto, this seems like clickbait to route us to Yet Another Blog.
For anyone who doesn’t know who the author is, he has written a ton of high performance code, the most notable being simdjson, fast_float and roaring bitmaps.
His performance posts are usually very insightful on things that are usually noise in other contexts (like division).
Not excusing the post, but the author has a history of interesting articles
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#14Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?
Running x86 code? :)
Depends largely on the code, lots of people show the M1 doing just fine running (translated) x86 code.
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#15Was expecting a bit more than a handful of paragraphs and three tests from this article.
I'm sure there are some around that would prefer this bit of terse review. There are less words in this tech review than in most "when I was a kid, mom would make us this" type of story before you can ever get to the actual recipe.
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#16Good effort by the author. I was expecting to see a bit more elaborate benchmarks, to be honest. I had a look at M1 Macbook Air yesterday at the local store. Everything felt snappy and the display is brilliant. I'd go for at least 16 gigs of RAM. I'd probably wait for the 2nd iteration as well.
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#17What I found shocking is just how drastically faster some workflows are.
If you work in JS and Node (say doing unit tests for an angular web app) this machine is so much better it’s unbelievable. It’s probably less than half the time to run tests. Half. It’s real productivity change.
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#18Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?
Running x86 code? :)
Apparently even this is not always the case(!)
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-b...
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#19Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?
Running x86 code? :)
Funny you should say that but perhaps that's not necessarily true.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3597949/everything-you...
https://www.imore.com/tests-show-apples-m1-emulates-x86-fast...
Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
#20Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?
Running x86 code? :)
Demoscene code in particular... especially demos in the 1K and below (sizecoding) range, which basically amount to very carefully handwritten Asm. I'd expect the x86-to-ARM translation to not do so well in that case, given that it's probably tuned toward typical compiler output.