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ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

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Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#41

Post by wait_a_minute »

nemothekid wrote: post #13
wait_a_minute wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't see why this justifies downvoting me, when I have no idea who this person is and their only submission I've seen is extremely scant on anything befitting the title of their post.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#42

Post by easde »

GeekyBear wrote: post #4

Anandtech's deep dive into Apple's Firestorm big cores is definitely worth reading if you are interested in how the chips that use their ARM implementation are different. >On the floating point and vector execution side of things, the new Firestorm cores are actually more impressive as they a 33% increase in capabilities, enabled by Apple’s addition of a fourth execution pipeline. The FP rename registers here seem to…

I like Apple's approach of having more narrow vector units rather than a few extremely wide ones. Narrower vector units are generally easier to program and easier to support on small cores (like the efficiency cores). It's a good tradeoff for cores used outside of niche applications that do a ton of numerical calculations.

Compare this to a design like AVX/AVX2 that has wider 256-bit vectors, but almost always forces the programmer to treat them as two 128-bit vectors glued together. All because Intel realized they had to power down half of each vector ALU to save power at idle.

Of course, the future is hopefully more flexible vector ISAs like SVE. AVX-512 is not too bad either today, but Intel seems almost pathologically opposed to making forward-looking decisions (what about when they want to double the vector width again??).

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#44

Post by higerordermap »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #41
nemothekid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't see why this justifies downvoting me, when I have no idea who this person is and their only submission I've seen is extremely scant on anything befitting the title of their post.

I don't think the person who submitted it is the original writer.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#45

Post by STRML »

rubicon33 wrote: post #38
breakfastduck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feeling exactly the same. I am trying my hardest to wait for a couple of generations after grabbing a 2019 16".

Same boat. Tough to hold out given these incredible reviews!

It's not even that expensive, so it's a much easier product to recommend.

Compare to the 2012 MBPr, a similarly innovative Apple laptop. The 2012 was $2,199 in 2012 dollars (nearly $2,500 today). This is that kind of leap, and more. $999 (sometimes $899) is a bargain.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#46

Post by christoph »

bognition wrote: post #11

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.

I jumped on the hype train and got a M1 Mac Mini with 16gb and 1TB SSD, as it felt like a steal at around £1k Ex. VAT. for something that reviews told me would be quicker than my MBP.

I've been blown away at how much faster/snappier it feels in day to day use compared to my 2018 16GB MBP. With the COVID situation I'm seated at my home office 95% of time now, rather than ~35%.

One of the biggest changes has been that instead of having a jet engine level of noise next to me most of the day now, I have something that I haven't heard a noise from once in three or four days. It takes up way less desk space as well. It's much easier to tuck away somewhere than a laptop which you always have an emotional connection to needing portability with. I've had Photoshop, Illustrator, Media Encoder running encodes, After Effects, loads of web tabs open and it still feels cold to touch. More desk space, faster, less noise, less heat. It's ticked all those boxes.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#47

Post by vlovich123 »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
theonemind wrote: post #9

Considering 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?

The only microbenchmark I've been able to produce that shows an Intel Tiger Lake as being faster than the M1 (mini) is in atomic primitives. For some reason taking and releasing contended locks is slow on this thing. Unclear if that's only because macOS doesn't have anything that can compete with futex. But all atomics seem slow, not just mutex. In all other respects the M1 stomps the TGL.

That’s interesting considering all the articles I’ve read on this thing indicate the exact opposite. Uncontended atomics are basically free and a huge reason why Swift and ObjC code gets such a huge boost (ARC cost is down significantly).

Traditional POSIX mutexes in MacOS weren’t heavily optimized. When I worked at Apple ~5 years ago they still didn’t have a good futex implementation (not sure if that’s changed since). Generally the OS team doesn’t care because you should be using libdispatch.

Anyway I’d love to read up on where you encountered this claim so I can better understand the countours of how this thing works.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#48

Post by cknoxrun »

jaredtn wrote: post #36
sim_card_map wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, now that we have this new fast hardware, time for developers to make everything 2x slower again.

Do all technical advances make you feel sad? Why hang out on Hacker News then?

It's actually a legitimate phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#49

Post by d3nj4l »

whymarrh wrote: post #30
agloeregrets wrote: post #17

What 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.

And this is via Rosetta 2?

You can build node for the M1.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#50

Post by mgkimsal »

agloeregrets wrote: post #17

What 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.

maybe more people will starting writing twice as many tests!
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