Really crazy results imo, being able to carry around the performance of a desktop in a laptop is quite the feat. I might pick up a MacBook next year if they allow for more than only 1 external display connected and increase to 4 usb c ports. Seems like a powerful portable option.
Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
21–30 of 467 posts
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#22Can we say that M1 will be much faster when those applications are compiled natively for M1? As far as I know there's a translation layer (Rosetta) at the moment.
I don't see mention one way or the other in the article but everything that was tested has a native version already so I'd assume Rosetta was not at play in these numbers.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#23> Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine. If your development environment/tooling/workflow does not gain any real advantage from more CPU cores. Also your data must fit in the 16GB of RAM as offloading any workload to disk will kill the performance and you cannot add more. The M1 has excellent single core performance so any task that is mainly single threaded wi…
Or if the bottleneck in your workflow is RAM read/write speed as opposed to RAM capacity. The RAM being on the same chip as the CPU/GPU gives it tremendously low RAM latency, which seems to be where it's getting much of its edge in these tests
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#24The fact that we are even able to realistically compare a CPU in an ultralight laptop with no fan to an i9 is absolutely amazing. To me that would be an upgrade even if performance is a complete wash.
Yeah seeing a MacBook Air beat an i9 is hilarious.
I think this should put arguments over X86 efficiency disadvantages to bed. The X86 is obviously a huge boat anchor. There is no other explanation for this monstrous of a performance efficiency gap... unless Apple has invented something fundamentally new that has never been done in the entire history of CPU design. I doubt that.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#25As soon as Apple sells this chip in a 32GB package I am going to be all over it.
Same!
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#26As soon as Apple sells this chip in a 32GB package I am going to be all over it.
I was worried about this too, but have been pleasantly surprised by this laptop. I'm sure my use case is far different to yours though. I was looking at my RAM consumption on my 16GB MacBook Pro prior to purchasing the M1 MacBook Air, and I was usually hitting 14-15GB with multiple GB of swap used in my regular use case (couple of chrome tabs, some electron apps, Xcode, 1st party apps all open).
I consciously pare down my usage on this MacBook Air, but I am typically at around 7GB/8GB of ram, with 3-4GB of swap space used. It feels noticeably snappier and overall better (minus some odd Big Sur UI bugs every now and then) than my 2017 15in MBP.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#27I’d like to see a “benchmark” about M1’s support for real world dev setup (docker, brew, libraries and so on). And when can we expect the full support
Brew status: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857
Docker status: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/142
From a quick glance neither have committed release dates, but "soon."
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#28The benchmarks look promising, but the advice at the end to "Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine" glosses over the issue of software compatibility; if you're buying an M1 device to use as a dev machine today, some of the tools you use may not yet work on M1.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#29The fact that we are even able to realistically compare a CPU in an ultralight laptop with no fan to an i9 is absolutely amazing. To me that would be an upgrade even if performance is a complete wash.
Stores should have a new category:
Apple M1 and Only Fans
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#30Can't wait to see the Mac Pro. The argument is over for best laptop processor. I want to see if Apple is as eager to beat the competition in the Workstation/HPC space as they were in the mobile/laptop. I think they are, Srouji looks like he's got a knife in his teeth and can't wait to claim fastest personal computer ever period. But we'll have to see, it's a tiny, tiny market to justify the effort.
How much effort is it really? Make a version of this with more cores and cache and maybe all high-performance cores instead of heterogenous. It's just a remix of the same already designed components. The only really tough thing would be supporting things desktop users want like external video cards, but people may be willing to forego that if the CPU smokes everything else and if the built-in GPU is at least fast eno…
Probably mostly this, but I would wager more work goes into providing more PCI lanes because I/O tends to be more demanding in pro workloads (connecting all kinds of things)