Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#41

Post by sudosysgen » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #19

blacktulip wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article: > You may wonder why I used 3900X instead of Ryzen 5000-series CPUs: Because I don't have it.

Ryzen 4000 series (which is for laptops) is relatively easy to get, but I don't fault the author for not buying a laptop specifically for this benchmark. The 3900x still pulls more power and is on the same technology as the 4900HS/4900H so it's definitely not a bad-faith comparison.

Not exactly. The 4000 series part have a finer lithography for I/O and use a low power process.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#42

Post by R0b0t1 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #38

jchw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intuition is that x86's wasted die space on instruction decoding, backwards compatibility, etc. can be spent on making bigger and wider cores, and this seems to be what M1 is doing. However, there are still some other aspects to consider. One is Apple's process lead against both Intel and AMD. The next is the memory situation; it'll be interesting to see if increased latency from more conventional configurations w…

The x86 space for decoding is tiny. The inefficiencies have to come from elsewhere and at least partially from the node difference. An architecturally big one is that x86 only implements SeqCst for atomics whereas looser memory models can allow multi-process programs to be written more efficiently (which they have been already for mobile). In other words I think the problem has to do with the semantics of x86 more th…

This was explored in detail in another thread, it seems most of the gains are from looser memory ordering.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#43

Post by cpascal » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

> Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine.

I would absolutely love to buy the M1 MacBook Air (and I almost did), the performance is just too good. It’s nearly impossible to justify spending money on any other laptop. Unfortunately, I just can’t get past the single external display limitation. I did see there is a DisplayLink workaround to get multiple external displays working, but the performance of DisplayLink is not great and requires purchasing a dock.

It’s frustrating because I want to buy a M1 laptop, and the display support is a complete dealbreaker.

Assuming Apple addresses the display support in the M2 laptops, they’ll be an insta-buy for me.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#44

Post by snazz » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

vmchale wrote: post #20

tambourine_man wrote: post #13

Can'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.

> I want to see if Apple is as eager to beat the competition in the HPC space Doesn't HPC use PPC or something? I could see them delivering on Desktop, not sure about HPC though. There's only one Fortran compiler for M1!

Fugaku, the current most powerful supercomputer, is Arm-based.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#45

Post by swalsh » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

This is so tempting, but I still struggle to make it over the privacy bump. I'm extremely bothered by the stuff I've seen stating that apple phone homes everytime I run an application.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#46

Post by tmalsburg2 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

Why is the naive-bayes benchmark (first graph) such an extreme outlier? M1 is ~10 times slower on this benchmark whereas it is faster than the competition on almost any other benchmarks.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#47

Post by nicoburns » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

epmaybe wrote: post #26

whalesalad wrote: post #9

As 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 do…

I wouldn't be worried about 16GB now (my current MacBook is 16GB and I don't have any problems). But I want my laptop to least a decent amount of time (at least 5 years), and I do worry about whether 16GB will be sufficient then.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#48

Post by AntiImperialist » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

>Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine.

Well, if you are testing it for "real world programming", you should check if your development environment and all the tools you use for it works first. There is more to development than minor performance benefits from a slightly faster processor.

Do you need to run VMs for your development? How about docker? Do you compile your binaries locally?

If you deploy your code to x86_64 systems, you're most likely better off with an x86_64 machine. Even if you are developing for arm machines which are not M1 macs or iPhones or iPads, you are most likely better off with an x86_64 machine.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#49

Post by friedman23 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

yumraj wrote: post #33

Just waiting for the 15"/16" version. I don't use an external monitor so 13" just doesn't work for me.

Same, im buying one the second its on sale

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#50

Post by whalesalad » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #47

epmaybe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

I wouldn't be worried about 16GB now (my current MacBook is 16GB and I don't have any problems). But I want my laptop to least a decent amount of time (at least 5 years), and I do worry about whether 16GB will be sufficient then.

This is one of the biggest reasons for me, personally. It is such an inexpensive difference in overall cost versus the benefits of having that headroom.

Plus I am sitting at ~26gb used memory right now. I tend to give my VM's a nice big 8-12GB chunk of ram depending on what I am doing too, so it is almost like I have two machines in one.

The disks and data pipelines on these new machines are so fast though that I do wonder if the RAM's responsibility has shifted towards being a giant CPU cache and the disk has likewise shifted into a point where it performs more like RAM.