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

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

#71

Post by sdflhasjd »

I'm still extremely suspicious of all these benchmarks, because they don't seem to correlate with my real-world experience.

All these benchmarks claim to be comparing real-world applications, but I don't trust them because of what they always show with regards to mobile i9 and desktop Ryzen.

I've got a Intel Macbook Pro, and a Ryzen desktop. When I'm using them for development, my Ryzen is absolutely wiping the floor with the Macbook, Android builds complete in a fraction of the time, and I barely ever have to wait for anything to complete. The story is much the same with almost any development tool or process I use.

Yet benchmarks like these show comparatively minor performance differences between the two. I just get the impression these benchmarks are being cherrypicked, or are "nerfed" in some way on multicore systems.

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

#72

Post by the_arun »

bb123 wrote: post #11

The 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.

Imagine AWS launching ec2 instances with M1 chips!

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

#73

Post by ogre_codes »

This kind of changes the narrative about the Intel/ AMD competition of late. For the past few years people have been suggesting AMD has been hitting it out of the park in terms of performance. This suggests that's not necessarily the case.

AMD didn't have to hit it out of the park to humiliate Intel, they just needed to be competent. A professional ball club doesn't need a team of All Stars to embarrass a farm team.

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

#74

Post by soheil »

bb123 wrote: post #11

The 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.

Just a quick note, the MacBook Air is by no means "ultralight" even by Apple standards, 2017 MacBook for example was more than twice lighter. Thinkpad laptops are also measurably lighter than any current generation MacBook.

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

#75

Post by cpascal »

kzrdude wrote: post #55
cpascal wrote: post #43

> 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 di…

Can't you configure it with two external displays (and the internal display blank)?

I don't think so, but I would love to hear otherwise. My research indicates it can only support one external display up to 6K@60Hz.

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

#76

Post by qz2 »

milansm wrote: post #8

I’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

I'm avoiding brew/docker myself on my main desktop as I've screwed it up a couple of times doing that before. Thus I fire up a t2.small in AWS to test docker images on. My local box is VSCode, Terraform, aws cli, Go, Python etc and everything just works (mostly through Rosetta)

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

#77

Post by gzer0 »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #46

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.

The decoupling of the class conditional feature distributions of the naive-bayes benchmark means that each distribution can be independently estimated as a one-dimensional distribution.

This helps alleviate problems stemming from the curse of dimensionality, such as the need for data sets that scale exponentially with the number of features. This is precisely an area where x86 architecture and CISC ISA will out rank the RISC-V ISA of M1's.

But perhaps, I don't know what I am talking about. Someone with more knowledge, please chime in.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140311005243/http://machinelea...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228845263_An_Empiri...

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

#78

Post by spamizbad »

api wrote: post #24
bb123 wrote: post #11

The 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.

I think people should pay more attention to the LPDDR4X RAM that's tightly coupled to the CPU and likely has significantly less latency and more bandwidth than anything on the Ryzen or i9. This is critical to keeping their wide design fed, and if you swapped this out with standard DDR3200 you'd see some lackluster numbers.

Both Intel and AMD try to overcome the memory wall with larger caches and clever prefetching, which is going to chew up more die space and power than x86 decoders.

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

#79

Post by alexhutcheson »

I recently ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon at a steep discount ($830 for Gen 8 w/ 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD). I felt great about it when I ordered it, but now I'm agonizing over whether to cancel and get an M1 MacBook Air instead. I'll probably be using the laptop for 4-5 years, and I'm concerned that anything with a current-gen Intel chip is going to feel like "legacy tech" for most of that time.

Amazing how the M1 has changed the landscape. If the MacBook Air could handle 2 external displays, I probably wouldn't even hesitate.

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

#80

Post by tambourine_man »

api wrote: post #16
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.

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…

What you’re describing is the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac mini pro, etc.

But I think they’ll have the Mac Pro continue to be RAM, GPU and PCI upgradable.

How they are doing that is the most interesting secret in the industry.

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