Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% improvement a year from now on.
Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
81–90 of 467 posts
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#82I mainly develop C++ targeted at x86-64 Linux. I'm interested in hearing about others' experiences trying to develop for that target using an M1-based Mac. For example, what's the status of VM systems with M1 Mac as host, and x86-64 Linux as guest?
> For example, what's the status of VM systems with M1 Mac as host, and x86-64 Linux as guest?
From what I understand, there is no way to virtualize an x86-64 operating system on the M1. You can run ARM Linux or Windows, but not x86-64.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#83Leaving aside the x86 vs Arm efficiency debate, the key takeaway with the M1 for me is that the Arm licensing business model has allowed Apple to innovate on top of the Arm ISA and create something genuinely impressive.
I know the x86 ecosystem is more open but the costs of being locked into the x86 duopoly for so long have been invisible. The M1 is making them visible.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#84Can'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…
I don’t think it’s that simple. This design is so good because Apple designed a system, and didn’t throw together a few parts they could buy.
They should revisit all choices they made earlier. Users might want more generic ML hardware, so that they can develop the algorithms that can get burned into specific hardware on some future consumer-level hardware, a GPU that can ray trace better, more memory than you can fit on a SoC, etc.
That last issue is particularly problematic. They might have to give up the idea of having (only) unified memory.
If so, the entire design could change. In some cases, that could mean task-specific hardware isn’t (much) faster anymore than doing it in the CPU, in which case discarding it to make room for extra cores, cache, etc. might be the better choice.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#85This 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.
You should research what Microsoft and Google send home then. You'll swear off computing entirely.
The problem with Apple verifying app signatures online each run is their implementation was crap and made Mac OS slow down to a crawl when they had problems. Incompetence not malice :)
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#86The 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.
> more than twice lighter.
Under half the weight?
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#87> 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
The RAM is not on the same chip. It's regular LPDDR4X chips on the same package (connected by regular-ass PCB traces, not even a silicon interposer like HBM would've been). It's clocked pretty high, but you can go even faster on DDR4 desktops.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#88Really 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.
I don’t understand the 4 ports issue. If you have that many things to plug in at your desk, don’t you keep them plugged into a dock that has power delivery, and just connect one wire when you sit down?
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#89The 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!
They have graviton, which is already more efficient by a huge margin (against intel per dollar).
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
It’s not the instruction decoder that wastes die space. In fact, it’s less than 5% of the die (on Skylake).[0]
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXFJLebXkAYkXTr?format=jpg&name=...
In case that link dies, it’s from [1] which is linked from [2]
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/GPUsAreMagic/status/1256866465577...
[2]: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/05/26/kreg2.html