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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

#91

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…

This bit from the article might bring things into focus:

> "I add the following comment as of Dec 14: we care how fast our dev computer runs. the multi-core advantage of 3900X is useless for most of the benchmarks here that don't represent the real-world production performance at all but devs usually work on their laptops, desktops, etc most of the time so I think such real-world development performance benchmarks make it worthwhile though. of course, Ryzen 3900X will perform way better than M1 and Intel when it comes to production, mostly achieved by parallelizing."

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

#92

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…

Would you also be able to run some of these?

They're publicly available; the more datasets we have the better picture we get.

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

#93
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!

[deleted]

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

#94
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.

You're not wrong but the article is still a 9th gen laptop i9. A desktop i9 is quicker - https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9880H-vs....

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

#95
post #68
post #10

> 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…

Yep. But these days for anything else, I just fire up a cloud VM and kill it when it's done. I spent less on that than the 3900X and RAM would have cost me in 5 years. My main daily driver machine and dev box is now the absolute ass end M1 Mac Mini and it's the best computer I have ever had.

I pretty much do work that needs more then 16GB of memory all day every day (and can take advantage of CPU cores up to 12 to 16 range). But yeah very dependent on your environment/workflow.

Especially if you are just doing lightweight web dev 16GB is more then enough (could probably get away with 8GB or less)

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine AWS launching ec2 instances with M1 chips!

They have graviton, which is already more efficient by a huge margin (against intel per dollar).

More efficient than Intel i-series or more efficient than M1?

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

#97
post #55
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)?

Officially just 1 external display. People have run more using DisplayLink.

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

#98
post #60

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 tends to hold back performance on first gen products and then boost them dramatically in the next iteration.

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

#99
Yeah, nice. Need 64 Gb and some way to virtualize x64 operating systems though. Not everyone does web development.

I could do a good part of my work on a M1 but not with so little ram. Come to think of it, did Apple limit the first ARM Macs to 16 Gb to specifically keep people like me away from it until the software matures a bit?

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

#100
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…

Yes I agree, it's more the semantics and the legacy of x86 (page sizes, MMU, memory models - even though Rosetta still runs faster than x86) than simply decoding.
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