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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

#101

Post by andrepew »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #71

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…

In laptops, the performance of the CPU in sustained use is heavily tied to the cooling solution. Almost all laptops will hit a performance ceiling due to thermal throttling. A desktop is at a massive advantage here.

There are also potentially OS differences or other config differences. You'd need to normalize everything to get an accurate picture when comparing the two CPUs.

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

#102

Post by Aperocky »

soheil wrote: post #74
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.

That's not true though, the air weighs at 1.27 kg whereas the 12" macbook weighs at 0.92 kg.

That's about a quarter lighter but not anywhere near half.

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

#103

Post by the_arun »

Aperocky wrote: post #89
the_arun wrote: post #72

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).

True, but I believe graviton is still not like M1. Do they support i386 / backward compatible?

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

#104

Post by kllrnohj »

ogre_codes wrote: post #73

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.

Well note that this seems to be nearly all single-core (or low-core) benchmarks, whereas AMD's Ryzen performance recommendation has always been around its multithreaded performance, with its single-core performance called out specifically as being a compromise (until the 5000 series, anyway, which wasn't used here).

Something like an ObjC or C++ compilation test would be very interesting here.

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

#105

Post by navaati »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #42
vlovich123 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By the way, does someone knows where RISC-V stands regarding this ?

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

#106

Post by pwthornton »

I am very excited to see what the M1X and other higher power variants is like.

I have an M1 MBA with the 7-core GPU, and it is a stunning machine. It is fast in everything, and in ways that Intel and AMD laptops are not. Every single interaction is fast. You will shave seconds off of everything, and it adds up over the course of a day.

The other big thing is the battery life. I do not use this laptop plugged in. I tend to charge it overnight, and it lasts through my entire day and night.

But this is of course Apple's lowest power chip, and it is plenty fast. What does a chip from Apple look like that has a lot more thermal headroom?

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

#107

Post by fredsted »

soheil wrote: post #74
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.

Yes, Apple's current lineup is a little confusing. The 13" Pro and 13" Air are so similar, and almost the same weight.

I still use a 12" MacBook, and it's just amazingly small and light. If Apple makes a 12" MacBook with a M1, it would be awesome. A dream machine for me.

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

#108

Post by codenesium »

qz2 wrote: post #68
doikor wrote: 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.

My primary dev environment is in ec2. I don't really care about multiple monitors. It's so convenient.

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

#109

Post by NeverFade »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #79

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 ch…

I own a Carbon X1 and it's one of my favorite laptops ever. I work exclusively on Linux, and detest Apple and the Walled Garden strategy in all their consumer products. That strategy is ridiculous for developer-related product, and I dislike that MacOS is hard to customize compared to Linux.

I would still cancel and order an M1 instead. It's that impressive of an upgrade.

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

#110

Post by floatboth »

snazz wrote: post #44
vmchale wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The previous one, Summit, was indeed IBM POWER9. So basically, HPC people will adopt any ISA, it's the hardware that matters.
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