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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

#111

Post by bigdict »

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…

Linux works great on X1 Carbons, not so much on new Apple machines. Keep the X1 if you care about that.

Also the next gen Carbons are supposed to have a 16:10 screen.

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

#112

Post by AceJohnny2 »

spamizbad wrote: post #78
api wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

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, w…

How would one benchmark memory performance (DRAM latency & bandwidth) on the various chips?

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

#113

Post by dmitriid »

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.

All these gains will be entirely swallowed by software in a few years.

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

#115

Post by alexhutcheson »

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…

One nice aspect of Big Sur and the M1 is that you can run the iPad version of many apps, rather than the Electron desktop version. The iPad versions often use way less memory.

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

#116

Post by pwthornton »

wwright wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

Well, Apple has managed to move all the way down to a 5nm process while Intel still hasn't made it past 14nm. AFAIK that's the largest limiting factor for Intel. I can't speak to why they have been stuck there for so long.

I think process node is overrated here. If the only thing that Intel was struggling with was process nodes and the rest of their designs were amazing, Apple would have probably stayed with them and encouraged them to outsource their chip fab work.

Apple is getting performance that matches the best of Intel has while beating the power draw of basically all they have.

And it's not just the CPU. The built in GPU of the MBA is surprisingly powerful, and the neural engine is beyond what Intel has.

Yes, Intel needs to get their chip fab back on track, but I also think they have issues with their chip designs (and perhaps something larger with x86).

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

#117

Post by soheil »

fredsted wrote: post #107
soheil wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed! Even dreamier if they bring back the magsafe and upgrade to the current keyboard with function keys.

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

#118

Post by wongarsu »

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.

I sit here with 24GB memory usage just from my browser, a couple PDFs and two IDEs (Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code).

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

#119

Post by philjohn »

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.

The X1 Carbon, which is what I assume you're referring to with Thinkpad, is 2.6Lbs vs 2.8Lbs for the 2020 Macbook Air.

That's 90g of difference ... I'd say that qualifies for Ultralight still.

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

#120

Post by seddin »

dmitriid wrote: post #113
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.

All these gains will be entirely swallowed by software in a few years.

Electron apps or worse.
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