131–140 of 467 posts
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.
Leaving 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.
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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.
The weaker memory model should help extracting additional memory level parallelism, but I doubt that ordering has large impact. M1 is quite good even when running in TSO mode.
[1] of course they need to be commended for this, they went against the usual wisdom, probably because their CPU was designed to be low power first then high performance, not the other way around.
[2] typically the average ILP for normal applications is 1.5 instructions per cycle, but the variance is high, so if you reduce the amount of cycles the cpu is stalled, the ILP can go up fast.
> 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…
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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?
I quickly looked up the AMD for price and TPD. Turns out, AMD Ryzen 3900X is a 105W TPD CPU with 420GBP price tag when on discount. The base Mac mini is 699GBP. Is there any info on the overclock prospects for Apple M1? Is there possibility to run this beast at AMD&Intel heat output levels? How fast a water cooled M1 could be?
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.
The only time you really run into thermal-limits on desktops (or laptops) is when you're hitting SIMD across many cores: 16-thread or 32-thread tasks with AVX and the like.
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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.
I don't have any insider knowledge but I am fully convinced (and so are many others) that we will see a newer Apple ARM based processor before the end of 2021. If you are a programmer and you have a machine to work on, I'd say hold out for the next one.
Brew: under Rosetta everything seems to work
Java/Clojure: the AdoptOpenJDK works fine but the performance is not good; similar numbers with my old machine. The Azul ARM JDK is literally twice as fast. The jsass library depends on a native binary which doesn’t exist for ARM which is a roadblock.
MongoDB and Redis work fine under Rosetta.
I didn’t have more time as I had to send it back because of a wrong keyboard (I’ve put in the wrong order) but something missing from the various benchmarks is the clear wins in UI zippiness, and the silence and relative lack of heat when the machine is taxed.
I’m looking forward to the replacement arriving so I can try a video call.