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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

#181

Post by kube-system »

cromka wrote: post #137
mrtksn wrote: post #69

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?

M1 doesn't hit thermal dissipation capacity of Apple's fan solutions (in Mini and MB Pro). You can witness that by torturing the CPU and not even hearing the fan at all. Plenty f videos on the web show that. The fan spins, but only barely and never quite as much as with Intel I-series. And they use the same fan/heatpipe as with previous models, so nothing was improved here.

I've been using my M1 MBP for a few days now, and the only way I have been able to get the fan to even power on was to run Cinebench.

This morning I was basically running the entire MS office suite, joined a video meeting, had a couple dozen tabs open in my browser, a couple of nodejs apps, and a few other things -- and the fan still didn't start.

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

#182

Post by tartaglia »

pmontra wrote: post #159

Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…

There is no incentive for AWS to add restrictions like Apple with XCode. Indeed, I think that this would just reduce the amount of the customers they can reach.

I don’t think that other computers manufacturers are going to follow Apple’s lead. Maybe Microsoft will do it if they decide to get serious with their Surface line.

The one company I see benefiting the most from this is Qualcomm. They have the customers and the money to invest in R&D.

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

#183

Post by nitrogen »

klelatti wrote: post #172
pmontra wrote: post #159

Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…

What do you mean by somewhat compatible? Why fragmentation when Arm sets the ISA standard?

The base ISA is set by ARM, but every vendor has their own set of features turned on or off, and their own extensions, and potentially their own way of laying out memory mapped IO and identifying peripherals.

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

#184

Post by muro »

philjohn wrote: post #119
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.

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.

The new X1 nano is 907g (1.99 lbs), so the Macbook Air at 1.29kg is 42% heavier.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/coming-soon/ThinkPad-X1-Nano/p/...

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

#185

Post by sandworm101 »

pmontra wrote: post #159

Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…

There is more to a cloud than the chips. Having the cloud chip in your dev laptop wont mean you have the same memory/power/cooling/storage services. Code optimized on your laptop, despite having the same chip, wont necessarily run perfectly in the cloud.

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

#186

Post by andrepew »

dragontamer wrote: post #138
andrepew wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But desktop cores use vanishingly small amounts of power for single-threaded tasks. 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.

They're talking about a difference in real world dev use. My Macbook Pro thermal throttles just running Chrome sometimes (which is always running while I develop). If I started a single threaded compile alongside that, it most definitely would run slower.

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

#187

Post by gonehome »

minot wrote: post #139
fredsted wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> M1 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.

Apple hardware resells extremely well and if you don't want to deal with the hassle of reselling privately you can can also trade it in for a decent return.

If you're not on a super tight budget it's not terrible to just pick up the new machine and swap it out for the next one that ships if you want to.

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

#188

Post by viktorcode »

pmontra wrote: post #159

Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…

Just use the gap in performance among smartphones. M1 utilises the same high performance cores A14 has. And A14 is ahead of competing Arm by roughly 2 years. Here's your answer, hardware-wise.

But in the world of software things are far more complicated.

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

#189

Post by paulgb »

codenesium wrote: post #108
qz2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you tell me more about your setup? Like which ec2 instance size, remote desktop software, and any other tips? I’ve considered doing the same.

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

#190

Post by andrewprock »

staffanj wrote: post #158

How is this possible? I know the Apple M1 is fast but against a 3900X? Is it mostly storage and memory affecting the results? (doesn't say what storage Ryzen uses). I mean - I still have a hard time believing that a M1 can outperform a Ryzen 3900X if they benchmark something that uses the CPU 100% for a while - like raytracing. Or do x86 just suck and we found out now when something else came out?

Most of the article uses single core benchmarks. For single core, the 5nm M1 beats previous generation 7nm x86 handily.

For the current generation (which is almost impossible to buy) it's a push.

For multi-core workloads (mostly niche use cases) high core count processors perform better.

I assume when the M1x comes out, it will similarly dominate the multi-core workloads, if it does have the rumored 32 cores.

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