Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by DoofusOfDeath » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #82

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #67

I mainly develop C++ targeted at x86-64 Linux. I'm interested in hearing about others' experiences trying to develop for that target using an M1-based Mac. For example, what's the status of VM systems with M1 Mac as host, and x86-64 Linux as guest?

> For example, what's the status of VM systems with M1 Mac as host, and x86-64 Linux as guest? From what I understand, there is no way to virtualize an x86-64 operating system on the M1. You can run ARM Linux or Windows, but not x86-64.

> From what I understand, there is no way to virtualize an x86-64 operating system on the M1.

I wonder if QEMU is up to the challenge. I know it's capable of emulating fairly recent Intel x86-64 chips. But I'm not sure what QEMU requires of the host hardware/OS.

EDIT: This seems relevant: https://www.techradar.com/news/you-can-now-run-linux-and-win...

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

#192

Post by sdflhasjd » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

gzer0 wrote: post #92

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…

Would you also be able to run some of these? They're publicly available; the more datasets we have the better picture we get.

So, I picked out a couple that I could run without installing too much extra:

Ryzen 3900X:

antd-admin webpack build: ~23 seconds. Not surprising, it's just single core.

golang.org/x/benchmarks, BenchmarkBuild-8: 4.61 seconds, so far off the value of 19.65s in the article that I feel I'm getting some suspicions confirmed...

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

#193

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

danieldisu wrote: post #166

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…

maybe you will be able to compile everything in the cloud and then it doesn't matter what type of computer you have

That would be the end of interesting software. Censorship at the compiler level.

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

#194

Post by floatboth » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

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…

They're mostly some weird "java bench" "python bench" thingies rather than multicore builds of large C++/Rust/etc projects

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

#195

Post by cferr » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

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…

How do we know yet if it's long-lasting?

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

#196

Post by BryantD » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #45

This is so tempting, but I still struggle to make it over the privacy bump. I'm extremely bothered by the stuff I've seen stating that apple phone homes everytime I run an application.

I think it's smart to be concerned and smart to make your own decisions about what you're comfortable with.

For what it's worth: Mac OS doesn't phone home on every app open. The result is cached on your computer for a few days[1]; this behavior was lightly confirmed by an independent researcher[2].

I don't think the caching really addresses the core concern. Apple has promised to provide an opt-out sometime in the next year[3], which is a superior fix. I personally will be keeping an eye on that committment.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment-reference-ios/pre... [2] https://blog.jacopo.io/en/post/apple-ocsp/ [3] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491

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

#197

Post by lights0123 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

re: 6: eh, it's less than that, as long as you're in the same architecture. Linux applications virtualized on M1, running on a Pi 4, and Graviton2 are going to be binary-compatible with each other, and although you'll get the extra atomic performance out of the M1, they won't be massively different other than just scaling up. Cross compiling after some testing to ensure the right atomic order was used should be fine cross-arch.

If one were to add more ARM extensions and actually push them for third-party usage, that might change though.

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

#198

Post by kube-system » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

cromka wrote: post #180

kube-system wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Apple is binning the worse chips in the Mini? It is their cheapest Mac, after all.

They bin the worse chips as a 7-core version of M1, which is not an option when configuring Mac Mini.

Maybe there are some chips with 8 functional cores but only at lower frequencies? ... just spitballing.

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

#199

Post by dpzmick » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #112

spamizbad wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

this is a reasonable test: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ref.html

but it's pretty straightforward to just copy giant buffers in order/out of order and squint really hard at the results

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

#200

Post by gameswithgo » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

SirIntruder wrote: post #171

gameswithgo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is unity3d running natively?

It definitely uses x86 emulation, if that's what you mean. But based on the these M1 threads I would expect M1 x86 emulation to work like magic, not be 5 times slower than some dual core 2016 model.

Yeah I just imagine that its a worst case scenario for Rosetta there. Possibly a lot of SIMD that isn't getting translated to neon simd.