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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

#301

Post by tartaglia »

janmo wrote: post #284
klelatti wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has nothing to do with their architecture. That it has zero to do with the architecture is a bold assertion (and seems unlikely). In any event Apple would not have been able to manufacture / buy an x86 on 5nm so the architecture has quite a lot of influence on the performance of the latest Apple laptops.

I made the following thought experiment. If we downscale the M1 to a 8b transistor chip and make it use 14nm technology, would it still be faster than an i9 chip? I don't think so.

I think so. 3900X has 9.89b transistors and it is still faster than the i9.

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

#302

Post by boyter »

NeverFade wrote: post #109
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.

Same. I was about to order a X1, then the new Apple machines hit and switched to an M1 Air. Just the battery life itself is a good enough reason.

I say that as someone who has been very critical of Apple for the last 5 years too. Looks like they care about their laptops again.

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

#303

Post by wrsh07 »

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…

All of the predictions / claims except for (1) seem very incorrect to me

At the big corps that I've worked, my laptop is just a client to the machine that hosts the code & does the builds (that machine has been a giant Linux desktop & an ec2 instance)

We already see Apple chips in ec2. Today it's ostensibly "rent a machine to run your test suite" (although iiuc there's a 24h minimum rental), but I don't see any reason why it won't eventually be "just run your server on an apple cloud instance on ec2" (or develop locally in a container and deploy to that)

Software is actually reducing the friction of deploying to a different machine than you develop on, and the proliferation of high end custom chips isn't going to change that

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

#304

Post by janmo »

redisman wrote: post #288
janmo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt the M1 would perform nearly as good if it was a 14nm chip with 8b transistors.

The nanometer process is not an actual standard. So it's apples and oranges to compare two fabs

You are right, there different ways to measure transistors, but if I recall it correctly this should not account for more than 20 or 30% difference.

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

#305

Post by Reason077 »

rsynnott wrote: post #278
SirIntruder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rosetta does quite badly with JITed stuff (notably, it does very, very badly with x86 JVMs). I assume it'll be fine once native Unity is available.

The linked article with the benchmarks doesn't make it clear what JVM is being used. Since the Java benchmarks seem to perform well, I assume they're using a native JVM?

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

#306

Post by ineedasername »

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…

N somewhat compatible ARM chips, that is to say they are somewhat incompatible. Remember the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s but also the diversity in server architectures and OSes

I'm not so sure. Or at least, I don't think a balkanized landscape like that would last very long before the market converges on some type of de-facto standard, much like things ultimately did in the 80's/90's, and late alternative ::ahem, Itanium:: failed to gain traction in the market.

Also, instead of a variety of (often vendor-specific) OS's, we're really only dealing with two major candidates: Windows & Linux. Linux with its multiple distributions is more complicated, although AFAIK the main server distros there are Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS. So the chips that best support these OS's would likely be the one the industry converges on, assuming it's available as a commodity component. (i.e., not just in a propriety cloud) And it would be smart to make sure desktops/laptops can run the flavor of chips running in clouds because that's where much development/coding happens.

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

#307

Post by Macha »

nickjj wrote: post #210

I'm not a hardware review expert but I think one of the biggest advantages of the Ryzen 5000 series vs the 3900x is the CPU performance for apps that don't take advantage of parallelism across many cores. The 5000 series has a completely new architecture and is supposedly WAY faster than the 3000 series for single core tasks. That's partly why gaming performance is so much better with the 5000 series since it often c…

> with hardware that's available today

I'm not sure the 5900x or 5950x qualify as "available today". Orderable today for delivery in 2-3 months, maybe.

That said, I do agree, the 5900x looks to be about 15-20% faster on single/few core tasks than the 3900x from benchmarks I've seen.

Also worth mentioning is that the M1 is one process node head of the 3900x/5900x (TSMC 5nm vs TSMC 7nm). There's a much slower rate of process shrinks these days, so I'd imagine 5nm will be available to AMD before Apple jumps to the next node.

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

#308

Post by klelatti »

janmo wrote: post #284
klelatti wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has nothing to do with their architecture. That it has zero to do with the architecture is a bold assertion (and seems unlikely). In any event Apple would not have been able to manufacture / buy an x86 on 5nm so the architecture has quite a lot of influence on the performance of the latest Apple laptops.

I made the following thought experiment. If we downscale the M1 to a 8b transistor chip and make it use 14nm technology, would it still be faster than an i9 chip? I don't think so.

Problem is your thought experiment doesn't work because you've ignored:

- The TDP of the M1 and the i9

- How each has utilised die area (e.g how much is devoted to CPU / GPU and accelerators)

When we see the version of the M1 for the larger MacBook Pros then the gap will become even bigger.

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

#309

Post by shmoogy »

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…

You can use display link adapters if necessary, or get a super ultra wide. My air is pushing 5120x1440 @ 120hz on my 49 inch super ultrawide and doesn't stress at all.

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

#310

Post by flohofwoe »

ducktective wrote: post #272
bhouston wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the m1 has dedicated js instructions.

What are js instructions and what does javascript(?) have to do with ISA?

See here:

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/g/A64-Floati...

Not Apple Silicon specific though

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