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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

#311

Post by gameswithgo »

csomar wrote: post #286
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…

Your Ryzen probably comes with a Cooler (wraith prism). The CPU slows down considerably when it gets hot. Also, if you built the thing yourself, you might have added a super fast RAM, Motherboard, Nvme, and a capable graphic card. Comparing Desktop to Laptop is Apple to Oranges. Otherwise the desktop market will no longer exist.

that doesn't address any of his comparisons. the person doing these benchmarks also had a cooler, fast ram, motherboard has no impact, mac air has FASTER ram and a good ssd also.

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

#312

Post by tartaglia »

cbozeman wrote: post #300
tartaglia wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a vision: Amazon Basics Laptops

That's not a vision, that's a nightmare.

Wait till you hear the best part. Like the Kindle, they will ship it with ads as screensaver. Additionally, you will receive promoted notifications once in a while.

You pay 529.99$ upfront, or a monthly subscription, in order to remove the ads and enjoy your O.S. powered by AWS Workspaces.

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

#313

Post by kllrnohj »

viktorcode wrote: post #239
kllrnohj wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well note that this seems to be nearly all single-core (or low-core) benchmarks, whereas AMD's Ryzen performance recommendation has always been around its multithreaded performance, with its single-core performance called out specifically as being a compromise (until the 5000 series, anyway, which wasn't used here). Something like an ObjC or C++ compilation test would be very interesting here.

Here you go (check for WebKit compiling time): https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

That doesn't compare against a 3900X or any other Ryzen CPU. It doesn't even compare against something not as heavily throttled as Apple's previous MacBooks.

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

#314

Post by Alex3917 »

I'm excited that this seems to reduce the time needed to compile Python regex by over 50%, something which Python currently offers no way to speed up or parallelize. You'd think that you'd be able to combine compiled regex to take advantage of repeated parts of patterns, or to compile regex across multiple processes and pickle them, but neither of those things are currently possible.

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

#315

Post by elcdodedocle »

bollocks.

M1 devices are quality products. A more than necessary innovation. I expect them to do well if sold at reasonable prices.

The strategy of trying to sell them as outperforming the big boys on computationally intensive tasks, on the other hand, is plain absurd.

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

#316

Post by kllrnohj »

floatboth wrote: post #179
kllrnohj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 already has the widest CPU design of anything out there. It's possible that Apple will still be able to scale up even wider, but that wouldn't be a necessarily "safe" bet. There's nothing obviously on the table for a big uptick in IPC. Apples got a great trajectory and great engineers, of course, but there's nothing here where you can point to an existing thing and be like "now as soon as they add that, too, w…

> clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo How high they can go really depends on the process. TSMC 7FF silicon didn't go that high early on, max clocks really were improving as the process matured. This was very noticeable with AMD Zen 2, early dies topped out at ~4.2 (for all cores on the die), later ones often easily take ~4.4.

How high it goes also depends on the CPU design. We know TSMC's 7NM can make CPUs that hit 4.5ghz, the Ryzen 5000 does this. It's also quite likely that TSMC's 5nm can still hit the 4ghz+ range in a CPU application.

What we don't know is if the M1 can actually run at those frequencies, too, or if there's other bottlenecks that prevent the M1 from clocking higher than it does.

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

#317

Post by cromka »

kube-system wrote: post #198
cromka wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean can you imagine the uproar it would cause if Apple did that?

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

#318

Post by cbozeman »

api wrote: post #24
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.

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.

LPDDR4X-4266 memory and its right on the chip.

I'd really like to see what AMD could do with a huge die that combines 8 Zen 3 cores, 16 GB of LPDDR4X-4266, and their GPU all on a single chip.

I'm very excited about the performance that Apple has been able to generate with this silicon, but these tests don't put anything to bed.

You're giving up extreme choice and expandability for performance by going the M1 route. You can spend $1700 for a Mac Mini with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD, but that's what you're stuck with. Forever. Until its time to buy a new computer. People who bought into AMD's AM4 platform at the start were able to go up from the 1000 series to the 3000 series, able to upgrade their RAM from nearly any size to 64 GB, and able to upgrade their SSDs by slotting in a new NVMe drive. To say nothing of the GPU, which for developers of specific solutions, is becoming a serious concern. Also if you game in your spare time, you're at a disadvantage not just due to the Apple ecosystem, but also limited by the GPU.

For most of us, our machines are disposable. Even though I still build myself a new workstation every 2-3 years, I never bother selling it, I just give it away to family because for me its not worth the hassle, and then I order $3-4000 in parts and build a new one all over again. So buying the new Mac Mini made sense for me, although I opted to go with the base model for $699 so I could evaluate it and determine if going "all-in" for a higher-end model made sense (it does), but not for one second am I under the illusion that this chip is going to be the death of x86.

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

#319

Post by chungus_khan »

epistasis wrote: post #157
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…

Anandtech measured the ram latency at >90ns, which is not great: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... The cache on the M1 is also massive. If Intel/AMD have clever prefetchers to make up for this, it looks like the M1 might be doing something more.

I have been trying to explain to people that having the DRAM chips physically next to the SOC on the package does not actually meaningfully improve memory latency.

I get that people on this site are excited, but please be excited about the right things.

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