Earlier quoted context omitted.
M1 is not RISC-V and I don't think CISC vs RISC is of any significance here. If naive bayes is really embarassingly parallel, SIMD+lots of cores help here of course. It is also probably highly optimized code that doesn't rely so significantly on OoO capabilities and can take advantage of the higher clock rate. Even Itanium was very good at numerical code.
What is the M1 then? https://medium.com/swlh/what-does-risc-and-cisc-mean-in-2020... confused.
Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
351–360 of 467 posts
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#352Leaving 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.
> Leaving aside the x86 vs Arm efficiency debate Just to clarify, there was no debate about efficiency in terms of work per Watt for a very long time now. Arm wins in this regard, because it is designed for efficiency. The remaining questions were question is how fast can Arm go? Can it compete with x86 performance-wise?
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, for the instruction set all the CPUs are required to be compatible. However, Apple seems to be going in the direction of having many many hardware accelerators builtin to their SoC and integrated into their software ecosystem. I assume that if Google and Amazon were to build their own chips, they'd do the same. Those accelerators will not be intercompatible, and we'll have a dozen different vendored drivers, li…
> Sure, for the instruction set all the CPUs are required to be compatible. However, Apple seems to be going in the direction of having many many hardware accelerators builtin to their SoC and integrated into their software ecosystem. There is little evidence that Apple has built anything truly non-standard in the M1 so far, the closest thing they have is the TSO mode, and that's not an optimisation since it provides…
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#354Many people overstate Apple's achievement, in reality most credit should go to TSMC the company that manufactures the M1 chip. The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC in order to be the first one to use their 5nm technology.
Arm cpu core designs like cortex a78 and x1 are also designed for tsmc 5nm. But their per core performance is like 30% to 50% worse than Apple's firestorm cores. The low power a55 is worse than Apple's low power. And the mali gpu is worse than apple gpu. The circuit design and placement on to the chip is part of the equation as well.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#355I'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…
This bit from the article might bring things into focus: > "I add the following comment as of Dec 14: we care how fast our dev computer runs. the multi-core advantage of 3900X is useless for most of the benchmarks here that don't represent the real-world production performance at all but devs usually work on their laptops, desktops, etc most of the time so I think such real-world development performance benchmarks ma…
(I'm not interested in going back to MacOS so I'm not really looking at the M1 as anything other than intellectually interesting at the moment, but if I were it certainly at least seems like it might compete there.)
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the m1 has dedicated js instructions.
This raises so many questions for me that are predicated on this being the case, but this is way out of my league so I could be off the mark. Incoming geeking about Universal Programming Languages. 1. If you can increase the performance of a language by adding language specific instruction sets to the processor, how much of a boost would we see on average? 2. Instead of building in instructions for say Python, C#, Ja…
Hardware can parallelize type checks. For instance, you can have an add instruction which proceeds on the assumption that the two arguments are numbers. In parallel, a type checking unit in the hardware can abort that instruction and cause a branch to some handler if the operand types are wrong.
Function calls in dynamic languages can be expensive partly due to the dynamic checking that there are not too few or too many arguments. This affects code that doesn't otherwise require type checking (like logic that is doing nothing more than just passing arguments through several layers of functions and capturing return values). Hardware can help here also.
The industry moved toward general-purpose hardware. The Lisp people figured out ways to compile Lisp well to general-purpose hardware.
The thing about hardware is that it also needs optimization: a machine designed for ideal execution of Lisp is going to be expected to produce new revisions that are faster and faster, keeping up with advances in general-purpose machines. If it fails to do so, its performance will be overtaken by Lisp that is compiled to the general-purpose machines.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#357As soon as Apple sells this chip in a 32GB package I am going to be all over it.
I wonder if the Mac Pro version of this will do a two-tiered thing, with 16GB on the chip, and then a bunch of slots for your slower, "external" memory modules— basically the Mac Fusion Drive of RAM, with an internal controller to manage moving stuff in and out of the low-latency area. I could certainly also see them going all-in on the integrated architecture, but the possibilities are intriguing if they want a reas…
The memory on the M1 actually has fairly poor latency compared to most x86 systems:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's only achievement...besides the actual design of the CPU, GPU, and ML accelerator that TSMC is manufacturing. Besides that what have the Romans every done for us?
Apple's M1 basically uses the architecture used for iPhone/iPad chips. Now I don't deny that the M1 is an impressive chip. But the question is would it be as good as the i9 if it would be a 14nm chip with only half of its 16b transistors?
1. Transistor density isn't necessarily orthogonal to node size. Intel's 10nm process has a higher transistor density than some of TSMC and Samsung's 10, 8, and 7nm processes.
2. It doesn't matter if the M1 at 10 or 14nm would beat an i9, 5nm M1's are on sale and 5nm i9's don't exist.
3. The M1 is keeping up with or beating an i9 with fewer physical cores and no use of SMT. An M1 only has 4 "performance" cores, the "efficiency" cores aren't contributing overmuch to the overall number crunching. The i9's have 8 full physical cores with SMT.
4. The M1 is a development of the A-series chips so you can compare their performance at larger node sizes to the i9, it hasn't been good news for Intel for the past few years. The A12 and A13 have been impressive and they have only 2 "performance" cores.
TSMC deserves a lot of praise for their manufacturing and process development. But the praise to go around is not zero sum, Apple deserves as much as TSMC. This is the exact same as AMD's Zen architecture being as deserving of praise for it's impressive performance over Intel's chips.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's very interesting. A CR-48 looking, basic laptop with workable keyboard and trackpad. Chrome/Chromium OS (similar to CloudReady) since all the schools are on Google. If they could get it to $249 with reasonable performance, they could crush it.
Since we’re fantasising, I’d say a bare metal Linux distro — or a fork of Chromium OS — running as web client for AWS Workspaces. The downside is that you need an Internet connection at all times, and possibly a subscription.
You own nothing but the locked-down terminal that connects you to the AWS virtual desktop cloud.
Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
#360Many people overstate Apple's achievement, in reality most credit should go to TSMC the company that manufactures the M1 chip. The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC in order to be the first one to use their 5nm technology.
So Microsoft could just fly to Taiwan, hand over a few billion and magically they have an M1 chip.
I wish we could all live in your delusional fantasy world because life sounds easy there.