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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

#391

Post by klelatti »

djsumdog wrote: post #350

I really fear that Linux might get left behind as Apple and Microsoft go after this ARMs-race (pun intended). At least Microsoft requires UEFI with their ARM offerings, but often the bootloaders are locked. I love Linux and I love running it natively. Currently I can grab almost any Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, etc. desktop/laptop and there's a very good chance all the hardware will work with mainline Linux. If I get a lap…

Whilst I have sympathy on many of your points and understand frustration the answer cannot be neverending lock-in to the Intel/AMD duopoly.

How many x86 based netbooks are e-waste now (despite being able to run linux) because the hardware simply wasn't up to the job?

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

#392

Post by chungus_khan »

tambourine_man wrote: post #387
chungus_khan wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not really any magic to it, they just need to implement PCIe and include memory slots instead of hardwired chips on the package. There are other ARM systems that already do this.

Yeah, but then you lose the benefits of the integrated memeory. How they're gonna solve that is the big question.

There actually aren't really any benefits outside of manufacturing. Trace length is a marginal factor in memory performance/latency, and having the memory on-package versus only slightly further away doesn't mean much. I'm not sure exactly where the idea that having the memory on-package was so beneficial came from, especially considering the M1 actually has fairly poor memory latency (though within the expected normal range for LPDDR4X):

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

As far as HSA/unified memory architecture, PCIe 4.0 has enough bandwidth to comfortably access main memory for applications that support it (and vice versa with GPU memory), although I imagine most high-performance GPU workloads will do better primarily operating on dedicated GPU memory (especially given that a single M1 core can already saturate the memory controller on its own).

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

#393

Post by anko »

skohan wrote: post #294
rayiner wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think this is overstated. There are quite a few differences between Intel and AMD extensions these days and they don’t create much of a problem. Apple’s architecture isn’t reliant on accelerators or special instructions to get good performance on general pu…

But it could exist right? For instance, what if MS created an ARM variant with special instructions to accelerate C# garbage collection? You could imagine a world where vertical integration throughout the entire stack leads to software which kind of works everywhere, but only really gives a good experience on 1st party hardware.

I'm no expert but put too many extensions in there and you're looking less like RISC and more like CISC. It would make more sense on x86 platforms.

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

#394

Post by nickjj »

Macha wrote: post #307
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 p…

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

Yeah the supply is low but I mean it's the current generation of chip that was released a few months before M1. It seems reasonable to compare the current gen vs the current gen instead of the current gen (M1) vs the previous gen (AMD 3000 series).

Hopefully the demand slows down in the next few months. I'm thinking about upgrading my workstation and I'm going AMD this time around (I've used Intel CPUs since the Pentium II era).

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

#395

Post by _ph_ »

jchw wrote: post #34
api wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My intuition is that x86's wasted die space on instruction decoding, backwards compatibility, etc. can be spent on making bigger and wider cores, and this seems to be what M1 is doing. However, there are still some other aspects to consider. One is Apple's process lead against both Intel and AMD. The next is the memory situation; it'll be interesting to see if increased latency from more conventional configurations w…

It isn't so much the decoder space, but the decoder complexity that is the disadvantage of x86 chips. The problem is that the instructions have varying lengths. Only when it has decoded an instruction, the chip knows where the next instruction starts. ARM-instructions are all the same length, so the instructions can be decoded in parallel without "knowing" the previous instruction. That lets Apple go much wider (8 instead of 4) with the instruction decoders.

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

#396

Post by Symmetry »

beezle wrote: post #353
masklinn wrote: post #274

Earlier 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. 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…

Not specializing in this area, I'm somewhat at a loss to understand what is so unique about the M1 that competitors could not implement similar in other ARM based systems or instead on Intel/AMD? Maybe another way to ask is what of the M1 performance is due to ARM and what from the Apple implementation?

Being willing to be inefficient in terms of performance per square millimetre of silicon to be more efficient in terms of performance per watt was how it started. Having less cruft in the ISA that let them be more creative in other areas might be the more important factor now.

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

#397

Post by djsumdog »

tempfs wrote: post #376
djsumdog wrote: post #350

I really fear that Linux might get left behind as Apple and Microsoft go after this ARMs-race (pun intended). At least Microsoft requires UEFI with their ARM offerings, but often the bootloaders are locked. I love Linux and I love running it natively. Currently I can grab almost any Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, etc. desktop/laptop and there's a very good chance all the hardware will work with mainline Linux. If I get a lap…

I mean Raspberry Pi's are ARM and there are more than a few of these are running Linux(Raspian/Arch/etc/). Linux will run on pretty much anything given an ounce of driver support. I'm not that overly worried about Linux and ARM. Microsoft is the one that should be worried!

Yes, but each distribution has to make a custom image for each Pi. One of my favorite distros, Void Linux, only has support for the Pi 1, 2 and 3:

https://voidlinux.org/download/ (click on arm platforms)

The Pi3 image does not work on the Pi 4. There are mentions on the bug tracker and how to patch in support, but this wouldn't happen at all on a UEFI+x86 system. You'd always be able to boot to a prompt on over 90% of motherboards.

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

#398

Post by pinewurst »

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.

And like their Halo Band, it'll listen in on your conversations to constantly assess your tone + upload semi-nude pics of you to AWS?

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

#399

Post by djsumdog »

klelatti wrote: post #391
djsumdog wrote: post #350

I really fear that Linux might get left behind as Apple and Microsoft go after this ARMs-race (pun intended). At least Microsoft requires UEFI with their ARM offerings, but often the bootloaders are locked. I love Linux and I love running it natively. Currently I can grab almost any Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, etc. desktop/laptop and there's a very good chance all the hardware will work with mainline Linux. If I get a lap…

Whilst I have sympathy on many of your points and understand frustration the answer cannot be neverending lock-in to the Intel/AMD duopoly. How many x86 based netbooks are e-waste now (despite being able to run linux) because the hardware simply wasn't up to the job?

Sure, they can be e-waste, but I can always pick up and old one and put Linux on it and there's a good chance I can get it working with a simple Live USB/CD, maybe some additional drivers.

The barrier to getting old ARMs to work is MUCH higher. Would a lot of them get thrown out anyway even if there was a Linux option? Most likely, but the option isn't even there.

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

#400

Post by djsumdog »

kube-system wrote: post #362
djsumdog wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A PC = x86_64 + UEFI. They are have a lot of standard components. You can take any Linux boot USB and boot almost any PC with it and at least get a console if nothing else. A PlayStation 4 is x86_64 but is NOT a PC. Watch the Fail0ver video on their PS4 kernel port to understand how different it is. ARM is a god damn clusterfuck of random pins soldered to random shit and every Android kernel patched to hell in non-up…

Devil's advocate: anything that says Compaq on it is probably e-waste anyway, standards notwithstanding. Being standards-compliant isn't enough to save a machine from the landfill by itself; if those machines can't keep up with users' expectations, they too will end up discarded. Most devices that people throw away are "serviceable" machines. The people who rescue old hardware with linux and put it back into service…

I used Compaq in my example because they were the first company to reverse engineer and IBM bios through some legal slight of hand (one group reverse engineered the entire BIOS and wrote a spec, an entirely different group re-implemented that spec, and the first PC compatible was born). I wasn't commenting on the quality of the brand at all.
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