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ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

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Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#101

Post by EricE »

vmception wrote: post #26

The only reason I would want more than 16gb RAM is for more room for virtual machines, so without that and it being cheaper than worse machines this is a hard yes, buy. BUT the possibility of familiar OS' coming out with ARM versions (or just the x86 versions being emulated well), and the possibility of a more powerful M1-style processor with more than 16gb RAM anyway makes me want to wait. But honestly if they roll…

I hope the next batch of laptops will allow at least 32GB. I was going to replace the 2015 MBA I'm typing on now with this new one, but after seeing how well games - even unoptimized ones like Cities:Skylines run on the current MBA I started to consider that perhaps I could abandon my Windows gaming machine and just go full time Mac.

But I subscribe to far too many mods in Cities:Skylines to get away with 16GB of RAM - unfortunately.

This MBA is way past expiration date so hopefully I don't have to wait more than six months (I suspect a fairly safe bet).

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#102

Post by vmception »

EricE wrote: post #101
vmception wrote: post #26

The only reason I would want more than 16gb RAM is for more room for virtual machines, so without that and it being cheaper than worse machines this is a hard yes, buy. BUT the possibility of familiar OS' coming out with ARM versions (or just the x86 versions being emulated well), and the possibility of a more powerful M1-style processor with more than 16gb RAM anyway makes me want to wait. But honestly if they roll…

I hope the next batch of laptops will allow at least 32GB. I was going to replace the 2015 MBA I'm typing on now with this new one, but after seeing how well games - even unoptimized ones like Cities:Skylines run on the current MBA I started to consider that perhaps I could abandon my Windows gaming machine and just go full time Mac. But I subscribe to far too many mods in Cities:Skylines to get away with 16GB of RAM…

I'm one of the 2015 MBP holdouts

I'm almost there. I always liked the newer form factor and my main plan was to wait for USB-C to become more prominent, and as a bonus Apple even got rid of the butterfly keyboard! So even thats not a blocker any more.

A very fast machine with only 16gb ram would be okay for me. But I do want an upgrade in that department.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#103

Post by kawera »

agloeregrets wrote: post #99
kawera wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On older platforms(High Sierra), brew builds from source most of the time and I just built node(latest) on a i5 MacMini 2011. It took 76 minutes.

Oh god. You are going to hate this. Node v15 on my MacBook Air built in 20 minutes.

Oh no, not at all, in fact for an entry level Mini of almost 10 years it's not bad at all.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#104

Post by joshspankit »

EricE wrote: post #101
vmception wrote: post #26

The only reason I would want more than 16gb RAM is for more room for virtual machines, so without that and it being cheaper than worse machines this is a hard yes, buy. BUT the possibility of familiar OS' coming out with ARM versions (or just the x86 versions being emulated well), and the possibility of a more powerful M1-style processor with more than 16gb RAM anyway makes me want to wait. But honestly if they roll…

I hope the next batch of laptops will allow at least 32GB. I was going to replace the 2015 MBA I'm typing on now with this new one, but after seeing how well games - even unoptimized ones like Cities:Skylines run on the current MBA I started to consider that perhaps I could abandon my Windows gaming machine and just go full time Mac. But I subscribe to far too many mods in Cities:Skylines to get away with 16GB of RAM…

I’d really be curious about your experience if you do decide to pull the trigger. I suspect that with integrated (everything), that Apple is doing some fancy tricks with swap files thus making 16GB good for larger workloads, but no review that I’ve seen yet has confirmed that.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#105

Post by celrod »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
theonemind wrote: post #9

Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?

The only microbenchmark I've been able to produce that shows an Intel Tiger Lake as being faster than the M1 (mini) is in atomic primitives. For some reason taking and releasing contended locks is slow on this thing. Unclear if that's only because macOS doesn't have anything that can compete with futex. But all atomics seem slow, not just mutex. In all other respects the M1 stomps the TGL.

Running on Rosetta (and looking like an x86 cpu without fma) is likely a contributing factor, but the M1 was much slower for sums and sums of squares than a Cascadelake (Intel, avx512) cpu here:

https://github.com/chriselrod/VectorizationBase.jl/issues/22

I do a lot of SIMD optimization, so it'll be interesting to see how the M1 competes once there's native support in Julia.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#106

Post by celrod »

TinkersW wrote: post #64
theonemind wrote: post #9

Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?

For SIMD it is fairly easily to predict the range of performance of an optimized kernel just based on looking at the micro architecture. M1 = 4x128 Zen3 = 4x256 Intel = can't make up its mind some are 2x256, others 2x512, and some others are weird combos like (2x256 or 1x512) M1 on paper looks half throughput compared to Zen3 SIMD per cycle, but because of larger caches and lots of other small advantages it probably…

Source for Zen3 having 4x per cycle? That's impressive and I'd like to read more about it.

Another comment mentioned 4, 2 of which are fma. Works this imply that a matmul kernel for zen3 should have a 2:1 ratio of fmas to mul+add?

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