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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

#451

Post by rsynnott »

nickjj wrote: post #394
Macha wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Eh, comparing what people can buy today makes sense. Especially if the comparer doesn't even have access to the theoretically launched but unavailable part.

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

#452

Post by rsynnott »

jeffbee wrote: post #64
milansm wrote: post #8

I’d like to see a “benchmark” about M1’s support for real world dev setup (docker, brew, libraries and so on). And when can we expect the full support

I consider myself a "real" developer and I don't use any of that stuff. So far my observations about tool and library availability: Node: build it from source at HEAD and it works fine. Will work out of the box in release 16. Java: Get the Azul JRE, works fine. Go: Has to be bootstrapped from HEAD. c++ toolchain: works out of the box cmake: build and install from source release, no problems. bazel: still doesn't grok…

Caveat; if you need Java 15, Azul doesn't have that as yet.

That said, most people probably do not; 11 is still the most recent LTS version, which is what most people would be interested in.

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

#453

Post by rsynnott »

elcdodedocle wrote: post #315

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.

And, yet (with important caveats, especially around core count right now), they, er... do? I mean, what are you looking for? People to fake benchmarks to show them as slower than they actually are?

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

#454

Post by rsynnott »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #114

In general if you spend more money you get better performance. Isn't this, and shouldn't this be the case with Apple products as well. They cost more, no? Apple-tax.

The tested Intel chip (i9-9880H) has an RRP of 556.00, and is generally in practice found in laptops in the $2000 range. The tested AMD chip has an RRP of $500 (though that comparison is arguably less fair as the core count is an issue). The tested Apple computers both cost about $1000. That's for the whole computer, not just the chip. You can have one of these for as little as $699 (though you shouldn't; 8GB of RAM really isn't enough).

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

#455

Post by Recurecur »

andreime wrote: post #444
alexchantavy wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Ryzen 3900X is a desktop processor, right? This is crazy - definitely was not expecting the M1 to be _better_ than the 3900X.

also ... single core performance m1, like the a* chips are great at single core performance m1, like the a* chips are underwhelming at multi-core performance last gen ryzen was competitive at single core performance, and great at multicore current gen ryzen is great at both

This isn't correct.

A fair number of these benchmarks were multithreaded, and the M1 held its own very well, despite being at a substantial disadvantage (8 threads (only 4 on performance cores) for M1 versus 24 for Ryzen 3900X).

That said, single threaded performance is extremely important, since not everything can be parallelized. Amdahl's Law, eh?

Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple Silicon is coming with many more cores. Amazon's Graviton2 shows how ARM can perform with massive core counts...

As to the current Ryzen (5000 series), it's a great chip and what I'm planning to use in a new build, but it also has a 105W power budget. We'll see what Apple produces for its desktop entries soon enough!

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

#456

Post by zamadatix »

cferr wrote: post #195
doikor wrote: post #10

> Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine. If your development environment/tooling/workflow does not gain any real advantage from more CPU cores. Also your data must fit in the 16GB of RAM as offloading any workload to disk will kill the performance and you cannot add more. The M1 has excellent single core performance so any task that is mainly single threaded wi…

How do we know yet if it's long-lasting?

It's most likely in reference to the battery life not hardware life.

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

#457

Post by zamadatix »

janmo wrote: post #291
t-writescode wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Apple not actually _design_ the chip, lay out transistor locations, do virtual testing against the future design, find bottlenecks, etc? 5nm is incredible and should not be understated; but I don't think anyone on the outside can say "most credit" should go to TSMC. A lot of credit? Absolutely. Most credit? I don't know.

Sure, the M1 chip is very good, the question here is what made the M1 perform better than a i9 and I would argue it is because of the 5nm technology. If the M1 had only 8b transistors and was using 14nm technology I really doubt that it would beat the i9.

5nm and 14nm are marketing names, not x^2/y^2 times better statistics. If you normalize them (i.e. actually look at transistor density) you'll find the difference is much smaller than you'd expect. TSMC 5nm is indeed the better process though but it alone isn't the primary driver of what makes the M1 good. Flipping it around I'm not as sure the i9 would come out on top all other things being equal between the 2.

I'm not sure there are many engineers at Apple that truly understand what makes the M1 perform better. How people think they can just boil it down to just is honestly confusing.

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

#458

Post by cromka »

kube-system wrote: post #429
cromka wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we're not speculating about what would happen if Apple did that explicitly . We're trying to understand why did the existing M1 Mini perform worse in some of those tests than the M1 Air did, while there is no known reason for it. Some speculate that they inexplicitly sell subpar/low freq chips, which would mean that they were selling an official 7-core, an official 8-core and a faster but otherwise non-advertised…

There has to be some reason for it. If not thermals, then what else about the hardware could explain the difference?

It's funny how we immediately resort to conspiracy theories about Apple and their hardware but completely forgo a substantial chance that it's the original author's human error at cause? It is much more plausible, isn't it, especially if the test results in speech actually also contradict literally every other independent test results out there?

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

#459

Post by hajile »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #90
jchw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’s not the instruction decoder that wastes die space. In fact, it’s less than 5% of the die (on Skylake).[0] [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXFJLebXkAYkXTr?format=jpg&name=... In case that link dies, it’s from [1] which is linked from [2] [1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/GPUsAreMagic/status/1256866465577... [2]: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/05/26/kreg2.html

> it’s less than 5% of the die

It would be equally fair to say that the same die uses less than 5% of it's space for the integer ALUs. It could also be said that the decode unit is so complex that it takes as much die space as all the integer ports put together.

SRAM may use most of the die, but it isn't using huge amounts of power most of the time as it's static. Those big SIMD units are also powered off when not used (no doubt it's the same with the other ALUs).

In contrast, the entire 5% of the die that makes up the decoder never power gates and is always running flat out. By size it's the same as leaving all your integer cores running full-out all the time.

The bigger issue seems to be that neither AMD nor Intel have been able to make those units much wider over the years which puts a hard limit on total throughput (they've hinted that the power cost on widening the decoder is very big which would mean loads of power used for diminishing returns).

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

#460

Post by hajile »

cromka wrote: post #180
kube-system wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Apple is binning the worse chips in the Mini? It is their cheapest Mac, after all.

They bin the worse chips as a 7-core version of M1, which is not an option when configuring Mac Mini.

There should be chips where one GPU core is flawed, but the CPU cores are fine and the chip otherwise hit the correct frequencies and thermals.
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