Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

eclecticlight.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 427 posts

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#131

Post by zerkten »

agloeregrets wrote: post #91
kryps wrote: post #75

It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.

In native Typescript compile of a very large angular app I see an even more dramatic 1:20s to 40s compared to a desktop i9. I feel as if the M1 may have been designed around a detailed and careful look at how computers and compliers work and then designed a CPU around that rather than the other way around. It's like buying a car and modifying to take it racing vs buying a race car, the race car was designed to do thi…

>> I feel as if the M1 may have been designed around a detailed and careful look at how computers and compliers work and then designed a CPU around that rather than the other way around.

This is the position that Apple have set up for themselves with their philosophy and process. It would seem that Intel and AMD have to play a very conservative game with compatibility and building a product that increments support for x86 and x64. They can't make some sweeping change because they have to think about Linux and Windows.

Apple own their ecosystem and can move everything at once (to a large degree.) This also gives an opportunity to design how the components should interact. Incompatibility won't be heavily penalized unless really important apps get left behind. The improvements also incentivize app makers to be there since their developer experience will improve.

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#132

Post by jfrunyon »

kryps wrote: post #75

It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.

Okay, compiling is faster. But you compile once and run many times. What about running it?

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#133

Post by LegitShady »

spideymans wrote: post #108
zelon88 wrote: post #48

That is all well and good. Great actually. And it makes sense. The high efficiency reduced instruction set computer has highly optimized architecture to improve efficiency. But we all knew that deep down. It's like the Ford Tempo. A mere 80 horsepower mated to a well designed and highly optimized transmission gave levels of performance that were higher than other cars in the same market. What I can't stand are all th…

>What I can't stand are all the people saying the M1 is capable of replacing high end x86 computers. Whether or not this is possible completely depends on their unique workload. The M1 could probaly obviate any x86 chip for the average programmers. But that wouldn't be the case for gamer workloads, for example.

I was thinking hard about getting an m1 mini but the upgrade pricing for ssd/ram is offensive and you can't upgrade them later. I will likely end up getting a newer ryzen system but it will end up costing much more for the cpu+motherboard, but will have access to dedicated graphics and I can actually just move my current 32gb of ddr4, video card, and SSDs over.

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#134

Post by _0w8t »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #68

These kinds of optimizations often harm benchmarks. Benchmarks are batch jobs, even the ones that try and mimic interactive sessions. Apple has made a latency/throughput optimization that often harms throughput slightly. This is the right call, but benchmarks are the reason why this low hanging fruit isn't being picked on the Intel side.

This should not harm benchmarks unless they mark their threads as background.

As for a particular strategy I presume Apple could, for example, use 6 high-performance cores instead of 4+4 hybrid. But then thermal management will be an issue. So the choice was about throughout/latency/energy efficiency. Using simple low-performance cores for tasks that can wait is very good strategy as one can put more of those cores as opposite to running the performance core under a low frequency.

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#135

Post by Pulcinella »

SigmundA wrote: post #103
kllrnohj wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you drop the 'user replaceable' requirement and place everything close together, you can have the benefits of both high bandwidth and unified memory Rather, if you drop the "big GPU" requirement then you can place everything close together. So called APUs have been unified memory for years & years now (so more or less Intel's entire lineup, and AMD's entire laptop SKUs & some desktop ones). It still ends up asso…

From the Anand article you linked further up: "The first Apple-built GPU for a Mac is significantly faster than any integrated GPU we’ve been able to get our hands on, and will no doubt set a new high bar for GPU performance in a laptop. Based on Apple’s own die shots, it’s clear that they spent a sizable portion of the M1’s die on the GPU and associated hardware, and the payoff is a GPU that can rival even low-end d…

Yeah I believe the M1 GPU(2.6 TFLOPS) falls between a PS4 (1.8 TFLOPS) and PS4Pro (4.2 TFLOPS). Yes the original PS4 came out in 2013, but still I find it impressive that a mobile integrated GPU has that much computational Power with no fan and that power budget.

I do wonder what they are going to do with the higher end MBP, iMacs, and Mac Pro (if they make one). Will they have an “M1X” with more GPU cores or will they offer a discrete option with AMD GPUs. I do think we could potentially see an answer at WWDC. I wouldn’t be surprised if eGPU support was announced for ARM Macs at WWDC.

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#136

Post by sundvor »

Nullabillity wrote: post #86
kryps wrote: post #75

It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.

Hard to compare without mentioning the actual CPU in it. FWIW my Ryzen 3900X completes that compile in 15s. To be fair, that is a relatively high-end desktop CPU, but it's also a massive margin for a last-gen model.

My water-cooled 3900XT is locked to 4.4ghz all cores with relatively fast double banked 2x16GB c15 3600mhz memory. (It never drops under 4.4 on any of the 12/24 cores.)

Also has a Samsung 980 1TB drive, and a 3070 GPU; the system truly is extremely quick. (Win10+WSL2).

(I'll have to try that compile in the next day or so; will reply to myself here).

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#137

Post by postalrat »

josephg wrote: post #106
kryps wrote: post #75

It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.

I did a side-by-side comparing with my friends' M1 macbook and my (more expensive, nearly brand new) ryzen 5800x workstation compiling rust. The ryzen was faster - but it was really close. And the macbook beats my ryzen chip in single threaded performance. For reference, the ryzen compiles ripgrep in 19.7 seconds. The comparison is way too close given the ryzen workstation guzzles power, and the macbook is cheaper, p…

How long is the battery life on both if compiling non-stop? Assuming both keep similar compile from start of battery to end it would be interesting to see if the ryzen is truly guzzling batteries.

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#138

Post by omegabravo »

josephg wrote: post #106
kryps wrote: post #75

It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.

I did a side-by-side comparing with my friends' M1 macbook and my (more expensive, nearly brand new) ryzen 5800x workstation compiling rust. The ryzen was faster - but it was really close. And the macbook beats my ryzen chip in single threaded performance. For reference, the ryzen compiles ripgrep in 19.7 seconds. The comparison is way too close given the ryzen workstation guzzles power, and the macbook is cheaper, p…

I've done a side by side with my Ryzen 3700x compiling a Go project.

6 seconds on the Ryzen, vs 9 seconds on the M1 air.

`time go build -a`, so not very scientific. Could be attributed to the multicore performance of the Ryzen.

Starting applications on the M1 seems to have significant delays too, but I'm not sure if that's a Mac OSX thing. Overall it's very impressive, I just don't see the same lunch eating performance as everyone else.

The battery life and lack of fans is wonderful.

edit: Updated with the arm build on OSX. 16s -> 9 seconds.

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#139

Post by jamespo »

archi42 wrote: post #71
damagednoob wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So nice + taskset[1]? 1: https://linux.die.net/man/1/taskset

Seems so. Just that it works "automagically" and reserves some cores for certain priority groups. Maybe one can write a script/daemon that `taskset`s all tasks with a certain niceness range (or by additional rules) to a few "background cores" and everything else to the "interactive cores"? On Linux you might also get some problems with kworker threads landing in the wrong group, but I'm not that much into Kernel inte…

Could do it with SystemD AllowedCPUs functionality, but that's not dynamic

Re: How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS

#140

Post by [deleted] »

adrianN wrote: post #53
StavrosK wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run KUbuntu, how can I enable this? EDIT: I searched a bit and, although I haven't found instructions anywhere, I did find people saying that the low-latency kernel decreases throughput as a tradeoff to lower latency. Have you found this to be the case? Also, another source says that the preempt kernel might be better for some workloads: https://itectec.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-choose-a-low-latency-kerne... Can anyone com…

If there were one simple trick to make your computer feel faster without downsides, defaults would change.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN