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

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

#151

Post by postalrat »

agloeregrets wrote: post #115
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…

...This is partially true in that the M1 is overhyped by some... But the M1 is also literally, by the numbers, the fastest machine in the world for some workloads. For us, my M1 Macbook Air compiles our large TypeScript Angular app in half the time of a current i9 with 64Gb ram on node v15. These are real-world, tested, and validated results. Nothing comes close..because the chip is designed to run JS as fast as phys…

What environment you compiling your large typescript app in? Windows with WSL on a 7400 rpm disk drive?

I think you have other things going on that's slowing down the compilation on the i9.

Maybe if run linux and install a fast SSD your i9 will be faster than your m1. Then by your logic you should ditch the m1.

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

#152

Post by simondotau »

artursapek wrote: post #125
wiremine wrote: post #117

Sounds like the consensus here is that the M1 feels faster, and is actually faster, for a lot of tasks. So, for a lot of engineers, the M1 is the better choice over Intels. (Faster compile times are a good thing for devs, among other things) In that regard, the moment feels similar to the mid 2000s, when you suddenly saw a huge uptick in Macbooks at technical conferences: software developers seemed to gravitate in dr…

I switched away from Macs to Thinkpads when the butterfly keyboards came out. Just happily switched back to Macs and loving my M1 Air.

It’s amazing how much of a dumpster fire the butterfly keyboard was, but perhaps more bewilderingly how long they persisted with it. That keyboard might well have done more than any other product design decision in the last decade to push people away from the Mac platform.

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

#153

Post by gpm »

postalrat wrote: post #137
josephg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm guessing the 5800x work station is a desktop, not battery powered...

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

#154

Post by mnw21cam »

StavrosK wrote: post #147
mnw21cam wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extraordinarily basic stuff. We knew how to do this kind of multitasking, with priorities, back in the 80s (or earlier). Yet people still don't understand it. As an example, a while back I ran a multi-threaded process on a shared work server with 24 cores. It used zero I/O and almost no RAM, but had to spend a couple of days with 24 threads to get the result. I ran it inside "chrt -i", which makes Linux only…

That's a useful command to know, thanks! However, shouldn't `nice` be handling that sort of stuff? Do you know why there are two commands for the same thing (as far as I can see)?

I would love to know why nice doesn't do this, and why top/ps doesn't show something more sensible when you do.

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

#155

Post by adriancr »

kllrnohj wrote: post #66
adriancr wrote: post #3

I'm still assuming it's faster due to unified memory architecture, latest generation lithography and less on tailored behavior for their OS. An AMD/Intel using same soldered RAM next to CPU and same process node would give Apple a run for its money. Still, the optimizations on OS side are interesting here.

> I'm still assuming it's faster due to unified memory architecture AMD, Intel, ARM, & Qualcomm have all been shipping unified memory for 5+ years. I'd assume all the A* SoCs have been unified memory for that matter too unless Apple made the weirdest of cost cuts. Moreover literally none of the benchmarks out there include anything at all that involves copying/moving data between the CPU, GPU, and AI units. They are…

> AMD's memory latency is already better than the M1's. Apple's soldered RAM isn't a performance choice:

Careful what you are comparing, in your examples the other CPU is also faster.

3950x is a desktop CPU and is faster then M1 -> https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-9-3...

5950x is even faster -> https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-9-5...

Lower latencies are likely due to higher clock.

For equivalent laptop specific CPU, you will get a speedup from on-package RAM vs user replaceable RAM placed further away, even desktops would benefit but it would not be a welcome change there.

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

#156

Post by Jiokl »

agloeregrets wrote: post #104
cmsj wrote: post #29

I'm curious if there is some architectural limit that prevents Apple from doing something similar on Intel Macs, at least ones with 8+ cores. The scheduler could arbitrarily nominate 4 cores as "efficiency" cores and keep them for background tasks, leaving the rest free for "performance".

For intel that would cause some serious thermal issues. The Four E cores in the M1 use about the same amount of power as one big core (5w total). In an Intel chip that would mean the four 'E' cores would use probably 10 watts each, that's 40 watts cooking a chip. Intel does have a chip for you though, they have a version with mixed UlV cores and big cores.

Afaik, that isn't launching until 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Lake_(microprocessor) Or do you mean another CPU?

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

#158

Post by jeswin »

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…

Typescript compilation doesn't use all the cores available on the CPU; I think it maxes out at 4 as of now [1]. This might be working well for M1, which has 4 high performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/30235

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

#159

Post by bombcar »

stefan_ wrote: post #55
bombcar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice but with additional limitations - on a normal Unix system even if you nice everything to the lowest level possible they'll still take over all cores. This limits things below a certain nice level to the efficiency cores, meaning that the performance cores are always available for foreground action.

Nothing has ever stopped Apple from pinning indexing work to specific cores. They just didn't give a shit.

I suspect they did it less for performance and more for energy savings - this prevents the scheduler from moving a background process to a performance core (which a naive one would do if it saw the performance core underutilized).

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

#160

Post by jbverschoor »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #150
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does it take on a Ryzen 9 5950X

Note that's a 16 core CPU with 105W TDP compared to a quad core < 10W M1

Yup, and the new macbook pro will probably be twice as fast
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