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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

#181

Post by snarfy »

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'm still unconvinced it's the M1's design and not TSMC's fab process.

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

#182

Post by varispeed »

deepdmistry wrote: post #146
varispeed wrote: post #37

People say that Ryzen is faster - but if it has a fan, then this is a deal breaker. I have become so annoyed by fans I often just stop work when they start whirling, go make a coffee etc. It seems like M1 is now the only laptop that can let you work in silence and be productive.

usernanme checks out :)

Wow I am fluttered

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

#183

Post by xfer »

harikb wrote: post #167
yaktubi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these performance metrics are somewhat limited in their usefulness. A Ryzen workstation might not have the same single-core performance or energy efficiency—however, a ryzen workstation can have gobs of memory for massive data-intensive workloads for the same cost as a baseline M1 device. In addition: let’s talk upgradability or repairability. Oh wait, Apple doesn’t play that game. You’ll get more mileage on…

granted they charge exorbitant prices for their hardware, but I can’t believe how my 2010 MacBook Pro is still functioning perfectly fine.. except for them making it unsupported. I can’t say that about any other pc/laptop I have had. Not even desktops

Using 2011 sandybridge motherboard with a xeon-1230 i bought in 2012. I Had to replace 2 HDD + started using ssd for OS partition. It's working great, need to replace my nvidia GPU that is EOL but still working great.

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

#185

Post by cbsmith »

snarfy wrote: post #181
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…

I'm still unconvinced it's the M1's design and not TSMC's fab process.

I think the latest Ryzen 5800x CPUs kind of prove it's the TSMC fab process. You've now got M1s, Graviton2s, and Ryzens all crushing it to similar levels.

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

#186

Post by adriancr »

kryps wrote: post #177
adriancr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just did a test on my old Lenovo laptop... Intel i7-8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz # git clone https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep && cd ripgrep # cargo clean # time cargo build real 0m23,805s user 1m11,260s sys 0m3,806s How is my crappy laptop on par with your M1? :)

You are not doing a release build.

thanks, problem solved - now it's 1 minute...

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

#187

Post by cogman10 »

apexalpha wrote: post #178

"Because Macs with Intel processors can’t segregate their tasks onto different cores in the same way, when macOS starts to choke on something it affects user processes too." Why is this? I understand that Intel chips don't use BIG/little but couldn't you assign all OS/background tasks to one core and leave the other cores for user tasks? Shouldn't the scheduler be able to do this?

Probably a fight with CPU frequency ramping. You could put all the tasks on one core, but then you risk the CPU frequency spiking when it shouldn't causing more power to be drawn than necessary.

With slow light power cores, that's less of an issue.

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

#188

Post by defaultname »

Interesting, enjoyable read.

The conclusions seem a bit off though

-Low QoS tasks are limited to certain cores. This doesn't necessitate efficiency cores (though it makes sense if you want power efficiency in a mobile configuration) and they could as easily be performance cores. The core facet is that the OS has core affinity for low priority tasks and quarantines them to a subset of cores. And it has properly configured low priority tasks as such.

-It also has nothing to do with ARM (as the original title surmised). It's all in the operating system and, again, core affinity. Windows can do this on Intel. macOS/iOS has heavily pushed priorities as meaningful and important, so now with the inclusion of efficiency cores they have established their ecosystem to be able to use it widely.

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

#189

Post by smoldesu »

nottorp wrote: post #172
agloeregrets wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like the M1, I don't think anything actually wins benchmarks vs the iPhone. There's display refresh rate and a few multicore stores that are closer but in any real world test, Single core dominance wins out. (Plus the big/little design in the A series chips is better than the three scales seen in QC chips as QC backfills the single large core with a ton of little cores to make the multicore numbers look competit…

Are you sure? iOS has been more responsive from day 1 (I mean the first 2-3 iphone versions), when they were using an off the shelf CPU that everyone else had.

I think the commenter is saying that iOS provides no discernible performance advancements over Android. If you ran Android on an M1, it likely would score just as well as an iOS/MacOS machine.

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

#190

Post by cbsmith »

zerkten wrote: post #131
agloeregrets wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

> 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.

Talk to people who design chips. The compatibility barely impacts the chip transistor budget these days, and since the underlying CPU isn't running x86 or x64 instructions, it really doesn't impact the CPU design. There may be some intrinsic overhead coming from limitations of the ISA itself, but even there they keep adding new instructions for specialized operations when opportunities allow.

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