211–220 of 427 posts
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Affinity Photo starts in 15 seconds on my M1, which IMO is not okay. It's just as slow as on my Haswell Intel Mac. Everything else launches in a second or so. Spotify (Electron) draws a window in three seconds, but takes another four to display all content.
For comparison, I have a maxed out current gen 16" Intel MBP and Affinity takes 25 seconds to launch.
I often have the feeling on my i9 machine it's almost idle but the specific core of my UI is working on something else which I don't particularly care for at the moment I'm interactive with the computer.
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> But, then why not just VNC into a beastmode machine on a netbook and compile remotely? After all, that’s what CI/CD pipeline is for. Is this how you work?
My work takes place at a beefy desktop machine. I wouldn't want it any other way... I get to plug in as many displays as I need, I get all the memory I need, I can add internal drives, there's no shortage of USB ports or expansion - and I get them cheap. For meetings or any kind of work away from my desk I'll remote in from one of my laptops. All that and my preferred OS (Manjaro/XFCE), which runs on anything, has be…
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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 performan…
I’d like to point out that compiling stuff is usually disk/io intensive. Could this not just be that the Apple machine has a faster hard drive/memory?
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…
> So, for a lot of engineers, the M1 is the better choice over Intels. I don't know which engineers you hang out with, but the only "engineer" I know who uses an M1 Mac does web design. Besides that, the M1 doesn't support most of the software that most engineers are using (unless you're working in a field already focused on ARM), and the fragility of a Macbook isn't really suited for a workshop environment. Among th…
All of the things you mentioned are also true of intel macs, which again are wildly popular among web devs of all kinds.
If you can't explain the popularity of those machines in spite of those limitations, I don't see why I should accept those as reasons why apple arm computers won't be popular.
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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?
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 previous discussions about this it was pointed out that LLVM may be significantly faster at producing ARM code versus x86. The comparison may still be the one that actually matters to you but at least in part be an advantage of ARM in general and not just the M1. rust is very good at cross-compiling so compiling to ARM on Dell and to x86 on the M1 may add some interesting comparisons.
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> 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 hi…
That's not really how dram latency works. In basically all CPUs the memory controller runs at a different clock than the CPU cores do, typically at the same clock as the DRAM itself but not always.
If you meant the dram was running faster on the AMD system then also no. The M1 is using 4266mhz modules while the AMD system was running 3200mhz ram
> 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.
Huge citation needed. There's currently no real world product that matches that claim nor a theoretical one as the physical trace length is minimal latency difference and far from the major factor.
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Is 22 seconds insetad of 34 seconds so much faster ? The difference does not feel huge to me
yes, it compiled the project in 35% less time. doesn't really matter much for such a small project, but imagine if on a larger project the intel part took an hour and the m1 did it in 39 minutes. that's a substantial speedup. of course, we might see different results after leaving the turbo window.
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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…
> But, then why not just VNC into a beastmode machine on a netbook and compile remotely? After all, that’s what CI/CD pipeline is for. Is this how you work?
This is exactly how I've worked for a number of years now, for my home/personal/freelance work. Usually using a Chromebook netbook ssh'ing into my high spec home server. I'd do the same for work, but work usually requires using a work laptop (MacBook).