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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

#241

Post by sod »

smoldesu wrote: post #208
CitizenKane wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be an interesting comparison. Non-apple silicon has definitely not been great and lags behind significantly. Would be very interesting to see what Android would be like on more modern CPU tech.

Non-Apple has been perfectly fine. I mean, AMD was putting higher-performing APUs in laptops half the price of the M1 Macbook Air, and they did that 18 months before the M1 even hit the market. If you wanted an 8 core, 4ghz CPU with the GPU power of a 1050ti, the R74800u was prevalent in notebooks as cheap as $400, and was even lauded for a short period as one of the best budget gaming options on the laptop market. I…

Yes, it's a bummer that Apple has a deathgrip on 5nm and after that 3nm.

Zen2 would be incredible on 5nm. IMHO the improvements we saw with geforce 30XX series and zen 2 were 80% the switch to 7nm tsmc. I'd fully expect another jump if nvidia and amd were able to get their hands on 5nm, but it's apple exclusive for now :(.

Well, at least we get huge investments in chip manufacturing thanks to apple throwing money at tsmc.

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

#242

Post by wmf »

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…

These days you'd probably want to use cpuset cgroups so you don't have to worry about individual processes.

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

#243

Post by hawski »

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.

And here I thought that having a desktop CPU like Ryzen 5 2400G with loads of RAM would take me somewhere. It took the machine around 71 seconds.

EDIT: could you measure C compilation. For example:

  git clone --depth 1 --branch v5.12.4 "git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git"
  cd linux
  make defconfig
  time make -j$(getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN)
For me it's slightly below 5 minutes.

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

#244

Post by artursapek »

simondotau wrote: post #152
artursapek wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it did, and the touch bar was a close second. Thankfully, whoever was in charge of those decisions seems to have lost decision-making power and Apple has walked back both.

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

#245

Post by artursapek »

jws wrote: post #198
artursapek wrote: post #89

The other half of the story for the efficiency cores seems to be the battery life. Most of these non-urgent background tasks are put on efficiency cores not only to separate them from my applications, but also to enable this insanely good battery life.

There is also a thermal benefit. Using the high efficiency cores puts a lower load on the cooling system. So even if the computer is plugged in and the performance cores are idle it may be best not to use them and let the cooling system gain some headroom for when the performance cores are needed.

Great point. Overall it seems like a very well designed system.

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

#246

Post by SigmundA »

kllrnohj wrote: post #221
SigmundA wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of those games were designed for UMA nor do they benefit as the API design for graphics forces copies to happen anyway. The M1's GPU is good (for integrated), but UMA isn't the reason why. I don't know why people seem so determined to reduce Apple's substantial engineering in this space to a mostly inconsequential minor architecture tweak that happen a decade ago.

From the article: "Meanwhile, unlike the CPU side of this transition to Apple Silicon, the higher-level nature of graphics programming means that Apple isn’t nearly as reliant on devs to immediately prepare universal applications to take advantage of Apple’s GPU. To be sure, native CPU code is still going to produce better results since a workload that’s purely GPU-limited is almost unheard of, but the fact that existing Metal (and even OpenGL) code can be run on top of Apple’s GPU today means that it immediately benefits all games and other GPU-bound workloads."

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/setting_reso...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/synchronizin...

"Note In a discrete memory model, synchronization speed is constrained by PCIe bandwidth. In a unified memory model, Metal may ignore synchronization calls completely because it only creates a single memory allocation for the resource. For more information about macOS memory models and managed resources, see Choosing a Resource Storage Mode in macOS."

I am not trying to minimize the other engineering improvements, however I do believe there may be less credit being given to the UMA than deserved due to past lackluster UMA offerings. As I said it will be interesting to see how far Apple can scale UMA I am not sure they can catch discrete graphics but I am starting to think they are going to try.

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

#247

Post by FpUser »

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

I have an old gaming ASUS laptop from 2010. Still works like a charm after hard drive was switched to SSD. I have an even older Asus Netbook (15 years old eee PC I think) that still works. Netbook is too slow for modern software and I do not really use it but it works.

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

#248

Post by supercheetah »

kogepathic wrote: post #229
eldaisfish wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that with mid-2010s apple laptops, >5 year lifespans are the norm. With the majority of other, even comparably priced laptops, that is the exception. There are other laptops that are similar or superior build quality to those from Apple (N.B. - older MacBooks, not the newer ones) but those are also easy to spot. They’ll usually be ThinkPads or some XPS models from dell.

> With the majority of other, even comparably priced laptops, that is the exception. Consumer grade PC hardware has terrible build quality, and regardless of the price of your unit, the consumer build spec is just inferior to the business/professional lines. Asus, MSI, Sony, Acer, etc laptops all have consumer grade build quality and they just aren't designed to last a decade. > They’ll usually be ThinkPads or some X…

For Dell, at least the business class desktops, they're trash, and are barely useable after 2-3 years and usually have some kind of problem long before that. I'm pretty sure Dell expects most businesses to buy new ones in that time frame.

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

#249

Post by bombcar »

atq2119 wrote: post #162
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…

Did both machines compile to the same target architecture? If you did native compiles, then perhaps LLVM's ARM backend is simply faster than its x86 backend...

I think this is potentially a huge part of it - I'd do the benchmark by doing a native compile and a cross compile of each, and also do the same on a RAM disk instead of SSD (a large compile can end up just being a disk speed test if the CPU is waiting around for the disk to find files).

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

#250

Post by GeekyBear »

smoldesu wrote: post #208
CitizenKane wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be an interesting comparison. Non-apple silicon has definitely not been great and lags behind significantly. Would be very interesting to see what Android would be like on more modern CPU tech.

Non-Apple has been perfectly fine. I mean, AMD was putting higher-performing APUs in laptops half the price of the M1 Macbook Air, and they did that 18 months before the M1 even hit the market. If you wanted an 8 core, 4ghz CPU with the GPU power of a 1050ti, the R74800u was prevalent in notebooks as cheap as $400, and was even lauded for a short period as one of the best budget gaming options on the laptop market. I…

> AMD was putting higher-performing APUs in laptops half the price of the M1 Macbook Air, and they did that 18 months before the M1 even hit the market

APUs with Zen and Zen 2 cores were absolutely not outperforming the M1's Firestorm cores.

>In SPECint2006, we’re now seeing the M1 close the gap to AMD’s Zen3, beating it in several workloads now, which increasing the gap to Intel’s new Tiger Lake design as well as their top-performing desktop CPU, which the M1 now beats in the majority of workloads.

In the fp2006 workloads, we’re seeing the M1 post very large performance boosts relative to the A14, meaning that it now is able to claim the best performance out of all CPUs being compared here.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

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