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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

#281

Post by kortex »

smoldesu wrote: post #199
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…

> 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…

I dewelop machine learning data pipelines. My dev environment of choice is a Macbook running JetBrains suite, Alfred, BetterTouchTool, and an iTerm pane or 3 with Mosh and Tmux running on an Ubuntu Server. HID is a tricked out Ergodox EZ, right hand mouse, left hand Magic Trackpad. Prior to that I developed directly on Ubuntu 18/20, and windows well before that. The experience unparalleled. The OS/windowed desktop is smoother and less buggy than Gnome 3, more responsive than Win 7 or 10.

I'm talking a 16GB Intel i7 8-thread Macbook vs a 32 thread twin-socket 72GB RTX2080 beast running Ubuntu 20. The Mac crushes it in terms of feel, fit and finish. I haven't tried M1 yet but I bet it'll one-up my current Intel macbook. I'm quite eager to get one.

> Besides that, the M1 doesn't support most of the software that most engineers are using...

??? Other than CUDA, the macbook meets my needs 95% of the time. I'm mostly want for a native Docker networking experience a small minority of the time. I need a responsive GUI head to act as my development environment. All the heavy lift compute is done on servers/on-prem/in-cloud.

> - BSD-styled memory management causes frequent page faults and thrashes memory/swap

Only under super heavy memory demand. I close some browser tabs or IDE panes (I normally have dozens of both).

> - Abstracting execution makes it harder to package software, harder to run it, and harder to debug it when something goes wrong

Almost everything I do is containerized anyways, so this is moot.

I was squarely one of those "why would anyone use mac? It's overpriced, lock in, $typical_nerd_complaints_about_mac" until COVID happened and it became my daily driver. Now I can't go back.

> - MacPorts and Brew are both pretty miserable package managers compared to the industry standard options.

No snark intended - Like what? I'm not exactly blown away by Brew, but it's been generally on par with Apt(get). Aptitude is marginally better. There's not a single package manager that doesn't aggravate me in some way.

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

#282

Post by f6v »

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…

> If Apple can keep their momentum going year over year with CPU improvements

I’ve been blown away with games running on M1. If Apple could up their GPU game as well, that’d be really cool.

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

#284

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

That really confused me until I discovered that Macs had something called a "butterfly keyboard" as well. At first I thought you switched to Thinkpads in the mid 90s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_701

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

#285

Post by barbazoo »

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…

Power consumption is a good point. I wonder what the M1's power consumption is during those 19.7 seconds of compiling ripgrep compared to other platforms.

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

#286

Post by spideymans »

zelon88 wrote: post #192
spideymans wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Is it really about workload though? A high end gaming PC will compile typescript, play games with high quality graphics, and run your 100 browser tabs. Let's be honest, an Intel Core 2 Duo would obviate most programmer workloads just fine. By your logic the Apple M1 is comparable to a high-end x86 chips, but you go on in the same breath with the disclaimer that it is "only certain workloads." That is my point. A high…

>Let's be honest, an Intel Core 2 Duo would obviate most programmer workloads just fine.

That's absolutely not the case. At least for my workflows. My work-issued five year old Intel i5 XPS would get incredibly slow, and incredibly hot when running unit tests or compiling code in Angular. Goes without saying that a Core 2 Duo would be simply unusable.

My personal machine was a 2018 i5 MacBook Pro. On that machine I could open just one iOS Simulator or Android Emulator and expect to have merely decent performance. And by decent, I mean the system would be running hot, the fans would be loud and the system would be noticeably slower. Having multiple simulators or emulators open is simply not a thing this Intel notebook was willing to do. Meanwhile on my M1, I've ran six iOS Simulators / Android Emulators at once, and the system did not slow down, at all (for reasons discussed in this article).

In a futile attempt to push my M1 to its limits in a dev workflow, I even trained TensorFlow models on it. Surprise, surprise: not only was the model trained in a decent time (for a notebook without a dGPU; I wasn't expecting miracles), but it did all this without any perceptible slowdown in system performance. The absolute worse thing I could have said about the M1s performance here was that the MacBook Air's chassis got a little hot. And keep in mind that when I way a little hot, I mean that it still produced less heat than my Intel notebooks often produce when watching a 4K YouTube video (and it does this all without a fan!).

So in short, no, the Intel Core 2 Duo would absolutely not be fine for my programmer workloads. And, yes, the M1 has pretty much obviated Intel's lineup for my work. Dare I say, the M1 MacBook Air has been the single biggest quality-of-life upgrade I've had as a developer. It's the first notebook I've used where I've never been bottlenecked by system performance. It's a fantastic machine through and through.

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

#287

Post by coupdejarnac »

zepto wrote: post #213
wayneftw wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is interesting - in the sense that you are someone who doesn’t want the UI to change, but it’s really not clear what this has to do with the question or the article.

I'm not the guy above, but I concur with the sentiments. After a while, adjusting to trivial UI changes becomes a huge chore and unnecessary cognitive overhead. It's relevant, because in order to use the M1, you have to buy into Apple's caprice.

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

#288

Post by valbaca »

I have a 2020 Intel Macbook from work and a M1 Macbook for personal use.

Granted I put my work laptop under more load (compiling, video chats at work) but it just feels like a normal laptop. I feel it take its time loading large programs (IDEs) and the fan clicks on when I'm doing big compiles.

I use my personal laptop for occasionally coding, playing games, and also video chats. But the M1 feels amazing. It's fast, snappy, with long battery life, and I've had it for several weeks and I never hear the fan. Even playing Magic Arena AND a Parallels VM runs silent. Arena alone turns my wife's Macbook Air into a jet turbine. It makes video chats so much nicer because it's dead silent.

I've run into occasional compatibility issues with the M1. sbt not working was the latest bummer.

So while my two laptops are technically a year apart, they feel like 5 years apart. The M1 laptop lives up to the hype and I'm glad to just have a laptop that's fast, quiet, has great battery, and is reliable.

Edit: More context, I had bought a maxed-out Macbook Air last year hoping it would be my "forever-laptop" but it was just not giving me the speed I wanted, and the noise was just too much. I couldn't play any game or do any real coding in the living room without disrupting my wife enjoying her own games or shows. I'm so glad I traded up to the M1

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

#289

Post by chmod775 »

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.

OS matters for this comparison. If your Dell XPS was running Windows, that might explain the discrepancy.

For instance Windows on NTFS etc. is notoriously slow at operations that involve a lot of small files compared to Linux or whatever on ext4.

Unless your Dell was also running OSX, you're probably not comparing hardware here.

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