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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

#291

Post by spideymans »

supercheetah wrote: post #248
kogepathic wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I really want to like Dell's XPS line. I really do. But their technical support is atrocious. My XPS trackpad stopped working months after purchase, and getting them to repair it was an utter nightmare. Their tech support seemingly hasn't improved at all in the past decade (which is when I last vowed to never buy a Dell again due to their horrible tech support). They may fool me twice, but never again.

(I do hear that their business support is pretty good though)

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

#292

Post by spideymans »

anw wrote: post #269
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…

> macbook … and lasts 22 hours on a single charge I keep hearing this but have not experienced this in person. I usually get about 5 hours of life out of it. My usual open programs are CLion, WebStorm, Firefox (and Little Snitch running in the background). However, even with not having IDEs open all the time, and switching over from Firefox to Safari, I’m only seeing about 8 hours of battery life (which is still nice…

>However, even with not having IDEs open all the time, and switching over from Firefox to Safari, I’m only seeing about 8 hours of battery life (which is still nice compared with my 2013 MBP that has about 30 minutes of battery life).

I would consider getting a warranty replacement. Something is wrong.

For reference, my M1 Air averages exactly 12 hours of screen-on time (yes, I've been keeping track), and the absolute worst battery life I've experienced is 8.5 hours, when I was doing some more intense dev workflows.

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

#294

Post by karmelapple »

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…

App developers are incentivized in another way: software that takes advantage of new features or performance are often what Apple chooses to promote in a keynote or in an App Store’s featured section.

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

#295

Post by EricE »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #141
coldtea wrote: post #9

Well, they don't just "feel" faster. They also complete lots of real-world tasks in shorter times, often significantly shorter than the last Intel Macbook Pro.

The author’s analysis sounds less like an explanation of how the M1 is faster, and more like an explanation of how it gets such amazing battery life. If someone could figure out a way to get all MacOS apps —including the system — to use the performance cores, perhaps the battery life would be back down to Intel levels?

>If someone could figure out a way to get all MacOS apps —including the system — to use the performance cores, perhaps the battery life would be back down to Intel levels?

Other than to prove an utterly useless point - why would you want to even remotely do that?!?

If my time machine backup takes four times as long but my battery lasts longer still why would I care? The overall experience is a HUGE net improvement.

That's the point being glossed over by the majority of commenters and the point the original author is making - benchmarks are interesting, but nothing beats real world experience and in real world experience there are a suite of factors contributing to the M1 and Apples SOC approach spanking the crap out of their competitors.

There is more to life than rAw PoWeR ;)

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

#296

Post by gketuma »

valbaca wrote: post #288

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,…

"I never hear the fan. Even playing Magic Arena AND a Parallels VM runs silent."

That is because there is no fan.

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

#297

Post by zepto »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #287
zepto wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Caprice seems like a weird way to characterize an aspect of the Mac a lot of people like.

I think it’s valid to want not to have to deal with the cognitive overhead of UI evolution.

It’s equally valid not to want to deal with the cognitive overhead of various attributes of Linux.

What’s not obvious is why people sneer about it.

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

#298

Post by losteric »

gketuma wrote: post #296
valbaca wrote: post #288

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,…

"I never hear the fan. Even playing Magic Arena AND a Parallels VM runs silent." That is because there is no fan.

The regular M1 MacBook does have a fan. The M1 Air doesn't, but throttles the CPU to avoid overheating

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

#299

Post by ralusek »

gketuma wrote: post #296
valbaca wrote: post #288

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,…

"I never hear the fan. Even playing Magic Arena AND a Parallels VM runs silent." That is because there is no fan.

In the Macbook Air there isn't. In the MBP there is.

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

#300

Post by SigmundA »

kllrnohj wrote: post #263
SigmundA wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exis…

To leverage shared memory in Metal you have to target Metal. Otherwise take for example glTexImage2D: https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL-Refpages/gl4/html/gl... Apple can't just hang onto that void* that's passed in as the developer is free to re-use for something else after the call. It must copy, even on a UMA system. And even if it was adjusted such that glTexImage2D took ownership of the pointer instead, the…

I believe most of the benchmarks where Metal based in the Anand article, also PBO have been around for quiet a while in OpenGL:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Gr...

Any back and forth between CPU and GPU will be faster with unified memory especially with a coherent on die cache.

This is the same model from iOS so just about anyone doing metal will already be optimizing for it same with any other mobile development.

It doesn't seem like a minor architectural difference to me:

"Comparing the two GPU architectures, TBDR has the following advantages:

It drastically saves on memory bandwidth because of the unified memory architecture. Blending happens in-register facilitated by tile processing. Color, depth and stencil buffers don’t need to be re-fetched."

https://metalkit.org/2020/07/03/wwdc20-whats-new-in-metal.ht...

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