Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eclecticlight.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 427 posts

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

#331

Post by jtriangle »

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?

Because they didn't design the OS to do that. You very well could lock a core or two at low freq/power and assign background tasks to that. It's not really a new or exotic idea.

macOS doing this is a side effect of them needing to do so, with the added benefit of it actually making things nicer all around. They could very well do this on intel/amd chips to the same effect.

The bummer is, we really don't know how good the silicon is, because nothing but macOS runs on it natively, so you can't really get an apples to apples comparison.

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

#332

Post by smoldesu »

GeekyBear wrote: post #250
smoldesu wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

How does this surprise anyone at all? You're comparing a 5nm-based core to a 7nm-based core, of course there will be a direct disparity in performance. If anything, I'm surprised they weren't able to eke more performance out of it. The GPU is frankly pathetic, and the memory controller and IO subsystems are both obviously gimped too. As a matter of fact, the current M1 Mac Mini quite literally could not connect to all of my hardware with all the dongles in the world. There's just not enough bandwidth to run it all. Even if I splurged for the "Pro" device, it will still have the same bottlenecks as the consumer product.

You can't spend a decade pretending that performance doesn't matter, only to rear your head again when Moore's law is sputtering out and gasping for air. Apple's power over the industry is unchecked right now, meaning they can play all sorts of petty tricks to gaslight mainstream manufacturers into a playing different game. ARM is the first step in that direction, and I for one couldn't be more happy with the hardware I own. Well, maybe if I sold my Macbook Air...

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

#333

Post by monocasa »

vetinari wrote: post #214
yaktubi wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn't. It has the same 4 lanes, PCIe 3.0 flash as everyone else.

They have an extremely heavily integrated flash controller. Part of it is what they bought from Annobit.

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

#334

Post by kingsuper20 »

archi42 wrote: post #64
cmsj wrote: post #29

I'm curious if there is some architectural limit that prevents Apple from doing something similar on Intel Macs, at least ones with 8+ cores. The scheduler could arbitrarily nominate 4 cores as "efficiency" cores and keep them for background tasks, leaving the rest free for "performance".

Without knowing the inner workings of Apple's scheduler: I don't think there is any reasons this wouldn't work on x86 hardware. All you need is some API to tell the scheduler whether a task should be done "asap" or "whenever". But you then get a huge tradeoff: If you reserve over 50% of the computational power for "asap" stuff, then all the "whenever" stuff will take twice as long as usual (assuming the tasks to be l…

>All you need is some API to tell the scheduler whether a task should be done "asap" or "whenever".

We could call it ::SetThreadPriority()

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

#335

Post by vetinari »

monocasa wrote: post #333
vetinari wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. It has the same 4 lanes, PCIe 3.0 flash as everyone else.

They have an extremely heavily integrated flash controller. Part of it is what they bought from Annobit.

I know, but the flash controller isn't the slow part (usually ;) ).

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

#336

Post by monocasa »

vetinari wrote: post #335
monocasa wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an extremely heavily integrated flash controller. Part of it is what they bought from Annobit.

I know, but the flash controller isn't the slow part (usually ;) ).

It does for real world tasks, rather than benchmarks. The FTL plays a big part in real world, small access latency.

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

#337

Post by andrekandre » 

  The Time Machine backup pictured above ran ridiculously slowly, taking over 15 minutes to back up less than 1 GB of files. Had I not been watching it in Activity Monitor, I would have been completely unaware of its poor performance. 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.
this is really smart, and makes one wonder why intel didnt have the insight to do something like that already.... is this the result of thier "missing the boat" on smartphone processors (a.k.a giving up xscale)??

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

#338

Post by dimgl »

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…

This is pretty disconnected from reality.

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

You're basically pulling this out of nowhere. Not once in six years of using MacOS has this ever happened to me.

> Quartz and other necessary kernel processes consume inordinate amounts of compute

Yes, because Windows is so much better. This is sarcasm. Just pull `services.msc` and take a look at everything that's running.

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

In your opinion, what is industry standard? `apt-get` and `yum`? I have yet to come across a better package manager than Brew. Brew just works. Additionally, most binaries that are installed in Brew don't require elevation. Which is fantastic because almost every program installation requires elevation in Windows.

> Macs have notoriously terrible hardware compatability

Hardware compatibility in what sense? As in, plug-and-play devices on a MacOS powered machine?

I'd argue the inverse; I often just plug in devices to my MacBook without having to install a single driver. Imagine my shock years ago when I plugged in a printer to my MacBook and I was able to immediately start printing without installing a single driver. Same with webcams, mice, etc.

Do you mean hardware compatibility in terms of build targets? I think here you might be correct, but even then you can compile for different operating systems from within MacOS... so again, I'm not entirely sure what you mean here.

I guess if you're talking about legacy devices where the hardware manufacturer hasn't bothered to create drivers for anything other than Windows, then your point might be valid, but how often does this happen...?

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

...more disingenuous statements. What do you mean by this? Under the hood, MacOS is Unix. Everything that runs on a MacOS machine is a process. You can attach to processes just as you would on a Windows machine. Similarly, if you have the debugging information for a binary you can inspect the running code as well.

MacOS is not a perfect operating system; for one, I do wish that it was better for game development. But I'm really struggling to understand your points here. Every single one is either not applicable or just straight up wrong.

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

#339

Post by vetinari »

monocasa wrote: post #336
vetinari wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, but the flash controller isn't the slow part (usually ;) ).

It does for real world tasks, rather than benchmarks. The FTL plays a big part in real world, small access latency.

We still don't know how good is the FTL in the Apple controller; all the devices are still too new and haven't been dragged through the coal as all the other controllers. It is still in the "easy job" part of it's lifecycle, with brand new flash cells.

However, to quote @Dylan16807 from similar discussion few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26118415):

> The analog parts are the slow parts.

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

#340

Post by astrange »

8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote: post #215
smoldesu wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is a lot of really well expressed information that completely fails to grapple with the fact that most developers write code for the web and apple computers are extremely popular among web developers. 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…

> This is a lot of really well expressed information

Well, no, it's all totally made up.

Post reply on HN