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

M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

eclecticlight.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 234 posts

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#21

Post by Gigachad »

yeldarb wrote: post #12

Mine just arrived today and I'm blown away. After upgrading our app's dependency chain to run native arm64 builds (which took a bit of googling) webpack's incremental build time on our app is down to 116ms from 983ms on my 2016 Macbook Pro. Over 8x faster. Our Tensorflow.js (webgl) models that previously ran about 8fps in the browser are now running at the camera's native 30fps framerate. (Similar to my desktop 2080t…

And if its anything like my regular M1, it does that while remaining cold. I used a 2019 macbook pro and the thing would be roasting hot if you had docker running.

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#22

Post by sumnuyungi »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #18

These laptops are too expensive. What the hell is the markup on these things

Compared to what? Their pricing is in-line with the previous Intel models and are a huge upgrade in performance. For some tasks, you have to look at a desktop configuration for comparable performance (at a much higher price).

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#23

Post by dwaite »

aroman wrote: post #15

In my usage, which is game development with Unity, I haven't really been particularly impressed with the performance improvements on my 10-core M1 Pro machine. I'm sure most of the blame is due to Unity (the app is a buggy mess), but it definitely took the initial "wow this is magic" down to reality very quickly for me.

You likely know this as a Unity developer, but my understanding is the native M1 support was added in 2021.2 , released a few weeks ago.

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#24

Post by Gigachad »

TillE wrote: post #3

"Surprisingly, these benchmarks seldom exceed 50% load on any of the ten cores, which raises the question of how accurately they represent maximum CPU performance." Eh, maybe. I'm not inclined to rely on the reported % CPU usage to represent anything useful. For example, it's very easy to be at 100% CPU when you're actually spending most of that time waiting for memory reads.

CPU % is such a complex metric that it hardly means anything real other than an general feel for how busy the system is.

I have seen on linux that I can be running something that uses 100% and the cpu is at 50c, then I run prime95 also at 100% and the cpu instantly hits 99c

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#25

Post by BoorishBears »

zibzab wrote: post #20
aroman wrote: post #15

In my usage, which is game development with Unity, I haven't really been particularly impressed with the performance improvements on my 10-core M1 Pro machine. I'm sure most of the blame is due to Unity (the app is a buggy mess), but it definitely took the initial "wow this is magic" down to reality very quickly for me.

Unity is slow on any machine. With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. It reminds me of the 64-bit ARM hype when someone benchmaked encryption (because ARMv8 has AES instructions) and everyone were made to belive that the new iPhone would be 3-4 times faster.

I've seen little to no hype based on synthetic benchmarks.

M1 macs are just really damn fast for daily usage.

My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" out of the water in every conceivable way. I'd elaborate but there seriously isn't any dimension of it that isn't an improvement. Maybe the smaller display?

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#26

Post by DrBenCarson »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #18

These laptops are too expensive. What the hell is the markup on these things

I believe these are actually one of the lowest markups Apple has and in general a great deal.

Consider this: 1. 14” or 16” custom miniLED display 2. Anodized one-piece aluminum clamshell 3. Completely custom SoC (much more expensive than buying Intel’s latest, at least in the short-term) 4. Completely custom OS with a full suite of native apps 5. Custom MagSafe adapter 6. Thunderbolt 4 (3 of them)

Now consider that this laptop outperforms most desktop workstations that cost $4k+…and does it on 16h of battery life.

If you’re in the market for a high-performance computer, you’d have to be dense to not buy one of these (or building x86 firmware)

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#27

Post by BoorishBears »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #18

These laptops are too expensive. What the hell is the markup on these things

These aren't too expensive, the M1 Macbooks are just really good values.

Before the M1 Air an entry-level MBP was the only "serious" choice for productivity. Even if you weren't a professional, an Air could be limiting.

Now we have an $800 laptop that can compete with the previous MBPs. The MBP can actually be a pro-only machine.

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#28

Post by wmf »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #16
wmf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are just now starting that research and blog posts like this one are all we have so far.

Asymmetric multiprocessing has been a big topic of research for many, many years. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=asy...

Yeah, but I'd bet 90% of that research makes wacky assumptions that don't apply to real processors. When real hardware becomes available you start over from scratch. (Source: I am a former CS researcher.)

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#29

Post by stephen_g »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #7
Aeolun wrote: post #2

I’m not sure how to interpret this, even after reading the article. Is any reason given for why the last 4 Performance cores get only a limited amount of work?

Keep in mind the only devices with M1 Pro/Max CPUs are currently battery-powered laptops (which in itself is quite a strange inversion!) Probably the "high power" mode available on an M1 Max in a 16" chassis is doing just that. And maybe Apple will decide to treat some kind of new iMac Pro as more of a pro machine, and make it chunky enough to dissipate that sort of heat without needing much fan noise...

Yeah, it was surprising that they didn't pop these SoCs into the Mac Mini but perhaps they are doing a full redesign of the Mini and we'll see a new version some time next year?

Obviously a 'Pro' version of the iMac is coming eventually with a larger screen but I don't think many people expected that yet. Maybe February or so next year...

Re: M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

#30

Post by whalesalad »

I can’t wait for the desktop-class Pro hardware. If you extrapolate on power consumption alone it would be a complete monster. They could do something gnarly like fit 8 sockets on a single board and send your compute ability to level 9000.

I’m hoping for a mid-tier unit though - a rebirth of the G4 Cube as a “Mac Mini Pro”

I daily drive an M1 mini now and abuse the hell out of it. I’ve never heard the fan. It’s a remarkable device. I was installing a Homebrew package the other day on my i7 MacBook Pro and the fans kicked on - it almost startled me - I had forgotten about active cooling.

Post reply on HN