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M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

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

#51

Post by iknowstuff »

lordnacho wrote: post #40
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…

Got mine last week and not only is it faster, the power usage is crazy good. I took it to town for the first time yesterday, thought I'd do some coding between meetings for a few hours. Battery is still over 90%. I actually don't know what the thing sounds like with fans on, because it hasn't happened yet. My old machine from 2019 would have been down to half power at least, and the fans used to come on with just two…

I think I'm missing out as mine drops by a very pedestrian 10% an hour. WindowServer keeps using a cool 4% of the CPU at all times, even when nothing is running.

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

#52

Post by ksec »

whalesalad wrote: post #30

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 rem…

>a rebirth of the G4 Cube as a “Mac Mini Pro”

That will be one of those shut up and take my money moment. Given how they have been going retro or paying tribute to past design in their recent new product lineup I am hoping a G4 Cube revival is actually within a possibility.

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

#53

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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.

> With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN.

The main thing driving this is that people are comparing a new M1 to their Intel Mac laptops with processors from ~2016 and then naturally it's a marked improvement because it's being compared to a five year old machine.

You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system and they're competitive. They win some and lose others. Much was made about the M1 Max taking the single thread performance crown; for less than a month. Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. It's plausible that it will be AMD's again in a couple months when we get Zen 3 with 3D V-Cache.

They're all within single digit percentages of each other and the winner is whoever released their top end processor most recently.

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

#55

Post by aroman »

midrus wrote: post #39
zibzab wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not an "HN thing". These machines are damn fast in day to day use. Absolutely zero heat, zero usage of fans and incredible battery life too. I see a lot of hype and fanboys around here regarding certain techs, but these machines are objectively on a whole different league.

Do you have one of the M1 Pros? Mine very much does gets hot and I can definitely hear the fans when I'm building a project, but both fronts are certainly improved vs the Intel Macs. Honestly, it gets about as hot and as loud as the Intel version, just far less frequently.

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

#56

Post by Maakuth »

midrus wrote: post #39
zibzab wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not an "HN thing". These machines are damn fast in day to day use. Absolutely zero heat, zero usage of fans and incredible battery life too. I see a lot of hype and fanboys around here regarding certain techs, but these machines are objectively on a whole different league.

Saying "absolutely zero heat" is not effective in refuting claims of fanboyism. By quick google these chips have 90W maximum TDP. That is not zero.

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

#57

Post by gcanyon »

kllrnohj wrote: post #43
perryizgr8 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" That is the issue though. Intel macbooks were notoriously badly cooled. That hurts the performance a lot. If all you have used is that, of course you find the new one a lot better. However, compared to any other high end Intel/AMD laptop, you would not perceive this much difference in speed. Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely…

And weirdly one of the major design changes for the new M1 Pro & Max machines were significantly improved cooling. Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's....

100 watts? That implies that with serious use you could burn the battery to zero in an hour. Apple's graphs don't show more than 60 watts at peak, and no one is reporting heavy fan output even when running extended benchmarks.

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

#58

Post by pram »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #35
BoorishBears wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" That is the issue though. Intel macbooks were notoriously badly cooled. That hurts the performance a lot. If all you have used is that, of course you find the new one a lot better. However, compared to any other high end Intel/AMD laptop, you would not perceive this much difference in speed. Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely…

What a load of shit lol. The XPS 15 9570 has similar throttling issues, down to the same fixes as a MBP 16 (undervolting, disabling HT, putting pads on the VRMs, redoing the paste)

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

#59

Post by Maakuth »

DrBenCarson wrote: post #26
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 t…

Whether some parts are custom or standard start to lose their meaning in Apple's scale. Probably you're right in the SoC case, reserving that sweet 5nm capacity from TSMC likely costs a lot. But the rest of your list is similar to any Apple device, so it shouldn't factor in the markup difference between these machines and their other products. Even the SoC investment is benefiting the whole product portfolio, even though this version is specific to laptops for now.
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