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M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

eclecticlight.co

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps you have some rogue process that is causing windows server to run at 4%?

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

#62
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. Yes, about 100 watts.

From Anandtech[0]:

> Finally, stressing out both CPU and GPU at the same time, the SoC goes up to 92W package power and 120W wall active power.

2. Yes, you can burn the battery quickly under heavy use. I've killed it easily in about 2 hours during heavy Unity work.

3. When I was doing that, I did experience heavy fan output, about as loud and as hot as my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. After the heavy utilization stopped, it cooled down much more quickly than the older Intel machine.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

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

#63

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…

They will skip desktop and ship server chips. If the trends hold, they will have TCO savings which no cloud provider can resist.

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

#64
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are reviews where they actually burn through the battery in an hour. This is not surprising: the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts, plus the display consumes tens of watts in HDR mode.

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

#65

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

Agreed ! We should also differentiate between "expensive" and "good-value for money".

a Ferrari sports car is very 'expensive' and not many ppl can afford it, a Ferrari at 35% discount is a great deal but still 'expensive' for most ppl.

Bringing this back to the M1 Macs, I think what you get for your money in terms of computing, power consumption and build quality is simply amazing ! I think few can argue that. But in terms of 'absolute money', I def won't be able to afford a new M1 not when a "decent-workhorse" laptop cost about $900-$1400.

Not saying I don't want one ! I absolutely do,but my broke ass can't afford one :/

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

#67
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…

> After upgrading our app's dependency chain to run native arm64 builds Would you mind sharing your research results? I am getting one soon and I am in progress of drafting notes for stuff like migration & setup.

I would like to see this too, it's my only hesitancy in getting one.

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

#68

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…

> They could do something gnarly like fit 8 sockets on a single board Those sockets need to communicate with each other, and extremely quickly. And that I/O is very, very expensive in terms of power. Even with that you still end up with poor performance scaling, especially with anything that isn't numa aware (which almost nothing is) So no, that extrapolation doesn't make sense. But even ignoring that missing cost, 8…

Interesting idea about the power usage of the interconnect. I don't remember this being discussed as an issue in tech press writings about multisocket Xeon or EPYC systems. Do you happen to have any references?

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

#69
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 14-inch MBP with M1 Pro (not Max) burns 69W under full load (including GPU), so it does run through its 70Wh battery in 1 hour and 9 minutes[1]. (The 16-inch Notebookcheck review is not published yet.)

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-P... , in the "Battery Runtime" and "Power Consumption" sections near the bottom.

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

#70
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.

> 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 sin…

> You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system

I compared my 2014 MBP to 2019 MBP and there was no marked difference. It was running hot and eating battery very fast. 2019 Intel Mac and 2020 M1 Mac are two completely different animals. Also, the price drop for a better-performing machine was jaw-dropping.

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