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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

#101

Post by capableweb »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #93
capableweb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than switching hardware, you can also switch out the software to more efficient one. esbuild would make your builds go sub-ms even without needing a M1 CPU, also worth a try if you cannot switch to the newest hardware, so I guess this comment is for poor people.

esbuild is not simply “more efficient webpack” so that’s quite misleading.

Good thing I never said esbuild is "simply" "more efficient webpack". Parent was talking about build times, probably bulk of that is spent building JS, which you can plug in esbuild to handle instead.

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

#102

Post by Zababa »

DSingularity wrote: post #63
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…

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

I know that AWS already have their own ARM chips: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/. I don't know about chips enough to understand how large is the gap between AWS and Apple when it comes to designing chips though.

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

#103

Post by Zababa »

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.

I wonder how much of that is due to a "finally, a good laptop" sentiment. I have used a lot of laptops over the years, and each and every one of them have been terrible in lots of ways, especially recently. If M1s "solve" the laptop problem, that would be great.

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

#104

Post by ebawho44 »

nvarsj wrote: post #95
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.

Don't you think it's deserved? I haven't seriously used a macbook in nearly a decade now but the M1 is making me consider buying one. Desktop class performance in a laptop with very long battery life is just amazing. The only thing stopping me is OS X. Using it is super painful for me - it doesn't even have basic snap to edge or split window functionality. My workflow is heavily dependent on tiling WMs and it would a…

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I haven't used it myself however

and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948

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

#105

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #89
f6v wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Apple selling you mid-range-3-year-old-intel CPUs (that are known to thermal throttle quite badly) at 50% markup, then robbing you slightly less hard on a product is not jaw dropping, it's merely you falling for their marketing three times in a row.

The MacBook Air line seems to be the only viable alternative for fanless notebooks at the moment, though.

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

#106

Post by nvarsj »

ebawho44 wrote: post #104
nvarsj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think it's deserved? I haven't seriously used a macbook in nearly a decade now but the M1 is making me consider buying one. Desktop class performance in a laptop with very long battery life is just amazing. The only thing stopping me is OS X. Using it is super painful for me - it doesn't even have basic snap to edge or split window functionality. My workflow is heavily dependent on tiling WMs and it would a…

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I haven't used it myself however and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948

Yeah I'm familiar with what is in OS X, I have had to use it a few times for work. The fullscreen approach is very clunky. And the window animations are incredibly slow. I'm used to dynamically moving windows around and tiling things quickly. I tried using yabai but it was so slow and buggy there was no point. I think magnet/rectangle helps but it is still a subpar experience.

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

#107

Post by nchie »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #53
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.

> 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…

>Much was made about the M1 Max taking the single thread performance crown; for less than a month.

This is quite misleading in multiple ways.

The M1 Max has the same single thread performance as the M1, which has been out for around a year.

You're also comparing Intel's latest desktop CPU to a laptop CPU. Before the M1, a laptop CPU competing with the highest-end consumer desktop CPU in multi-core OR single-core was unthinkable and had never happened. Yes, there have been leaks in which Alder Lake's mobile CPU beats the M1, but we don't know whether these benchmarks are representing the numbers we'll be seeing in consumer laptops with laptop cooling.

That being said, I hope there will be competition!

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

#108

Post by foldr »

jquery wrote: post #91
mikevm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at pure performance without power usage is meaningless for these machines.

Power usage doesn’t scale linearly, at all. Mobile Ryzens are very competitive with the M1 watt for watt (trading blows with Ryzen winning sometimes). Seems you’ve fallen for Apple marketing again.

What Ryzen laptop would you recommend with performance and battery life roughly equivalent to an M1 MacBook Air? A lot of people on HN obsess over benchmarks, but people buy laptops, not CPUs. I haven’t yet seen a product that’s competitive with the M1 MacBook Air in its niche (which to be fair isn’t really a niche - a laptop for what 90% of people use their laptops for).

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

#109

Post by GhettoComputers »

iknowstuff wrote: post #51
lordnacho wrote: post #40

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.

The task manager (called activity monitor) has a power usage section. It might be syncing or if you had Firefox on it uses way more than safari.

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

#110

Post by KptMarchewa »

ReaLNero wrote: post #50

I have an M1 Max. If anyone wants me to benchmark any workflows, I'd be glad to help!

Do you have two 4k displays? If yes, then does running them affects performance significantly? On i9 MBP this was causing extremely severe performance issues, to the point where processor was throttled to 30% performance.
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