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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

#111
post #71

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…

> Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling. One visit to XPS owner’s subreddit was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying it.

One visit to Louis Rossmann YouTube channel Louis was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying Apple laptops. It's almost like people that have no problems don't go around saying that (except for Apple users)

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

#112
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…

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.

Why not both? I can honestly say that I didn't know how bad the 2019 MBP Intel CPUs are until I tried a M1. It's streets ahead.

I don't think people will be moving away from webpack for awhile, but transpilation is often a very expensive part, and `swc` is very near to stable, and as a transpiler / polyfilling tool it's pretty fast.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%?

Visual studio code haha

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ESBuild doesn't polyfill, so it's _really_ not a decent replacement, unless you want to keep track of which JS object features are available in which targets and import those manually yourself?

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

#115
post #108
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Im also curious. I run amd on the desktop w good results- but not seeing the air competition yet when I last looked when air came out

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

#116

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.

Any chance you have Dropbox running? They are very slow to native M1 support and otherwise their app manages to really kill battery life.

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

#117
Any devs here switched from an old 15.4" MBP to a new 14" MBP? I'm curious how you find the screen size for doing work?

My 15.4" can scale to "looks like 1920x1200" and the 14" to "1800x1169" so there's not a lot of difference. Does the smaller size make it feel cramped?

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

#118

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…

I was considering an XPS and read through the Dell subreddits. People were constantly complaining how their machine was throttled and even opened it up to apply better cooling paste, undervolted it and so on.

I have a hard time believing that one company is doing miracle work in a small and light laptop. That's also true in the other direction - I don't really believe that Apple's machines deliver desktop performance on battery remaining cool and quiet over longer times...

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

#119

Any devs here switched from an old 15.4" MBP to a new 14" MBP? I'm curious how you find the screen size for doing work? My 15.4" can scale to "looks like 1920x1200" and the 14" to "1800x1169" so there's not a lot of difference. Does the smaller size make it feel cramped?

I switched - regretting it and may return mine in favour of the 16". As great as the 14" is (amazing machine), the loss of screen real estate has been felt.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Laptops command higher margins. They will want to milk the market with their Pro/Max laptops and then release Minis and larger iMacs next year.

Also, even a huge company like Apple would want to stagger releases so design teams can have some constant workload. Releasing laptops and a new Mini and a new iMac would put quite some work on the team and then it would be idle for a time. They are probably done with the Mini and working on a Mac Pro right now.

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