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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

#141

Post by vmception »

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.

I’m actually debating if I even want to do a backup and restore because of this. I don’t want my chimera of an environment.

I think I want to just use this machine fresh and just move a few files over as needed.

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

#143

Post by saagarjha »

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.

How are you measuring CPU usage? Presumably whatever monitoring tool you're looking at needs to redraw itself, and that's going to bring in WindowServer…

(FWIW, my WindowServer usage is generally around 3-8% when idling and I am losing about 6% an hour at the moment.)

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

#144

Post by jb1991 »

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.

Any background process running through Rosetta, like dropbox, or maybe your Windows server, will eat up tons of battery if they’re not running native.

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

#145

Post by saagarjha »

Gigachad wrote: post #21
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.

I've gotten M1 Pro to heat up and require active cooling, unlike M1. It's certainly no space heater like my Intel Core i9 work laptop, but you can push it pretty hard.

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

#146

Post by cesarb »

majou wrote: post #33
uudecoded wrote: post #11

I am curious, since Intel is relying more and more on P and E cores as well, is there any reference or research available for optimizing multithreaded userland process tasks with varying QoS? A lot of the pthreads books I see are from the late 90s. Is there a more recent reference? What's the best way to write cross-platform (e.g. not Grand Central Dispatch) multithreaded apps with these new chip architectures?

I just ran into this tweet for Intel: https://twitter.com/DeepSchneider/status/1456314755380097027 They move everything that isn't foreground to an efficiency core, which is awful for compiling or video processing. There's apparently a BIOS option that will use ScrollLock for disabling the efficiency cores entirely.

> They move everything that isn't foreground to an efficiency core, which is awful for compiling or video processing.

Windows has had that (foreground boost) for a long time, Intel probably piggybacks on it. It'll be interesting to see how it will behave on Linux, which AFAIK never had that mechanism (except perhaps on Android).

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

#147

Post by saagarjha »

dwaite wrote: post #19
uudecoded wrote: post #11

I am curious, since Intel is relying more and more on P and E cores as well, is there any reference or research available for optimizing multithreaded userland process tasks with varying QoS? A lot of the pthreads books I see are from the late 90s. Is there a more recent reference? What's the best way to write cross-platform (e.g. not Grand Central Dispatch) multithreaded apps with these new chip architectures?

For Linux, I believe it will dispatch based on the niceness level and overall CPU utilization - past a certain threshold, it will start putting work at default or higher priority onto the performance cores. For the Mac, I believe you have equivalent access for scheduling between posix and GCD, but the scheduling configuration is likely way more approachable in GCD. Also: On M1, there is an added capability to run in…

M1's cores are homogenous and all of them support TSO.

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

#148

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

keymone wrote: post #78
asdff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must be getting their bread by charging $400 for the ram upgrade instead of the traditional $200 apple price for what should be $80 of memory.

That ram is no longer a commodity ram sticks, can’t compare prices directly

Good point. The ram is cheaper for them because they aren't buying the dimms, just the silicon.

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

#149

Post by floatboth »

ReaLNero wrote: post #50

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

Relatively obscure fun thing: CRC32 checksum instructions.

https://github.com/srijs/rust-crc32fast/pull/6

(Get rust nightly via https://rustup.rs, pull the repo, run: cargo bench --features nightly)

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

#150

Post by saagarjha »

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…

> much more expensive than buying Intel’s latest, at least in the short-term

This sounds very unlikely? Apple has been building their own silicon for a decade, I am sure they are saving significant money on their chips.

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