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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

#182
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And each time I read a post like this I wonder: what do these people _do_ with these machines? To give you an idea, I don't have Macs, but I have a beefy desktop because I run my own OpenStreetMap server on it. My old machine: i7 3770, 32GB ram, 1 TB sata SSD: 3 days to import Europe's map. The new one: Ryzen 5800, 32GB ram, 1 TB NVME: 10 hours to import Europe's map. I will probably need to upgrade my ram and NVME…

> because I run my own OpenStreetMap server on it. What do you do with it?

Whatever they want. It's theirs.

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

#183

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....

The 16" MBP already had the thermal design improvements, there was a firmware issue for a short time after release that caused the thermal throttling, after they fixed that it was on par with the XPS with the same chip.

The older ones got really toasty, but it's not like the XPS faired better in the thermal design department.

Both these had their own quirks, (I returned the XPS I got from my place of work twice because I couldn't stand the insane amount of coil whine)

Been running the 2019 MBP since it was released and it's been a pretty pleasant experience overal. Only issue I've had was with external displays drawing too much power, which was fixed by forcing the refresh rate to 59.98Hz.

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

#184
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

AMDs Renoir stood up to desktop CPUs some 6 months before the M1. Still yeah, the M1 is a performance beast. But like others have said already, in the latest gen (and considering Alder Lake is fresh out of the oven[0]), they're all quite close, trading blows with each other.

[0] almost literally by the thermal numbers

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

#185
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a hard time finding mips/flops for the M1 CPU, can you measure one of them?

~100G fp32 FMA/s per core on my M1 air last I checked.

Is that CPU or GPU? Sounds a bit high when 2Gflops/watt (but I guess at 40W for all cores =2,5Gflops/W it could make sense?!) is the industry standard! Can you turn off the acceleration to get CPU only figures? What is FMA/s?

Edit: Ok that is some sort of SIMD/GPU... I need figures for the raw CPU that can also do general purpose calculations and branches!

Maybe MIPS is a better "apples to apples" measurement?

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

#186
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried getting Macs to work for years with yabai etc and came to the same conclusion as you. It's garbage for my workflows. Linux is a million times better.

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

#187

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 had it even worse only 5 hours of battery life in my first week of usage. It turned out OneDrive had a bug with syncing; after reinstalling (then keeping it on overnight for the sync to finish), the battery jumped to ~8-10 hours with fairly heavy usage (Parallels + Safari, though with syncing paused), which is near your current level. The Energy tab of the Activity Monitor helped me identify OneDrive as the power suck.

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

#188

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....

Lol what is this vaguely accusatory tone? First off the M1 Air has no fans. Second the MBP 16" was the one with the improved cooling, so it wasn't throttled randomly by using the wrong charging port. And finally the whole reason the M1s are so well cooled is there's no 100W SoC, or 200W probably when you consider the additional dedicated GPU in my 16". My M1 has a 10W TDP! 10! I don't think the GPU alone in my 16" co…

> First off the M1 Air has no fans.

Your M1 Air doesn't have an M1 Pro or Max, either, which I clearly specified. Why are you talking about M1 power draw in your response when that's not the SoC in question?

> Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw,

Power in == heat out. CPUs don't do mechanical work, all power is converted to heat.

If the 'TDP' is less than peak power draw (and is actually respected in some form), it simply means the SoC is intended to power throttle after a duration. But that's so far not the case for any of the M1's, so claimed TDP is fully irrelevant as it's seemingly not enforced in any way. Which isn't unique to Apple fwiw, AMD's claimed TDPs are equally irrelevant.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From recent benchmarks you need to go into $1000+ territory for the CPU alone to get close to M1 multi-core performance I don't think so, quick comparison, with numbers from https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Apple-M1-Pro-10-Core-32... : - Apple M1 Pro 10 Core 3200 MHz - Score: 23730 - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X - Score: 27293 - Price: ~$499 And I just spent 2 minutes digging up those numbers, didn't even look…

The latest Ryzen CPU is the 5950X, costing near 1k, and it’s behind M1 in that same site’s leaderboard: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html All the recent M1 benchmarks from respectable news sites confirm the same for the majority of multi core real workloads. tl;dr you absolutely will not beat M1 Pro with a $1500 PC for work.

Did you miss that I mentioned AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X or you're just willingly ignoring it? It beats the M1 and costs > https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

> $1000+ territory for the CPU alone to get close to M1 multi-core performance

Your claim was that you need a +$1000 CPU to get close to M1 multi-core performance, then now you link the single-thread tests?

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

#190
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple is using very high bandwidth LPDDR5 - it can't be cheap.
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