Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
tlkh.dev
Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
1–10 of 217 posts
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#2for those curious about running their own matmul benchmarks, I wrote a script a while back that works with both linux and MacOS that should make comparison easy.
https://jott.live/code/blas_test.cc
I saw ~1.2tflops on the regular M1
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#3Great detailed benchmarking.
This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops.
But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of news outlets were suggesting it would.
In fact, a lot of the GPU tests here show more or less what I’ve seen: That Apple has matched the power/performance of other leading-edge GPU hardware:
> Pretty much what we would expect, with the M1 Max having about 8x less performance, but at 8x less power, so performance per watt is surprisingly quite comparable between the two.
This is actually an impressive accomplishment out of Apple. I’m just afraid it might get overshadowed by the fact that it doesn’t live up to some of the fairly extreme performance claims that got tossed around in the days following the launch.
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#4I also got an M1 Max. The chip is amazing. Compile times are a lot faster than on the 6 core Intel Mac mini I had before.
But at this point it's really held back by Apple's software.
Anything related to Apple ID and iCloud regularly hangs 30-60 seconds, showing a spinner with no progress indicator whatsoever.
Apps randomly take 20 seconds to launch, maybe because of [1]?
The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show.
ControlCenter using 8GB of RAM to show a few sliders (I hope they fix that bug soon).
The scanning feature in Preview is so unreliable that I started using my Windows machine for scanning something on my HP all-in-one.
Some of those problems may be issues with 3rd party software (drivers), and others are just things that slipped through QA, and will hopefully be fixed in an update.
But some of the issues are structural issues, where Apple has made questionable decisions that means issues can never be fixed.
Eg. designing a security architecture that requires synchronously checking a binary signature during app startup with a web service is bound to cause performance issues.
Or the design of the XPC system, which uses asynchronous message passing between services that are implicitly launched on demand sounds nice in theory, but it has been the source of so many bugs, causing temporary or permanent app hangs that are impossible to debug. The system was introduced in macOS 10.7 (!) and it still doesn't work reliably! At this point I've lost hope it will ever work properly.
[1]: https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-d...
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#5I also got an M1 Max. The chip is amazing. Compile times are a lot faster than on the 6 core Intel Mac mini I had before. But at this point it's really held back by Apple's software. Anything related to Apple ID and iCloud regularly hangs 30-60 seconds, showing a spinner with no progress indicator whatsoever. Apps randomly take 20 seconds to launch, maybe because of [1]? The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show…
If software is the issue, can't you run Linux on it?
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#6Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of new…
Pretty sure the panegyric performance claims are from Mac people comparing it to the rather sad previous generation of Macbooks.
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#7I also got an M1 Max. The chip is amazing. Compile times are a lot faster than on the 6 core Intel Mac mini I had before. But at this point it's really held back by Apple's software. Anything related to Apple ID and iCloud regularly hangs 30-60 seconds, showing a spinner with no progress indicator whatsoever. Apps randomly take 20 seconds to launch, maybe because of [1]? The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show…
My M1 Pro has none of these problems. I would try a fresh install.
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#8Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of new…
But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this.
Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#9Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of new…
I was like you at first, seeing that my chrome speeds don't feel that fast, then I did my first XCode build. Holly.. it is so much faster than my 2017 Macbook Pro.
Super fast builds, and A huge productivity boost. I think it shows that if software is optimized for it, M1 can be/feel crazy fast.
Unfortunately, anything running with Roseta, will not feel that fast, as it's performance will be hobbled by the emulation layer.
Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
#10Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of new…
It's kind of hard to compete with raw power if you don't want a space heater of a device (hint: not wanted in laptop form factor).
However, part of me thinks this is Apple doing iterative rollout best - they could have created a 20-core desktop version of this in 2021 but will likely delay that to next year for the new Mac Pro and iMac Pro.