Live data from Hacker News

Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

tlkh.dev

21–30 of 217 posts

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#21
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software is the issue, can't you run Linux on it?

Does anyone really think that running Linux on custom Apple hardware is actually going to make things _better_?

I don't know how it holds with the current M1s but I was much happier with Linux than macOS under my 2014 MBP, everything was incredibly much snappier.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#23

I 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…

I have an M1 MacBook Air and the Open/Save dialog opens in less than a second. I think your system has a defect.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#24

Great 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.

There were really similar discussions in mid-2020 when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips launched, because they were beating Intel desktop chips.

That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for Macbook users (and Mac Mini users).

It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#25

I 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…

Maybe you have DNS issues? It's always DNS, so they say. XPC is not asynchronous; that's up to the individual caller. The synchronous methods are easier to debug for sure.

> XPC is not asynchronous

It's been some time since I dug into the internals of XPC, but my assumption was that the underlying protocol is asynchronous, and if you do sync calls the wrappers just do the waiting for you.

The problem is that it has a tendency to get stuck in some rare cases, where services just don't reply for some reason. Then the sync calls are the worst -- the UI of the app is completely frozen and there's nothing you can do except restart the app. If the problem is with an Apple service (like Apple ID) then the only way to fix it is to restart the Mac and hope it doesn't happen again.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#26
post #19

I 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…

Are you running any 3rd party kernel extensions, if so which ones? (E.g. littlesnitch, FUSE, etc....). I've got an M1 and M1 Pro and I've never seen anything like this, macOS in general has some long standing software bugs around the performance of apps like Music and Preview that I've seen hit on the M1 processor but they seem to make less of an impact to the usability compared to the Intel processors.

I'm not running any kernel extensions on this Mac, the first iCloud related hang happened during the setup process before I installed anything at all.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#27
Excellent investigation.

I have the first M1 MBP pro 13” and have done a lot of data stuff on it. My experience was also that python flew - cpython on the M1 being almost as fast as pypy on my 2019 i7 laptop - and java compilation was much faster too. The CPU is fast and the memory is really fast.

The performance pain points though was anything involving containers, random 10-30 sec stalls in boot and app startup (I think it’s corporate firewall stuff) and a general preference I have for Linux desktop over OSX (yeah I’m a programmer).

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#28

I 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…

You're not alone. my m1 mac mini is better, but i still see random beach balls, though the duration is less than on the intel mbp.

For anyone saying "I never see this" or "something's wrong with your system" - I've seen these sorts of problems, in some capacity or another, over ... 12 years, multiple macbooks and imacs, multiple OS versions, multiple internet providers, from various parts of the world. I think the folks saying "never affects me" simply do not notice this stuff. I don't know how/why you can't notice stuff like this, but I've been present where I've noticed people getting beach balls, I've pointed it out, and was told "oh, didn't see that". Not saying every single person is missing every single instance 100%, but I've no doubt this interrupts peoples' flow different from mine.

If I've paid $4k for a laptop and click a button, I don't expect to wait for... 1-2 seconds, then see a beach ball, then wait.... then wait some more... before a button click is recognized. It's better today than last year, and the year before, but... wtf... it's still there.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#29
post #9

Great 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 l…

Note that one part of this is that llvm is significantly faster to generate code for arm64 than for x86_64. I'm not saying that accounts for all the difference, but it helps.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#30
post #23

I 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…

I have an M1 MacBook Air and the Open/Save dialog opens in less than a second. I think your system has a defect.

These issues are intermittent and only happen sometimes. My system is not broken, it's a design defect/tradeoff in macOS sandbox. I've seen it on at least 5 different Macs on a lot of different versions of macOS. It's been an issue ever since they use a separate process to show the dialog.
Post reply on HN