I'd be curious to see properly done benchmarks against top of the line Intel or AMD machines. I'd be surprised if the Mac was faster.
I do understand that people want the Mac for the build quality of the laptop, not just for speed.
ARM64 Linux Workstation
41–50 of 493 posts
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that hard to believe when you consider the hardware specs for Apple machines are so heavily locked down to a very specific set of mobo, cpu, and only variability in core count, ram amount, hard drive size, etc. It's not like PC world of mix and match everything.
It's hard to believe because virtually none of the proprietary Apple Silicon platform (except the CPU instruction set itself) is documented and involved a tremendous amount of reverse-engineering effort by some very bright volunteers .
Agreed, if anyone wants some good insight, this video is fantastic. It gets to the tech stuff about 20 mins in iirc and explains some quite surprisingly open aspects of the apple ecosystem and some approaches to funky stuff with the closed bits.
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#43Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost? There's also the obvious set of trade offs, such as being quiet, compact, but being unrepairable, while the PCs having nearly the opposite qualities. Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?
It’s about half the cost to build your own based on Ryzen thread ripper and DDR5. I’ve done this before however, it’s not ARM64. It also requires like 1000w power supply. Can you build a machine just as capable? Yes. Will it be as efficient? No. Will it be Arm? Probably not. That said, I run Apple MacBook Air as my daily so YMMV. *edit* ok a bit more than half. Chip shortage has scalpers sitting on threadrippers.
If you leave it switched on using 5 cents worth of electricity an hour, how long does it take to cost more?
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#44That's really impressive! That said, I really wish someone other than Apple would release something like an ARM64 NUC, with good Linux compat. Even something on par with the SD Gen 2 should be plenty to run a desktop day to day.
I'm not trying to invalidate your specific use case, but in general, there's not really any practical difference between ARM64 and x86 for desktop use. ARM is generally perceived as being more power efficient, but the latest x86 mobile processors from AMD (and probably also Intel) are very efficient. The Apple M series does have very tightly coupled RAM and onboard ML & video encode accelerators, but when it comes to plain old compute power & efficiency, AMD and Intel have pretty much caught up afaik.
There were recently a couple of new NUC-type devices based on the outgoing generation AMD mobile processors. I have the Minisforum UM690, based on the Ryzen 6900HX, and it's been working great as my new desktop computer. The iGPU is pretty good too. The Ryzen 6800U (U = efficient variant, 25 W TDP) is about the same as the M2 for performance and power consumption. The 6900HX in this device is the high power variant, default TDP is 45 W but you can lower it to 25 W in the BIOS which should make it about identical to a 6800U. The newer ones with the latest gen Ryzen chips should be much more efficient.
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#45I'd be curious to see properly done benchmarks against top of the line Intel or AMD machines. I'd be surprised if the Mac was faster. I do understand that people want the Mac for the build quality of the laptop, not just for speed.
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Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#46Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost? There's also the obvious set of trade offs, such as being quiet, compact, but being unrepairable, while the PCs having nearly the opposite qualities. Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?
> Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost?
If you normalize to performance, building a comparable PC for things like compiling code can be about half the price. Intel and AMD’s latest top-end consumer CPUs are very, very fast and significantly cheaper.
> Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?
If you’re going for ultimate silence and/or you need the smallest machine possible, power efficiency matters.
If you’re spending 99% of your time in the code editor and web browser, your CPU is going to be mostly idle anyway and peak power usage basically doesn’t matter. A decently configured AMD or even Intel system with reasonable fan curves can be plenty quiet for the 1% of time that you’re at 100% CPU usage (hint: embrace the high temperatures and let it throttle, it’s fine).
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#47Asahi Linux is amazing and pretty usable at this point. However, last I tried I couldn't get stuff like Slack and Spotify to work on it because there are no Arm packages for those. Has anyone found a way around that?
At least for Spotify, there are many other options, like spotifyd and spotify-tui. Also one decent GUI app build with Rust, if you want to try them.
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems like a wonderful opportunity to use QEMU since it's not all that performance-sensitive (I think?) and you're not running random pre-built binaries directly on your computer.
I ran all my stuff inside non-root non-volume container so prebuilt binary it is not really a problem. I used QEMU through Podman machine in the end, but the performance is terrible. Even on MacOS side QEMU does not support Rosetta 2. Docker for Desktop supports and gives significant boost, but I don’t want to use it.
Did you try Lima on Mac? I never did compare apples to apples, ran an x86 Podman VM and then switched to an arm64 Lima VM and had drastically improved performance.
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#49Forgive a bit of ignorance on my end; does Asahi have x86_64 emulation? It would be cool to play Linux Steam games on Arm.
Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
#snarc beats /s anyday. On a serious note. If you want to save on the power bill. Arm anything wins against my 1000 watt xeon workstation. I can heat several rooms with that monster.
It's a shame Apple is Apple and you can't pay a reasonable price for RAM, otherwise these would make awesome servers.
That's the cost for 10x the memory bandwidth of the Ryzen 7950x.