Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

eclecticlight.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 419 posts

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#101

Post by _ph_ »

hajile wrote: post #60
brigadier132 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a 15% increase? I really don't consider any double digit percent increases to be small.

Actual IPC increase is 1-2%. The rest is from ramping the clockspeeds. This is a problem because power consumption goes up exponentially with frequency. Go up too high and they'll be doing what AMD or Intel does where a single core is using 50+ watts to hit those peak numbers.

How is this a problem? It just looks that they didn't try to improve the general architecture but make one step to ramp up the clock speeds without increasing the power consumption thanks to the process step. Which is a great achievement, because any tape out on a new advanced process - here for the first time a "3nm" - is a big achievement. One has to consider that Apple now has yearly updates in its processor lineup. The next step will probably introduce more architectural changes. Only if those would stop showing up for several years in a row I would get concerned.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#102

Post by reliablereason »

sfmike wrote: post #73

is efficient cores just lower clock or how could 3 6 efficient and 6 performance be worse, is it possible it could be better as its more efficient while also faster and just calling it efficient cores? After all isn't that an arbitrary semantic term?

They take up a smaller size of the chip.

Which could be seen as an indication that those cores have less caching and less parts for prefetching and stuff like that.

The efficiency core would do less things per cycle but also use less power per cycle. The performance cores would do 3 instructions in a cycle but the efficiency core might only do half an instruction.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#103

Post by masklinn »

_ph_ wrote: post #95
Detrytus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it's a dick move from Apple to artificially limit number of external screens supported.

They are not artificially limiting the number of external screens. To support more screens, they would have to reserve die area for an additional controller. That could mean a gpu less or something. This is about engineering tradeoffs.

Considering the M3 has 55% more transistors than the M1, I'm sure they could have found some room for a third display controller, or a more capable one (one with MST support for instance), or just a more flexible one.

They're selling a $1600 machine which can't drive two external displays, it's sad. Intel's HD Graphics have been doing better since 2012 and they're trash.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#104

Post by user_7832 »

turtlebits wrote: post #93
user_7832 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High refresh rates aren't just for games, they make the entire interface smoother. Things like frame rate or latency are quality of life things that you don't need , but once you upgrade, the difference becomes clear. Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. Hopefully someone else has a better analogy.

IME, the difference is negligible. I went from a iPhone 12 to a Galaxy S21 Ultra and yes, there is a difference, but it's not something I notice, even when occasionally using my wife's iPhone 12. The bigger difference I notice is in loading times for apps.

I'm not sure how the Galaxy handles it but if it's similar to the stock android situation, you're likely often only seeing a 60hz screen rate. You can go to developer settings (or perhaps screen settings) and force 90hz or 120hz on. If your eyesight is otherwise good (especially if your younger than 50) you should be able to notice the difference quickly.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#105

Post by culturestate »

turtlebits wrote: post #93
user_7832 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High refresh rates aren't just for games, they make the entire interface smoother. Things like frame rate or latency are quality of life things that you don't need , but once you upgrade, the difference becomes clear. Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. Hopefully someone else has a better analogy.

IME, the difference is negligible. I went from a iPhone 12 to a Galaxy S21 Ultra and yes, there is a difference, but it's not something I notice, even when occasionally using my wife's iPhone 12. The bigger difference I notice is in loading times for apps.

> yes, there is a difference, but it's not something I notice

Anecdotally, I use the last gen pre-120hz iPad Pro as my daily driver and I notice the difference immediately when I switch from my phone to the iPad. It’s not annoying enough to force me to upgrade immediately, but it’ll absolutely be a requirement for me going forward.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#106

Post by bloopernova »

Ographer wrote: post #89
euazOn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks but at least DisplayLink works well enough. Driving 4 monitors this way with my M1 Mac Air with no issues.

Can you name or link any specific hardware or software you're using? Last time I looked into how to run 2 monitors on my M1 Air I gave up after seeing $400 docks that seemed to have performance issues for some people.

I have this for my m1 pro:

https://a.co/d/gD5q8G3

It uses the 6950 DisplayLink chip, which can do 4K@60Hz.

It's 90 dollars and drives 2 screens.

Software is less good. I had to enable Rosetta2 to get the pkg to install. Then you have to boot to recovery mode to allow signed 3rd party drivers. And you get a creepy notice that someone is watching your screen, which is how the display driver works.

Performance is pretty good, just a bit laggy on mouse movement.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#107

Post by user_7832 »

sneak wrote: post #90
user_7832 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is. > IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price. It is possible for your comment to be correct while the poster above is also correct. T…

Generally speaking, people don’t use the port on an iPhone for anything other than charging. The fact that it supports USB v-anything is mostly unnecessary cost. If you are thinking in any way whatsoever about the non-wireless data transfer speeds on your phone, you are not the market or user it was designed for. Same goes for external monitors on an MBA.

I agree that USB isn't commonly used but that's kinda the point - it doesn't hurt apple much to do it (and they're not saving anything remotely significant), but they still do it to force the few who do want to use fast USBs. A more common example where nearly everyone would notice would be the abysmal ram in their phones until very recently.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#109

Post by adolph »

abrouwers wrote: post #64
strangescript wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, how are people overlooking this. Its like saying I am going to drop a near silent windows laptop, that is thin and cool, oh and has BETTER performance than last year's desktop windows machines.

I agree it's impressive, in the same way Ferrari announcing a new super car is impressive. But, I drive a hatchback, and was just hoping they'd cave on 8gb/256gb for ram/storage, or support for multiple monitors.

Well they just caved on the 128G storage last year (2022 [0]), so it seems premature to think that might happen. The last bump in base RAM was 2017 [1] and before that 2012, so one might think that would increase soonish. However, the shift from Intel to Apple silicon changed the nature of RAM in the machines. Its too soon to tell what a base-level upgrade would look like.

0. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook...

1. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook...

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#110

Post by wubrr »

asylteltine wrote: post #67

And yet the air can’t support more than one monitor. I know Apple is a small company with only a few engineers so it must have been too hard. Sarcasm obviously. As an Apple enthusiast it’s so annoying how they sniff farts.

I mean, the support for even one monitor is by far worse than windows or linux IMO.

- Monitor randomly resets/readjusts for no apparent reason. Like multiple times every hour.

- Windows disappear, become inaccessible after moving between monitors, even though it still open and active according to doc/task list.

- Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window? Like, you can do it by un-maximizing the window in question, moving the other window over and then re-maximizing the window again. But why is this nonsense needed? What problem could this restriction possibly be solving?

- Lots of other monitor/workspace related problems (quick google will show dozens related problems without any obvious solutions or explanations for the completely nonsensical behaviour).

I really don't understand how people can say macos has good and consist overall UI? I mean, yeah - it's consistently buggy and un-intuitive:

- Doc constantly breaks/becomes inaccessible. This is a known problem for at least 5+ years - the solution is to manually kill and restart the process???

- Text cursor/caret randomly disappears when editing text, so you can't see where the cursor is, and you can't fix this unless you restart the app (happens to pretty much all apps).

- Was working with unicode characters recently, now whenever I press command+s to save something, it gives me a visual unicode character selector popup, with no apparent way to stop/cancel this behaviour from the popup itself.

- Bad defaults in terms of keypress repeat times and rate. No apparent way to change this from settings - need to run commands and re-login to test new behaviour.

Just an overall crap OS and UI imo.

Post reply on HN