Live data from Hacker News

Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

tlkh.dev

131–140 of 217 posts

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#131

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.

[deleted]

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

"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," Is this even possible? I don't think a 50k computer can guarantee no wait on software. How would any hardware prevent excessive software utilization?

Apple's entire USP is vertical integration. The fact that Linux is significantly more responsive than Mac on the same hardware is an embarrassment to Apple.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#133
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIR if you have Mac, you are legally allowed to run MacOS in VM on that computer.

Running macOS in a VM is okay for testing purposes, but in my experience it's not a great experience for productive work. There are a lot of graphics glitches because macOS assumes that you have hardware graphics acceleration, but no VM that I know supports that for macOS guests.

I'm not sure why a VM was supposed to help your situation but in regards to GPU in a VM Parallels can provide paravirtualized GPU to enable acceleration for macOS (metal), Windows (DX 9/10/11), and Linux (Virgil) guests.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#134
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern. Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits. If a higher performance/watt…

> The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. Yeah, all pretty major concerns?

The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything.

I admit it's a pedantic comment but I was pulled in by use of "literally everything".

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#135
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. Yeah, all pretty major concerns?

The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything. I admit it's a pedantic comment but I was pulled in by use of "literally everything".

The other ways to mitigate those things have pretty significant downsides. For instance, maybe you can stick a bigger battery in there to improve battery life, sure. But now it's heavier and more expensive.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#136
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article literally benchmarks a variety of low-level compute heavy operations and compares them with a Ryzen. It’s about as far away from your take as possible.

You might have missed the point - he means that more we get performance from the hardware, less we care about optimising software. And this is already a problem with Electron for example.

I get that point, thanks. Neither that glittering generality nor the supposition that Mac users are blown away by the M1 simply because macOS was running on creaky Intel hardware have anything to do with the article though.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#137
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people keep talking about power performance per watt, do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the performance scales linearly? The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700 and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ). 5900x cost $480.

One reason: try to work alongside a 3080 or 3090 running at full power for awhile, and you will understand. Especially if you don't have really good AC in your work area during summer. =)

[deleted]

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#138
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.

That already happens though given that different hardware has different support for hardware accelerated playback of video. E.g even on the M1 Pro/Max, you're going to get much better performance and battery if you're using a video editor that supports prores decoding.

I get that, but that's a bit more general than saying Safari will run faster than Chrome because Apple made Safari-specific application instructions rather than H.264 will be more power efficient than Theora on a given CPU. Any browser could support any particular hardware's video decoders, but only Safari behaves exactly like Safari. The person I was replying to was writing specifically about CPU instructions to enhance the performance of Safari in particular, not of all browsers in general.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#139
post #121
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rumors are that the M1 supersized version they are putting in the new Mac Pro is 20 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores, which would place it at a little under twice the performance of a 3090. Not saying that Nvidia can't catch up with a hypothetical 4090 next year but it'll be a tall order.

The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.

Dumb question here: Can you get more performance from the same number of cores by giving them more power?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.

By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for anything , they're somehow punishing everybody else with "penalties." What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else? At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with the…

When they make optimizations for something, and then _artificially limit_ access to those optimizations (for applications that absolutely could utilize them) for purely commercial or marketing reasons, then yes, absolutely they're punishing.

Intel doesn't forbid compilers from generating code for SSE or AVX.

Apple _does_ forbid Chrome from using energy management and other APIs for no other reason than to keep it less efficient than Safari.

Post reply on HN