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

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

#131

Post by shepherdjerred »

wubrr wrote: post #119
varispeed wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the lowest tier models probably beat any PC laptop when it comes to usability and comfort though.

Strong disagree. UI is very buggy and inconsistent. CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. Uses it's own set of shortcuts, different from what's standard on windows/linux and most other operating systems. Not sure what people mean when they say completely vague…

> CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying.

macOS is UNIX certified and POSIX compliant. You're probably expecting GNU commands, but macOS is based off of FreeBSD (and is not related Linux).

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

#132

Post by the8472 »

bloopernova wrote: post #98

I want a better system load metric now that we've got heterogenous cores in CPUs. The Pixel 8 Pro has 3 types, efficiency, performance, and one single ultra performance core. If your efficiency cores are always close to max usage, but your performance cores are idle, is your system being heavily or barely used? I understand that system load isn't really a useful metric between systems, but it's useful to compare on a…

linux has pressure stall information[0] which tracks the time where some processes couldn't be run because they were waiting for contended resources (cpu/io/memory). An N-parallel compute-bound job on an M-thread CPU will stay at nearly 0 CPU pressure if N=M (assuming no background tasks) because they're not stepping on each other's toes. At N>M pressure will start to rise.

[0] https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html

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

#133

Post by shepherdjerred »

wubrr wrote: post #128
_ph_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engineering tradeoffs to support something intel/amd PCs have supported for 15+ years? Maybe apple is just shit at engineering?

Intel/AMD chips don't approach the efficiency of what Apple makes.

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

#134

Post by flashback2199 »

larkost wrote: post #123
flashback2199 wrote: post #108

I don't see apple silicon in macs having been the right decision a decade from now because competing toe to toe with the entire semis industry on architecture has never worked before except in iphone where they had a huge first mover advantage.

I think the argument that this might not be great in the long run is worth considering, but in the short run I think that their results over the last few years are nothing short of astonishing. Specifically their laptops, especially when not plugged into a power source, have both stunning performance and battery life at the same time. Yes there are competitor chips from AMD and the like that are faster when plugged i…

They are making themselves more different from the rest of the market instead of "the same but better" which brought people back to the mac in the first place. It used to be as a normal person you bought the latest Mac and it came with the latest i7 and you didn't even think about it and none of your friends on PC could say anything bad about it because it was the same chip they had. Now it's like woo M chip is so different and fast look at my new Mac guys and then your friends who have PC say actually it's not faster it's just more power efficient and now the seed of wondering if Apple is really better has been planted whether or not it's totally true. I've already started seeing this happen on forums. The average person buying a Mac doesn't want to have to think about the nuances of specs and once they start digging into specs they might find themselves buying a PC instead. But we'll see, maybe the past won't repeat itself this time.

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

#135

Post by zaphar »

wubrr wrote: post #119
varispeed wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the lowest tier models probably beat any PC laptop when it comes to usability and comfort though.

Strong disagree. UI is very buggy and inconsistent. CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. Uses it's own set of shortcuts, different from what's standard on windows/linux and most other operating systems. Not sure what people mean when they say completely vague…

    CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish
    unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving 
    just differently enough to be annoying.
They wasn't following unix/Linux standards they are following unix/bsd standards. Standards that predate Linux and for some of us are very familiar indeed.

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

#136

Post by wubrr »

stouset wrote: post #125
wubrr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree. UI is very buggy and inconsistent. CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. Uses it's own set of shortcuts, different from what's standard on windows/linux and most other operating systems. Not sure what people mean when they say completely vague…

> Unix tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. I'm pretty sure this is simply you expecting GNU and actually getting FreeBSD-based tooling. It's not wrong, it's just different than what you expected.

Not at all. As a single example - macos comes with an extremely outdated version of GNU bash (3.2) from 2007. And yes, this has consequences in that many modern bash scripts depend on bash 4+ (current latest GNU bash is 5.2+).

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

#138

Post by wubrr »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #131
wubrr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree. UI is very buggy and inconsistent. CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. Uses it's own set of shortcuts, different from what's standard on windows/linux and most other operating systems. Not sure what people mean when they say completely vague…

> CLI tools/shell is attempting to follow more-or-less standardish unix/linux setup but fails pretty hard, with many of the same commands existing but behaving just differently enough to be annoying. macOS is UNIX certified and POSIX compliant. You're probably expecting GNU commands, but macOS is based off of FreeBSD (and is not related Linux).

First of all unix/freebsd/linux are all closely related. Second, macos does not come with current freebsd set of CLI tools, and in fact comes with several very outdated GNU CLI tools.

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

#139

Post by GeekyBear »

brigadier132 wrote: post #36
cubefox wrote: post #3

This seems to be a lot of effort to rationalize the surprisingly small performance increase from M2 to M3. Initially the assumption was that M2 to M3 would be a bigger step than M1 to M2, not a smaller one. Perhaps TSMC 3nm is showing the limits of scaling?

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

> Isn't it a 15% increase?

At least according to Geekbench, it's a 20% performance increase.

> The M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of about 3,000 and 11,700, respectively, in the Geekbench 6 database. When you compare these scores to those of the M2's single-core and multi-core scores (around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively), the M3 chip is indeed up to 20% faster like Apple claims.

https://www.laptopmag.com/laptops/macbooks/apple-m3-benchmar...

Along side a battery life increase to 22 hours? It's been a pretty good showing.

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

#140

Post by jwells89 »

wubrr wrote: post #110
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-m…

I’ve been using macOS in a multimonitor setup for years without much issue. A good bit of it boils down to macOS expecting monitors to be well-behaved, e.g. each having unique EDIDs (many don’t, instead sharing one across all units of a particular model) and initializing in a timely fashion.

> Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window?

Because it’s fullscreened, not maximized. macOS doesn’t really have window maximization in the traditional sense out of the box, you need a utility like Magnet or Moom for that.

That fullscreen mode was introduced in 10.7 Lion and a lot of long time mac users have found it silly from day one. Personally I never use it.

> 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).

I’ve seen this, but only in Chromium browsers and Electron apps. Seems like it might be a Blink bug.

Regarding other OSes, multimonitor on Linux is mostly fine (so long as you’re using Wayland; X11 is another matter especially if you’re doing something slightly uncommon like using two GPUs, in which case xorg.conf mucking will likely be necessary).

By far the most frustration I’ve had with multimonitor is in Windows, which is generally weak there. IIRC it only recently gained the ability to set per-display wallpaper; before you had to glue wallpapers together into a single image that spanned across them, which is silly.

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