141–150 of 427 posts
Well, they don't just "feel" faster. They also complete lots of real-world tasks in shorter times, often significantly shorter than the last Intel Macbook Pro.
If someone could figure out a way to get all MacOS apps —including the system — to use the performance cores, perhaps the battery life would be back down to Intel levels?
This certainly makes a lot of sense, and it's a brilliant strategy to improve overall performance. But it doesn't account for the full picture either. My M1 Macbook Pro feels about as responsive as my desktop system with an AMD Ryzen 3900X, which is impressive to say the least. It doesn't quite have the raw computing power of the 3900X, but given that it's a portable device that's something else.
It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.
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Shared graphics-memory is not the same as unified memory. In a shared graphics-memory system, a part of the system RAM is reserved for the GPU. The amount of RAM reported to the OS is the total RAM minus the chunk reserved the GPU uses. The OS only can use it's own part, and cannot access the GPU memory (and vice versa). If you want to make something available to the GPU, it still has to be copied to the reserved GPU…
It's basically the same thing. It's the same address space. If you want to get technical about it, the Amiga had "unified memory" in 1985.
I don't believe Apple claimed to invent unified memory only that they are taking maximum advantage of the architecture more so than anyone to this point.
Federighi:
"We not only got the great advantage of just the raw performance of our GPU, but just as important was the fact that with the unified memory architecture, we weren't moving data constantly back and forth and changing formats that slowed it down. And we got a huge increase in performance."
This seems to be talking about the 16mb SLC on die cache that CPU,GPU and other IP cores share:
"Where old-school GPUs would basically operate on the entire frame at once, we operate on tiles that we can move into extremely fast on-chip memory, and then perform a huge sequence of operations with all the different execution units on that tile. It's incredibly bandwidth-efficient in a way that these discrete GPUs are not. And then you just combine that with the massive width of our pipeline to RAM and the other efficiencies of the chip, and it’s a better architecture."
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I did a side-by-side comparing with my friends' M1 macbook and my (more expensive, nearly brand new) ryzen 5800x workstation compiling rust. The ryzen was faster - but it was really close. And the macbook beats my ryzen chip in single threaded performance. For reference, the ryzen compiles ripgrep in 19.7 seconds. The comparison is way too close given the ryzen workstation guzzles power, and the macbook is cheaper, p…
I've done a side by side with my Ryzen 3700x compiling a Go project. 6 seconds on the Ryzen, vs 9 seconds on the M1 air. `time go build -a`, so not very scientific. Could be attributed to the multicore performance of the Ryzen. Starting applications on the M1 seems to have significant delays too, but I'm not sure if that's a Mac OSX thing. Overall it's very impressive, I just don't see the same lunch eating performan…
People say that Ryzen is faster - but if it has a fan, then this is a deal breaker. I have become so annoyed by fans I often just stop work when they start whirling, go make a coffee etc. It seems like M1 is now the only laptop that can let you work in silence and be productive.
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You can do it on one processor with a process/thread scheduler. This is what makes multitasking possible in general.
This is extraordinarily basic stuff. We knew how to do this kind of multitasking, with priorities, back in the 80s (or earlier). Yet people still don't understand it. As an example, a while back I ran a multi-threaded process on a shared work server with 24 cores. It used zero I/O and almost no RAM, but had to spend a couple of days with 24 threads to get the result. I ran it inside "chrt -i", which makes Linux only…
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Strange. With the exception of electron apps (which are slow everywhere), I've found my M1 mini to be extremely responsive. Much moreso than my 16" mpb.
VS Code launches instantly on my i7-4770 under Linux with XFCE. Same under Windows. So do Slack and Spotify... That's an 8 year old CPU! If you're having issues, the problem lies elsewhere not with Electron.
Well, they don't just "feel" faster. They also complete lots of real-world tasks in shorter times, often significantly shorter than the last Intel Macbook Pro.
I have two laptops side by side, one is an M1, the other a HP in a slightly higher price point (more memory, bigger SSD). The challenges Intel has in the form factor are obvious — it’s a 1.2Ghz chip that turbos almost 2x as heat allows.
In any dimension that it can do what you need, the Apple wins. Cheaper, faster, cooler, longer battery endurance. The detriments are the things it cannot do — run Windows/Linux or VMs or tasks that need more memory than is currently available.
It does not just feel faster, in many cases it is faster. E.g. compiling Rust code is so much faster that it is not even funny. cargo install -f ripgrep takes 22 seconds on a Mac Book Air with M1, same on a hexacore 2020 Dell XPS 17 with 64GB RAM takes 34 seconds.
How long does it take on a Ryzen 9 5950X