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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

#161

Post by lostlogin »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #8

Feels like we’ve gone from “it’s just better, it’s obviously better you can see with your eyes and feel it as you use it” when M1/2 dropped. To trying to justify why the M3 is 20% faster than the M1 and the M2 was also 20% faster than the M1 and weirdly Apple is only comparing it to their older processor. Like people, maybe it’s just an underwhelming update… no need to pretend it’s not.

Most of the customers are going to be Mac users, and I’ll bet that most already have M series machines.

Comparing M3s to old Intel Macs would also be lame, and a fairly meaningless comparison.

It would be interesting to know how many people compare M series performance to Intel performance when buying, as those are usually going to be different markets surely?

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

#162

Post by _gabe_ »

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…

I think the buggy apps and UI isn’t emphasized enough on Macs. I honestly can’t remember the last time I was on Windows and performing an action failed to give me any visual indicator whatsoever that something happened, but that’s common on my M2. I’ll click something, have no feedback, and then a few seconds later the thing happens.

Just a couple concrete examples, if you open an app in a workspace, then switch screens to a different workspace, then click the app in the dock, nothing happens. I would expect to be taken to the screen and have the app made visible, but instead, nothing. I kept thinking that the app must be frozen or something until I switched screens and found it.

Another example, I was carrying my laptop to and from work. I put it in my backpack with padding that protects the laptop. I didn’t jostle it around, I literally just carried it to and from work. I get home and the screen is in some sort of weird flickering bugged out state. I had to forcefully restart it just to get it working again.

With all that said, the trackpads and gestures on Macs are amazing. The displays are also very visually appealing. The performance is good.

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

#163

Post by jwells89 »

Terretta wrote: post #153
jwells89 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Agreed, however it's arguably for a different mental model. If people think of it as "focus mode" or "workspace mode" it makes more sense. Four finger swipe to slide between the workspaces or focuses. More importantly, you don't need MOOM. - - - To maximize a window to the d…

> To maximize a window to the dimension of the screen without entering full screen mode, either:

This is a handy trick to know, but has caveats. Option-green-functionality is actually defined by apps, not the OS, and so in some cases it will for example act as a “fit window to content” button.

Option-double-clicking a corner appears to be consistent across windows however.

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

#164

Post by claytongulick »

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?

Have you ever actually tried driving decent large monitors from those crappy intel chips?

I have.

Engineering tradeoffs indeed.

For all its flaws, Apple focuses on making sure there is a good experience overall. In general, they'd rather have a more limited hardware ecosystem that works better than a broad ecosystem that's flaky.

There are tradeoffs to both approaches. I go back and forth between windows and mac, and have for decades.

I was a surfacebook/win10/WSL guy for a few years, and liked it a lot. Win 11? Not so much.

Currently the M series chips blows any PC laptop away for the combination of portability/performance/battery.

The Snapdragon X might change that in the next couple years, and I'll take a look at switching back then, and see what win 12 offers. If MS decides to take a step back from being an ad-serving platform and goes back to focusing on productivity, I may switch back.

For now though, I'm planning on accepting the gut punch to my wallet and picking up a 14" M3 Max in a few weeks.

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

#165

Post by wubrr »

foldr wrote: post #157
wubrr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+).

Zsh has been the default shell on MacOS for ages now. If you need a more modern bash then you can easily install it using brew or other common package managers. This is a total non-issue.

Of course shipping a very outdated tool with your OS is an issue. And the fact that you need to use 3rd-party package managers to update/replace it is also an issue.

But if you want to contend that anything that is solveable via customization/3rd party packages is a 'total non-issue', then I fail to see how you could argue that Linux isn't superior to MacOS in every single way.

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

#166

Post by jltsiren »

stetrain wrote: post #32
jmull wrote: post #15

It seems like the M3 favors efficiency and thermals over raw power. This makes sense for the devices they've put it in. I wonder if we're going to see different processors (M3X or M4) for the next release of the pro desktops, that favor power over thermals and efficiency? Maybe there will be a kind of tick-tock, with odd numbered processors favoring efficiency and even numbered processors for power? M3, M5, M7 for th…

For the M3 and M3 Pro, they kept the same number of cores or in the case of the Pro actually decreased them. On the other hand, the M3 Max gained 4 Performance cores for a total of 16 cores (12P 4E) vs the M2 Max's 12 cores (8P 4E). The M3 Max beats the M2 Ultra (2x M2 Max dies) in single and multicore benchmarks. Seems like Apple is leaning towards efficiency on their lower end chips, but also using the extra transi…

The M3 Max beats the M2 Ultra in single-task benchmarks, that measure how well various kinds of software can take advantage of the hardware. Such benchmarks don't scale well with the number of CPU cores, because many tasks involve sequential bottlenecks.

With higher-end hardware, you should get more meaningful results by running a few copies of the benchmark software in parallel and reporting the sum of multicore scores as the true multicore score. That would reflect the common use case of running several independent tasks in parallel.

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

#167

Post by scrlk »

blktiger wrote: post #113
scrlk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a mixture of several problems: * TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive) * Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last few years * Tim Cook trying to push the average selling price up to keep revenue growth going in the face of sales declines (e.g. hobbling memory bandwidth, reducing the number of performance cores for M3 Pro) I don't expect there to be a M1 style generational l…

Weren't all of the new M3 Macs announced the same price as they previously were or lower? Same with the recently announced iPhones? Or am I mis-remembering? Seems like prices not increasing given all the recent inflation are actually a price decrease pretty much across the board not an increase on the average selling price?

Entry level pricing for a MacBook Pro now starts at $1599 rather than $1299.

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

#168

Post by toast0 »

wubrr wrote: post #136
stouset wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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+).

Using tools from the base OS is really holding it wrong. Just like ftp.exe/Internet Explorer/Edge and Safari should only be used to download a usable browser, the Apple provided CLI tools should only be used to download the tools and versions of tools that you actually want.

Otherwise, you have no way to control versioning anyway. When the OS version is tied to the version of so many other tools, it's a nightmare. Apple is trying to push you in the right direction by basically not updating the CLI tools ever, even when upstream didn't change the license to something unacceptable for them to distribute as in the case of bash.

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

#169

Post by jwells89 »

claytongulick wrote: post #155
jwells89 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting - it's one of the killer features of macos for me. I use it to compartmentalize stuff I'm working on, and 4 finger swipe between them. I have a couple instances of VSCode, some app/debugging browser windows, some chrome profile windows etc... all running full screen and I spend my day brush swiping between them. It may be different for me because I work on a 14" macbook pro, mostly at coffee shops or unus…

I could definitely see it being more useful on a small screen, especially something like the 12” Macbook.

Generally I’m working at my desk with at least 2x 27” displays. If I’m out somewhere it’s instead 16” MBP + 12.9” iPad with Sidecar.

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

#170

Post by wubrr »

claytongulick wrote: post #164
wubrr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you ever actually tried driving decent large monitors from those crappy intel chips? I have. Engineering tradeoffs indeed. For all its flaws, Apple focuses on making sure there is a good experience overall. In general, they'd rather have a more limited hardware ecosystem that works better than a broad ecosystem that's flaky. There are tradeoffs to both approaches. I go back and forth between windows and mac, and…

> Have you ever actually tried driving decent large monitors from those crappy intel chips?

Yes, I regularly drive my monitors with 1 intel laptop and/or 1 amd laptop (modern ones, linux). Not a single issue ever. I plug in my work m2 pro mac to these same monitors - constant issues.

> For all its flaws, Apple focuses on making sure there is a good experience overall.

MacOS has had dozens of well-know, well-documented bugs for years that haven't been addressed, many of them mentioned in this thread. I don't see any focus from Apple on these whatsoever - their main focus seems to be advertising and visual design.

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