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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

#181

Post by [deleted] »

wubrr wrote: post #170
claytongulick wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-documente…

[deleted]

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

#182

Post by speedgoose »

stetrain wrote: post #117
speedgoose wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that’s overpriced for such low specs.

For 16 core CPU, a dedicated GPU equivalent, 400GB/s LPDDR5 memory, 3024x1964 Mini-LED, and 18 hours of battery? The closest I can configure a Dell XPS 15 is $3099, and that's a 14 core CPU and likely lower memory bandwidth and lower performance SSD. They claim 18 hours of battery but only with the base screen, the upgraded screen is presumably less. And from personal experience using an XPS 15 is a significantly wor…

Yes I guess if you absolutely need those specs in a small laptop and you don’t care about value it makes sense. I think it’s more that the laptop is not a good deal compared to other Apple laptops.

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

#183

Post by shepherdjerred »

wubrr wrote: post #138
shepherdjerred wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, macOS does include some GNU programs, and both the FreeBSD and GNU programs that it includes are rather outdated.

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

#184

Post by wubrr »

jwells89 wrote: post #140
wubrr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A good bit of 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.

I don't really buy this explanation. I'm talking about using a single external monitor here, a monitor which I regularly also use with linux (intel/amd) laptops without a single issue.

> 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's not really a good reason though. It still doesn't explain why the restriction exists. Why can't a non-maximized/fullscreen window be displayed on top of a fullscreen/maximized window? What problem does that solve?

> 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.

It's default though.

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

#185

Post by rahoulb »

dnissley wrote: post #120
rahoulb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought my M1 MacBook Pro not long after they were released. It's approaching 3 years old which is a pretty standard age for people to start looking at a replacement - I guess that's why they're comparing it to the M1. Slight tangent - even though the MBP has been struggling to handle my dev work (partly because the codebase I'm working on has grown significantly in the last two years) I won't be upgrading. Work bou…

Oldest MBPs with an M1 are from late 2021, so only 2 years old.

Those were the redesigned M1 Max/Pro versions.

Mine is the M1-with-touchbar (same design as the intel version) which was released at the same time as the M1 MacBook Air - late 2020.

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

#186

Post by pretzel5297 »

GeekyBear wrote: post #124
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…

> expect 2010s Intel style yearly performance gains from here on out Intel saw very little gain this year at all in return for a 400 watt power draw under load. The plain old M3 saw a 20% performance gain along side efficiency gains. Having a 22 hour battery life is insane and you certainly aren't going to manage that with a 400 watt power draw.

400 watts is on a desktop chip where there is no concept of battery life.

20% increase on performance is compared to M1 not, M2 - which also had 20% increase in performance on M1.

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

#187

Post by wubrr »

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…

But you can have workspaces/maximized windows without having the restriction of preventing moving windows to another monitor/workspace that has a maximized window.

I use workspaces on my linux laptops all the time - this 'feature' has existed for ~20 years, and is not hard to implement. The difference being that macos seems to force the restriction of having only 1 window per workspace and not being able to drag a window from one workspace to another. If that's the behaviour you want (one window per workspace), you can easily operate in this way without having the forced restriction.

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

#188

Post by wtallis »

_gabe_ wrote: post #162
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…

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 scre…

> 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

I find that more often than not I can't make it through the Windows setup without worse janky stuff happening. Pretty often when toggling off all the bullshit privacy settings that shouldn't be opt-out to begin with, I'll get a visual indication of the switch starting to move after my click, then turning around and going back to the default—so my click was definitely received, but rejected somehow. That seems worse to me than a correct response delayed.

> 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.

There is a visual indication in that the contents of the menu bar change to reflect the newly active app; unlike on Windows a Mac app can be active without having an active or foreground window. There's a system setting to control whether to switch spaces in this scenario, but I don't recall whether the behavior you describe is the default or something you accidentally configured to annoy you.

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

#189

Post by pretzel5297 »

GeekyBear wrote: post #139
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.

> 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.…

Benchmarks are optimized for specifically.

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

#190

Post by skuhn »

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+).

Unfortunately this will never be fixed. It's not a technical problem. They refuse to ship software licensed under GPL v3, and bash 3.2 is the final GPL v2 version.

I hate it.

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