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Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

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Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#281

Post by russli1993 »

janmo wrote: post #219

Many people overstate Apple's achievement, in reality most credit should go to TSMC the company that manufactures the M1 chip. The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC in order to be the first one to use their 5nm technology.

Arm cpu core designs like cortex a78 and x1 are also designed for tsmc 5nm. But their per core performance is like 30% to 50% worse than Apple's firestorm cores. The low power a55 is worse than Apple's low power. And the mali gpu is worse than apple gpu. The circuit design and placement on to the chip is part of the equation as well.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#282

Post by GeekyBear »

bhouston wrote: post #253
hugi wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What utter nonsense. Different ARM chips aren't "somewhat compatible" anymore than Intel/AMD x86 chips. It's a standard instruction set. And even if we'd get different instruction sets, we have much better toolchains/compilers to work with multiple architectures now than we did in "the home computing landscape of the 80s / early 90s" (GCC and LLVM aren't really comparable to Sinclair Basic). The M1 has been out for a…

I thought the m1 has dedicated js instructions.

There are several theories as to why the M1 does so well on on JavaScript benchmarks.

>Firestorm can do 4 FADDs and 4 FMULs per cycle with respectively 3 and 4 cycles latency. That’s quadruple the per-cycle throughput of Intel CPUs and previous AMD CPUs, and still double that of the recent Zen3, of course, still running at lower frequency. This might be one reason why Apples does so well in browser benchmarks (JavaScript numbers are floating-point doubles).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

>Apple has confirmed that it’s a massive 192KB instruction cache. That’s absolutely enormous and is 3x larger than the competing Arm designs, and 6x larger than current x86 designs, which yet again might explain why Apple does extremely well in very high instruction pressure workloads, such as the popular JavaScript benchmarks.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#283

Post by rsynnott »

msoad wrote: post #59

Rumor is in a few months Apple will release a new chip that is made for pro computers. It will be in iMac and MacBook Pro 16in. I don't know what it is called but it had almost double the cache and core count of M1. That MacBook Pro is the one you probably want to buy for coding purposes.

Based on prior naming schemes, it will almost certainly be called an M1X. An A12X was more or less just two A12s stuck together, for instance.

That said, one might reasonably expect them to go even bigger for the iMac; it has much more thermal headroom than a 16" MBP.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#284

Post by janmo »

klelatti wrote: post #264
janmo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with their architecture. Here are the facts: The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. No surprise the M1 is faster. Most credit should go to TSMC for being able to manufacture 5nm chips.

> It has nothing to do with their architecture. That it has zero to do with the architecture is a bold assertion (and seems unlikely). In any event Apple would not have been able to manufacture / buy an x86 on 5nm so the architecture has quite a lot of influence on the performance of the latest Apple laptops.

I made the following thought experiment. If we downscale the M1 to a 8b transistor chip and make it use 14nm technology, would it still be faster than an i9 chip? I don't think so.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#285

Post by geogra4 »

easton wrote: post #280
tartaglia wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a vision: Amazon Basics Laptops

That's very interesting. A CR-48 looking, basic laptop with workable keyboard and trackpad. Chrome/Chromium OS (similar to CloudReady) since all the schools are on Google. If they could get it to $249 with reasonable performance, they could crush it.

Would they really want to use Google's OS? I would expect a FireTop, right?

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#286

Post by csomar »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #71

I'm still extremely suspicious of all these benchmarks, because they don't seem to correlate with my real-world experience. All these benchmarks claim to be comparing real-world applications, but I don't trust them because of what they always show with regards to mobile i9 and desktop Ryzen. I've got a Intel Macbook Pro, and a Ryzen desktop. When I'm using them for development, my Ryzen is absolutely wiping the floor…

Your Ryzen probably comes with a Cooler (wraith prism). The CPU slows down considerably when it gets hot. Also, if you built the thing yourself, you might have added a super fast RAM, Motherboard, Nvme, and a capable graphic card.

Comparing Desktop to Laptop is Apple to Oranges. Otherwise the desktop market will no longer exist.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#287

Post by rsynnott »

x87678r wrote: post #60

Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% improvement a year from now on.

Seems reasonable to expect that the version for 16" MBP/high-end 13"/iMac will be more or less the same thing but with more cores.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#288

Post by redisman »

janmo wrote: post #279
cr3ative wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This... isn't a fact. It's the opposite from what I've read - the architecture is just as important as the smaller nm process. This post is good reading on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932

I really doubt the M1 would perform nearly as good if it was a 14nm chip with 8b transistors.

The nanometer process is not an actual standard. So it's apples and oranges to compare two fabs

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#289

Post by MrMorden »

geogra4 wrote: post #268
FredFS456 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume that they would go under the Fire branding, like FireBook.

They had a FirePhone but they seemed to not push it to hard and dropped it.

They couldn't convince developers to publish applications to the Amazon Store, which meant that the device was substantially less useful than a Google Android phone.
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