391–400 of 565 posts
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It’s not out of nowhere. It’s just that people didn’t pay attention to their mobile chips. But Anandtech had articles as far back as the A12 7 years ago where it was competing with the intel chips of the era A secondhand link because anandtech is restructured now unfortunately https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/05/apples-a12-bionic...
> because anandtech is restructured now unfortunately …because he left to work on the chips.
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That's what the single thread score is supposed to be for. The multi-thread score is supposed to tell you how the thing performs on the many real workloads that are embarrassingly parallel. Suppose I'm trying to decide whether to buy a 32-core system with a lower base clock or a 24-core system with a higher base clock. What good is it to tell me that both of them are the same speed as the 8-core system because they h…
The only valid benchmark for that is to use the application you intend to use as a benchmark. Even embarassingly parallel problems can have different characteristics depending on their use of memory and caches and the thermal characteristics of the CPU. Something that uses only L1 cache and registers will probably scale almost linearly in the number of cores, except for thermal influences. Something that uses L2, L3…
Suppose I run many different kinds of applications and am just looking for an overall score to provide a general idea of how two machines compare with one another. That's supposed to be the purpose of these benchmarks, isn't it? But this one seems to be unusually useless at distinguishing between various machines with more than a small number of cores.
Your analysis is also incorrect for many of these systems. Each core may have its own L2 cache and each core complex may have its own L3, so systems with more core complexes don't inherently have more contention for caches because they also have more caches. Likewise, systems with more cores often also have more memory bandwidth, so the amount of bandwidth per core isn't inherently less than it is in systems with fewer cores, and in some cases it's actually more, e.g. a HEDT processor may have twice as many cores but four times as many memory channels.
The real question for me is how much they target GPU support towards accelerating language and vision models in the Macbook Pro lineup. I don't know if Apple actually cares but they've got a huge opportunity to steal the spotlight from nVidia if they make inference competitive with nVidia chips.
Nvidia's spotlight comes from $30k datacenter GPUs and network equipment. So unless Apple starts making those, nobody but a few privacy conscious enthusiasts will care about running some mediocre models at glacial speeds on their MacBook.
But I disagree that only privacy conscious enthusiasts will want to run locally in the end. Right now in the hype froth and bubble and while SOTA advances fast enough that getting the very latest hosted model is super compelling, nobody cares about anything. Longer term, especially once hosted services start deciding to try and make real money (read: ads, tracking, data mining, etc) this is going to change a lot. If you can get close to the same performance locally without data security issues, ads or expensive subscriptions, I think it will be very popular. And Apple is almost uniquely positioned to exploit this once the pendulum swings back that way.
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> The reduced horsepower relative to M-series isn't a problem for me as much as efficiency is Same here. I actually don't care for macOS much, and I'm one of those weirdos who actually likes Windows (with WSL). I tried the surface laptop 7 with the snapdragon X elite, and it's..OK. Still spins up the fans quite a bit and runs hotter than my 14" M4 Pro. It's noticeably slower than the MacBook too, and isn't instant wa…
It’s even worse: Parallels on MacBooks runs windows better than a dedicated windows laptop…
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Nice. Lots of people still claim that M1 is super duper fast but now we're at almost twice the performance!
M1 is still fast, the speed of its successors does not change that.
Which is not to say that the Air is a bad device, its an amazing laptop (especially for the price, I have not seen a single Windows laptop with this build quality even at 2x price) and the performance is good - that if I was doing something like VSCode and node/frontend only it would be more than enough.
But also people here oversell its capabilities, if you need anything more CPU/Memory intensive PRO is a must, and the "Apple needs less ram because of the fast IO/memory" argument is a myth.
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Here’s the multi core Geekbench progression: M1: 8350 M2: 9700 M3: 11650 M4: 14600 M5: 16650 (estimated) This is assuming an 8% uplift as mentioned. Also nice.
I wish we could get something other than Geekbench for these things, since Geekbench seems to be trash. For example, it has the Ryzen 7 7700X with a higher multi-core score than the Epyc 9534 even though they're both Zen4 and the latter has 8 times as many cores and is significantly faster on threaded workloads in real life.
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Keep in mind that a big part of the huge jump in recent chips was that GB6 added support for SME, and to my knowledge, no app uses SME as of yet. GB5 is a better benchmark for all these chips for this reason. The actual IPC increase and perf/clock of these chips excluding SME specific acceleration is MUCH smaller.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Any app compiled using LLVM 17 (2023) can use SME directly and any app that uses Apple's Accelerate framework automatically takes advantage of SME since iOS 18/macOS 15 last year.
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I use one for software development and it's great. Sometimes rust builds are slow and I'd love to force that to be faster with hardware (optimizing build time would be a huge undertaking with not-so-great returns), otherwise I'm totally content. I also have an M2 Max with 32GB of RAM that still feels like magic. I've never had computers that felt so fast for so long.
I dunno, working with M1 daily I struggle with resource contention and slow py/js builds. I'd love something faster when work provides me with updated device.
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M1 is still fast, the speed of its successors does not change that.
Not really - I bought an M4 Air to check how my dev ecosystem (.NET) would run on the ARM/Apple silicon and while its usable its noticeably slowing me down in my day to day with Rider. I will be getting the M5 pro because the performance is a bottleneck for me (even incremental builds take a while). Also I regret not getting at least 30gb ram (Amazon only had 24gb configurations) because with docker running I constan…