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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

#401

Post by zamalek »

merb wrote: post #377
sdflhasjd wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I picked out a couple that I could run without installing too much extra: Ryzen 3900X: antd-admin webpack build: ~23 seconds. Not surprising, it's just single core. golang.org/x/benchmarks, BenchmarkBuild-8: 4.61 seconds, so far off the value of 19.65s in the article that I feel I'm getting some suspicions confirmed...

well he used bad ram and didn't specify his ssd. basically compilation is cpu+ssd+memory so if one of these suck you get what he did. a good cpu with garbage components. not sure why somebody buys an X5xx mainboard and uses 3200mhz memory (which he hopefully ran in dual channel...) also my macbook pro is slower.

> not sure why somebody buys an X5xx mainboard and uses 3200mhz memory

Because of the assumption that expensive is better.

For those who don't know: X5xx boards are better for overclocking as they typically have better VRMs (stable on-board power supply). In addition those boards have better memory traces, increasing the chances that you can overclock memory (beyond XMP) and tighten memory timings. On my 3950x this all resulted in about a 15% performance uplift (compared to XMP enabled alone).

If Apple were to ever use AMD hardware, they would likely use a B450 - it is perfectly capable of running all the components to spec.

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

#402

Post by lliamander »

I am all for more attempts to benchmark programming tasks. I really appreciate this article for that, and I hope we see more content like this.

However, I would note a couple of things:

- As the author acknowledges, the Ryzen CPU is last gen. The current generation of Ryzen CPUs are about 20% faster gen-over-gen.

- The memory configuration used with that Ryzen CPU is not optimal. I believe DDR4-3600 is recommended, and does have a measurable impact on performance.

That said, the M1 is still quite impressive. However the Ryzen 5 5600X (or the upcoming Ryzen 7 5800U for laptops) is a solid choice for a developer workstation.

EDIT: I would also add, the limitation of 16GB RAM max is a deal breaker for me (as MacOS, but that's a different story).

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

#403

Post by kilburn »

dkersten wrote: post #238
robin_reala wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside the fact that process size is a marketing term these days, I’m currently typing this on a previous-gen Macbook Air with a 10nm Intel CPU. They’re definitely not stuck on 14nm.

> Leaving aside the fact that process size is a marketing term these days There was a youtube video where the guy used a scanning electron microscope to compare gate sizes between 14nm intel and 7nm AMD and both were basically the exact same size. The conclusion was that the term is useful only to compare a single companies product line against other offerings in that line (eg comparing Intel's 14nm to Intel's 20nm m…

I think you are speaking of der8auer and this video in particular: https://youtu.be/1kQUXpZpLXI?t=716

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

#404

Post by smilekzs »

pmontra wrote: post #159

Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…

IMHO even if fragmentation happens (quite likely as RISC-V gains traction), this will force developers to actually take cross platform compatibility AND performance seriously.

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

#405

Post by epistasis »

chungus_khan wrote: post #319
epistasis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anandtech measured the ram latency at >90ns, which is not great: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... The cache on the M1 is also massive. If Intel/AMD have clever prefetchers to make up for this, it looks like the M1 might be doing something more.

I have been trying to explain to people that having the DRAM chips physically next to the SOC on the package does not actually meaningfully improve memory latency. I get that people on this site are excited, but please be excited about the right things.

Yeah, speed of PCB transmission is ~8 inches (~20cm) per nanosecond. Which is about 2/3 of the classic "light-nanosecond", which is roughly a foot.

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

#406

Post by philjohn »

muro wrote: post #184
philjohn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The X1 Carbon, which is what I assume you're referring to with Thinkpad, is 2.6Lbs vs 2.8Lbs for the 2020 Macbook Air. That's 90g of difference ... I'd say that qualifies for Ultralight still.

The new X1 nano is 907g (1.99 lbs), so the Macbook Air at 1.29kg is 42% heavier. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/coming-soon/ThinkPad-X1-Nano/p/...

Ah, wasn't aware of that!

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

#407

Post by ksk »

hugi wrote: post #205
pmontra wrote: post #159

Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…

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…

>Different ARM chips aren't "somewhat compatible" anymore than Intel/AMD x86 chips. It's a standard instruction set.

Can you create a single build for all ARM chips for the same OS? If not, its all the same. At work we're using binaries built for XP that work without modification on W10. No doubt, its a testament to the massive backwards compat. effort by MS, but also from Intel. This is a massive, massive benefit to actual customers who just want to keep running software that they purchased/developed/commissioned on the replacement hardware when their current hardware fails. ARM/M1 brings a lot of benefits too, but as always, each person has to decide what they're willing to give up.

>The M1 has been out for a month and we already have hundreds/thousands of natively compiled binaries—and Windows and Linux are up and running.

Assuming the vendor is still in business, you have to rely on the good faith of the vendor to gift you the new version for free.

The OP raises very valid points, I don't know what is 'utter nonsense' about it. It's only tech, not a tribal war :)

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

#408

Post by rsynnott »

Reason077 wrote: post #305
rsynnott wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rosetta does quite badly with JITed stuff (notably, it does very, very badly with x86 JVMs). I assume it'll be fine once native Unity is available.

The linked article with the benchmarks doesn't make it clear what JVM is being used. Since the Java benchmarks seem to perform well, I assume they're using a native JVM?

Yeah, looks like it. It say they're using Azul's one, and that's available for MacOS ARM64.

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

#409

Post by rsynnott »

chungus_khan wrote: post #319
epistasis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anandtech measured the ram latency at >90ns, which is not great: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... The cache on the M1 is also massive. If Intel/AMD have clever prefetchers to make up for this, it looks like the M1 might be doing something more.

I have been trying to explain to people that having the DRAM chips physically next to the SOC on the package does not actually meaningfully improve memory latency. I get that people on this site are excited, but please be excited about the right things.

People seem to have dramatically missed the point here; it's almost certainly done for power reasons.

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

#410

Post by jeffbee »

spamizbad wrote: post #155
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would one benchmark memory performance (DRAM latency & bandwidth) on the various chips?

Above my pay grade! You probably operating with a fixed speed on M1 so you can't intentionally cripple it, but it would be interesting to see "What would this look like if Apple had paired it with standard DDR4-3200?". AMD's Zen core's are known to respond well to lower latency RAM, but in the PC space you're not getting anything close to what Apple has with the LPDDR4x on package. You could try benchmarking the Inte…

> in the PC space you're not getting anything close to what Apple has with the LPDDR4x on package.

I mean, that's exactly how an 11th Gen Core laptop is constructed.

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