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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#841

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

fastball wrote: post #820
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Lenovo Y700, which is a CPU beast of a laptop (built mostly for gamers, I believe). It's powerful enough to make working on my project feasible, and indeed when travelling, it is what I use, reasonably happily. But most laptops just can't compile 800k lines of C++ fast enough to make them practical as a development system for that type of software, so the "type of dev" I am really does have something to do w…

Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop. And in that case maybe the M1 IS for you, since I'd be willing to bet it outperforms your existing laptop. Assuming I've found the right computer, my existing (non-M1) Macbook Pro is beefier than your Lenovo, and it gets outperformed by the M1 too[1]. Just seems pretty disingenuous tbh. Th…

> Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop.

Although I appreciate the ability as a software developer to "work anywhere", if I was restricted to working only the Y700 I can guarantee you that certain development avenues would happen very differently, if at all. The laptop works fine as a machine to use "when I have to", but if I'm doing "deep" development, it's a PITA and makes me lose focus too much because of the delays in the edit-compile-test cycle.

I have absolutely no doubt that the M1 macbooks will easily outperform the Y700, along with most other computers I've ever owned.

It remains true, for now, that if you actually care about maxCPU (with a linearly parallelizable workload) (which I do for at least half of my development work), the current M1 machines are not the top of the line. I would tend to agree with anyone who suggests that this will likely change in the near future.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#842

Post by sliken »

thayne wrote: post #673
freeAgent wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s not true. Most people buy their computers because of the price, style, and easily observable features (not necessarily performance, certainly not the type of difference that only shows up in benchmarks). Hacker News commenters are far from your average PC buyer. I’m sure the M1 and future desktop Apple silicon will have an impact, but it’s far from a killing stroke. If people only cared about maximum perform…

And not all HN readers are won over either. I for one am not willing to switch to Apple's closed ecosystem for a chip that is a little faster. Or even a lot faster.

Nor I, so I contributed to the patreon for a linux port to the M1.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#843

Post by fastball »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #841
fastball wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop. And in that case maybe the M1 IS for you, since I'd be willing to bet it outperforms your existing laptop. Assuming I've found the right computer, my existing (non-M1) Macbook Pro is beefier than your Lenovo, and it gets outperformed by the M1 too[1]. Just seems pretty disingenuous tbh. Th…

> Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop. Although I appreciate the ability as a software developer to "work anywhere", if I was restricted to working only the Y700 I can guarantee you that certain development avenues would happen very differently, if at all. The laptop works fine as a machine to use "when I have to", but if I'm…

Ok, but again, this has really nothing to do with what kind of developer you are, it has to do with the fact that you are apparently not in the market for a new laptop.

Because if you were, the M1 laptops are the best in the market for the linearly parallelizable workloads you are talking about.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#844

Post by sliken »

innagadadavida wrote: post #739
asveikau wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm typing this on FreeBSD. If the most interesting part of a Mac to you is the BSD layer ... Well, I doubt that. People like Mac for the UI and Cocoa stuff, plus hardware and integration thereof. The way you've substituted "BSD" for macOS really doesn't make sense. Yes, there is BSD code in MacOS, quite a bit of it in fact. But they're not the same thing.

You are right that people that buy a Mac don’t get it for the FreeBSD kernel. However, most people that complain about not being able to run Linux on a M1 can be just as productive with the alternatives on macOS. For 99% of other things that run in a terminal, you can get it to work in FreeBSD/macOS. Also, for Python folks, there is anaconda distribution that is agnostic to the underlying OS. Ditto for node or ruby d…

It's not a FreeBSD kernel, it's a Mach kernel. The userspace is based on FreeBSD though.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#845

Post by sliken »

p1necone wrote: post #516
outworlder wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system It doesn't matter. Sure, that might mean that an Apple system is not for you. But the crux of the matter is: Apple did something truly revolutionary. How is the rest of the market going to respond? Specifically, how are Intel, AMD and Microsoft going to respond? Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta. Intel and AMD have nothing remotely…

> Apple did something truly revolutionary This is hyperbole. Apple has released a CPU that has very good perf/watt compared to it's current competition. That's it. This isn't revolutionary, it's just another incremental step in CPU improvements. Can we please give Apple praise for competing well in the hardware market without fully drinking the kool aid and parroting their marketing.

Sounds revolutionary to me. The new M1 is faster and MUCH lower power than an i9 based system that would ramp up fans at even the most minor of workloads like say upgrading iterm2 from version n to version n+1.

Suddenly $700 mac mini's can do crazy things like edit 4k video and the m1 laptops can handle being plugged in to wall power much less often than the i9 systems.

Likely within 12 months there's likely to be systems with twice as many cores bringing unheard of levels of performance to reasonable price points.

Keep in mind Intel hasn't shipped something significantly faster than the previous generation in 5 years.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#846

Post by sliken »

sjwright wrote: post #649
coldtea wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead. Being a process node ahead is already "much better", and IS a feat. Where are the process node ahead chips from the competitors? On top of that, it's Apple's own SoC design, it has its…

In terms of GPU cores it seems evident that Nvidia is clearly number one—disregarding any thermal limits—and AMD is clearly number two. It seems Apple is a solid contender for third place now. I don't think Intel or the smaller embedded players (Mali, PowerVR etc) have anything quite so good. Am I missing something?

Dunno, do you want a GTX 3070 for $499 or a AMD 6800 for $580? The benchmarks come out at about the same per $ (AMD wins by 10-15%). Sure you could get the 3080 ... or the 6800XT. Pick your price point and AMD and Nvidia will have something close. Sure AMD has nothing to compete at the $1500 price point, but the reviews I've seen claim that the $1500 nvidia is just a big waste not close to justifying the price.

PS5, Xbox X/S, and Apple have been preferring AMD lately. Even Tesla seems excited by the RNDA2 cards.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#847

Post by sudosysgen »

grecy wrote: post #839
sudosysgen wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it would be a monumental waste of money to develop a 7nm version of the laptop chips for what, 3 months?

But surely the 7nm part has been around long enough, they should have been designing and validating it months before the part even existed...

Well, no. The 7nm part is specifically meant for desktop computers. The part meant for laptop computers, that has graphics, uses a different memory controller, has different I/O characteristics, and uses very different cache structures, was always meant for 5nm only.

They both, however, share almost the exact same CPU logic, which is why we know that performance characteristics will be essentially identical.

You could ship a laptop with the 7nm chip, and it was done with Zen 1, but then you will have very high RAM power usage, you will need dedicated graphics with Non-unified memory, you will miss out on some accelerators, and you will some I/O issues

Because of all these problems, no one thinks it worth it to design a laptop against the 7nm parts, and it's not possible to build a 7nm version of the laptop part without very high investment.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#848

Post by sliken »

grecy wrote: post #634
sudosysgen wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can walk into a store, buy a Zen 3 processor right now (if you're lucky, they're in high demand), fiddle with the clocks and voltages to simulate (poorly) a laptop chip, and notice that, right now, at the same power, a Zen3 core at 7nm HPP is comporable in single core performance to a single M1 big core on 5nm LPP. So right now we know that Zen 3 is more or less equivalent or even ahead in architectural power eff…

So why can't we walk in and buy a Zen 3 in a laptop right now? .... because the thermals and engineering have not been designed/completed yet. Sometime in the future they will be, which is great. But that's the future. I'm still talking about right now. I like to buy things that actually exist and work today, not things that hypothetically work well in the future.

There's a difference between Zen3 desktop chips and Zen3 laptop chips. The former has 2 pieces of silicon and the later has 1. They just aren't shipping yet, apparently some announcements are due at CES in January, it's unclear if there will be volume available then.

Much of AMD's current fab capacity is going for PS5 and Xbox X/S CPUs and of course the rather popular zen 3 desktops.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#849

Post by sliken »

r00fus wrote: post #412
mlyle wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said "in the PC space" here. There's lots of credible ARM work in both the mobile and the server space. Generally, a lot of it would work OK in the PC space, but for the lack of software support. Apple has the ability to leapfrog that particular problem. Still, Apple seems to have done pretty well compared to both the other mobile and server ARM vendors with their PC offering.

This whole article and thread are about the desktop (not server) space. I do agree that Apple's push to ARM for laptops will have a dramatic impact on the server space in a year or two. Intel is in for a world of hurt unless they can pull a rabbit out of their hat.

Dunno, seems more like now. Amazon has arm instances, there's a bunch of arm systems in the server space already and the world's fastest HPC cluster is already arm.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#850

Post by tambourine_man »

dang wrote: post #832
tambourine_man wrote: post #45

I submitted the same exact link 8 hours earlier. This HN behavior is very frustrating. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285489

Yes, sorry—I know it's frustrating when a later submission 'wins'. The reason we allow reposts of articles that haven't had significant attention yet is that it's largely random what happens to get noticed on /newest, and we want to allow good articles multiple rolls of the dice. The priority is on the article, not who submitted it. That does make it a bit of a lottery, and it's winner-take-all. There are definitely…

Are people really harvesting links on /newest? You guys should know better of course, but I always thought what drove an article to the top was multiple people submitting the same link. That was my reasoning for a 24h window defining a submission.

As for karma inflation, it's an interesting concept, but I don't know if I'd like that :)

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