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Is anyone else thinking, what the f*ck? Are we in a new era of computing? It certainly feels that way when looking at these desktop class ARM chips, where perfo

Is anyone else thinking, what the f*ck? Are we in a new era of computing? It certainly feels that way when looking at these desktop class ARM chips, where performance doubled every year or so, just like back in the 80s and 90s.

burlesona 6y ago
I agree, and posted something similar on another M1 thread, though it got downvoted and I'm not sure why :D
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  I lot of people are having a hard time grasping or accepting. “But this benchmark has these issues”, “but this is hardware accelerated, so it's not a fair comparison”, etc. I think when enough benchmarks and real world usage have been run, it will sink in. What did people expect? They've been killing it with 5W fan-less chips for years. Have you seen how confident Apple is in those videos?
  - utxaa 6y ago
    it's fair to be careful with something new. if it's that great and it will be quickly apparent.
    - tambourine_man 6y ago
      I wouldn't classify the backlash as carefulness.
tambourine_man 6y ago
Yes. Exactly. I haven't been this exited about a chip in a really long time. Decade-long, probably. And I'm really hopping Intel manages to get its act together. Competition is great for everyone.
- regularfry 6y ago
  I'd make a bet on Intel not turning around without new leadership at least willing to fling a gravitationally-significant pile of money at TSMC in the short term and significantly improve their pipeline in the medium to long term. They're so far behind now they're basically betting on everyone else screwing up. It's not just their position, though, it's their rate of change... their chip releases aren't getting faster as fast as AMD's or ARM's are, not by a long way.
  - spullara 6y ago
    They need a Satya to replace their Balmer. Immediately.
- utxaa 6y ago
  well don't exit! stick around man.
  - tambourine_man 6y ago
    No matter how much I spend on keyboards, I still can't type. But thanks, I will :)
    - utxaa 6y ago
      breaks. https://workrave.org/ https://workrave.org/
bmurphy1976 6y ago
Normally this wouldn't feel so ground breaking, but the stars are in alignment and all these improvements are hitting at the same time. We're seeing years of work and investment paying off (AMD, Apple, ARM, Nvidia, Amazon), new process nodes (TSMC), and new tech (Ray Tracing, DLSS, machine learning) all hitting at the same time. And that's the big stuff! There's also the steady incremental improvements such as battery technology, SSD and RAM that are ongoing. You also have an incumbent (Intel) who's lost their way. If they were as scrappy as they were 15 years ago this wouldn't feel like such a banner year. Yeah, I think we are in a new era of computing.
- whizzter 6y ago
  Not to forget that apparently some of the people driving that scrappy team that had a big part in Intel's resurgence has been working on the M1. This actually reminded me of how I got skeptical comments from people when I told them that my small and scrappy Pentium-M (P-M -> M1, HAH!) based laptop was almost as fast as their desktop P4 monsters in compiling code.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    The P4 (and Netburst in general) was a true low-point for Intel. Intel is struggling with fab issues right now, but things were really bad from about '02 to '06, with the P4 not completely going away until '08.
  - Bayart 6y ago
    I remember people using socket adapters to put Pentium M chips on their desktop. I also have very bad memories of my P4 Prescott around the same era. What an absolute trash pile of an architecture.
    - spronkey 6y ago
      It wasn't actually that bad... Everyone likes to remember it as this massively power hungry beast with terrible performance. It was power hungry compared to what came later, but it did also provide some pretty good performance at the time - especially if you were the kind of tweaky nutter who liked to overclock. Northwood was a relative bargain when you cranked the bus clocks up well beyond what it said on the box.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I suspect HP/Lenovo/Microsoft are squirming in their chairs right now.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  I'm not so sure. Some people simply need Windows and now you can't Bootcamp on ARM Macs so people will take the best Windows laptop instead.
  - Siira 6y ago
    Who knows, they might continue to offer an Intel MBP for years to come, or even add Windows ARM support if it commands enough demand. The other manufacturers have no mote here.
    - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
      Windows arm is not real windows. It's not a substitute. Apple might command it's developers like a herd, moving them to whatever fancy new thing they make but windows is much more fragmented with 20+ years of backwards compatibility and tons of unmaintained software that won't be magically ported.
      - robotnikman 6y ago
        Current Windows on ARM seems promising with its x86 emulation so far, but still has a lot of room for improvement. Combined with the Windows 10 S sandboxing old windows apps I can see Microsoft catching up again in a few years once we have more widely available high power ARM processors. In IT though, I don't expect any changes over to ARM hardware for another decade. I know where I work we have plenty of legacy cruft which would probably run into some weird edge cases if emulated on ARM.
- egao1980 6y ago
  Lenovo and Microsoft had started to release ARM devices way before Apple.
ogre_codes 6y ago
The CPU gains on ARM have been increasing consistently year over year for the past decade. People have posted benchmarks of the A11/ A12/ A13 versus Intel for a while so this has been pretty obvious. It's just surfacing because suddenly we have a desktop CPU with desktop software like compilers and other things where it's more obvious outside of benchmark tools. Apple is just jumping onto their existing ARM track, once they migrate their product line, which has surpassed Intel. Once they've migrated all their lines to ARM, the performance gains will be more like they have been on the iPhone/ iPad over the past few years. Mostly 20-30%/ year.
- sudhirj 6y ago
  Chalking it down to ARM doesn’t cut it... other companies make ARM chips too, including Qualcomm. Most Android phones run ARM, and given they outnumber iPhones heavily you’d expect massive improvements. But this is better than putting Qualcomm’s best chip into the Mac.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Yes, ARM is one piece of many. (Commented about this above) Though I suspect if Qualcomm were able to source a TSMC 5nm chip, it would be more competitive with Apple than Intel is at this point though. Apple has a lot of other things going for it where Qualcomm lags (the Secure Enclave, graphics performance, audio and photo processing, the neural engine etc etc)
    - selectodude 6y ago
      Debatable. Qualcomm operates under a strict transistor budget because their chips lack a dedicated customer willing to pay what it costs to develop an ultra-wide CPU like this. Apple knows they're going to sell 100+ million of whatever core they make so they're able to more easily amortize and justify the costs of development. Intel gets no such benefit of the doubt. I have no idea what on earth is going on over there.
      - 6y ago
vgchh 6y ago
This is the Apple equivalent of a Tesla showing up and out competing much more expensive cars on the performance. It feels like a huge disruption and probably Apple’s chance to gain significant PC market share.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > the Apple equivalent of a Tesla showing up and out competing much more expensive cars on the performance Which was Tesla's equivalent of Jobs walking on stage with the iPhone, itself an homage to his iMac G3 turnaround, in turn a recapitulation of his promotion of the Apple II.
- unsigner 6y ago
  The difference being that Apple can actually manufacture the numbers needed to make a difference.
- spronkey 6y ago
  The issue with this is that Apple has the same problem that they have had for years - they don't really offer mainstream products. Even their most inexpensive products are on the higher end of the pricing spectrum, and they could be 5x the performance but it still wouldn't matter. There's a reason why Chromebooks are so popular and it sure isn't anything to do with their performance.
epistasis 6y ago
So though it's a new age in some ways, I don't think it will benefit many people. It will just increase the churn. Witnessing all the cries of "16GB of RAM isn't enough!" makes it quite apparent that software behaves like a gas rather than a liquid, and will expand to consume whatever hardware is available to developers. I think that for consumer products, which these are targeting, software responsiveness, usability, and battery lifetime are by far the most important metrics. These chips help with battery, and can hell with software responsiveness if there's is developer focus on it. But what will probably happen is that development teams will buy the fastest computers they can, and then develop software that is mostly, somewhat adequately performing on this beefy hardware, then ship it to customers that are on weaker hardware. This effect is especially pronounced for web software, where it's easier to make unresponsive interactions due to so many layers of software, especially with developer network connections usually being 10x-100x less latency than users.
- xbar 6y ago
  I do not agree. Look at the AnandTech Speedometer 2.0 metric. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... The 8GB Macbook Air at $899 educational is faster, and will feel faster, than any laptop that anyone has owned or thought of owning at that price point. Millions of buyers who need laptops for *-at-home activities will sing its performance praises on Sheets and Salesforce. The "I need 16GB crowd" of content creators need more RAM and GPU but they are a tiny fraction of the market for laptops.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    I guess my point is that any such gains are temporary and will soon disappear with the next release of software, or with the next website redesign. MS Office apps, for example, are horrifically unresponsive on Macs. Switching the ribbon to a new view has 700-1000ms of lag on my 2.4 GHz i5. Maybe an M1 brings it to 350ms. Once MS developers start developing on an M1 laptop, the developers will change code, and it will slow down, and until it gets slower than it currently is, the code will not be optimized. This is what I mean about software being like a gas rather than a liquid. Any new CPU performance will be consumed by developers because their threshold for performance optimization changes with each new performance improvement.
throwaway894345 6y ago
I’m guessing the performance improvements derive from integrating the memory onto the same chip (instead of using external memory), not from ARM (although power savings come from ARM). So we will probably see a new era of laptop SoCs, but that also means coupling RAM with CPU (or maybe you can mix and match the on-chip RAM with external RAM?).
- wmf 6y ago
  I’m guessing the performance improvements derive from integrating the memory onto the same chip Nope, LPDDR4x-4266 is LPDDR4x-4266. Apple, Intel, and AMD all have access to the same RAM. The Firestorm core is the real advantage.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Ah, well I'm happy to be mistaken.
  - Symmetry 6y ago
    You do get a power benefit from keeping the RAM in-socket rather than having to go out over more wires to reach the RAM.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Isn't it attached via a wider bus?
  - unixfg 6y ago
    A single core being able to fully saturate LPDDR4X bandwidth seems pretty advantageous. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... “One aspect we’ve never really had the opportunity to test is exactly how good Apple’s cores are in terms of memory bandwidth. Inside of the M1, the results are ground-breaking: A single Firestorm achieves memory reads up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at 33-36GB/s. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before.”
oarsinsync 6y ago
I was until I tried doing the test myself. It takes 82 seconds to compile on my i5-4200M. I'm not sure this test is deserving of the breathless headline and commentary, especially since the original tweeter later follows up with: > Extra info: The M1 macbooks (air/pro) can't drive 2 external screens, and the air throttles a bit after 3+ minutes sustained compute (20-30%) https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328753176552632321 https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328753176552632321 I'll be more interested if the M1 can compile something 2x quicker than the i9 when the compile time on the M1 exceeds 30-60 minutes rather than being less than a minute. EDIT: to be clear, I expect the M1 to feel faster than the i9 for the vast majority of users, however the headline is "in a real world Rust compile", implying that this is a more valid test than synthetic benchmarks. I take issue with that, as I don't really consider something that compiles in less than 2 minutes on 6 year old hardware to be a much more useful test than the benchmarks. We already know the A-series of chips performs incredibly in short workloads. We have no information yet on how it performs under sustained workloads.
- w0utert 6y ago
  >> We already know the A-series of chips performs incredibly in short workloads. We have no information yet on how it performs under sustained workloads. What makes you think that given sufficient cooling, it will not perform exactly the same as the M1 in the MBA but sustained? It’s not like the ARM architecture changes anything in the thermodynamics of cooling cpus compared to an x86 chip, right? I’d wager that under load an i9 with passive cooling wouldn’t even last 30 seconds without throttling below even its base clock, if it doesn’t just shut down to prevent frying itself
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    It's an Apple chip that will only ever be in Apple computers. Asking about how it would do in a computer with sufficient cooling is about as relevant as asking how it would do in a computer with a usable keyboard or OS.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It's in the same ballpark of power efficiency as AMD's x86 chips. It's slightly more efficient because of 7nm vs 5nm but if you scale it up to desktop frequencies it's going to consume the same amount of power as Ryzen CPUs.
codeulike 6y ago
Note that the comparison is also compiling to ARM vs compiling to Intel, so its partly to do with the simplicity of the compilation process between the two architectures. https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328762958118346753 https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328762958118346753
- rualca 6y ago
  I'm also curious to learn where was the bottleneck in both tests. I've read stuff about how the M1-packing MacBook Air shipped with a SSD whose burst write speed was far higher than the one shipped in older MacBooks. The bottleneck on build jobs tends to lie on disk access, specially with projects comprised of a significant number of small files whose build also outputs a bunch of small files. This is one of the reasons behind doing builds on RAM drives. If that's the case then these weird speedups might not be due to magic properties on Apple's M1 professor but due to the fact that the processor doesn't idle as much while waiting for all those reads and writes to finish. If anyone has any data on this, please do share.
  - bydo 6y ago
    The SSDs are faster, but only by ~20%: https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BlackMagic-Disk-Speed.png https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BlackMagic... From the TechCrunch review, which is pretty breathless but also contains a lot of good data: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro-is-powerful-but-its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
    - spronkey 6y ago
      Sequential performance is only one facet of overall SSD performance. Some older Apple SSDs weren't the greatest at random reads and writes - it's possible these new ones are quite a bit faster in that department, FWIW.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  Well that pretty much settles the matter, doesn't it.
d33lio 6y ago
Completely! Worth the wait given it took about a decade for Arm chips to suck less ;)
bob1029 6y ago
I thought this for a few seconds and then realized these sorts of benchmarks are lacking obvious controls (i.e. compiling for different architectures as noted by others). If you want a more realistic sense of how the M1 performs relative to x86 peers in raw, equivalent workloads, there are some cinebench numbers appearing out there: https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/146878-apple-m1-cinebench-r23-benchmark-scores-revealed/ https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/146878-apple-m1-cinebench-r2... I am way more interested in non-accelerated, deeply out-of-order instruction processing capabilities if we are talking about a "new era of computing". Being able to compile to ARM faster than x86_64 and having super fast HW codecs for processing special unicorn byte streams are not very compelling arguments in this context. Show me an ARM chip scaled up to the same power+price budget as an Epyc 7742, throw them both at a 24 hour SAP benchmark, and then I will start paying attention if the numbers get close.
- unsigner 6y ago
  People are celebrating a kickass electric bicycle doubling the range of all the existing ones, and you demand to be shown it scaled up to the same power+price budget as an open pit mining truck, hauling dirt in three shifts. It might or might not happen, but the electric bicycle is still impressive.
  - spronkey 6y ago
    Well, it's more like people celebrating an electric scooter that has twice the range of the electric bike. Not saying it isn't a novel form of transport or equally useful in most cases, but... we're comparing a very stripped-down SoC to systems that have vastly more complexity for several different reasons - not least the ability to support more modular CPU/memory/GPU configurations. Rework the existing x86 cores that we have into similar configurations and we'll likely see pretty substantial efficiency gains there too.
csjr 6y ago
It certainly feels that way! Also, imagine if they keep pushing it like the A series.
ummonk 6y ago
It would be normal if Moore's law hadn't dropped off in recent years.
lavp 6y ago
Couldn't agree with you more. For the first time in who knows how long, I can confidently say that we made a leap into a new generation of computer power. It's a huge step up from the small marginal improvements we've been seeing over the past few years.

burlesona 6y ago

I agree, and posted something similar on another M1 thread, though it got downvoted and I'm not sure why :D

tambourine_man 6y ago
I lot of people are having a hard time grasping or accepting. “But this benchmark has these issues”, “but this is hardware accelerated, so it's not a fair comparison”, etc. I think when enough benchmarks and real world usage have been run, it will sink in. What did people expect? They've been killing it with 5W fan-less chips for years. Have you seen how confident Apple is in those videos?
- utxaa 6y ago
  it's fair to be careful with something new. if it's that great and it will be quickly apparent.
  - tambourine_man 6y ago
    I wouldn't classify the backlash as carefulness.

tambourine_man 6y ago

Yes. Exactly. I haven't been this exited about a chip in a really long time. Decade-long, probably. And I'm really hopping Intel manages to get its act together. Competition is great for everyone.

regularfry 6y ago
I'd make a bet on Intel not turning around without new leadership at least willing to fling a gravitationally-significant pile of money at TSMC in the short term and significantly improve their pipeline in the medium to long term. They're so far behind now they're basically betting on everyone else screwing up. It's not just their position, though, it's their rate of change... their chip releases aren't getting faster as fast as AMD's or ARM's are, not by a long way.
- spullara 6y ago
  They need a Satya to replace their Balmer. Immediately.
utxaa 6y ago
well don't exit! stick around man.
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  No matter how much I spend on keyboards, I still can't type. But thanks, I will :)
  - utxaa 6y ago
    breaks. https://workrave.org/ https://workrave.org/

bmurphy1976 6y ago

Normally this wouldn't feel so ground breaking, but the stars are in alignment and all these improvements are hitting at the same time. We're seeing years of work and investment paying off (AMD, Apple, ARM, Nvidia, Amazon), new process nodes (TSMC), and new tech (Ray Tracing, DLSS, machine learning) all hitting at the same time. And that's the big stuff! There's also the steady incremental improvements such as battery technology, SSD and RAM that are ongoing. You also have an incumbent (Intel) who's lost their way. If they were as scrappy as they were 15 years ago this wouldn't feel like such a banner year. Yeah, I think we are in a new era of computing.

whizzter 6y ago
Not to forget that apparently some of the people driving that scrappy team that had a big part in Intel's resurgence has been working on the M1. This actually reminded me of how I got skeptical comments from people when I told them that my small and scrappy Pentium-M (P-M -> M1, HAH!) based laptop was almost as fast as their desktop P4 monsters in compiling code.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  The P4 (and Netburst in general) was a true low-point for Intel. Intel is struggling with fab issues right now, but things were really bad from about '02 to '06, with the P4 not completely going away until '08.
- Bayart 6y ago
  I remember people using socket adapters to put Pentium M chips on their desktop. I also have very bad memories of my P4 Prescott around the same era. What an absolute trash pile of an architecture.
  - spronkey 6y ago
    It wasn't actually that bad... Everyone likes to remember it as this massively power hungry beast with terrible performance. It was power hungry compared to what came later, but it did also provide some pretty good performance at the time - especially if you were the kind of tweaky nutter who liked to overclock. Northwood was a relative bargain when you cranked the bus clocks up well beyond what it said on the box.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

I suspect HP/Lenovo/Microsoft are squirming in their chairs right now.

cercatrova 6y ago
I'm not so sure. Some people simply need Windows and now you can't Bootcamp on ARM Macs so people will take the best Windows laptop instead.
- Siira 6y ago
  Who knows, they might continue to offer an Intel MBP for years to come, or even add Windows ARM support if it commands enough demand. The other manufacturers have no mote here.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    Windows arm is not real windows. It's not a substitute. Apple might command it's developers like a herd, moving them to whatever fancy new thing they make but windows is much more fragmented with 20+ years of backwards compatibility and tons of unmaintained software that won't be magically ported.
    - robotnikman 6y ago
      Current Windows on ARM seems promising with its x86 emulation so far, but still has a lot of room for improvement. Combined with the Windows 10 S sandboxing old windows apps I can see Microsoft catching up again in a few years once we have more widely available high power ARM processors. In IT though, I don't expect any changes over to ARM hardware for another decade. I know where I work we have plenty of legacy cruft which would probably run into some weird edge cases if emulated on ARM.
egao1980 6y ago
Lenovo and Microsoft had started to release ARM devices way before Apple.

ogre_codes 6y ago

The CPU gains on ARM have been increasing consistently year over year for the past decade. People have posted benchmarks of the A11/ A12/ A13 versus Intel for a while so this has been pretty obvious. It's just surfacing because suddenly we have a desktop CPU with desktop software like compilers and other things where it's more obvious outside of benchmark tools. Apple is just jumping onto their existing ARM track, once they migrate their product line, which has surpassed Intel. Once they've migrated all their lines to ARM, the performance gains will be more like they have been on the iPhone/ iPad over the past few years. Mostly 20-30%/ year.

sudhirj 6y ago
Chalking it down to ARM doesn’t cut it... other companies make ARM chips too, including Qualcomm. Most Android phones run ARM, and given they outnumber iPhones heavily you’d expect massive improvements. But this is better than putting Qualcomm’s best chip into the Mac.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Yes, ARM is one piece of many. (Commented about this above) Though I suspect if Qualcomm were able to source a TSMC 5nm chip, it would be more competitive with Apple than Intel is at this point though. Apple has a lot of other things going for it where Qualcomm lags (the Secure Enclave, graphics performance, audio and photo processing, the neural engine etc etc)
  - selectodude 6y ago
    Debatable. Qualcomm operates under a strict transistor budget because their chips lack a dedicated customer willing to pay what it costs to develop an ultra-wide CPU like this. Apple knows they're going to sell 100+ million of whatever core they make so they're able to more easily amortize and justify the costs of development. Intel gets no such benefit of the doubt. I have no idea what on earth is going on over there.
    - 6y ago

vgchh 6y ago

This is the Apple equivalent of a Tesla showing up and out competing much more expensive cars on the performance. It feels like a huge disruption and probably Apple’s chance to gain significant PC market share.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> the Apple equivalent of a Tesla showing up and out competing much more expensive cars on the performance Which was Tesla's equivalent of Jobs walking on stage with the iPhone, itself an homage to his iMac G3 turnaround, in turn a recapitulation of his promotion of the Apple II.
unsigner 6y ago
The difference being that Apple can actually manufacture the numbers needed to make a difference.
spronkey 6y ago
The issue with this is that Apple has the same problem that they have had for years - they don't really offer mainstream products. Even their most inexpensive products are on the higher end of the pricing spectrum, and they could be 5x the performance but it still wouldn't matter. There's a reason why Chromebooks are so popular and it sure isn't anything to do with their performance.

epistasis 6y ago

So though it's a new age in some ways, I don't think it will benefit many people. It will just increase the churn. Witnessing all the cries of "16GB of RAM isn't enough!" makes it quite apparent that software behaves like a gas rather than a liquid, and will expand to consume whatever hardware is available to developers. I think that for consumer products, which these are targeting, software responsiveness, usability, and battery lifetime are by far the most important metrics. These chips help with battery, and can hell with software responsiveness if there's is developer focus on it. But what will probably happen is that development teams will buy the fastest computers they can, and then develop software that is mostly, somewhat adequately performing on this beefy hardware, then ship it to customers that are on weaker hardware. This effect is especially pronounced for web software, where it's easier to make unresponsive interactions due to so many layers of software, especially with developer network connections usually being 10x-100x less latency than users.

xbar 6y ago
I do not agree. Look at the AnandTech Speedometer 2.0 metric. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... The 8GB Macbook Air at $899 educational is faster, and will feel faster, than any laptop that anyone has owned or thought of owning at that price point. Millions of buyers who need laptops for *-at-home activities will sing its performance praises on Sheets and Salesforce. The "I need 16GB crowd" of content creators need more RAM and GPU but they are a tiny fraction of the market for laptops.
- epistasis 6y ago
  I guess my point is that any such gains are temporary and will soon disappear with the next release of software, or with the next website redesign. MS Office apps, for example, are horrifically unresponsive on Macs. Switching the ribbon to a new view has 700-1000ms of lag on my 2.4 GHz i5. Maybe an M1 brings it to 350ms. Once MS developers start developing on an M1 laptop, the developers will change code, and it will slow down, and until it gets slower than it currently is, the code will not be optimized. This is what I mean about software being like a gas rather than a liquid. Any new CPU performance will be consumed by developers because their threshold for performance optimization changes with each new performance improvement.

throwaway894345 6y ago

I’m guessing the performance improvements derive from integrating the memory onto the same chip (instead of using external memory), not from ARM (although power savings come from ARM). So we will probably see a new era of laptop SoCs, but that also means coupling RAM with CPU (or maybe you can mix and match the on-chip RAM with external RAM?).

wmf 6y ago
I’m guessing the performance improvements derive from integrating the memory onto the same chip Nope, LPDDR4x-4266 is LPDDR4x-4266. Apple, Intel, and AMD all have access to the same RAM. The Firestorm core is the real advantage.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Ah, well I'm happy to be mistaken.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  You do get a power benefit from keeping the RAM in-socket rather than having to go out over more wires to reach the RAM.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Isn't it attached via a wider bus?
- unixfg 6y ago
  A single core being able to fully saturate LPDDR4X bandwidth seems pretty advantageous. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... “One aspect we’ve never really had the opportunity to test is exactly how good Apple’s cores are in terms of memory bandwidth. Inside of the M1, the results are ground-breaking: A single Firestorm achieves memory reads up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at 33-36GB/s. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before.”

oarsinsync 6y ago

I was until I tried doing the test myself. It takes 82 seconds to compile on my i5-4200M. I'm not sure this test is deserving of the breathless headline and commentary, especially since the original tweeter later follows up with: > Extra info: The M1 macbooks (air/pro) can't drive 2 external screens, and the air throttles a bit after 3+ minutes sustained compute (20-30%) https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328753176552632321 https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328753176552632321 I'll be more interested if the M1 can compile something 2x quicker than the i9 when the compile time on the M1 exceeds 30-60 minutes rather than being less than a minute. EDIT: to be clear, I expect the M1 to feel faster than the i9 for the vast majority of users, however the headline is "in a real world Rust compile", implying that this is a more valid test than synthetic benchmarks. I take issue with that, as I don't really consider something that compiles in less than 2 minutes on 6 year old hardware to be a much more useful test than the benchmarks. We already know the A-series of chips performs incredibly in short workloads. We have no information yet on how it performs under sustained workloads.

w0utert 6y ago
>> We already know the A-series of chips performs incredibly in short workloads. We have no information yet on how it performs under sustained workloads. What makes you think that given sufficient cooling, it will not perform exactly the same as the M1 in the MBA but sustained? It’s not like the ARM architecture changes anything in the thermodynamics of cooling cpus compared to an x86 chip, right? I’d wager that under load an i9 with passive cooling wouldn’t even last 30 seconds without throttling below even its base clock, if it doesn’t just shut down to prevent frying itself
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  It's an Apple chip that will only ever be in Apple computers. Asking about how it would do in a computer with sufficient cooling is about as relevant as asking how it would do in a computer with a usable keyboard or OS.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's in the same ballpark of power efficiency as AMD's x86 chips. It's slightly more efficient because of 7nm vs 5nm but if you scale it up to desktop frequencies it's going to consume the same amount of power as Ryzen CPUs.

codeulike 6y ago

Note that the comparison is also compiling to ARM vs compiling to Intel, so its partly to do with the simplicity of the compilation process between the two architectures. https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328762958118346753 https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328762958118346753

rualca 6y ago
I'm also curious to learn where was the bottleneck in both tests. I've read stuff about how the M1-packing MacBook Air shipped with a SSD whose burst write speed was far higher than the one shipped in older MacBooks. The bottleneck on build jobs tends to lie on disk access, specially with projects comprised of a significant number of small files whose build also outputs a bunch of small files. This is one of the reasons behind doing builds on RAM drives. If that's the case then these weird speedups might not be due to magic properties on Apple's M1 professor but due to the fact that the processor doesn't idle as much while waiting for all those reads and writes to finish. If anyone has any data on this, please do share.
- bydo 6y ago
  The SSDs are faster, but only by ~20%: https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BlackMagic-Disk-Speed.png https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BlackMagic... From the TechCrunch review, which is pretty breathless but also contains a lot of good data: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro-is-powerful-but-its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
  - spronkey 6y ago
    Sequential performance is only one facet of overall SSD performance. Some older Apple SSDs weren't the greatest at random reads and writes - it's possible these new ones are quite a bit faster in that department, FWIW.
an_opabinia 6y ago
Well that pretty much settles the matter, doesn't it.

d33lio 6y ago

Completely! Worth the wait given it took about a decade for Arm chips to suck less ;)

bob1029 6y ago

I thought this for a few seconds and then realized these sorts of benchmarks are lacking obvious controls (i.e. compiling for different architectures as noted by others). If you want a more realistic sense of how the M1 performs relative to x86 peers in raw, equivalent workloads, there are some cinebench numbers appearing out there: https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/146878-apple-m1-cinebench-r23-benchmark-scores-revealed/ https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/146878-apple-m1-cinebench-r2... I am way more interested in non-accelerated, deeply out-of-order instruction processing capabilities if we are talking about a "new era of computing". Being able to compile to ARM faster than x86_64 and having super fast HW codecs for processing special unicorn byte streams are not very compelling arguments in this context. Show me an ARM chip scaled up to the same power+price budget as an Epyc 7742, throw them both at a 24 hour SAP benchmark, and then I will start paying attention if the numbers get close.

unsigner 6y ago
People are celebrating a kickass electric bicycle doubling the range of all the existing ones, and you demand to be shown it scaled up to the same power+price budget as an open pit mining truck, hauling dirt in three shifts. It might or might not happen, but the electric bicycle is still impressive.
- spronkey 6y ago
  Well, it's more like people celebrating an electric scooter that has twice the range of the electric bike. Not saying it isn't a novel form of transport or equally useful in most cases, but... we're comparing a very stripped-down SoC to systems that have vastly more complexity for several different reasons - not least the ability to support more modular CPU/memory/GPU configurations. Rework the existing x86 cores that we have into similar configurations and we'll likely see pretty substantial efficiency gains there too.

csjr 6y ago

It certainly feels that way! Also, imagine if they keep pushing it like the A series.

ummonk 6y ago

It would be normal if Moore's law hadn't dropped off in recent years.

lavp 6y ago

Couldn't agree with you more. For the first time in who knows how long, I can confidently say that we made a leap into a new generation of computer power. It's a huge step up from the small marginal improvements we've been seeing over the past few years.