10 ms·
ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
- jp0d 6y agoGood effort by the author. I was expecting to see a bit more elaborate benchmarks, to be honest. I had a look at M1 Macbook Air yesterday at the local store. Everything felt snappy and the display is brilliant. I'd go for at least 16 gigs of RAM. I'd probably wait for the 2nd iteration as well.
- agloeregrets 6y agoWhat I found shocking is just how drastically faster some workflows are. If you work in JS and Node (say doing unit tests for an angular web app) this machine is so much better it’s unbelievable. It’s probably less than half the time to run tests. Half. It’s real productivity change.
- whymarrh 6y agoAnd this is via Rosetta 2?
- d3nj4l 6y agoYou can build node for the M1.
- agloeregrets 6y agoI was using Native Node built from source.
- sim_card_map 6y agoGreat, now that we have this new fast hardware, time for developers to make everything 2x slower again.
- eganist 6y agoIt's not far from reality; suddenly there's 100% more capacity for analytics and behavioral tracking. God I hate this timeline.
- Yetanfou 6y agoThen opt out of it by blocking all that tracking and those analytics as well as those spurious a/b tests. While you're at it you might as well block any and all "social functionality". This way they get to play with their new toys without bothering you.
- jaredtn 6y agoDo all technical advances make you feel sad? Why hang out on Hacker News then?
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- cknoxrun 6y agoIt's actually a legitimate phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663
- sooheon 6y agoSee also Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the time available for it's completion"
- smnrchrds 6y agoAlso the famous Jevons paradox.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y agoBlinn’s Law “As technology advances, the rendering time remains constant.” https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/founders-series-industry-legend-jim-blinn/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/founders-series-industry-...
- geodel 6y agoNot all but software related in general and Javascript/Electron related in particular any advance make me sad. I hang out on HN to find comfort in fact that others also feel crappy software hosing all the hardware advances.
- sys_64738 6y agoRemember what happened with the last great speed increase from spinners to SSD. They speed up was as dramatic as the bloat added in the past decade to slow it down. One of the worst offenders is Apple though.
- mgkimsal 6y agomaybe more people will starting writing twice as many tests!
- arvinsim 6y agoAs a JS developer, still waiting for full Homebrew. But then again, I might as well wait for the next iteration of Apple Silicon if that is the case.
- shepherdjerred 6y agoYou can install ARM and x86 Homebrew side-by-side. It works really well. When I set up my M1 mac I compiled as much as I could from source using the ARM Homebrew, and for everything else I installed it via the x86 Homebrew.
- jeffbee 6y agoWhy wait? I just built node myself, yes it takes a solid hour to compile but it works.
- kawera 6y agoOn older platforms(High Sierra), brew builds from source most of the time and I just built node(latest) on a i5 MacMini 2011. It took 76 minutes.
- agloeregrets 6y agoOh god. You are going to hate this. Node v15 on my MacBook Air built in 20 minutes.
- kawera 6y agoOh no, not at all, in fact for an entry level Mini of almost 10 years it's not bad at all.
- kilburn 6y agoOr you can try MacPorts which already supports ARM ;) https://www.macports.org/ https://www.macports.org/
- theonemind 6y agoConsidering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?
- miohtama 6y agoRunning x86 code? :)
- ogre_codes 6y agoDepends largely on the code, lots of people show the M1 doing just fine running (translated) x86 code.
- ohazi 6y agoApparently even this is not always the case(!) https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-benchmark/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-b...
- pilsetnieks 6y agoFunny you should say that but perhaps that's not necessarily true. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3597949/everything-you-need-to-know-about-rosetta-2-on-apple-silicon-macs.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3597949/everything-you... https://www.imore.com/tests-show-apples-m1-emulates-x86-faster-intel-can-run-it-natively https://www.imore.com/tests-show-apples-m1-emulates-x86-fast...
- userbinator 6y agoDemoscene code in particular... especially demos in the 1K and below (sizecoding) range, which basically amount to very carefully handwritten Asm. I'd expect the x86-to-ARM translation to not do so well in that case, given that it's probably tuned toward typical compiler output.
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- bognition 6y agoAnecdotally I recently grabbed a M1 MacBook Air and it’s an incredible machine. I prefer it over my work issued 2019 pro. It could be that the MDM software has slowed down the pro, but overall the experience with the M1 is very good.
- STRML 6y agoIt's excellent. I have the 8-core i9 16" Pro and I prefer the Air in every way for development. The keyboard is better (no touchbar), it doesn't get as hot, the battery life is better, it's faster, and it cost 1/4 as much ($999 vs about $4k). I bought the 16" in February, only 10 months ago. What a leap.
- spideymans 6y agoI've been using my girlfriend's M1 Air, and I am superbly impressed. You can feel how much more responsive the system is with every click. I am so tempted to upgrade my from my 2017 Pro. The only thing holding me back is the knowledge that the M1 is the slowest Macintosh chip Apple will ever make.
- breakfastduck 6y agoFeeling exactly the same. I am trying my hardest to wait for a couple of generations after grabbing a 2019 16".
- rubicon33 6y agoSame boat. Tough to hold out given these incredible reviews!
- STRML 6y agoIt's not even that expensive, so it's a much easier product to recommend. Compare to the 2012 MBPr, a similarly innovative Apple laptop. The 2012 was $2,199 in 2012 dollars (nearly $2,500 today). This is that kind of leap, and more. $999 (sometimes $899) is a bargain.
- overcast 6y agoWas expecting a bit more than a handful of paragraphs and three tests from this article.
- dylan604 6y agoI'm sure there are some around that would prefer this bit of terse review. There are less words in this tech review than in most "when I was a kid, mom would make us this" type of story before you can ever get to the actual recipe.
- combatentropy 6y agoI think he wanted more content, more tests, not more words.
- wait_a_minute 6y agoDitto, this seems like clickbait to route us to Yet Another Blog.
- nemothekid 6y agoFor anyone who doesn’t know who the author is, he has written a ton of high performance code, the most notable being simdjson, fast_float and roaring bitmaps. His performance posts are usually very insightful on things that are usually noise in other contexts (like division). Not excusing the post, but the author has a history of interesting articles
- wait_a_minute 6y agoI don't see why this justifies downvoting me, when I have no idea who this person is and their only submission I've seen is extremely scant on anything befitting the title of their post.
- higerordermap 6y agoI don't think the person who submitted it is the original writer.
- GeekyBear 6y agoAnandtech's deep dive into Apple's Firestorm big cores is definitely worth reading if you are interested in how the chips that use their ARM implementation are different. >On the floating point and vector execution side of things, the new Firestorm cores are actually more impressive as they a 33% increase in capabilities, enabled by Apple’s addition of a fourth execution pipeline. The FP rename registers here seem to land at 384 entries, which is again comparatively massive. The four 128-bit NEON pipelines thus on paper match the current throughput capabilities of desktop cores from AMD and Intel, albeit with smaller vectors. Floating-point operations throughput here is 1:1 with the pipeline count, meaning 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). Vector abilities of the 4 pipelines seem to be identical, with the only instructions that see lower throughput being FP divisions, reciprocals and square-root operations that only have an throughput of 1, on one of the four pipes. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
- easde 6y agoI like Apple's approach of having more narrow vector units rather than a few extremely wide ones. Narrower vector units are generally easier to program and easier to support on small cores (like the efficiency cores). It's a good tradeoff for cores used outside of niche applications that do a ton of numerical calculations. Compare this to a design like AVX/AVX2 that has wider 256-bit vectors, but almost always forces the programmer to treat them as two 128-bit vectors glued together. All because Intel realized they had to power down half of each vector ALU to save power at idle. Of course, the future is hopefully more flexible vector ISAs like SVE. AVX-512 is not too bad either today, but Intel seems almost pathologically opposed to making forward-looking decisions (what about when they want to double the vector width again??).
- TinkersW 6y agoThe article is phrased confusingly, at one point saying there are 4 pipelines, and then saying it can do 4 FADDs and 4 FMULs(for a total of 8) per cycle. So are there 4 or 8?? I believe what they meant to say was 4 FADDs OR 4 FMULs. Then they say it has quadruple the throughput of Intel and older AMD chips, but that doesn't follow unless this does 8 floating point operations per cycle not 4. The image of the pipeline only shows 4 so I think this is 4x128 wide, which is good but not going to compete with Zen3 with its wider registers. It is also not quadruple the throughput of Intel or AMD for SIMD..
- alwillis 6y agoThe M1 has 8 instruction decoders while every Intel processor maxes out at 4. This enables many more instructions in flight than on Intel. The M1 can process twice as many instructions per clock cycle than an x86 processor can.
- syberslidder 6y ago4 x86 decoders, all modern x86 CPUs have micro-op caches that are wider than 4 and the retire width of the machines are 6 or greater. Saying it can process twice as many instructions per clock cycle is an incredibly incorrect statement.
- syberslidder 6y agoTo follow-up on my own point, once an x86 instruction has been decoded into a micro-op, it gets stored in a micro-op cache, where the vast majority of the frontend spends it's time fetching from. Additionally, "in flight" is a function of frontend width, Reorder buffer size, additional Out of order structures sizes and throughput depends on those plus the retire width. Additionally, IPC alone is a poor metric for performance analysis because run time is a factor of IPC and clock speed. M1 has higher IPC because it runs at around 3 GHz compared to x86 CPUs running at 4 or 5 GHz. Apple optimizes for IPC, they are all different tradeoffs. Lastly, Apple's cores are probably the biggest in the industry. Compare their new generation of cores, they had to jumbo-size every structure (much larger than most x86 cores). So while it is impressive from a design point, from a micro-architecture point their cores have ballooned in size and are on 5 nm. Their architects are very good, but not godly like I see many tech sites ascribe them to be. Experience: Designed SPARC, ARM, and x86 CPUs
- nielsbot 6y agoHow does this square with their relatively low power consumption? (Honestly asking--I don't know about this stuff)
- userbinator 6y ago
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- vmception 6y agoThe only reason I would want more than 16gb RAM is for more room for virtual machines, so without that and it being cheaper than worse machines this is a hard yes, buy. BUT the possibility of familiar OS' coming out with ARM versions (or just the x86 versions being emulated well), and the possibility of a more powerful M1-style processor with more than 16gb RAM anyway makes me want to wait. But honestly if they roll out a better processing still with only 16gb RAM I guess I'll pull the trigger on one of the models.
- EricE 6y agoI hope the next batch of laptops will allow at least 32GB. I was going to replace the 2015 MBA I'm typing on now with this new one, but after seeing how well games - even unoptimized ones like Cities:Skylines run on the current MBA I started to consider that perhaps I could abandon my Windows gaming machine and just go full time Mac. But I subscribe to far too many mods in Cities:Skylines to get away with 16GB of RAM - unfortunately. This MBA is way past expiration date so hopefully I don't have to wait more than six months (I suspect a fairly safe bet).
- vmception 6y agoI'm one of the 2015 MBP holdouts I'm almost there. I always liked the newer form factor and my main plan was to wait for USB-C to become more prominent, and as a bonus Apple even got rid of the butterfly keyboard! So even thats not a blocker any more. A very fast machine with only 16gb ram would be okay for me. But I do want an upgrade in that department.
- joshspankit 6y agoI’d really be curious about your experience if you do decide to pull the trigger. I suspect that with integrated (everything), that Apple is doing some fancy tricks with swap files thus making 16GB good for larger workloads, but no review that I’ve seen yet has confirmed that.
- bfgoodrich 6y ago"The Intel processor has nifty 256-bit SIMD instructions. The Apple chip has nothing of the sort as part of its main CPU. So I could easily come up with examples that make the M1 look bad." The M1 has 128-bit NEON SIMD, and given its decode pipeline and cache efficiency it seems more likely to actually benefit entirely from it. AVX on Intel devices is often of limited value because it's either memory starved or gets throttled (many SKUs throttle once you start using AVX). I've had cases where vectorizing ongoing sequential processing in the most optimal fashion available barely gave a single digital percentage increase. 9 times out of 10 it's snake oil. But regardless, if there's an example that would make the M1 look bad, do it.
- thewebcount 6y agoThis is one of the things I missed about AltiVec from the PPC days. They really designed it nicely. It was a different set of registers that worked normally. The permute instructions were very useful! When trying to port AltiVec code to Intel SSE at the time, it would often come out worse because of all the constraints. You couldn't intermix floating point and SSE code because they used the same registers. There were stalls if you did as it switched back and forth. A friend actually hired Intel engineers to port his AltiVec code to Intel at the time and even they couldn't make it work as fast as it was on his PPC Mac. So I'm hoping the Neon instructions bring back some of the elegance and sanity we had in the PPC/AltiVec days.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoMan that takes me back, it used to be pretty common to see Mac apps advertise their leverage of AltiVec, even for “consumer” stuff. It may be entirely imaginary but I always felt like the PowerPC versions of OS X were more responsive than their Intel counterparts, despite running on CPUs that were at a disadvantage in terms of clock speed. I wonder how much of that was due to the PowerPC arch itself.
- watersb 6y agoYeah I really wanted to dig into AlitVec a bit more, but by the time I took a look at it, we had moved on to Intel. So I just tried to use the OS X vector libraries where possible, and hope for the best. There was a paper that really got my attention, from US Air Force research I think, that reported a micro benchmark on a Mac Mini G4 where the AltiVec scores blew away their best Silicon Graphics beast. The M1 reports feel a lot like that. Or better, because of the reports coming in on huge performance gains in real world apps.
- hmsync 6y agoJust run the author's benchmark program on my i5-9600k: | | i5-9600k | i7-7700HQ | Apple M1 | |strtod | 217.97 MB/s | 80 MB/s | 115 MB/s | |abseil | 613.48 MB/s | 460 MB/s | 580 MB/s | |fastfloat | 1400.15 MB/s | 1000 MB/s | 1800 MB/s |
- craftoman 6y agoStill way more slower than a Ryzen 4800 HS. Last time I checked a low end laptops with Ryzen had double performance (multi-core) compared to Macbooks with A1.
- neogodless 6y agoCan you be more specific as to what workloads you arecomparing? I find methodical comparisons quite scant. Anandtech has one page that includes the Ryzen 7 4800U and Ryzen 9 4900HS[0] for some synthetic integer/floating point benchmarks. In many cases the Apple Silicon M1 outperforms the Ryzen 7 4800U and in several it outperforms the Ryzen 9 4900HS. It's a bit difficult to extract from that how well they compete across all workloads, but it looks like they are quite comparable. (And this is from someone who spends a lot of time trying to correct the misconception that the M1 outperforms all competitive processors.) [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...