16 ms·

Ryzen 5800X vs. M1: Programming benchmarks

338 points by tuhdo 6y ago

moocowtruck 6y ago
i feel like this is missing the point..
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's not missing the point it's debunking junk journalism.
gigatexal 6y ago
This is how-to-make-a-click-bait article-101. Show me an x86 laptop in the same power envelope that can match the fanless MacBook Air with the m1. I’ll wait. Oh and do so at roughly 1k. On the desktop the Mac mini is 699 USD in its base spec. The 5800X is 500 euros on its own before motherboard, case, ram etc etc. Apples to apples benchmarks either controlling for power or price would make for a more relevant article.
- tuhdo 6y ago
  Many other clickbait articles claimed that M1 is better than the best desktop class CPUs. I only tested the water and found otherwise. The 5900HX is planned and should be within 90% performance of my 5800X within 45W TDP. Not close to the power consumption, but then zen 3 is only on 7nm, while M1 is on 5nm. The Mac Mini is $699 with only 8GB RAM, that runs out after a few browser tabs. So, for a work machine, you would need at least the 16GB model and add $200 to that. Though the build quality and the panel is excellent. You could opt for the 5600X. The core count is not relevant in the article, as the benchmarks are mainly single-threaded.
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    The unified memory does go to great lengths to make memory not such an issue. It also pages a ton. I’ve read that people can throw up hundreds of tabs in safari on the 8GB model and be just fine.
  - new_realist 6y ago
    The claims were fastest per-core performance, not fastest absolute performance in a single system. Heck, there are desktops out there with hundreds of cores in them, drawing hundreds of watts of power. I haven't had time to delve into most of these benchmarks, but they look multithreaded to me.
  - macintux 6y ago
    > that runs out after a few browser tabs Citation needed
    - darkteflon 6y ago
      Anecdotal, of course, but I currently have 42 tabs open in Firefox 84 (native M1 build) on an 8gb M1 Mac Mini, as well as two VS Code windows and a bunch of other things like Mail, Calendar, Authy, Bitwarden, etc. As far as memory management is concerned, user experience is indistinguishable from my 32gb Ryzen 3700X desktop with a Samsung NVMe.
    - BearOso 6y ago
      8GB is plenty for most people right now. A browser won’t eat that much memory for normal sites and reasonable tab counts. An interesting thing about the M1’s RAM limit, though, is that it literally can’t get any bigger. 16GB is pushing it, but fitting 32GB into a package-on-package simply can’t be done with our current tech. Apple is solely relying on Moore’s law for future advances because, with the way these processors are designed, external infrastructure would wreck performance.
    - yxhuvud 6y ago
      If you need citation for that you clearly don't use jira.
      - qz2 6y ago
        I just spent all week on an 8gb mini with slack and about 50 JIRA tabs open. Works fine.
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    This is comparing the M1 which a mobile focused chip in a tiny power envelope to the pinnacle of AMD cpu design in a giant (relatively) power envelope. My point was that the article could have stood on its own without even benching against the M1. Just show the performance of the 5800X in tasks the M1 and the 5800X are not in the same league.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      I don't know what you are talking about. The problem with fake information is that you have to spend more resources debunking it than it takes to create fake information in the first place.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    > The Mac Mini is $699 with only 8GB RAM, that runs out after a few browser tabs You know swap exists right. I just opened 30+ tabs on the MacBook Air without any issues.
- mping 6y ago
  The article mentioned faster, not cheaper. A performance-per-dollar and per watt is certainly valuable, but for a forum that always mentions that a couple hundred bucks are worth spending for shaving off time from a developer workflow (SSDs, RAM, etc, assuming they earn market rates) this benchmark is worth it. As a desktop user, I certainly am interested in these numbers.
  - new_realist 6y ago
    Why would you buy a Mac mini for performance critical work? I could see being bound to a laptop for some workflows, but is that Ryzen available in laptops?
    - sliken 6y ago
      Yes, but only the zen 2 flavor which is significantly slower per core. The M1 competitor with similar thermals, close IPC per core, and on board GPU is widly rumored to be announced in Jan at CES.
      - jsjohnst 6y ago
        > The M1 competitor with similar thermals, close IPC per core, and on board GPU is widly rumored to be announced in Jan at CES. Ok, so what you’re saying is that AMD is wildly rumored to have a processor that you might be able to find as an option on a niche (term not used in a negative sense) brand laptop in Summer 2021 that directly competes with Apple’s M1 processor available in Fall 2020 on their highest sold models which are their lowest price point machines?
        ben-schaaf 6y ago
        If by "AMD is wildly rumored to have a processor" you mean it's been leaked and benchmarked multiple times, then sure: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-5800H-shows-decent-performance-gains-over-the-4800H-model-in-latest-Geekbench-tests.509896.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-5800H-shows-decent...
- mmgutz 6y ago
  The M1 is certainly impressive but how much does the same configuration say with 16GB and 1TB SSD cost? Most enthusiasts aren't going to buy an AMD Ryzen 5800x and limit themselves to 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. A mac mini 8GB + 512GB SSD configuration is 900USD. Can you imagine what a 16GB + 1TB SSD cost, which is not an uncommon configuration? My guess is in the 1300USD range.
- jgalentine007 6y ago
  Here's a datapoint. I just got an HP Omen gaming laptop for $1100 on Amazon. Pretty much equivalent to the 3800x mentioned in the article, but came with 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD, and 6GB Nvidia 1660ti discrete graphics. I can seemingly run unlimited browser tabs, video conference and play a game across 3 monitors (built in one is 144hz) simultaneously with no latency whatsoever. I upgraded to 32GB of ram for $144 and added another 512gb PCIe SSD I had lying around, because it had an extra slot. The fans do run (quietly) all the time, and it has a battery life of about 4 or 5 hours. Not in the same league performance per watt as the M1, but interesting performance for the dollar none the less.
  - muyuu 6y ago
    sounds good but I'm waiting for a proper Ryzen Linux laptop that is actually meant to be carried around... otherwise a desktop makes more sense to me
- eloff 6y ago
  For my work machine I don't care much about the price (to a point) or the power consumption. I want the fastest compiles money can buy. This article is exactly what I want to see, and confirms my decision to go for the 5900x. Now if AMD can just get them in stock. The local waiting list is months long.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    If you want the fastest compiles money can buy, wouldn't you be looking at a massive, 3rd gen threadripper?
    - eloff 6y ago
      If you mean the 3rd gen server chips, they're not released yet. Also there are diminishing returns as core count increases. I'm doubting that a 5950x is worth it over the 5900x for me.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        You don't run parallel compiles? They can use all your cores, with a linear speedup ... I meant the latest Ryzen Threadrippers, whatever "generation" they are now. The 3970X would likely be a good example.
        Macha 6y ago
        Depends on the language of course. Most JS tools are strongly single threaded. Rust is quite good for multi core and benefitted hugely from my 3900x but even that only keeps all the cores busy for the first 60% of a compile then we're limited by the slowest chain of dependencies.
        eloff 6y ago
        The compiles are parallel, but not all work can be done in parallel or divided among 32 threads equally. So from 24 to 32 threads is not typically a 33% increase unless your compiles are huge (like the Linux kernel).
- macintux 6y ago
  On the other hand there have been plenty of benchmarks reported of like to like and many have been asking what M1 would look like against the best AMD has to offer. There’s room for plenty of comparisons. It’s a big world.
- admiralspoo 6y ago
  I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. The M1 is ahead by 2-3x in performance per watt and highly competitive in performance/dollar. This result is indeed quite meaningless as Apple will have 16 high-performance core variants of the M1 soon.
  - BearOso 6y ago
    > Apple will have 16 high-performance core variants of the M1 soon I doubt that’s coming soon. The M1 is a HUGE chip. The decoders and pipelines take up a massive amount of space, and the L2 cache is apparently unwieldy, too. They’ve focused on making a limited number of cores perform very well, but there isn’t enough room. They need another die shrink to add any more. I think the upcoming pro hardware will just be tweaks to the current formula.
    - spacedcowboy 6y ago
      It’s not that big, it’s ~120 mm^2. You can go to intel or AMD and find 750 mm^2 chips... Apple have 2 advantages here. - They don’t play in the low-cost arena, people expect a Mac to be a bit more expensive, so they have a larger cost budget to work with - They don’t have to make a profit on the CPU in particular, whereas Intel and AMD do. Apple want a 38-40% margin on the whole shebang, and if it needs a more expensive chip, then that’s what’ll happen, maybe taking cost-savings from (2), and of necessary adding price because of (1). I would be shocked if Platform Architecture at Apple didn’t already have 8, 16, and 32-core variants of the M series up and running, or at the very least in simulation. They’re coming, and the world will change. Again.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I have mentioned this in several comments and no, it's not that simple and worse, there is zero money to be made even if they did release such a product because Apple would never sell their chips as an OEM.
- imtringued 6y ago
  How is it clickbait? The title says it compares a specific CPU model vs another specific CPU model and that is exactly what it does. Where do you see deception in the title? >Show me an x86 laptop in the same power envelope that can match the fanless MacBook Air with the m1. I’ll wait. Oh and do so at roughly 1k. How does this prove that the title is lying? >On the desktop the Mac mini is 699 USD in its base spec. The 5800X is 500 euros on its own before motherboard, case, ram etc etc. Again, how is this relevant to whether the title is clickbait or not? >Apples to apples benchmarks either controlling for power or price would make for a more relevant article. Seriously, what does this have to do with clickbait? Here is my perspective. I saw lots of articles that pretended that the M1 is better than all x86 CPUs including Ryzens (one of them is linked in the article). This was getting on my nerves because everyone is being dishonest. I clicked on this article because the title compared a Ryzen desktop CPU with the M1 with the expectation that these benchmarks disprove the garbage journalism and that's exactly what I got. The Ryzen 5800X performs better than the M1. x86 is still strong in single core performance. Those real "clickbait" articles were just lazy and trying to hype something up. This article is not clickbait and you are just being dishonest.
ivoras 6y ago
In other words, Apple needs to just add 4 more cores to M1 to absolutely mop the floor with the Ryzen?
- new_realist 6y ago
  Exactly. This is apples to oranges; laptop power envelope and budget to desktop power envelope and budget.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    The original test linked at the beginning of the article is telling that multicore is not that relevant for the tested performance. The article is mentioning the power envelope and the fact that 5nm is temporary exclusive to Apple, but not for long - AMD will utilize it and that would be a closed test. In the end, if you want to compare performance before you buy, you care less about the internal and more about performance and price.
    - new_realist 6y ago
      I look forward to an M1 processor comparison to something with a similar core count, similar total power envelopes, and similar cost. The Ryzen processor benchmarked here costs more than the entire Mac Mini M1 system.
      - FpUser 6y ago
        They're 2 different CPU with the different market. The only reason I think that this comparison is being made is that it is a response to an avalanche of articles claiming that M1 beats everything speed wise and is the best thing since sliced bread.
    - new_realist 6y ago
      The first test listed is Renaissance, which, from https://renaissance.dev/resources/docs/renaissance-suite.pdf https://renaissance.dev/resources/docs/renaissance-suite.pdf, is a concurrency benchmark. It likely benefits from multiple cores. All in all I'm not sure the author has the relevant expertise.
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foobarbazetc 6y ago
You’re undervolting the CPU and overclocking your RAM in a benchmark... Why?
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  It is explained in the article: undervolting the CPU allows it to run longer at higher frequency, otherwise it will be thermally throttled. RAM has no such problem, overclocking improved performance.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Yes, but is that fair in a benchmark? The RAM maybe because all high end RAM speeds are technically out of spec and are overclocking. But messing with the CPU voltage to juice the benchmark results seems like cheating to me.
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      Is it fair to have Apple paying for 5nm exclusivity? Fairness is relative.
    - Jonnax 6y ago
      Apple's chip has 4200Mhz RAM. Wouldn't it be fair to have both ram speeds the same? Also it's a set of benchmarks some random person did. It's interesting and useful information. They aren't a publication doing a comparison.
      - jzelinskie 6y ago
        For Zen, you actually want to run your memory clock at a multiple of the FCLK and not as high as possible. So making the RAM frequency the same as the M1 might have actually harmed performance.
        eloff 6y ago
        I don't think that's true with Zen 3. If you have a source to the contrary I'm interested to see it.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Thanks for sharing some programming-centric benchmarks using modern CPUs. I always wish that CPU reviewers would stop churning out pages of graphs with synthetic benchmark workloads and instead post things that actually matter, like compile times and other programming benchmarks. The M1 processor is extremely impressive for the price and power envelope. However, I'm noticing a lot of people have taken Apple's marketing material a bit too literally and assumed that it somehow beats any and every desktop CPU out there, which is clearly not the case. Moreover, as the author mentions: A significant portion of Apple's lead came from buying exclusivity on TSMC's 5nm process through the end of the year. It will be interesting to see how AMD stacks up as they roll out 5nm parts in the future, compared to Apple's scaled up M1 successors. Exciting times. It's good to have some progress in CPU technologies again after years of Intel stagnation.
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- thejosh 6y ago
  This is why I really like phoronix, they show benchmarks aimed towards developers.
- leecb 6y ago
  > A significant portion of Apple's lead came from buying exclusivity on TSMC's 5nm process It's hard to estimate how much of Apple's advantage came from the 5nm process, but we can get a guess by comparing the A13 and A14. One of the biggest differences between last year's A13 and this year's A14 is the 5nm process (vs 7nm+). The performance increase seems to be on the order of 15% [1], and Apple was able to fit in a lot more transistors- 11.8B vs. 8.5B, though we don't know how many of those transistors were spent on the CPU, and how many were spent in other areas like the GPU or ISP. Seems like the additional transistors and lower power consuption were used to increase performance in a bunch of ways- higher clock speeds, more cache, and a bigger reorder buffer being the obvious improvements. Perhaps AMD can pull off a similar improvement when they switch processes. [1] Spec2006 numbers from https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2
pella 6y ago
M1: Four high‑performance cores + Four high‑efficiency cores vs 5800X : Eight high‑performance cores
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  As a developer, I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores as long as it gets the workload done quickly. In the real world, I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. The implementation details are interesting, but they don't matter when I'm trying to get work done as fast as possible. The M1 comes in at a great price point for what it is and it's obviously your only option if you want to run macOS (hackintosh isn't an option for production use). Good to have options.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    > I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. > I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores Both of these things cannot be true.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      You misunderstand how some of those words work.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        > I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. > I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores So first means: "my only concerns are performance and cost". What determines performance and cost? Primary answer: number of cores. If you care about performance, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. If you care about cost, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. You might not articulate your concerns in this way, but they are intimately bound together. If you only care about "good enough" performance and "in my range" cost, then your concerns are still bound up with core count. So what's your apparently more correct understanding of some of those words?
echlebek 6y ago
This isn't an apples to apples comparison like the author says, because the package power (37W) of the Ryzen is still quite a bit higher than the M1's. You can see it right there in the graph from Anandtech. The 5800X is a beast of a CPU. The IPC improvements over the previous generation really are incredible. It's not surprising to me at all that it beats the M1 in several benchmarks. However, it's not the same class of device at all.
- glasshead969 6y ago
  yea its hard to compare, this makes sense as what is the most powerful cpu one can get no matter the power usage but there isn't anything close to M1 when it comes to high performance and long battery life. Even ryzen 4000 series laptops throttle a lot when on battery power while M1 performance doesn't change. I don't expect this to change with Zen 3 laptops either.
- hawk_ 6y ago
  > This isn't an apples to apples comparison I mean how could it be. It's AMD to Apple's :-P
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  In the real world, there aren't many people making purchasing decision between an M1 Apple laptop or Mac Mini and an AMD 5800X desktop machine anyway. Still interesting to see the comparisons. The leaked Geekbench results of AMD's upcoming 5800H laptop parts are about 85% of the M1's single core score and matching the M1's multi-core score. TDP is still higher than the M1, obviously, but AMD is also using a 7nm process while Apple got the jump on 5nm by buying exclusivity on TMSC's 5nm process through the end of the year. I'm extremely impressed with the M1 and I'll be buying an Apple Silicon device as soon as they have something with 32GB or more of RAM. However, the sentiment that the M1 chip obliterates any and every desktop part on the market is getting kind of silly at this point.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Some are making a "desktop with cheaper terminal laptop -vs- pro laptop" choice though. And in that case the comparison may matter.
glasshead969 6y ago
Regarding the 5nm vs 7nm thing, I expect apple to be at least 1 node or intra-node improvement (eg: 5nm vs 5nm+ or 4nm) ahead for foreseeable future. They pay TSMC pretty penny to have access to cutting edge nodes. Not much different from how Intel had node advantage over others albeit here apple paying for it so at-least others aren't locked out of it for too long.
- ece 6y ago
  AMD would rather spend money on getting more capacity for the current 7nm products, that have seen a couple of years of severe shortages at launch, and gain market share. It's a problem that Apple doesn't seem to have, though maybe with desktop/server chips they might if they also start to gain market share.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  They'll presumably be the first to use each node, but that only gives them a number of months before competitors are on it. I would expect to see 5nm Ryzen before 3nm Apple Silicon. There's also a major question about what happens with Intel. If they ever get their process advantage back then it's not clear what Apple's response is. But if they implode then AMD takes over the PC market and probably becomes TSMC's biggest customer, which could put them in a position to get on newer nodes at the same time as Apple.
- yowmamasita 6y ago
  So now each year we can't do proper benchmarks anymore because there will always be the (X)nm vs (X-1)nm argument. What's wrong with using price-power-performance ratio benchmarks on what's available on the market?
  - glasshead969 6y ago
    Yea I think this argument about node size comes up because in this case you couldn't buy just the soc but the whole Mac computer. People didn't care that some of advantage Intel had was from their process superiority because you didn't have to make any choices other than the CPU itself.
rafaelturk 6y ago
I'm still impressed how fast Intel was overtaken by AMD and now Apple. Benchmarks don't even bother including Intel.
- p1necone 6y ago
  It wasn't really very fast. Intel got away with releasing basically the same CPU year over year with minor incremental improvements for almost a decade before anyone caught up.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    It's more than a decade. The first core2duo were released in 2006. I think people are thinking of the first i5/i7 from 2008 when they do the comparison, unfortunately AMD was out of the run before that.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Fast as in about a decade of consolidated work while Intel ran away with all the money? Apple bought PA Semi in '08, for example.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Tiger Lake has pretty impressive single-core and GPU performance. Tiger Lake H also promises to be very interesting. Honestly, 2021 is going to be a good year for laptops and mini-pcs. I don't think any of the chip manufacturers have objectively bad silicon for those form factors anymore.
thom 6y ago
Realistically, what do people think the iMacs and Mac Pros of the M1 era will look like?
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  The speculation I've read is that the Pro will look similar to current styling but smaller, and the iMac will be a screen on a stand without the chin from the current model. More like a big iPad Pro. I wouldn't be surprised to see FaceID make its first Mac appearance with those.
  - christoph 6y ago
    Very interesting observation. Is that the end game? An iPad Pro to rule all? It can be docked on a nice stand, powered from the mains for more performance and charging when required, docked to external monitors when needed. Now they have chip parity across the line, what stops this from happening?
    - jbverschoor 6y ago
      Who said it is stopped from happening? It's happening right under our eyes, at a slow pace, because you can't just make so many changes in terms of software, ui, perspective, etc.
liquidise 6y ago
Last year i replaced my aging mac pro with a 3900x amd Hackintosh. The cpu upgrade was hard to believe. Everything felt fast in a way even my 2019 air failed to achieve. The idea that the laptop-grade M1 is keeping pace in these tests with the processor in my desktop is mind blowing. Sure the 5800x was tuned for these tests. Sure the M1 is on 5nm. All of this is missing the point: Intel created a huge market opportunity and 2 of the best poised companies to take advantage of it have. Computer consumers are winning big thanks to TSMC in 2020. Let's all hope intel can turn things around and keep the space competitive.
- ece 6y ago
  If they could just get even or ahead on EUV, which they skipped on 10nm, I think they will be just fine.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    They will surrender and buy from TSMC.
    - ece 6y ago
      Temporarily, but over the long term, TSMC would likely have to more than double their leading edge capacity, which would take a decade or two or more.
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - ComputerGuru 6y ago
      TSMC doesn’t have enough capacity for that. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung are the only players in the game, and they’re basically all churning at capacity.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  > Let's all hope intel can turn things around and keep the space competitive. Although they have a lot of work to do, I can't help but think people writing off Intel are way too keen. Intel's annual dividend is still bigger than AMD's revenue IIRC, so at worst they should be able to buy themselves out of the hole they're in.
FpUser 6y ago
This is all splitting hairs. Major manufacturers are in active competition and bar temporary hick-ups they will all be leap frogging each other while offering more or less the same deal over time in regards to performance / power. In the end it'll be just personal preference whether go with Apple, AMD or Intel. Well I suspect due to loyalty factor Apple as usually may be able to extract more money from the customers.
7e 6y ago
Many of these tests are Java, but to my knowledge only Azul has a JVM for the M1. Which JVM was used?
- threeseed 6y ago
  It's on the graphs: Azul OpenJDK 13.0.5
iseanstevens 6y ago
I come away from this way more impressed by the M1 than I was going in. It's a comparison of a ~$700 stock, low end full computer Vs. $700 for high end CPU only. And the high end CPU has overclocking tweaks enabled, and overclocked memory. The M1 generally keeps up quite well, which blows my mind. The power use difference Is pretty big as well. Yeah, it would be great if Apple was totally open source. But this is going to push the entire industry to do way better.
- kuschku 6y ago
  The M1 also has overclocked memory (by spec, DDR4 only supports 3200MHz), and the 5800X isn't a 700$ CPU, actually it's at 450$ (and it will fall even further soon, I bought a 3900x recently for below 400$).
  - Scarbutt 6y ago
    Still... $450 for the CPU only vs a $999 laptop, for most use cases the apple's MBA offers much more value and will have slower depreciation.
    - superkuh 6y ago
      So, like normal, the value of a Mac is in appealing to others not doing things on the computer.
      - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
        ? What part of “M1 outclasses every similar laptop” indicates to you that the MBA is a machine targeted at people who don’t do serious computer work (Whatever “serious” means)
        coldtea 6y ago
        Parent probably associates some value in dishing Apple, the reverse-fan-boy phenomenon.
musicale 6y ago
> While M1 is indeed very powerful for its size, when comparing it to the high-end x86 desktop, it is still slower I too am astonished that a high-end x86 desktop could possibly be faster than a Mac mini or a laptop without a fan. Now I will have to burn my Apple card (if I had one) in protest. I call on Apple to immediately retract all of its marketing that says that the M1 is the fastest CPU in the universe. > obscene power draw Who cares about power in a desktop (or laptop for that matter)? These things aren't solar powered - just plug it in like a normal person! Duh. I also note that a single Ryzen 5800X processor is actually cheaper than the Mac mini, and is readily available from many helpful and enterprising resellers on ebay at special holiday pricing. ;-)
zamalek 6y ago
> RAM: 64 GB DDR4 overclocked to 3733 MHz, stress testing 24 hours stable OP, it may be worth downclocking the RAM to 3600MHz (while tightening timings) unless you have a golden chip with >1800MHz Infinity Fabric. Decoupling IF and memory speed can cause huge latency (90ns on my 3950x). Obviously you want a baseline and benchmark from there, but you clearly know what you are doing.
- tuhdo 6y ago
  My FCLK is also set to 1867, so no decoupling there.
nessex 6y ago
The most impressive part to me is how the m1 compares to the 3900X. I’ve got a mere 3600X and every laptop I owned or worked on over the past year is noticeably and painfully slower than the 3600X. It’s been a relief to get home and turn on my desktop. It doesn’t matter if the laptops I’m using are very recent i7’s and i9’s, the desktop is always very noticeably faster. I got my m1 MacBook Pro 16GB yesterday and was pretty confused to find that Rust compilation felt faster than the desktop. To go from recent Intel laptops taking two to three times longer to compile Rust than my budget desktop despite the laptops' whiny fans and extreme heat, to having my desktop be sightly outclassed by an ice cold laptop on battery (which got at least 15 hours of use, including said compiling, with no need to charge) is a world changer. I can’t remember the last time a laptop was this close to desktop performance for my everyday workflow. Now that I think about it, I haven’t even tried optimising compile times on the MacBook like I usually do with Rust projects. My desktop would have been running lld at least to make its compilation significantly faster, and the MacBook more than kept up in spite of the handicap.
- dijit 6y ago
  No doubt that the 3600x is impressive- but Desktop class CPUs will outperform laptop ones almost always (due to the significantly higher power draw and thermal envelope). My 7 year old desktop goes toe-to-toe with my top of the line MacBook Pro from 2020 and in almost all benchmarks crushes it. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4930K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-1065G7/1976vsm888368 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4930K-vs...
  - dis-sys 6y ago
    your 4930k from 7 years ago is a 130w processor for PC enthusiasts, it was a top of the line product back in its days with a $600 price tag. most regular desktop users wouldn't buy that processor, e.g. I bought a 4770k at half of your 4930k price in 2013. on the other hand, your mentioned 1065G7 is a 15w processor that doesn't really represent what a laptop processor can do in 2019/2020. laptop processors like i7-10875H would be a far better apple-to-apple comparison in case you still want to make your claims above. the reality here is that at much lower power draw and thermal envelope (45w vs 130w), laptop processor like 10875H would crush 4930k in both single core and multi core settings.
Guthur 6y ago
I'm glad someone finally started comparing state of the art vs state of art. Most comparisons have been M1 vs the frankly dated Intel offerings with the previous Mac product line. So things to remember would be that power/performance is not linear and so 5800 like CPU could be scaled back in power consumption without sacrificing the same proportion of it's performance. Also, 5800X is on TSMC 7nm process where as M1 is on the 5nm; this difference will have a measurable impact on performance and power consumption.
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xbmcuser 6y ago
Ryzen and M1 both had design wins this year I feel because of broader and faster access to memory. In the next few years L1 & L2 caches might be getting bigger.
bhauer 6y ago
Can anyone explain the Redis numbers, specifically the 3900X versus 5800X [1]? The 5800X is showing numbers easily more than 2x the 3900X. I understand this is a single-threaded test, so the additional cores of the 3900X (12C/24T versus 8C/16T for the 5800X) do it no advantage. But I wouldn't expect the Zen 3 architecture to be that dramatically superior to Zen 2. [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tuhdo/tuhdo.github.io/master/emacs-tutor/static/5800x_m1_charts/Redis.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tuhdo/tuhdo.github.io/mast...
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  This is pure speculation, but the Zen 3 cores have access to double the cache. In very specific workloads that could lead to a 2x speedup.
  - stickyricky 6y ago
    I agree. I also think the unified core complex means less cross ccx cache access routes.
- injinj 6y ago
  I would bet that the redis-benchmark and the redis-server were running across the CCD, not tasklocked to CPUs on the same chiplet. I have a 3970x, I'll run this test on different chiplets and the same chiplet...
  - injinj 6y ago
    $ taskset -c 1 redis-server $ taskset -c 2 redis-benchmark -p 6379 -P 8 -q -c 1 -n 100000 PING_INLINE: 775193.81 requests per second PING_BULK: 869565.19 requests per second SET: 724637.69 requests per second GET: 787401.56 requests per second INCR: 775193.81 requests per second LPUSH: 684931.50 requests per second RPUSH: 699300.69 requests per second LPOP: 680272.12 requests per second RPOP: 704225.31 requests per second SADD: 769230.81 requests per second HSET: 675675.69 requests per second SPOP: 819672.12 requests per second LPUSH (needed to benchmark LRANGE): 680272.12 requests per second LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements): 107758.62 requests per second LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements): 30721.96 requests per second LRANGE_500 (first 450 elements): 20040.08 requests per second LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements): 14658.46 requests per second MSET (10 keys): 317460.31 requests per second $ taskset -c 20 redis-server $ taskset -c 2 redis-benchmark -p 6379 -P 8 -q -c 1 -n 100000 PING_INLINE: 469483.56 requests per second PING_BULK: 505050.50 requests per second SET: 446428.56 requests per second GET: 465116.28 requests per second INCR: 458715.59 requests per second LPUSH: 425531.91 requests per second RPUSH: 438596.50 requests per second LPOP: 429184.56 requests per second RPOP: 434782.59 requests per second SADD: 460829.50 requests per second HSET: 421940.94 requests per second SPOP: 478468.88 requests per second LPUSH (needed to benchmark LRANGE): 425531.91 requests per second LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements): 96899.23 requests per second LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements): 29019.15 requests per second LRANGE_500 (first 450 elements): 19109.50 requests per second LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements): 14035.09 requests per second MSET (10 keys): 253807.11 requests per second
phamilton4 6y ago
This is pretty wild. The M1 beats my Xeon E-2176M @2.7GHz with 64GB of memory in every test but Jython. (I'm on OpenJDK 15, which probably doesn't matter). Later tomorrow I'll try it on my 2700x based system. 45W vs 10W... Running these tests may have changed my mind on this little CPU!
darthrupert 6y ago
To summarise: Top-of-the-line desktop computer barely beats an ultraslim passively cooled laptop.
- agloeregrets 6y ago
  Also read the opening paragraph, they also massively overclocked the ram and underclocked the CPU. Out of the box the 5800 loses.
  - adambatkin 6y ago
    ...which is entirely reasonable. Laptops are heavily customized/optimized for power/heat, whereas off-the-shelf CPUs (like the 5800x) are very much general-purpose devices but can absolutely be customized to be fit-for-purpose (and the entire hardware ecosystem is built around that).
- mahkeiro 6y ago
  Since when twice as fast is barely?
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  - acdha 6y ago
    What are you basing “twice as fast” on? The margins shown are nowhere near that across the board and it took over overclocking a system with 4 times the RAM to produce the most decisive wins. Java is sensitive to memory pressure so just the RAM alone is a significant factor.
    - africanboy 6y ago
      I ran those Java benchmarks and they don't seem very good to test CPUs, also they force a GC after every run and used around 4GB of memory (I have 64) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25421028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25421028
jeffbee 6y ago
The major difference between Ryzen 5000-series and Apple M1 is the former is sold out worldwide and the latter is on the shelf at every Apple Store in the world. Comparing the M1 to something that nobody can buy is dumb.
- qz2 6y ago
  Yeah this is why I spent my saved ryzen money on a Mac mini. And found out it was good enough!
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  Well, you're not wrong, but there are huge wait times for the M1 MacBooks all over the world. My M1 Air 16G was shipped after three weeks, and some US people over at Macrumors have been waiting for a month. The Mini seems to be more available.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Just checked and I could see some Ryzen 5000 available on Amazon (not the 5900X though). Honestly I expect the price and availability to suck big time for both. AMD can't manufacture half the volume they should to satisfy demand, while Apple is a poster child of $900 laptops costing €1000 when they finally cross the Atlantic long after release. "Available at an Apple store" might be the biggest joke one could possibly say. There's only a handful of store worldwide.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    I don't know if you're just being obtuse or what but there are over 500 Apple stores in 25 nations, that's not a handful. If you don't feel like visiting one, Apple offers same-day delivery for only $5 if you live near one. The product is readily available.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      I'm not trying to be obtuse or anything, I'm just saying they have very few physical shops. There might be 10 in Paris for example but if you're in the rest of the country, tough luck! Well I am double checking and I see they have shops in the top 5 cities now. Maybe things have changed for the better. Last time I tried to buy an Apple product there was simply no shop in a hundred miles radius.
tobyhinloopen 6y ago
I’m just sitting here wondering why a mobile chip from a 1100$ fan-less notebook is even a challenging contender in this race
- idnefju 6y ago
  lol judging from this post, my MBP m1 is pretty much better than my desktop 3900x... Not disappointed! The only time the fan even spun up was when I built nodejs from source (which took 10mins). And even then it ran at like ~10% fan speed or something.
fvv 6y ago
Those are single core benchmarks, the wow effect is because you are comparing on single core benchmarks 4 core against 24 core cpu , the 5800x with only 4 cores enabled would probably still beat the m1 , probably even with one
- imtringued 6y ago
  Yeah that's the impression I get every time. Just think about it. The most power hungry desktop core needs 20W and going all the way from 4Ghz to 4.8Ghz is easily the difference between 10W and 20W. Apple's TDP for the entire package is 30W. They can trivially just overclock their CPU to the same performance level of any desktop. Nothing surprising here but everyone sells this like some amazing thing. In practice they use less power because the SoC is fully integrated, they have the 5nm process advantage and there are special processes for mobile chips that consume less power below 4GHz. Consider for one second that in theory the M1 is technologically superior because it can decode double the instructions per second and yet it still is only consuming 2x times less power but at the cost of delivering worse performance on a superior manufacturing process. A lot of hard work with very little to show for it.
evacchi 6y ago
An additional observation that I haven't read here, is that all of these languages (except Python) are JITted, and the ARM backend may be less mature than the x86 equivalent
pojzon 6y ago
Some ppl say that Apple is only a marketing company. TBH with results like those its clear the company in case of tech is years ahead of competition. This is a comparison of current beast desktop CPU which requires water cooling to maintain low temps vs air cooled CPU. Those results are amazing.
Synaesthesia 6y ago
A very important reason this CPU benchmarks well in these tests has to do with the fast SSD and SSD controller. One cannot ignore the I/O factors in these tests, which often involve reading and writing to lots of little files.
bestboy 6y ago
I have a little doubt about the results of the Java benchmarks. I think the JVM tests should have been executed with the same amount of heap allocated for each platform in order to get the internal dynamics/heuristics of the JVM to be comparable. IMHO all JVM tests should have been executed with -Xmx 7G (8 Gigs maximum as per the M1 MacBook Air minus a little something for the OS and the system buffers) Still, I'm impressed with the Apple silicone.
- Macha 6y ago
  Why? You cannot buy 8gb of dual channel high performance ddr4 - it's a capacity with such a small market and low expected price that manufacturers won't bother. It's only Apple that insists on $200 extra for 16gb.
  - bestboy 6y ago
    I'm sorry, if I wasn't making this clear enough. I'm not proposing to remove DIMMs. I'm merely suggesting to run the Java VM with the same amount of memory/heap for all the platforms. That is purely a software setting. The command-line switch to configure the heap size of a JVM is -Xmx The reason why I'm suggesting to have the same heap size for the benchmarks is that the maximum heap size is the single most important (tuning) setting for the JVM. Based on this setting the VM sizes its internal data structures and adepts its behavior. Also, garbage collection times are typically* dependent on the size of the heap. With most* garbage collectors collecting a 32gb heap takes longer than collecting a 8gb heap. If the workload of the benchmark allows for the heap to be used entirely, then garbage collection overhead is directly related to the heap size. * unless a "big heap" garbage collector like ZGC or Shenandoah is used
    - user5994461 6y ago
      They should set both the minimum size and maximum size to 4 GB (assuming it's enough). Heap resizing has a much bigger impact on performance than garbage collection.
- TravelPiglet 6y ago
cjdell 6y ago
I'm a huge AMD fan. Been waiting all year for my dream Ryzen laptop but just given in to a MacBook Air M1. I have no regrets, but this gives me hope that a true Ryzen ultrabook might exist next year, now that the industry have to take AMD seriously. I will sell my MacBook in a heartbeat if that happens.
- carlmr 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat and debating waiting another year or going for the M1. I really don't like Apple's other policies though.
  - cjdell 6y ago
    The plus is Apple hardware has low depreciation so it might worth getting the M1 if you're a dev and appreciate rapid compile times. My webpack build times are less than half the 7700HQ that I was using which makes me way more productive. Also just got a nice Ubuntu VM going last night using vftool. :-)
    - kelchm 6y ago
      Absolutely this — I’ve had several MacBooks that ended up costing me less than $150 per year after I upgraded and resold them years later.
hepinhei 6y ago
There is a key aspect to take into consideration, price of the cpus and energy. With the price of 2 or 3 ryzen we can buy a complete pc. Anyway really useful info
LockAndLol 6y ago
It really doesn't matter what kind of stat you bring out against the M1. People have made up their mind and either the marketing worked or it didn't. The minority will be swayed by facts and will cling to whatever preconception they have or been told to have. That's just how the world is (now?). Nice benchmarks though.
lr1970 6y ago
Please note that M1 MBP with 16GB of RAM is being compared to Ryzen 5800X machine with 64GB of RAM. GC-driven memory management performance (I am looking at you Java) can tangibly affect the benchmarking results.
- ksec 6y ago
  Not to mention Java and Go's VM / Runtime ( or in fact most of so called benchmarks ) doesn't have years of optimisation like they were on x86.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    AFAIK Azul makes highly optimized openjdk builds for arm and Go had arm support from day one
rurban 6y ago
Benchmarking Ryzen on ClearLinux is problematic, Fedora 33, Arch or Gentoo would be much better. Intel explicitly didn't set AMD-specific optimizations to favor Intel. https://github.com/clearlinux-pkgs/linux/blob/26bf1495e7aac067651c33e199b6ae70c6627bd6/config#L377 https://github.com/clearlinux-pkgs/linux/blob/26bf1495e7aac0...
alex0ptr 6y ago
I think a lot of commenters ar forgetting another fact about the M1: It also offers low power cores, neural engine, a GPU and RAM all on a single die. Therefore die sizing comparisons to most desktop class cpus make little sense and money comparisons too. (Of course the article was about something different, I’m referring to the comments)
arid_eden 6y ago
This guy really doesn't get the point - he's testing an embedded part with 16GB RAM against an overclocked desktop part with 64GB RAM (and a load of the benchmarks are garbage collected so the extra RAM is significant). Its also the case that none of these benchmarks are Apple specific - users buying a Mac Mini for development are likely to be developing in Swift for which the M1 has special optimizations. Need to wait for Apple to release a part for an iMac or MacBook Pro to inform his conclusion that x86_64 is going to be able to outperform Apple's ARM chips going forward.

338 points by tuhdo 6y ago

moocowtruck 6y ago

i feel like this is missing the point..

imtringued 6y ago
It's not missing the point it's debunking junk journalism.

gigatexal 6y ago

This is how-to-make-a-click-bait article-101. Show me an x86 laptop in the same power envelope that can match the fanless MacBook Air with the m1. I’ll wait. Oh and do so at roughly 1k. On the desktop the Mac mini is 699 USD in its base spec. The 5800X is 500 euros on its own before motherboard, case, ram etc etc. Apples to apples benchmarks either controlling for power or price would make for a more relevant article.

tuhdo 6y ago
Many other clickbait articles claimed that M1 is better than the best desktop class CPUs. I only tested the water and found otherwise. The 5900HX is planned and should be within 90% performance of my 5800X within 45W TDP. Not close to the power consumption, but then zen 3 is only on 7nm, while M1 is on 5nm. The Mac Mini is $699 with only 8GB RAM, that runs out after a few browser tabs. So, for a work machine, you would need at least the 16GB model and add $200 to that. Though the build quality and the panel is excellent. You could opt for the 5600X. The core count is not relevant in the article, as the benchmarks are mainly single-threaded.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  The unified memory does go to great lengths to make memory not such an issue. It also pages a ton. I’ve read that people can throw up hundreds of tabs in safari on the 8GB model and be just fine.
- new_realist 6y ago
  The claims were fastest per-core performance, not fastest absolute performance in a single system. Heck, there are desktops out there with hundreds of cores in them, drawing hundreds of watts of power. I haven't had time to delve into most of these benchmarks, but they look multithreaded to me.
- macintux 6y ago
  > that runs out after a few browser tabs Citation needed
  - darkteflon 6y ago
    Anecdotal, of course, but I currently have 42 tabs open in Firefox 84 (native M1 build) on an 8gb M1 Mac Mini, as well as two VS Code windows and a bunch of other things like Mail, Calendar, Authy, Bitwarden, etc. As far as memory management is concerned, user experience is indistinguishable from my 32gb Ryzen 3700X desktop with a Samsung NVMe.
  - BearOso 6y ago
    8GB is plenty for most people right now. A browser won’t eat that much memory for normal sites and reasonable tab counts. An interesting thing about the M1’s RAM limit, though, is that it literally can’t get any bigger. 16GB is pushing it, but fitting 32GB into a package-on-package simply can’t be done with our current tech. Apple is solely relying on Moore’s law for future advances because, with the way these processors are designed, external infrastructure would wreck performance.
  - yxhuvud 6y ago
    If you need citation for that you clearly don't use jira.
    - qz2 6y ago
      I just spent all week on an 8gb mini with slack and about 50 JIRA tabs open. Works fine.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  This is comparing the M1 which a mobile focused chip in a tiny power envelope to the pinnacle of AMD cpu design in a giant (relatively) power envelope. My point was that the article could have stood on its own without even benching against the M1. Just show the performance of the 5800X in tasks the M1 and the 5800X are not in the same league.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I don't know what you are talking about. The problem with fake information is that you have to spend more resources debunking it than it takes to create fake information in the first place.
- threeseed 6y ago
  > The Mac Mini is $699 with only 8GB RAM, that runs out after a few browser tabs You know swap exists right. I just opened 30+ tabs on the MacBook Air without any issues.
mping 6y ago
The article mentioned faster, not cheaper. A performance-per-dollar and per watt is certainly valuable, but for a forum that always mentions that a couple hundred bucks are worth spending for shaving off time from a developer workflow (SSDs, RAM, etc, assuming they earn market rates) this benchmark is worth it. As a desktop user, I certainly am interested in these numbers.
- new_realist 6y ago
  Why would you buy a Mac mini for performance critical work? I could see being bound to a laptop for some workflows, but is that Ryzen available in laptops?
  - sliken 6y ago
    Yes, but only the zen 2 flavor which is significantly slower per core. The M1 competitor with similar thermals, close IPC per core, and on board GPU is widly rumored to be announced in Jan at CES.
    - jsjohnst 6y ago
      > The M1 competitor with similar thermals, close IPC per core, and on board GPU is widly rumored to be announced in Jan at CES. Ok, so what you’re saying is that AMD is wildly rumored to have a processor that you might be able to find as an option on a niche (term not used in a negative sense) brand laptop in Summer 2021 that directly competes with Apple’s M1 processor available in Fall 2020 on their highest sold models which are their lowest price point machines?
      - ben-schaaf 6y ago
        If by "AMD is wildly rumored to have a processor" you mean it's been leaked and benchmarked multiple times, then sure: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-5800H-shows-decent-performance-gains-over-the-4800H-model-in-latest-Geekbench-tests.509896.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-5800H-shows-decent...
mmgutz 6y ago
The M1 is certainly impressive but how much does the same configuration say with 16GB and 1TB SSD cost? Most enthusiasts aren't going to buy an AMD Ryzen 5800x and limit themselves to 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. A mac mini 8GB + 512GB SSD configuration is 900USD. Can you imagine what a 16GB + 1TB SSD cost, which is not an uncommon configuration? My guess is in the 1300USD range.
jgalentine007 6y ago
Here's a datapoint. I just got an HP Omen gaming laptop for $1100 on Amazon. Pretty much equivalent to the 3800x mentioned in the article, but came with 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD, and 6GB Nvidia 1660ti discrete graphics. I can seemingly run unlimited browser tabs, video conference and play a game across 3 monitors (built in one is 144hz) simultaneously with no latency whatsoever. I upgraded to 32GB of ram for $144 and added another 512gb PCIe SSD I had lying around, because it had an extra slot. The fans do run (quietly) all the time, and it has a battery life of about 4 or 5 hours. Not in the same league performance per watt as the M1, but interesting performance for the dollar none the less.
- muyuu 6y ago
  sounds good but I'm waiting for a proper Ryzen Linux laptop that is actually meant to be carried around... otherwise a desktop makes more sense to me
eloff 6y ago
For my work machine I don't care much about the price (to a point) or the power consumption. I want the fastest compiles money can buy. This article is exactly what I want to see, and confirms my decision to go for the 5900x. Now if AMD can just get them in stock. The local waiting list is months long.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  If you want the fastest compiles money can buy, wouldn't you be looking at a massive, 3rd gen threadripper?
  - eloff 6y ago
    If you mean the 3rd gen server chips, they're not released yet. Also there are diminishing returns as core count increases. I'm doubting that a 5950x is worth it over the 5900x for me.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      You don't run parallel compiles? They can use all your cores, with a linear speedup ... I meant the latest Ryzen Threadrippers, whatever "generation" they are now. The 3970X would likely be a good example.
      - Macha 6y ago
        Depends on the language of course. Most JS tools are strongly single threaded. Rust is quite good for multi core and benefitted hugely from my 3900x but even that only keeps all the cores busy for the first 60% of a compile then we're limited by the slowest chain of dependencies.
      - eloff 6y ago
        The compiles are parallel, but not all work can be done in parallel or divided among 32 threads equally. So from 24 to 32 threads is not typically a 33% increase unless your compiles are huge (like the Linux kernel).
macintux 6y ago
On the other hand there have been plenty of benchmarks reported of like to like and many have been asking what M1 would look like against the best AMD has to offer. There’s room for plenty of comparisons. It’s a big world.
admiralspoo 6y ago
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. The M1 is ahead by 2-3x in performance per watt and highly competitive in performance/dollar. This result is indeed quite meaningless as Apple will have 16 high-performance core variants of the M1 soon.
- BearOso 6y ago
  > Apple will have 16 high-performance core variants of the M1 soon I doubt that’s coming soon. The M1 is a HUGE chip. The decoders and pipelines take up a massive amount of space, and the L2 cache is apparently unwieldy, too. They’ve focused on making a limited number of cores perform very well, but there isn’t enough room. They need another die shrink to add any more. I think the upcoming pro hardware will just be tweaks to the current formula.
  - spacedcowboy 6y ago
    It’s not that big, it’s ~120 mm^2. You can go to intel or AMD and find 750 mm^2 chips... Apple have 2 advantages here. - They don’t play in the low-cost arena, people expect a Mac to be a bit more expensive, so they have a larger cost budget to work with - They don’t have to make a profit on the CPU in particular, whereas Intel and AMD do. Apple want a 38-40% margin on the whole shebang, and if it needs a more expensive chip, then that’s what’ll happen, maybe taking cost-savings from (2), and of necessary adding price because of (1). I would be shocked if Platform Architecture at Apple didn’t already have 8, 16, and 32-core variants of the M series up and running, or at the very least in simulation. They’re coming, and the world will change. Again.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I have mentioned this in several comments and no, it's not that simple and worse, there is zero money to be made even if they did release such a product because Apple would never sell their chips as an OEM.
imtringued 6y ago
How is it clickbait? The title says it compares a specific CPU model vs another specific CPU model and that is exactly what it does. Where do you see deception in the title? >Show me an x86 laptop in the same power envelope that can match the fanless MacBook Air with the m1. I’ll wait. Oh and do so at roughly 1k. How does this prove that the title is lying? >On the desktop the Mac mini is 699 USD in its base spec. The 5800X is 500 euros on its own before motherboard, case, ram etc etc. Again, how is this relevant to whether the title is clickbait or not? >Apples to apples benchmarks either controlling for power or price would make for a more relevant article. Seriously, what does this have to do with clickbait? Here is my perspective. I saw lots of articles that pretended that the M1 is better than all x86 CPUs including Ryzens (one of them is linked in the article). This was getting on my nerves because everyone is being dishonest. I clicked on this article because the title compared a Ryzen desktop CPU with the M1 with the expectation that these benchmarks disprove the garbage journalism and that's exactly what I got. The Ryzen 5800X performs better than the M1. x86 is still strong in single core performance. Those real "clickbait" articles were just lazy and trying to hype something up. This article is not clickbait and you are just being dishonest.

ivoras 6y ago

In other words, Apple needs to just add 4 more cores to M1 to absolutely mop the floor with the Ryzen?

new_realist 6y ago
Exactly. This is apples to oranges; laptop power envelope and budget to desktop power envelope and budget.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  The original test linked at the beginning of the article is telling that multicore is not that relevant for the tested performance. The article is mentioning the power envelope and the fact that 5nm is temporary exclusive to Apple, but not for long - AMD will utilize it and that would be a closed test. In the end, if you want to compare performance before you buy, you care less about the internal and more about performance and price.
  - new_realist 6y ago
    I look forward to an M1 processor comparison to something with a similar core count, similar total power envelopes, and similar cost. The Ryzen processor benchmarked here costs more than the entire Mac Mini M1 system.
    - FpUser 6y ago
      They're 2 different CPU with the different market. The only reason I think that this comparison is being made is that it is a response to an avalanche of articles claiming that M1 beats everything speed wise and is the best thing since sliced bread.
  - new_realist 6y ago
    The first test listed is Renaissance, which, from https://renaissance.dev/resources/docs/renaissance-suite.pdf https://renaissance.dev/resources/docs/renaissance-suite.pdf, is a concurrency benchmark. It likely benefits from multiple cores. All in all I'm not sure the author has the relevant expertise.

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foobarbazetc 6y ago

You’re undervolting the CPU and overclocking your RAM in a benchmark... Why?

AdrianB1 6y ago
It is explained in the article: undervolting the CPU allows it to run longer at higher frequency, otherwise it will be thermally throttled. RAM has no such problem, overclocking improved performance.
- eloff 6y ago
  Yes, but is that fair in a benchmark? The RAM maybe because all high end RAM speeds are technically out of spec and are overclocking. But messing with the CPU voltage to juice the benchmark results seems like cheating to me.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    Is it fair to have Apple paying for 5nm exclusivity? Fairness is relative.
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    Apple's chip has 4200Mhz RAM. Wouldn't it be fair to have both ram speeds the same? Also it's a set of benchmarks some random person did. It's interesting and useful information. They aren't a publication doing a comparison.
    - jzelinskie 6y ago
      For Zen, you actually want to run your memory clock at a multiple of the FCLK and not as high as possible. So making the RAM frequency the same as the M1 might have actually harmed performance.
      - eloff 6y ago
        I don't think that's true with Zen 3. If you have a source to the contrary I'm interested to see it.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

Thanks for sharing some programming-centric benchmarks using modern CPUs. I always wish that CPU reviewers would stop churning out pages of graphs with synthetic benchmark workloads and instead post things that actually matter, like compile times and other programming benchmarks. The M1 processor is extremely impressive for the price and power envelope. However, I'm noticing a lot of people have taken Apple's marketing material a bit too literally and assumed that it somehow beats any and every desktop CPU out there, which is clearly not the case. Moreover, as the author mentions: A significant portion of Apple's lead came from buying exclusivity on TSMC's 5nm process through the end of the year. It will be interesting to see how AMD stacks up as they roll out 5nm parts in the future, compared to Apple's scaled up M1 successors. Exciting times. It's good to have some progress in CPU technologies again after years of Intel stagnation.

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thejosh 6y ago
This is why I really like phoronix, they show benchmarks aimed towards developers.
leecb 6y ago
> A significant portion of Apple's lead came from buying exclusivity on TSMC's 5nm process It's hard to estimate how much of Apple's advantage came from the 5nm process, but we can get a guess by comparing the A13 and A14. One of the biggest differences between last year's A13 and this year's A14 is the 5nm process (vs 7nm+). The performance increase seems to be on the order of 15% [1], and Apple was able to fit in a lot more transistors- 11.8B vs. 8.5B, though we don't know how many of those transistors were spent on the CPU, and how many were spent in other areas like the GPU or ISP. Seems like the additional transistors and lower power consuption were used to increase performance in a bunch of ways- higher clock speeds, more cache, and a bigger reorder buffer being the obvious improvements. Perhaps AMD can pull off a similar improvement when they switch processes. [1] Spec2006 numbers from https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2

pella 6y ago

M1: Four high‑performance cores + Four high‑efficiency cores vs 5800X : Eight high‑performance cores

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
As a developer, I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores as long as it gets the workload done quickly. In the real world, I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. The implementation details are interesting, but they don't matter when I'm trying to get work done as fast as possible. The M1 comes in at a great price point for what it is and it's obviously your only option if you want to run macOS (hackintosh isn't an option for production use). Good to have options.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  > I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. > I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores Both of these things cannot be true.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    You misunderstand how some of those words work.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      > I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. > I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores So first means: "my only concerns are performance and cost". What determines performance and cost? Primary answer: number of cores. If you care about performance, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. If you care about cost, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. You might not articulate your concerns in this way, but they are intimately bound together. If you only care about "good enough" performance and "in my range" cost, then your concerns are still bound up with core count. So what's your apparently more correct understanding of some of those words?

echlebek 6y ago

This isn't an apples to apples comparison like the author says, because the package power (37W) of the Ryzen is still quite a bit higher than the M1's. You can see it right there in the graph from Anandtech. The 5800X is a beast of a CPU. The IPC improvements over the previous generation really are incredible. It's not surprising to me at all that it beats the M1 in several benchmarks. However, it's not the same class of device at all.

glasshead969 6y ago
yea its hard to compare, this makes sense as what is the most powerful cpu one can get no matter the power usage but there isn't anything close to M1 when it comes to high performance and long battery life. Even ryzen 4000 series laptops throttle a lot when on battery power while M1 performance doesn't change. I don't expect this to change with Zen 3 laptops either.
hawk_ 6y ago
> This isn't an apples to apples comparison I mean how could it be. It's AMD to Apple's :-P
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
In the real world, there aren't many people making purchasing decision between an M1 Apple laptop or Mac Mini and an AMD 5800X desktop machine anyway. Still interesting to see the comparisons. The leaked Geekbench results of AMD's upcoming 5800H laptop parts are about 85% of the M1's single core score and matching the M1's multi-core score. TDP is still higher than the M1, obviously, but AMD is also using a 7nm process while Apple got the jump on 5nm by buying exclusivity on TMSC's 5nm process through the end of the year. I'm extremely impressed with the M1 and I'll be buying an Apple Silicon device as soon as they have something with 32GB or more of RAM. However, the sentiment that the M1 chip obliterates any and every desktop part on the market is getting kind of silly at this point.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Some are making a "desktop with cheaper terminal laptop -vs- pro laptop" choice though. And in that case the comparison may matter.

glasshead969 6y ago

Regarding the 5nm vs 7nm thing, I expect apple to be at least 1 node or intra-node improvement (eg: 5nm vs 5nm+ or 4nm) ahead for foreseeable future. They pay TSMC pretty penny to have access to cutting edge nodes. Not much different from how Intel had node advantage over others albeit here apple paying for it so at-least others aren't locked out of it for too long.

ece 6y ago
AMD would rather spend money on getting more capacity for the current 7nm products, that have seen a couple of years of severe shortages at launch, and gain market share. It's a problem that Apple doesn't seem to have, though maybe with desktop/server chips they might if they also start to gain market share.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
They'll presumably be the first to use each node, but that only gives them a number of months before competitors are on it. I would expect to see 5nm Ryzen before 3nm Apple Silicon. There's also a major question about what happens with Intel. If they ever get their process advantage back then it's not clear what Apple's response is. But if they implode then AMD takes over the PC market and probably becomes TSMC's biggest customer, which could put them in a position to get on newer nodes at the same time as Apple.
yowmamasita 6y ago
So now each year we can't do proper benchmarks anymore because there will always be the (X)nm vs (X-1)nm argument. What's wrong with using price-power-performance ratio benchmarks on what's available on the market?
- glasshead969 6y ago
  Yea I think this argument about node size comes up because in this case you couldn't buy just the soc but the whole Mac computer. People didn't care that some of advantage Intel had was from their process superiority because you didn't have to make any choices other than the CPU itself.

rafaelturk 6y ago

I'm still impressed how fast Intel was overtaken by AMD and now Apple. Benchmarks don't even bother including Intel.

p1necone 6y ago
It wasn't really very fast. Intel got away with releasing basically the same CPU year over year with minor incremental improvements for almost a decade before anyone caught up.
- user5994461 6y ago
  It's more than a decade. The first core2duo were released in 2006. I think people are thinking of the first i5/i7 from 2008 when they do the comparison, unfortunately AMD was out of the run before that.
mhh__ 6y ago
Fast as in about a decade of consolidated work while Intel ran away with all the money? Apple bought PA Semi in '08, for example.
lliamander 6y ago
Tiger Lake has pretty impressive single-core and GPU performance. Tiger Lake H also promises to be very interesting. Honestly, 2021 is going to be a good year for laptops and mini-pcs. I don't think any of the chip manufacturers have objectively bad silicon for those form factors anymore.

thom 6y ago

Realistically, what do people think the iMacs and Mac Pros of the M1 era will look like?

wlesieutre 6y ago
The speculation I've read is that the Pro will look similar to current styling but smaller, and the iMac will be a screen on a stand without the chin from the current model. More like a big iPad Pro. I wouldn't be surprised to see FaceID make its first Mac appearance with those.
- christoph 6y ago
  Very interesting observation. Is that the end game? An iPad Pro to rule all? It can be docked on a nice stand, powered from the mains for more performance and charging when required, docked to external monitors when needed. Now they have chip parity across the line, what stops this from happening?
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    Who said it is stopped from happening? It's happening right under our eyes, at a slow pace, because you can't just make so many changes in terms of software, ui, perspective, etc.

liquidise 6y ago

Last year i replaced my aging mac pro with a 3900x amd Hackintosh. The cpu upgrade was hard to believe. Everything felt fast in a way even my 2019 air failed to achieve. The idea that the laptop-grade M1 is keeping pace in these tests with the processor in my desktop is mind blowing. Sure the 5800x was tuned for these tests. Sure the M1 is on 5nm. All of this is missing the point: Intel created a huge market opportunity and 2 of the best poised companies to take advantage of it have. Computer consumers are winning big thanks to TSMC in 2020. Let's all hope intel can turn things around and keep the space competitive.

ece 6y ago
If they could just get even or ahead on EUV, which they skipped on 10nm, I think they will be just fine.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  They will surrender and buy from TSMC.
  - ece 6y ago
    Temporarily, but over the long term, TSMC would likely have to more than double their leading edge capacity, which would take a decade or two or more.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    TSMC doesn’t have enough capacity for that. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung are the only players in the game, and they’re basically all churning at capacity.
mhh__ 6y ago
> Let's all hope intel can turn things around and keep the space competitive. Although they have a lot of work to do, I can't help but think people writing off Intel are way too keen. Intel's annual dividend is still bigger than AMD's revenue IIRC, so at worst they should be able to buy themselves out of the hole they're in.

FpUser 6y ago

This is all splitting hairs. Major manufacturers are in active competition and bar temporary hick-ups they will all be leap frogging each other while offering more or less the same deal over time in regards to performance / power. In the end it'll be just personal preference whether go with Apple, AMD or Intel. Well I suspect due to loyalty factor Apple as usually may be able to extract more money from the customers.

7e 6y ago

Many of these tests are Java, but to my knowledge only Azul has a JVM for the M1. Which JVM was used?

threeseed 6y ago
It's on the graphs: Azul OpenJDK 13.0.5

iseanstevens 6y ago

I come away from this way more impressed by the M1 than I was going in. It's a comparison of a ~$700 stock, low end full computer Vs. $700 for high end CPU only. And the high end CPU has overclocking tweaks enabled, and overclocked memory. The M1 generally keeps up quite well, which blows my mind. The power use difference Is pretty big as well. Yeah, it would be great if Apple was totally open source. But this is going to push the entire industry to do way better.

kuschku 6y ago
The M1 also has overclocked memory (by spec, DDR4 only supports 3200MHz), and the 5800X isn't a 700$ CPU, actually it's at 450$ (and it will fall even further soon, I bought a 3900x recently for below 400$).
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  Still... $450 for the CPU only vs a $999 laptop, for most use cases the apple's MBA offers much more value and will have slower depreciation.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    So, like normal, the value of a Mac is in appealing to others not doing things on the computer.
    - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      ? What part of “M1 outclasses every similar laptop” indicates to you that the MBA is a machine targeted at people who don’t do serious computer work (Whatever “serious” means)
      - coldtea 6y ago
        Parent probably associates some value in dishing Apple, the reverse-fan-boy phenomenon.

musicale 6y ago

> While M1 is indeed very powerful for its size, when comparing it to the high-end x86 desktop, it is still slower I too am astonished that a high-end x86 desktop could possibly be faster than a Mac mini or a laptop without a fan. Now I will have to burn my Apple card (if I had one) in protest. I call on Apple to immediately retract all of its marketing that says that the M1 is the fastest CPU in the universe. > obscene power draw Who cares about power in a desktop (or laptop for that matter)? These things aren't solar powered - just plug it in like a normal person! Duh. I also note that a single Ryzen 5800X processor is actually cheaper than the Mac mini, and is readily available from many helpful and enterprising resellers on ebay at special holiday pricing. ;-)

zamalek 6y ago

> RAM: 64 GB DDR4 overclocked to 3733 MHz, stress testing 24 hours stable OP, it may be worth downclocking the RAM to 3600MHz (while tightening timings) unless you have a golden chip with >1800MHz Infinity Fabric. Decoupling IF and memory speed can cause huge latency (90ns on my 3950x). Obviously you want a baseline and benchmark from there, but you clearly know what you are doing.

tuhdo 6y ago
My FCLK is also set to 1867, so no decoupling there.

nessex 6y ago

The most impressive part to me is how the m1 compares to the 3900X. I’ve got a mere 3600X and every laptop I owned or worked on over the past year is noticeably and painfully slower than the 3600X. It’s been a relief to get home and turn on my desktop. It doesn’t matter if the laptops I’m using are very recent i7’s and i9’s, the desktop is always very noticeably faster. I got my m1 MacBook Pro 16GB yesterday and was pretty confused to find that Rust compilation felt faster than the desktop. To go from recent Intel laptops taking two to three times longer to compile Rust than my budget desktop despite the laptops' whiny fans and extreme heat, to having my desktop be sightly outclassed by an ice cold laptop on battery (which got at least 15 hours of use, including said compiling, with no need to charge) is a world changer. I can’t remember the last time a laptop was this close to desktop performance for my everyday workflow. Now that I think about it, I haven’t even tried optimising compile times on the MacBook like I usually do with Rust projects. My desktop would have been running lld at least to make its compilation significantly faster, and the MacBook more than kept up in spite of the handicap.

dijit 6y ago
No doubt that the 3600x is impressive- but Desktop class CPUs will outperform laptop ones almost always (due to the significantly higher power draw and thermal envelope). My 7 year old desktop goes toe-to-toe with my top of the line MacBook Pro from 2020 and in almost all benchmarks crushes it. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4930K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-1065G7/1976vsm888368 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4930K-vs...
- dis-sys 6y ago
  your 4930k from 7 years ago is a 130w processor for PC enthusiasts, it was a top of the line product back in its days with a $600 price tag. most regular desktop users wouldn't buy that processor, e.g. I bought a 4770k at half of your 4930k price in 2013. on the other hand, your mentioned 1065G7 is a 15w processor that doesn't really represent what a laptop processor can do in 2019/2020. laptop processors like i7-10875H would be a far better apple-to-apple comparison in case you still want to make your claims above. the reality here is that at much lower power draw and thermal envelope (45w vs 130w), laptop processor like 10875H would crush 4930k in both single core and multi core settings.

Guthur 6y ago

I'm glad someone finally started comparing state of the art vs state of art. Most comparisons have been M1 vs the frankly dated Intel offerings with the previous Mac product line. So things to remember would be that power/performance is not linear and so 5800 like CPU could be scaled back in power consumption without sacrificing the same proportion of it's performance. Also, 5800X is on TSMC 7nm process where as M1 is on the 5nm; this difference will have a measurable impact on performance and power consumption.

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xbmcuser 6y ago

Ryzen and M1 both had design wins this year I feel because of broader and faster access to memory. In the next few years L1 & L2 caches might be getting bigger.

bhauer 6y ago

Can anyone explain the Redis numbers, specifically the 3900X versus 5800X [1]? The 5800X is showing numbers easily more than 2x the 3900X. I understand this is a single-threaded test, so the additional cores of the 3900X (12C/24T versus 8C/16T for the 5800X) do it no advantage. But I wouldn't expect the Zen 3 architecture to be that dramatically superior to Zen 2. [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tuhdo/tuhdo.github.io/master/emacs-tutor/static/5800x_m1_charts/Redis.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tuhdo/tuhdo.github.io/mast...

ben-schaaf 6y ago
This is pure speculation, but the Zen 3 cores have access to double the cache. In very specific workloads that could lead to a 2x speedup.
- stickyricky 6y ago
  I agree. I also think the unified core complex means less cross ccx cache access routes.
injinj 6y ago
I would bet that the redis-benchmark and the redis-server were running across the CCD, not tasklocked to CPUs on the same chiplet. I have a 3970x, I'll run this test on different chiplets and the same chiplet...
- injinj 6y ago
  $ taskset -c 1 redis-server $ taskset -c 2 redis-benchmark -p 6379 -P 8 -q -c 1 -n 100000 PING_INLINE: 775193.81 requests per second PING_BULK: 869565.19 requests per second SET: 724637.69 requests per second GET: 787401.56 requests per second INCR: 775193.81 requests per second LPUSH: 684931.50 requests per second RPUSH: 699300.69 requests per second LPOP: 680272.12 requests per second RPOP: 704225.31 requests per second SADD: 769230.81 requests per second HSET: 675675.69 requests per second SPOP: 819672.12 requests per second LPUSH (needed to benchmark LRANGE): 680272.12 requests per second LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements): 107758.62 requests per second LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements): 30721.96 requests per second LRANGE_500 (first 450 elements): 20040.08 requests per second LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements): 14658.46 requests per second MSET (10 keys): 317460.31 requests per second $ taskset -c 20 redis-server $ taskset -c 2 redis-benchmark -p 6379 -P 8 -q -c 1 -n 100000 PING_INLINE: 469483.56 requests per second PING_BULK: 505050.50 requests per second SET: 446428.56 requests per second GET: 465116.28 requests per second INCR: 458715.59 requests per second LPUSH: 425531.91 requests per second RPUSH: 438596.50 requests per second LPOP: 429184.56 requests per second RPOP: 434782.59 requests per second SADD: 460829.50 requests per second HSET: 421940.94 requests per second SPOP: 478468.88 requests per second LPUSH (needed to benchmark LRANGE): 425531.91 requests per second LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements): 96899.23 requests per second LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements): 29019.15 requests per second LRANGE_500 (first 450 elements): 19109.50 requests per second LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements): 14035.09 requests per second MSET (10 keys): 253807.11 requests per second

phamilton4 6y ago

This is pretty wild. The M1 beats my Xeon E-2176M @2.7GHz with 64GB of memory in every test but Jython. (I'm on OpenJDK 15, which probably doesn't matter). Later tomorrow I'll try it on my 2700x based system. 45W vs 10W... Running these tests may have changed my mind on this little CPU!

darthrupert 6y ago

To summarise: Top-of-the-line desktop computer barely beats an ultraslim passively cooled laptop.

agloeregrets 6y ago
Also read the opening paragraph, they also massively overclocked the ram and underclocked the CPU. Out of the box the 5800 loses.
- adambatkin 6y ago
  ...which is entirely reasonable. Laptops are heavily customized/optimized for power/heat, whereas off-the-shelf CPUs (like the 5800x) are very much general-purpose devices but can absolutely be customized to be fit-for-purpose (and the entire hardware ecosystem is built around that).
mahkeiro 6y ago
Since when twice as fast is barely?
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- acdha 6y ago
  What are you basing “twice as fast” on? The margins shown are nowhere near that across the board and it took over overclocking a system with 4 times the RAM to produce the most decisive wins. Java is sensitive to memory pressure so just the RAM alone is a significant factor.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    I ran those Java benchmarks and they don't seem very good to test CPUs, also they force a GC after every run and used around 4GB of memory (I have 64) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25421028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25421028

jeffbee 6y ago

The major difference between Ryzen 5000-series and Apple M1 is the former is sold out worldwide and the latter is on the shelf at every Apple Store in the world. Comparing the M1 to something that nobody can buy is dumb.

qz2 6y ago
Yeah this is why I spent my saved ryzen money on a Mac mini. And found out it was good enough!
Toutouxc 6y ago
Well, you're not wrong, but there are huge wait times for the M1 MacBooks all over the world. My M1 Air 16G was shipped after three weeks, and some US people over at Macrumors have been waiting for a month. The Mini seems to be more available.
user5994461 6y ago
Just checked and I could see some Ryzen 5000 available on Amazon (not the 5900X though). Honestly I expect the price and availability to suck big time for both. AMD can't manufacture half the volume they should to satisfy demand, while Apple is a poster child of $900 laptops costing €1000 when they finally cross the Atlantic long after release. "Available at an Apple store" might be the biggest joke one could possibly say. There's only a handful of store worldwide.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  I don't know if you're just being obtuse or what but there are over 500 Apple stores in 25 nations, that's not a handful. If you don't feel like visiting one, Apple offers same-day delivery for only $5 if you live near one. The product is readily available.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    I'm not trying to be obtuse or anything, I'm just saying they have very few physical shops. There might be 10 in Paris for example but if you're in the rest of the country, tough luck! Well I am double checking and I see they have shops in the top 5 cities now. Maybe things have changed for the better. Last time I tried to buy an Apple product there was simply no shop in a hundred miles radius.

tobyhinloopen 6y ago

I’m just sitting here wondering why a mobile chip from a 1100$ fan-less notebook is even a challenging contender in this race

idnefju 6y ago
lol judging from this post, my MBP m1 is pretty much better than my desktop 3900x... Not disappointed! The only time the fan even spun up was when I built nodejs from source (which took 10mins). And even then it ran at like ~10% fan speed or something.

fvv 6y ago

Those are single core benchmarks, the wow effect is because you are comparing on single core benchmarks 4 core against 24 core cpu , the 5800x with only 4 cores enabled would probably still beat the m1 , probably even with one

imtringued 6y ago
Yeah that's the impression I get every time. Just think about it. The most power hungry desktop core needs 20W and going all the way from 4Ghz to 4.8Ghz is easily the difference between 10W and 20W. Apple's TDP for the entire package is 30W. They can trivially just overclock their CPU to the same performance level of any desktop. Nothing surprising here but everyone sells this like some amazing thing. In practice they use less power because the SoC is fully integrated, they have the 5nm process advantage and there are special processes for mobile chips that consume less power below 4GHz. Consider for one second that in theory the M1 is technologically superior because it can decode double the instructions per second and yet it still is only consuming 2x times less power but at the cost of delivering worse performance on a superior manufacturing process. A lot of hard work with very little to show for it.

evacchi 6y ago

An additional observation that I haven't read here, is that all of these languages (except Python) are JITted, and the ARM backend may be less mature than the x86 equivalent

pojzon 6y ago

Some ppl say that Apple is only a marketing company. TBH with results like those its clear the company in case of tech is years ahead of competition. This is a comparison of current beast desktop CPU which requires water cooling to maintain low temps vs air cooled CPU. Those results are amazing.

Synaesthesia 6y ago

A very important reason this CPU benchmarks well in these tests has to do with the fast SSD and SSD controller. One cannot ignore the I/O factors in these tests, which often involve reading and writing to lots of little files.

bestboy 6y ago

I have a little doubt about the results of the Java benchmarks. I think the JVM tests should have been executed with the same amount of heap allocated for each platform in order to get the internal dynamics/heuristics of the JVM to be comparable. IMHO all JVM tests should have been executed with -Xmx 7G (8 Gigs maximum as per the M1 MacBook Air minus a little something for the OS and the system buffers) Still, I'm impressed with the Apple silicone.

Macha 6y ago
Why? You cannot buy 8gb of dual channel high performance ddr4 - it's a capacity with such a small market and low expected price that manufacturers won't bother. It's only Apple that insists on $200 extra for 16gb.
- bestboy 6y ago
  I'm sorry, if I wasn't making this clear enough. I'm not proposing to remove DIMMs. I'm merely suggesting to run the Java VM with the same amount of memory/heap for all the platforms. That is purely a software setting. The command-line switch to configure the heap size of a JVM is -Xmx The reason why I'm suggesting to have the same heap size for the benchmarks is that the maximum heap size is the single most important (tuning) setting for the JVM. Based on this setting the VM sizes its internal data structures and adepts its behavior. Also, garbage collection times are typically* dependent on the size of the heap. With most* garbage collectors collecting a 32gb heap takes longer than collecting a 8gb heap. If the workload of the benchmark allows for the heap to be used entirely, then garbage collection overhead is directly related to the heap size. * unless a "big heap" garbage collector like ZGC or Shenandoah is used
  - user5994461 6y ago
    They should set both the minimum size and maximum size to 4 GB (assuming it's enough). Heap resizing has a much bigger impact on performance than garbage collection.
TravelPiglet 6y ago

cjdell 6y ago

I'm a huge AMD fan. Been waiting all year for my dream Ryzen laptop but just given in to a MacBook Air M1. I have no regrets, but this gives me hope that a true Ryzen ultrabook might exist next year, now that the industry have to take AMD seriously. I will sell my MacBook in a heartbeat if that happens.

carlmr 6y ago
I'm in the same boat and debating waiting another year or going for the M1. I really don't like Apple's other policies though.
- cjdell 6y ago
  The plus is Apple hardware has low depreciation so it might worth getting the M1 if you're a dev and appreciate rapid compile times. My webpack build times are less than half the 7700HQ that I was using which makes me way more productive. Also just got a nice Ubuntu VM going last night using vftool. :-)
  - kelchm 6y ago
    Absolutely this — I’ve had several MacBooks that ended up costing me less than $150 per year after I upgraded and resold them years later.

hepinhei 6y ago

There is a key aspect to take into consideration, price of the cpus and energy. With the price of 2 or 3 ryzen we can buy a complete pc. Anyway really useful info

LockAndLol 6y ago

It really doesn't matter what kind of stat you bring out against the M1. People have made up their mind and either the marketing worked or it didn't. The minority will be swayed by facts and will cling to whatever preconception they have or been told to have. That's just how the world is (now?). Nice benchmarks though.

lr1970 6y ago

Please note that M1 MBP with 16GB of RAM is being compared to Ryzen 5800X machine with 64GB of RAM. GC-driven memory management performance (I am looking at you Java) can tangibly affect the benchmarking results.

ksec 6y ago
Not to mention Java and Go's VM / Runtime ( or in fact most of so called benchmarks ) doesn't have years of optimisation like they were on x86.
- africanboy 6y ago
  AFAIK Azul makes highly optimized openjdk builds for arm and Go had arm support from day one

rurban 6y ago

Benchmarking Ryzen on ClearLinux is problematic, Fedora 33, Arch or Gentoo would be much better. Intel explicitly didn't set AMD-specific optimizations to favor Intel. https://github.com/clearlinux-pkgs/linux/blob/26bf1495e7aac067651c33e199b6ae70c6627bd6/config#L377 https://github.com/clearlinux-pkgs/linux/blob/26bf1495e7aac0...

alex0ptr 6y ago

I think a lot of commenters ar forgetting another fact about the M1: It also offers low power cores, neural engine, a GPU and RAM all on a single die. Therefore die sizing comparisons to most desktop class cpus make little sense and money comparisons too. (Of course the article was about something different, I’m referring to the comments)

arid_eden 6y ago

This guy really doesn't get the point - he's testing an embedded part with 16GB RAM against an overclocked desktop part with 64GB RAM (and a load of the benchmarks are garbage collected so the extra RAM is significant). Its also the case that none of these benchmarks are Apple specific - users buying a Mac Mini for development are likely to be developing in Swift for which the M1 has special optimizations. Need to wait for Apple to release a part for an iMac or MacBook Pro to inform his conclusion that x86_64 is going to be able to outperform Apple's ARM chips going forward.