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Well, I kind of agreed with them. It's easy to assume that phone apps written for a few GB ram would not be representative of high end use like compiling large
by sliken 6y ago
Well, I kind of agreed with them. It's easy to assume that phone apps written for a few GB ram would not be representative of high end use like compiling large projects, editing 4k video, manipulating large datasets, etc.
But as it turns out the M1 does quite well at quite a few real world aggressive desktop applications.
- mrtksn 6y agoI was on the other side: Bits are bits, loops are loops. Why there’s a distinction between phone app and desktop app? Isn’t it that the difference is only the UI input method? At least for the last 5 years an iPhone and a desktop would handle the exact same images, videos, spreadsheets and websites with any desktop and often with better performance. Why would anyone think that these are fundamentally different?
- Retric 6y agoRAM latency for one thing. Phones have a huge advantage in that area which translates very well to most tasks as long as they have enough memory. OS differences also favor phones in many ways.
- BeeOnRope 6y agoNo, they don't. Memory latencies for top-end phones like the iPhone are generally over 100 ns, which far from being a huge advantage is consderably worse than the best desktop and latpop x86 chip latencies which hover around 50 ns.
- Retric 6y agoYou’re numbers are way off, where did you get them? Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency
- BeeOnRope 6y agoBenchmarks. CAS latency is only a small part of total memory latency as seen by the CPU.
- Retric 6y agoAs we are talking about comparing different CPU architectures it’s the external latency that’s important. Even then I have been looking at sub 25ns on AMD CPU memory benchmarks and I assume similar Intel numbers.
- sliken 6y agoI generally try to quantify TLB latency and DRAM latency separately. The M1 chip has quite impressive memory latency around 30ns, assuming you aren't thrashing the TLB. Desktops tend to be much higher latency, like say the AMD ryzen 5950X. In particular the R per RV range benchmark uses between 1 and 32 pages in a sliding window. The M1 gets around 30ns (which I've personally verified with code I wrote) and the Ryzen 5950x gets around 65ns. Intel does a bit better than AMD, but nowhere close to the M1.
- sliken 6y agoIphones are generally media consumption devices. Sure they can take pictures and video, but most often they are processed on laptops or desktops. Similarly programming, compiling, making videos, making music, etc is most often done on laptops and desktops. Certainly you are right, the M1 is a very capable CPU for all of these things, just that it was a surprise for many.