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M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari's experimental WebGPU
- aminozuur 6y agoI'm impressed by this minimal blogging platform. No author name, no link to the main page with other blog-posts. Just the post. Reminds me of telegra.ph. I like it.
- asciident 6y agoUnfortunately when I loaded it it had a major screen repaint about half a second during load. It would be more minimal if it didn't have that.
- spullara 6y agoI saw that as well. I think it is loading a font.
- chrismorgan 6y agoRather, The page includes the Markdown of the article, which is then rendered to HTML in client-side JavaScript, after page load. This is not a good approach: it means that everyone will always get a complete rerender after the page finishes “loading”, as it switches from monospaced Markdown to the final HTML. Doing it before the load event would be a little better, as it could make it so that many people wouldn’t get the flash of Markdown source, but the real solution is to please render the Markdown on the server and serve real HTML instead of <pre>[Markdown]</pre>.
- dogma1138 6y agoIt’s the demo website for Jott https://github.com/bwasti/jott https://github.com/bwasti/jott
- beervirus 6y agoIt's minimal-looking, but the formatting is broken without Javascript.
- bee_rider 6y agoWhat's broken? It looks fine with noscript blocking everything.
- brrrrrm 6y agoyea, I haven't spent too much time reducing the markdown rendering overhead (just pulled a library off the shelf). I basically just use this site to upload static text files. The same text can be rendered a couple ways (e.g. as hmtl, raw, as code with syntax highlighting)
- FabHK 6y agoNot sure I understand. Why don’t you run the markdown source through markdown once, then put up the resulting static HTML without any JavaScript?
- brrrrrm 6y agoeh, I'd prefer to save the source of truth when possible. I might want to swap out the rendering library one day for something prettier
- usui 6y agoI like it too, but one thing that bothers me about online articles in general recently is the way they hide publishing date. If the date is there, then it's going to be purposely bumped across many years to generate more SEO clicks Too many times I have tried to look up more recent information, but the article content clearly shows that it was written a few years ago due to inaccuracy Without reading the article content, I haven't found a way to discern which articles are actually released recently. Google Search filters for time does not seem to work as well anymore as they have found a way around it, but Google Search quality going down the drain recently and I ranted about it in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26202941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26202941
- brrrrrm 6y agooh this is an interesting concern. Perhaps I should expose an endpoint to allow checking the "last edit" date of all notes. I'll need to think through the privacy/security concerns about that, though
- shakezula 6y agoare you the maintainer of the platform? If so, props! I also dig the minimal vibe to it, it's a really interesting approach.
- parhamn 6y agoThis is one of the reasons I added archiving to a browser we’re building[1]. I wouldn’t archive when I had to do it manually. The internet is way too ephemeral as an information source. Let me know if you want to try it at some point (super pre launch). [1] CloudSynth.com
- carabiner 6y agoPet peeve is using "here" or "this" as link text. I can't believe in tech people still do this.
- gpanders 6y agoWhy is this so bad, and what do you suggest as an alternative?
- chrismorgan 6y agoSay I’m using a screen reader and am skimming through the links. I want to hear something like this: “Link, WebGPU demo. Link, tuning code.” Instead, I will hear this: “Link, here. Link, here.” This is not very useful.
- saagarjha 6y agoNo, you'll hear "Try the WebGPU demo; link, here".
- chrismorgan 6y agoI said skimming through the links. When you’re reading the whole text the difference isn’t so big (though I’d still prefer “link, try the WebGPU demo” to “try the WebGPU demo, link, here”), but it’s common to navigate through documents by heading or by link. (Related: all desktop browsers support navigating through the document by link/form field with the Tab key.) Imagine also reading through the whole document and then deciding you want to click on one of the links. You’ll execute an action like “back to last link”, and the screen reader will announce “link, here”. Now which link was that? And so you’ll have to ask it to read the whole line before you find out, which really slows you down.
- carabiner 6y agoOriginal: If you have Safari, you can try it [here]. Better: If you have Safari, [you can try it]. Best: [Try it on Safari]. -- Original: The tuning code can be found [here]. The basic idea is... Better: The [tuning code is available]. The basic idea is... Best: The basic idea of the [tuning code] is... -- See how explicit it is? How it reads better, but also how anyone scanning the blue links immediately gets an idea of the link's destination? Do you prefer reading things in two steps or one? This way, the link text informs, rather than being a reference back to previous text.
- zimpenfish 6y agoThe M1 MacBook Pro gets just over 1TFlops. best: 1022.61 gflops [numthreads(2, 16, 1)] compute void main(constant float4[] A : register(u0), constant float4[] B : register(u1), device float4[] C : register(u2), float3 threadID : SV_DispatchThreadID) { [...etc...]
- jeffbee 6y agoThere must be some quantization happening here for us to both get the same gflops to 6 significant digits.
- brrrrrm 6y agoI looked into this in the past: it's the timing API (and the fact that I'm not running that many iterations of the kernels). Browsers restrict the resolution to prevent side-channel attacks
- Jonovono 6y agoThat's exactly what I got on my air ``` best: 1022.61 gflops [numthreads(2, 16, 1)] compute void main(constant float4[] A : register(u0), constant float4[] B : register(u1), device float4[] C : register(u2), float3 threadID : SV_DispatchThreadID) { uint m = uint(threadID.x); uint n = uint(threadID.y); ```
- fazulzip 6y agoM1 Mac Mini best: 1022.61 gflops [numthreads(2, 4, 1)] compute void main(constant float4[] A : register(u0), constant float4[] B : register(u1), device float4[] C : register(u2), float3 threadID : SV_DispatchThreadID)
- thebigspacefuck 6y agoMy iPhone XS is faster?? best: 2684.35 gflops [numthreads(16, 16, 1)] compute void main(constant float4[] A : register(u0), constant float4[] B : register(u1), device float4[] C : register(u2), float3 threadID : SV_DispatchThreadID) { uint m = uint(threadID.x); uint n = uint(threadID.y);
- jeffbee 6y ago1023 gflops on the M1 mini using the kernel in the blog post, although if I let it run some more it discovers an 8-way unroll that's a bit quicker (1073).
- gerry_shaw 6y agoRidiculous comparison but 4 Gflops on a 2017 12" MacBook.... Looking forward to an upgrade this year.
- nknealk 6y agoI just upgraded from a 2017 12" macbook to an M1 air. It's day and night in terms of performance across the board. I love the fanless design and the M1 air runs cooler than the 12". Also the keyboard is much better.
- red369 6y agoAnother ridiculous comparison - 70.2 gflops on a iPhone SE 2016 (actually it hit 109 at one point, but that seems to be a fluke, whereas ~70 was hit fairly reliably).
- nodesocket 6y agoThis is promising as Deno made a recent announcement[1] of full WebGPU support. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26323600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26323600
- qeternity 6y agoI usually avoid hype. But the M1 is just unreal. I was back in the office for the first time in months, and since getting my M1 MBP...my overclocked i5 hackintosh with 4x RAM just disappointed. It didn’t feel slow, but it stopped feeling fast.
- pengaru 6y agoi5, so you're comparing to what, a 14nm processor? yawn.
- mberning 6y agoAnd the m1 is an entry level part used in some of their cheaper products. I can’t wait to see what M2 or M1x has in store. It’s gonna be bonkers.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoI’m a bit worried every time I hear this. We are setting our expectations so high... doesn’t seem like it’s possible for the M2 to be as much of a leap over the M1 as the M1 was over the status quo. The M2 might be amazing, but now that we are all awake to what’s possible I doubt it’s going to blow our socks off quite as much as we hope. But the fact that we have anything to look forward to at all is awesome. These are super exciting times in the computing space. Processors have been boring for way too long.
- nindalf 6y agoI'm a cynical bastard, but the M1 MacBook Air is the real deal. I don't recall being so pleased with a laptop in a long, long time. I'm yet to find something I could possibly gripe about.
- kelchm 6y agoCompletely agreed. I've owned a lot of laptops and other devices... There's no question at this point that the M1 MBA has become my all time favorite. The only complaint I have is that you can't run two external monitors off of it, but I have no doubt that the next generation will address that.
- aminozuur 6y agoUsing a DisplayLink adapter, you can extend a second external display. Still silly these machines they can't do it out of the box.
- agloeregrets 6y agoBingo. I do this. It's a little buggy every now and then, you lose unlock with Apple Watch and there is a small performance cost on one core of the system, but they just shipped a native driver too. Compared to my coworker's 10 core i9 build with over 64GB of ram, my base model Macbook Air builds our node app in half the time.
- herpderperator 6y agoJust be aware that DisplayLink uses the CPU to do this, so it will increase overall CPU utilisation, and you'll notice dropped frames occasionally.
- SXX 6y agoI kind a like that I can run my primary display at 164Hz via dedicated Type-C to DisplayPort adapter. Too bad DisplayLink can't go beyond 60Hz on 2K screen.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sxp 6y agoWhat WebGPU API is this using? If I try on Chrome Canary after enabling WebGPU under `chrome://flags`, I get an exception on the `device.createBindGroupLayout` call because "required member entries is undefined". The API call on the demo page doesn't seem to match the spec at https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#GPUDevice-createBindGroupLayout https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#GPUDevice-createBindGroupLa... If I change to code to refer to `entries: ...` instead of `bindings: ...`, I get further, but it fails on a missing `createBufferMapped` function. Firefox nightly just crashes at this stage.
- brrrrrm 6y agoit's Safari's WSL API, which doesn't work on the other browsers. There's a bit of a debate about the API (Spir-V vs WSL/WHSL), you can find some context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022962
- jdashg 6y agoThe debate was settled long ago. The resolution was WGSL: https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/wgsl.html https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/wgsl.html
- cpeterso 6y agoI got the same createBindGroupLayout error in Firefox and filed a Firefox bug before I saw brrrrrm's sibling comment about Safari's WSL API. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1696336 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1696336 If your Firefox actually crashed, do you see any crash report IDs in "about:crashes"?
- mbroncano 6y agoiPhone 12 Pro - 397 GFlops!! Sometimes it’s just hard to realize that we’re carrying a super computer in our pockets ...
- gnatman 6y agoTwice as fast as the #1 supercomputer in the world 1994-1996, the Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel.
- tablespoon 6y ago> Sometimes it’s just hard to realize that we’re carrying a super computer in our pockets ... I mean, that's probably been true since forever. A "super computer" is only super relative to other machines from the same era. If you can compare between eras, you could probably call ENIAC a "supercomputer" and some early pocket calculators "a supercomputer [ENIAC] in your pocket." In other words "a supercomputer in your pocket" is marketing nonsense.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoNot to mention the API and computing model of a supercomputer is vastly different to a phone.
- kergonath 6y agoPhones are heterogeneous multi-core devices these days, with sophisticated memory architectures. They don’t have infiniband but that’s not too far from cutting edge HPC node architectures from ~ a decade ago. I am sure you can use MPI on them as well. Sure, nobody needs to run ScaLAPACK or $random_simulation_code on a phone, but AFAIK there’s nothing stopping them. The difference between a phone and a cluster node is mostly one of use cases, not technology.
- photojosh 6y ago12 Pro Max - 457 GFlops! Did you leave yours running long enough? It took mine over a minute to get to that score.
- remoquete 6y agoIn 1996 you needed 1,600 sq ft of supercomputing hardware to reach the same mark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red
- ashton314 6y agoI like this metric: sq ft of supercomputer-year. It'd be fun to see comparisons of, say, phones, holding supercomputer-year constant.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoHow many libraries of Congress is that per second?
- tyingq 6y agoFor a little less distant comparison, you could buy a Sun E10k in 1997. It was roughly two full racks in size with 64 total Sparc CPUS delivering ~50GFlops. So 18 of those needed, 36 full racks of space, 1152 CPUs to get to 900GFlops. Each 10k is roughly 39"W x 50"D x 70"H, so about ~244 square feet of floor space for 18 of them, not including space needed around it. Including the space around it, it would be a typical 1BR apartment full of compute. Also, I assume the M1 does significantly better than 900 GFlops if you don't run it through the browser.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoEven more exciting would be a power use comparison, including for the air conditioning and other auxiliary support needs. Exciting times we live in
- tyingq 6y agoA single E10k fully populated needs 11,041 watts, not including the needed air conditioning. So 198kW for 18 of them. I don't know how to convert Btus/hr into power, but each E10k needs 37,165 Btus/hr of A/C. The Macbook Air M1 would be something lower than 30W, since that's what the power supply is rated for.
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoThe only thing that upsets me about Apple's M1 performance is that I don't think it's going to get any better from here in terms of real everyday speed. The phenomenon of everyone being blown away by the M1's performance is based so much on the fact that developers haven't built a lot of software on it yet. Engineers all over the world will "figure out" how to take this fast hardware and make it feel slow again.
- leokennis 6y agoIn general, yes, a new laptop hits its peak performance on day one. Software is most often written to perform well on the “median machine”, and today’s top performing computer is tomorrow’s bargain bin underachiever. However, the M1 is a huge leap forward. It gives you a maybe 3 year head start on all other computers. So no, in a few years it won’t be as revolutionary and fast as it is today. But I think it’s safe to say you can expect an M1 to last you a good few years longer than a similarly priced Intel based laptop you can purchase today.
- shakezula 6y agoYeah I don't really understand what the parent comment is trying to say. They wouldn't have this argument if it was a new processor from Intel or AMD, just seems like the point is moot - developers will _always_ utilize available resources, it doesn't mean that the pursuit of more efficient resources is not worthwhile.
- uyt 6y agoThis is just the unfortunate consequence of devs not bothering to optimize something if it runs fast enough on their own machine. Stuff that is just on the edge of human perception (100ms or so?) might become a few times slower on an older machine and become noticeably laggy. I think there are now more tools to help with phenomenon. For example for web dev, chrome has a built-in cpu/network throttler so you can simulate a low-end device.
- tdsamardzhiev 6y agoElectron blows my mind every time I open Activity Monitor. How on the Earth does Spotify manage to use 2GB RAM and 48 threads for a music player?!
- SXX 6y agoToo bad it's also hit 200GBW / hour on SSD writes of my 16GB Air when swapping even though memory usage only went as high as 13GB.
- lunixbochs 6y agoWait do you have an easy repro for this that doesn't go over ~16GB total memory used? I'm not actually convinced it's caused by swap.
- SXX 6y agoI do have repro for MacOS swapping even though it's can just be dropping filesystem cache. Obviously 200GBW / hours is when Windows VM is running and there is 5GB of swap usage, but again there is still plenty of unused memory.
- lunixbochs 6y agoCan you post a quick summary of what's running and the amount of ram allocated to the vm? Is there one process claiming to have written terabytes of disk in Activity Monitor? Would be curious to repro as my M1 is nowhere near this and it's even an 8GB model.
- SXX 6y agoIf you dont mind come back check reply later then I'll post reproduction once I can. Might be in 8-10 hours. Few people on HN check old replies though.
- lunixbochs 6y agoI'll check, thanks! Or you can tweet at me, as I see you found that thread as well.
- vardump 6y agoAlso curious, waiting for your results. Been putting off M1 purchase due to this issue.
- nynx 6y agoYou probably won't get this performance when webgpu is finalized. It has to add bounds and sanity checks. It's unclear how much worse the perf will be.
- brrrrrm 6y agothis is a good point, and I'm quite curious what the hit will be. Safari makes it substantially easier to enable WebGPU than Chrome does (requiring a canary version and flags), which leads me to believe there's already some security mechanisms in place. But, time will tell!
- captainbland 6y agoI tried it with Chrome Canary with the relevant flag but unfortunately it didn't seem to work with this particular site failing with "TypeError: Failed to execute 'createBindGroupLayout' on 'GPUDevice': required member entries is undefined.". Shame as I wanted to see what happened if I pitted my desktop against it. Of course it's likely the WebGPU implementations between browsers are not equivalent from a performance point of view.
- brrrrrm 6y agoUnfortunately the browsers haven't quite settled on a standard, so the code posted only works in Safari. More context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022962
- andy_ppp 6y agoI like the M1 in theory but my work’s weird crusty express app produces an empty response on localhost on the M1. It works on everything else of course and even all the microservices work (also express) but at this point I’m stumped. Maybe I should just try x86 node for now? I think my point is, for developers it’s not working out that great in a lot of cases, especially docker and so on. Performance is not everything if you were hoping to get some actual work done!
- javajosh 6y agoYes I'd be surprised if the fiddly open-source parts of non-XCode toolchains are reliably being built for M1 (or ARM in general) yet. An interesting downside to the M1 macs for sure, at least for a while. Thanks for bringing it up.
- thoughtsimple 6y agoNow that Homebrew is up and running on Apple Silicon, I haven't found too much that doesn't work. MacPorts seems to mostly working too though at this point brew seems more up to date. If you want to get an M1 Mac for development, I haven't found too many things that don't work and most work very well. The compile speed on even an M1 MacBook Air is incredible.
- ngcc_hk 6y agowaiting for this and get I can now exchange my developer one coupon with a real one ...
- martinald 6y agoActually, I've found the opposite. XCode stuff I found janky, poorly thought out and requiring arcane compiler flags set and a bunch of cryptic error messages. Homebrew works great on M1. I use it a lot and have only had one problem (some gem on ruby doesn't compile properly) where I've had to switch to the x86 version, but it all seems to work side by side perfectly and you can just prefix any command with _arch x86-64_ if you do need x86.
- deleted 6y ago
- baybal2 6y agoCan wait for experimental WebGPU miner hitging you on every page =P
- fxtentacle 6y agoThat's almost as much as a credit card sized passively cooled NVIDIA Jetson TX2.
- tppiotrowski 6y agoHopefully WebGPU lands in Safari faster than WebGL2, which is already in the works but lagging behind FF and Chrome.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIs 900GFlops of GPU compute supposed to be impressive?
- hellotomyrars 6y agoTo take this comment as a serious question: Maybe, it depends? Context is everything. Certainly compared to the same benchmark on the non-M1 hardware as presented by the author, yes. In general this is a very specific test of multiple technologies and whether it is relevant or meaningful is certainly up for debate but if you take it on face value of the number being presented it is either impressive or not impressive based on what you are comparing it to. I think the very specific parameters of the test here make the result largely arbitrary and irrelevant to an end-user when you consider that WebGPU isn't currently relevant to users. Outside of the test and more generally the M1 delivers incredible performance relative to it's power consumption which I think is what is truly impressive about it. Personally I hope one day Apple will finally give up on trying to make a hard stance about keeping the Mac/iOS devices separate and just give the damn things a touch screen. I know they would prefer that I own both a Mac and an iPad but it's really absurd when the only thing separating them now is touch input.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIt's really not. They are comparing it to ancient Intel integrated graphics. It's not the actual competitor in this class.
- hellotomyrars 6y agoWhich is typical of devices in this size/cost. Intel Iris/UHD is exactly the competitor in this class. Some of the recent integrated AMD graphics are modestly capable but are also part of a 35w or higher TDP packages. Looking beyond this arbitrary test, results like these: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... are incredible for Rise of the Tomb Raider on those settings with that power consumption.
- linuxhansl 6y agoNot sure if that means much since it's theoretical only... The GTX 1650 Max-Q in my laptop can reach 5.1 TFLOPS at half precision according to spec.
- sp332 6y agoThis isn't in any spec, it's a benchmark run.
- linuxhansl 6y agoI was referring to my statement being of theoretical nature - as opposed to this test which was a real benchmark. :) Upon re-reading I realize the wording was ambiguous.
- M4R5H4LL 6y agobest: 2386.09 gflops Chipset Model: AMD Radeon Pro W5700X
- xyst 6y agoif apple ever creates and leases their hardware for commercial use, it might actually disrupt the google and amazon stranglehold in the compute space. if power consumption is reduced to a minimum with their in-house arm processors, and they are highly efficient. then they could significantly undercut their competition since their costs are very low.
- tyingq 6y agoIs it clear that Apple is that far ahead of whatever Neoverse based CPUs are coming? Meaning, that disruption is probably already available to Amazon soon-ish as "Graviton 3".
- qbasic_forever 6y agoGiven the current chip shortage issues and looooong hardware lead times it would not surprise me to see someone with more money than sense be forced to do wild things like buy retail M1 mac minis to power their infrastructure. Like Azure or Google for example, if their customers are demanding ARM instances yesterday and their engineering teams are saying in-house hardware is 2-3 years away... there's no real other choice. At least get _something_ out there for people to build on and pray you can catch up before the costs get out of hand.
- 908B64B197 6y agoI want an early Google style rack (Ikea shelf really) of M1 Mac Mini with aftermarket cooling hardware running in a closet and used as an ARM build farm somewhere.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoThink bigger, I want a SoC "Server-on-a-chip" design. Integrate everything into the silicon for processing, network and basic storage I/O. I want to drop a big block on a simple 4 layer PCB and route memory, ethernet physical pins, USB, storage interface, and a power bus and that's it. The only other parts on the board are some passives. Then I want to duplicate that 64x or so on a rack sized PCB, put some cooling on the chips and board and have a super dense, super powerful cluster of ARM processors. Racks and racks and racks of these for as far as the eye can see...
- okamiueru 6y agoGroan. I suppose the smart thing is to just ignore this and let this weird fascination and appraisal of mediocrity echo on its vehement chamber. This is OK. Why is it lauded as impressive? I honestly have no clue. The hardware is good enough to do some normal tasks, right? So why pretend it's some kind of beast at doing at heavy computation measured in flops, when it's absolutely nothing even remotely impressive? If it's compute power in tflops is about half that of the Jackson tx2, which is also just cool because its a tiny computer... What's going on here? Is it a sunken cost fallacy thing? I get that the m1 hardware is pretty good for the battery life and the portability. If there is such a fanfare over this kind of mediocre performance... It leaves me confused. If its top end performance that is important, then, surely the hardware is pretty bad for the price, and even ignoring the price, its far down the list. So, what's going on here? Why are people this excited over something like this, if not to justify a purchase that is highly questionable?
- echelon 6y agoApple.
- Miraste 6y agoThere's excitement because, as it says in the post, this is a 𝟿̶𝟶̶𝟶̶ 800% improvement. The Jetson TX2 (assuming that's what you meant) is a development board and not really comparable. That said, you're comparing raw performance with webGPU, which has a big performance hit; raw vs raw the M1 is faster than the TX2.
- lohfu 6y ago800% improvement. 100% improvement is times 2, so 800% improvement is times 9
- TheRealSteel 6y agoI'm on your side but like "bimonthly" this is a lost cause.
- brokenmachine 6y agoThe overly positive comments in here are really setting off my /r/hailcorporate spidey-senses. Also all the downvotes for even mildly negative comments.
- macintux 6y ago> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lsb 6y agoOk, my Pixel 4 phone has 950 Gigaflops??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_processors#Snapdragon_855_and_855+_(2019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_pr...
- SekstiNi 6y agoFrom the article: > Hitting nearly 1TFlops in the browser (50% of peak) is extremely empowering and it's exciting to see such technology available.
- ghego1 6y agoThanks for pointing this out. This does put things in perspective. While it's true that achieving that in the browser is something, this sounds much less interesting and a lot more like the usual hype.
- LockAndLol 6y agoSo much for an "amazing M1". So it's as performant as a chip that was in a phone released a year prior.
- float4 6y agoA passively cooled M1 beats a Ryzen 3900X, an i7, and an i9 in most benchmarks[0]. But if you want to pick this single benchmark so that you can conclude that the M1 is not better than a mobile phone SoC from a year ago, then you do you. [0] https://tech.ssut.me/apple-m1-chip-benchmarks-focused-on-the-real-world-programming/ https://tech.ssut.me/apple-m1-chip-benchmarks-focused-on-the...
- eertami 6y agoSome of those tests are realistically testing RAM speed more than CPU power. Yet he has the 3900x configured with only 1600Mhz memory clock compared to 2133Mhz on the M1. The single core performance of these chips is very impressive, especially at such a TDP, but in raw multi-core CPU power it simply does not beat a 3900x. But if you want to pick one set of benchmark tests so that you can conclude that the 3900X from two years ago is not better than an M1, then you do you.
- prvc 6y agoDoes running the test trigger the unpleasant industrial smell that these models emit while under heavy use?
- winter_blue 6y agoThis is running on the GPU right? — I wonder how many GFlops it would hit, if you run it on a laptop with an RTX 3080.
- ngcc_hk 6y agomy 2019 MacBook Pro is only best: 47.30 gflops ...
- brokenmachine 6y agoWhat kind of numbers do other PCs achieve in this benchmark?
- cliftonk 6y agoMy iPhone 12 pro hits 476gflops with default settings.
- apparition 6y ago15.78 gflops -> late-2012 MBP 13" 766.96 gflops -> 2017 5K iMac
- bigmadwolf 6y ago740.51 gflops -> HP Z440 Hackintosh Xeon E5-1650v3 with Radeon RX 570 8GB
- purephase 6y agoGetting buyers remorse since I just picked up the i9 macbook pro. I passed on the M1 since I need the RAM. I just wish you could use 32gb with the initial release. It sounds like it's coming in the new few months now. I just couldn't hold out. Oh well.
- alwayssmh 6y agobecause of the fundamental difference in architecture, one should not compare ram size of an intel based mac against the ram of a M1 based mac. it's like comparing fuel tank sizes between two cars when one of them has a much more fuel efficient engine.
- TheBigSalad 6y agoDoes the M1 make programs use less RAM somehow?
- imwillofficial 6y agoI don’t know how, but similar workloads between my intel MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Air show about half the ram usage on the M1
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoThe M1 seems to be designed around the retain/release cycles that are at the core of everything Apple has been building on going all the way back to NeXTSTEP https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1326238434235568128?s=21 https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1326238434235568128?s...
- blep-arsh 6y agoThis tweet has nothing to do with RAM usage. Maybe about the performance of (uncontended) atomic operations if I'm reading this corectly.
- 6y ago
- rock_hard 6y agoThe M1 is amazing! But also, I love where this internet thing is going...GPU access in the browser...the things we are gonna build ya’ll!
- lasagnaphil 6y agoThough I'll bet someone's probably going to write some malicious code that mines Ethereum in the background...
- smcleod 6y agoPretty impressive, indeed on stable Safari I get: 1022.61 GFlops
- verytrivial 6y agoThese CPUs are truly righteous. "If only" these were generally available, but that's the whole point of Apple's increasing vertical integration. Fingers crossed there's enough wiggle room in the presumably hundreds of patents around these for reasonable copy-cat devices.
- ogrisel 6y agoThis kind of matches the performance I recorded when numpy is linked to vecLib for large matrix matrix multiplication in float32: https://gist.github.com/ogrisel/87dcf2c3ab8a304ededf75934b116b61#gistcomment-3614885 https://gist.github.com/ogrisel/87dcf2c3ab8a304ededf75934b11... Note however there is currently no way to build and link numpy and scipy against vecLib to get correct results when calling LAPACK routines (to get Singular Value Decomposition for instance). It might be related to low level fortran ABI problems but I am not an expert so I don't know for sure. It's possible to get a fully working numpy / scipy stack with OpenBLAS and gfortran by using the conda-forge distribution: https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge#download https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge#download The performance is not as good as with vecLib (see the linked benchmark) but it's already very good (e.g. compared to a similarly priced Intel or AMD laptop with OpenBLAS and maybe even MKL).
- michelb 6y agoNot bad for an entry level Mac laptop. iPhone 11: 350 RX Vega 64: 800 Radeon 560X macbook: 41
- bloqs 6y agoCan we talk about the premature SSD aging and how it will conveniently ensure you will have to throw away your laptop when it goes?
- mahesh_rm 6y agoExactly. Currently at 7% SSD wear after 2 months of normal frontend work (16gb RAM, and 1TB SSD).
- littlecranky67 6y agoI read in a german computer magazine that those SSD wear values on the M1 are only caused by faulty tools not adjusted for the new SSDs, and the readings are plain wrong. Has this been debunked in the meantime, i.e. do the tools authors have verified their sensor readings are correct?
- mahesh_rm 6y agoAs of now the picture is not 100% clear, but so far reports of everybody looking into the issue seems to indicate that data is indeed being written (either cause of a bug, or aggressive swap), and it's not a tooling misreporting issue.
- sktrdie 6y agoHow hard is it to replace the SSD?
- Flex247A 6y agoIt's irreplaceable
- captainbland 6y agoWhat's impressive about this is the high utilisation in this scenario. This is 900 GFLOPS out of a theoretical 2.1 TFLOPS on the M1. The Macbook that this site lists at a minimum comes with a 5500M which has a theoretical peak throughput of 4.4 TFLOPS, over twice that of the M1. Yet the M1 gets better almost 9 times better performance in this benchmark. Apparently. The issue is, though, we don't know whether this is actually about the architecture of the products or if the Safari WebGPU implementation is just not as well optimised for the AMD GPUs that came with the 2019 Intel Macs. Or I suppose there's also the possibility that it's actually fallen back to the iGPU which actually has a peak throughput of 384 GFLOPS.
- misja111 6y agoCould somebody explain how the M1 can reach 900 GFlops or more? My knowledge is probably outdated by the M1 cpu runs on 3.2Ghz with 8 cores and each instruction needs at least 1 clocktick, so I would say it could reach max 25.6 GFlops? Similarly, the M1 GPU seems to have only 8 cores on 1.2 Ghz. Obviously something is wrong in my reasoning, where are all those GFlops coming from?
- avianes 6y agoModern processors execute more than one instruction per cycle by executing several instructions in parallel on each core. In sequential code, it's common that some instructions are independent and can theoretically be executed in parallel, this is measured with ILP (Insturction Level Parallelism). Modern processors exploit ILP by detecting dependencies between instructions and execute independent instructions in parallel. These are superscalar processors. In addition, some extensions of the instruction sets add instructions that allow you to compute several data at the same time. They are called SIMD extensions (Single Instruction Multiple Data).
- littlestymaar 6y agoIt runs on the GPU (as written in the title). Also, this assumption is wrong too: > and each instruction needs at least 1 clocktick Modern[1] CPU use a superscalar architecture[2] which allows them to excute more than one instruction per clock cycle (usually 4 or more[3]). [1]: well, it's been the case for the past decades actually [2]: https://kb.iu.edu/d/aett https://kb.iu.edu/d/aett [3]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37041009/what-is-the-maximum-possible-ipc-can-be-achieved-by-intel-nehalem-microarchitect https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37041009/what-is-the-max...
- misja111 6y agoThanks, as you say it must be running on the GPU then because even with 5 superscalar instructions per clocktick the M1 CPU wouldn't be anywhere near 900GFlops. And besides, isn't the thing that makes the M1 so fast the fact that it's a RISC processor that is -not- superscalar? The headline suggested this had anything to do with the specific qualities of the M1 but apparently this has nothing to do with the M1 CPU? Any modern GPU can easily reach 1 TFlop nowadays.
- diegoperini 6y agoDear developers with M1 Airs, How does your dev tools behave with this device? Docker, entire Android toolchain (this one important), XCode, qemu, VirtualBox, you name it. (I'm planning to get one)
- azeirah 6y agoI use PHPStorm with Docker for my development environment. Against all odds, it actually works perfectly. MariaDB, Redis, nginx and some php/laravel services The only thing that I had trouble with was building the images, they're large images with over 200 build steps (laradock), and it took a really long time to build them. Then again, I haven't compared build times to my surface pro 7 or my ryzen 1800x, it just felt incredibly slow
- api 6y agoI have a Mac Mini with an M1. We got it for testing, but I've played with it a bit and can answer a few questions. Homebrew seems to be fine. Some packages have M1 versions and others run via Rosetta. Parallels has a preview version of Parallels Desktop for Mac that can run both Linux and Windows (tested both) for ARM64. Windows/ARM64 has its own Rosetta-like thing that seems able to run most Windows software. The M1 is stupidly fast. Going from a relatively high end Intel laptop to the M1 feels like going from a 286 to a 486 back in the 1990s, and the thing barely gets warm even after you max it out for an hour. Intel is finished.
- deergomoo 6y ago- Docker: I've had no issue with arm64 containers so far. Most of my x86 containers appear to work fine (albeit noticeably slower) under QEMU, except none of the MySQL containers start for some reason. They crash out with a Go error, so I feel like it's a Docker issue rather than a QEMU issue? - Xcode: Don't have much cause to use it, but in my limited playing around it's totally fine, as I would expect from a 1st party product. - VirtualBox: Incompatible, with apparently no intent to support ARM hosts at all. I've installed Windows for ARM in the Parallels M1 Tech Preview though, and that seems to work fine. There's also UTM which will use virtualisation for arm64 guests and QEMU for x86. - Installing random stuff via MacPorts: Totally fine, a lot of the packages I needed (nginx, PHP, etc.) are already available for arm64. The only issues I've had are Big Sur related, not ARM specific.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoI’m getting 170 gflops on my iphone 7, so that mac is like ~5 times faster at this task than my 5 years old phone? I gotta run the test on my desktop pc to decide how to feel about this.
- api 6y agoA decent GPU on a desktop will destroy it, but that's not the point. The point is the power/performance ratio. The M1 hits this while barely getting warm, while the PC requires active cooling and uses 200+ watts. Put a 40Tflops PC GPU on your lap and it will brand a stamp of the laptop's bottom cover onto your thighs.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoWell it’s not going to happen. Although I can enable webgpu in chrome canary it throws an error: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Failed to execute 'createBindGroupLayout' on 'GPUDevice': required member entries is undefined.
- turing_complete 6y agoCool, but it is not a great idea to try to move high-performance computing to the browser.
- mariust 6y ago2018 model is by far the most non dev friendly without an escape key, and I am not sure how they did the study that buttons on arrows should be of different sizes :facepalm: Further more heating wise, I am happy, I boil my tea while running tests, you can't do that on 2015 model, I tried :D It's really a fail. I don't care at all about that usb / hdmi ports talk, but make it work without needing to have ice over it, ah yeah one more thing, please fix the keyboard, this has less than 2 years and it's typing for meeee some times :(
- fredley 6y ago"Forget megahertz. We're talking gigaflops." https://neatdesigns.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/728.jpg https://neatdesigns.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/728.jpg
- pmarreck 6y agoThe raving in this thread is to me indicative of how far behind Intel has fallen behind ARM in technical terms. Now we just need more, better, faster ARM-based chips. Linux is ready, macOS is ready... but it looks like Windows is not yet ready: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoI got the 8GB MacBook Air. I didn’t notice till last week, I thought I got the 16GB one. It’s a perfect laptop for writers and front-end devs. I’m gonna get a Mac mini but for now, I haven’t felt the need to. This is my favorite laptop. It’s like Amadeus good
- hddu 6y agoI can't wait for all of googles engineers to get the m1 laptops so they can redesign gmail for the 3rd time in 5 years but this time make it even slower and more unuseable for people on non-cutting edge hardware
- brian_herman 6y agoI did the thermal pad mod and I got around 1000 Gflops. https://twitter.com/BrianHe12620155/status/1367977694483341313?s=20 https://twitter.com/BrianHe12620155/status/13679776944833413...