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> if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 Yes, you missed something huge. Apple Silicon M1 or nothing. It's just too good. Low power consumption a

> if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 Yes, you missed something huge. Apple Silicon M1 or nothing. It's just too good. Low power consumption allows the laptop to actually be used as a laptop. The power use-to-performance ratio is unmatched by anything on the market. Apple is breaking us free from decades of stagnation on the hardware front. Nothing else on the market comes close. I expect this to change in the future. Will happily switch to a linux laptop once an energy efficient alternative to x86 becomes mainstream for linux. There's just no way I can go back to x86 after tasting the sweet nectar of M1.

Underphil 5y ago
Like so many people, I love the hardware but hate the software. Hoping that once Linux is solid on there, I'll be able to get one.
- tim333 5y ago
  From a practical point of view the software works pretty well (I've got M1 Air, Big Sur) but I can understand if people want independence from Apple. It seems that virtualized Ubuntu with UTM works ok: https://youtu.be/hnwK-nkXolc https://youtu.be/hnwK-nkXolc
- BozeWolf 5y ago
  I was in the same boat around 2012. After 11 years of linux on the desktop and crappy student laptop, I needed a proper laptop for freelance jobs. Bought a macbook to put linux on. Ruined macos on day one. Reinstalled macos. Got used to it. Loved that all the hardware and software just works. Never installed ubuntu desktop again. Would like to use linux again on the desktop, but macos is so nicely integrated with everything. The desktop experience is so much better than the gnome or kde version of the day. I code embedded c and web (python). Also do the occasional cad drawing and 3d printing. All this software just works on mac. Even corporate slack works okay, ms teams as well. Word, even! It sucks to be a linux desktop user or fanboy in professional environments. Not a mac fanboy, would switch if there was something better. One drawback is that docker is just awfully slow compared to running it on native linux.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." A reference to the freedom from corporate bondage you trade away for convenience in macos. (I don't have any significant issues with Ubuntu Mate, but I don't use it for many things however.)
conductr 5y ago
Is this user specific though? I mainly still use a 2013 MacBook Air and I’ve never had power management issues. I can work 10-12 hours on a full charge. Recharge is pretty quick. 90% of my usage is browser, text editor, light terminal, and a pretty basic dev environment. The only times I’ve hit performance issues is working with video editing and graphics. I don’t game and don’t edit videos , so that was a minor pothole on this long journey. If this is the main benefit of M1 I’m likely to be under welmed is what I’m thinking. I’ll upgrade to it next, but it’s not going to force me to upgrade. I expect at some point Apple will start making my device suck via MacOS updates like they’ve done with iOS and those devices.
crooked-v 5y ago
Also, the M1X laptops (probably) release Monday and will be even more ridiculous.
- katbyte 5y ago
  I’ve been waiting for years, finally time to replace my 2015!
- foobarbaz33 5y ago
  M1X will be a trade off. Trading battery life for speed. It will still have great battery life relative the dumpster fire of x86 laptops.
  - cehrlich 5y ago
    If the M1X 16" keeps the battery size of the current model, which is the largest possible battery you can take on an airplane, it will run a bit shorter than the M1 Air at full throttle (but get more done in that time), but significantly longer than the M1 Air for casual use, because it's presumably using the exact same efficiency cores.
    - manmal 5y ago
      Depends on what they do with GPU. If they put in desktop-class(-ish) graphics, then that would impact battery life heavily (and make me super happy OTOH).
      - johnwalkr 5y ago
        It probably wouldn’t, at least not in every situation. It would probably be low power until more is needed.
      - cehrlich 5y ago
        You're actually right. MacBook Air M1: 49.9Wh | MacBook Pro 16" 2019: 100Wh The 16" MacBook Pro is rumored to have double the performance CPU cores, and either double or 4x the GPU cores. So for tasks that are strictly GPU bound, battery life could be about half of the M1 Air. Considering that this is the absolute worst case scenario battery life (assuming of course that they don't make the battery smaller), the new 16" Pro is looking pretty exciting.
deleted 5y ago
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Leherenn 5y ago
Is ARM really the reason the M1 is so much better than the current x86 CPUs? If you have a look at the competition (Qualcomm), it sounds to me that it's Apple expertise at designing a SoC and using a more advanced node that makes it such a good CPU, not really the architecture. Said another way, I highly doubt we will see a non-Apple ARM CPU outclass the x86 competition in such a way anytime soon, so saying "never x86 again" might not be very wise. ARM is not a magic bullet.
- diroussel 5y ago
  ARM isn’t _the_ reason. It is a reason. If we were to go back in time to before apple introduced it’s own SoC and before it had acquired chip design start ups, even before than ARM was on the table as that is what the iPhone ran. RISC-V wasn’t a thing back then. So the alternatives were MIPS, Power or maybe a home grown instruction set. So we just have to go with what the reality is now. The apple silicon has been well optimised for performance per watt. And it runs on an ARM instruction set that apple itself helped in the design of.
- deadmutex 5y ago
  100% agree. A lot of people asking for ARM based machines do not really realize that the reason is not because of ARM, but they just want faster/more efficient machines. I think to make a analogy for HN frontend sw devs, imagine a non-technical marketing person going to a developer and saying "I want this website in AMP, because AMP is fast.". And sure, a lot of sites with AMP framework are fast... but that doesn't mean that you have to build a site in AMP to make it fast. You could build a simple site with similar principles and get it fast too. Similarly, not all ARM laptops are fast. Even if the laptops hw is fast, you want something that can efficiently run x86 code as well for compatibility purposes for many years.
  - NobodyNada 5y ago
    It’s true that ARM alone isn’t the reason for the M1’s performance, but it’s definitely a significant factor. x86 is old — modern x86 chips are still backwards-compatible with the original 8086 from 1978 — and it’s stuck with plenty of design decisions that might have been the correct choice sometime within the past 45 years but no longer today. Whereas the M1 only implements AArch64, a complete redesign of the ARM architecture from 2012, so it doesn’t have to deal with legacy architectural baggage. (We’ve known x86 was the wrong design since the 80’s — hence why there’s no Intel chips in smartphones — but it hasn’t been realistic for anybody except Apple to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to make a high-performance non-x86 chip.) Some examples: - x86 guarantees strong memory ordering on multi-processor systems, which adds completely unnecessary overhead to every memory access. arm64 uses a weak memory model instead, providing atomic instructions with relaxed or acquire/release semantics (see https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=28m19s https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=28m19s for a more detailed discussion). This significantly improves performance all around the board, but especially with reference counting operations (which are extremely common and often a bottleneck in code written in ObjC/Swift): https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128 https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128 > fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1 - x86 instruction decode is pretty awful, a significant bottleneck, and not parallelizable due to the haphazardly-designed variable-length CISC instruction set. arm64’s instruction set is highly regular and easy to decode, so Apple can decode up to 8 instructions per clock (as opposed to 4 for x86 chips). Most sources agree this is why the M1 can have such a big out-of-order-execution window and achieve such high instruction-level parallelism compared to Intel/AMD. - x86_64 has only 16 architectural registers, compared to 32 for arm64. This means the compiler has a much harder time generating efficient, parallelizable code and must resort to spilling registers much more often.
bo1024 5y ago
What are you doing on your laptop where you can see such a big difference? My x86 laptop (Purism Librem 14) has an all-day battery and plenty more performance than I need. But I don't do things like compile code all day. If I were running a really big compute task I'd use a desktop or cluster.
- zrm 5y ago
  This is what I don't get about high performance laptops. Low end Ryzen 3 laptops have four cores, single thread performance within a few percent of the fastest processors in existence and will do something like render a web page at a speed indistinguishable from instantaneous. The fastest laptops have twice that many cores. And if you actually try to use them, either half of them are low performance cores or they all clock down to a speed that makes them equivalent to a quad core desktop. Whereas for the same price as a high end laptop, you get a desktop with 12 or 16 high performance cores and >16GB memory which is so much faster for intensive tasks that the laptop should be embarrassed to show up. Why should I do anything other than buy an inexpensive laptop with a good screen and keyboard and a fast desktop I can access remotely for any kind of intensive workload?
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    I do agree ultrabook + powerful desktop is the best combo for most people who actually need a powerful computer. that's what I ran for many years. there are a few reasons why you might want a powerful laptop though, mostly coming down the limitations of remote access. using a GUI over remote kinda sucks imo. even something like text editing is not as smooth as it would be locally. photo/video editing and especially anything 3D (CAD, gaming, etc.) is really painful. there's also the security implications of enabling remote desktop. it's not a showstopper, but it's something I'd rather not worry about for my personal computer. and finally, if you have the money for a powerful desktop and a powerful laptop, why not get both? anyways, I just gave away my old xps 13 and replaced it with a zephyrus g15. it's not nearly as fast as my 9700k + 1080ti desktop, but it runs most games acceptably at 1440p. c++ compilation is very fast, though obviously not comparable to an overclocked 9700k. the portability and overall fit and finish aren't as nice as the xps 13, but now that I'm not taking the laptop everywhere as a student, I don't find it to be much of a compromise.
harshitaneja 5y ago
Agreed. I hate that M1 is so good. I got an M1 macbook pro when my older laptop broke and I needed to temporarily deal with some iOS work. I bought it thinking I would regret it and have to replace it with another machine especially being used to 15inch devices. But it turned out to be such a great experience using this device without ever worrying about charging and rosetta2 worked so much better than expected. I hate that this device is so great that when I look at other options with linux support I just get drawn back to this. It is really frustrating to have such a great hardware be limited by the software, rather the userspace(kernel and drivers seem solid). MacOS is just so frustrating at times. Asahi team's linux support can't come fast enough.
- mustache_kimono 5y ago
  What do you feel like you're missing in userspace?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    - A good (not Homebrew and not quite Macports) package manager. - Ways to permanently disable Gatekeeper - Some kind of quick setup. On Linux I use a bootstrapping script, MacOS does not offer the same extensibility. - Real virtualization support like QEMU - Real container support (if I set up another local Docker host on a Mac I swear to god...) - Up-to-date coreutils - A way to install Git without dragging along a few gigs of dependencies - Ways to monitor my network usage and ensure Apple isn't spying on me - Real encryption (eg. Apple/NSA isn't holding a master key) - CUDA support - 32-bit app execution - A way to disable the hash that gets sent to Apple every time I open an app That's just the starter kit, if I sat down with some pen and paper I could probably keep going ad-infinitum.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      - A good (not Homebrew and not quite Macports) package manager. nix? - Some kind of quick setup. On Linux I use a bootstrapping script, MacOS does not offer the same extensibility. Apple mdm implies that the hooks exist, although I know notthing of using that and it very well might be insufficient. - Real virtualization support like QEMU Isn't hyperkit decent? I agree with the general thrust of your comment, though; just unsure of some details.
52-6F-62 5y ago
I just bought one and have to agree. I was aiming for the i9 because audio production tools hadn’t migrated fully but it wasn’t available anymore so I went with an M1. inside of a month any of the tools or plugins I’ve bought in the past have all updated for the m1. Including Waves plug-ins now. Outside of software work I run Logic as my primary DAW and it’s like there are no limits. It’s fantastic.
Joeri 5y ago
I was going to replace my thinkpad with a new thinkpad, but when apple released the M1 macbook air I had to change my mind. I paid the same that I would have paid for a T series, but got something that has the sleek thin and light build quality on par with an X1 with performance of a P series and battery life that hasn't existed on thinkpads ever since they dropped power bridge. Oh, and it is fanless. If my macbook air fell into the abyss I would replace it with another air right away, it is that good. If lenovo still made thinkpads like they used to: reasonably priced, easy to upgrade and repair, with large external batteries, and with top-notch keyboards, I might have opted for a thinkpad still. But they don't make those. All new thinkpads have so-so keyboards, they all have internal batteries (and often too small), and they're getting harder to upgrade and repair with every generation. Lenovo has chosen to chase after the macbook design, and that makes me less likely to buy thinkpads, because a thinkpad will never be as good a macbook as a macbook.
- godDLL 5y ago
  Not so, and here's why: Apple is chasing a target, and so does Lenovo. But Lenovo is chasing the way a MacBook used to be, which is good in my opinion. And Apple is skating wherever THE PUCK ARE THEY SKATING NOW SRSLY
- Izkata 5y ago
  > If lenovo still made thinkpads like they used to: [..] and with top-notch keyboards, I might have opted for a thinkpad still. But they don't make those. All new thinkpads have so-so keyboards I've seen this a few times and am curious: I got a Thinkpad at the end of 2019, and the keyboard is waaay better than the various HP, Dell, and Asus laptops I've had in the past. Did I get lucky or were all of those just way worse than I thought? What's the difference between old and current Thinkpad keyboards?
  - Joeri 5y ago
    It depends on your definition of good, as for me most laptops have bad keyboards, and so-so is actually somewhat of a compliment. I do think thinkpad keyboards are still better than macbook keyboards, but not by as large a degree as they used to be. This article is a good summary of the keyboard situation: https://www.notebookcheck.net/X1-Carbon-Gen-9-Lenovo-has-to-be-careful-with-the-ThinkPad-keyboard.537996.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/X1-Carbon-Gen-9-Lenovo-has-to-...
mdp2021 5y ago
The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts: I use one third of that with Intel... Crunching some numbers, some benchmarks seem to place the M1 as three times faster. Through raw numbers, the M1 seems not much more "performant per watt" than the Pentium Silver - only slightly better. And, for a laptop, the importance is (in general) more on energy efficiency than in speed. Edit: danieldk rightly noted below that TDP is a "high load consumption estimate". Official data for the "situational" consumptions are a bit harder to find.
- microtonal 5y ago
  The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts That's the TDP. For light daily tasks (casual web browsing, e-mail, etc.) the M1 primarily relies on the energy-efficient Icestorm cores. While typing this comment and having some applications in the background (like Slack), package power use hovers between 40 and 300mW (roughly 100mW on average). The energy efficiency of M1 MacBook is remarkable. My wife had an M1 before I did. She was in some video meetings on battery for some hours, I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining.
  - eertami 5y ago
    >I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining. Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. I have a 13" Linux laptop with the i7-1185g. I'm not going to pretend it matches the performance/watt of an M1, but a few hours of video calling makes a completely negligible difference to battery life for me. 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline. I've never been in a situation where I needed to get back to a charger, and can happily go the whole day of development and meetings with charge left over to spare.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      We should also compare the batteries to talk about "hours". This one is around 40Wh, according to `upower -d`; when it was new, I could do light work for 12..14h (Linux "desktop"). I have been trying getting some numbers from `powerstat`, intrigued by danieldk's results of 0.1W consumption: I am getting 3.7W during this browsing session. That 0.1W must be related to the CPU only. The result from `powerstat` is aggregate (if I raise the display lightness to an uncomfortable level the consumption raises to 4.5W). I do not know how to only get the consumption of the CPU. Trying to check... Edit: I am really not sure how to disaggregate consumption and find a number comparable to that 0.1W. Maybe, danieldk, you could provide instead the aggregate consumption - the total (not just CPU) average consumption of your system? And eertami? Just to get an idea.
smoldesu 5y ago
Lol
- godDLL 5y ago
  No, he's correct on the side of speed. But that only ticks one of seven.
godDLL 5y ago
That was a significant development, six years late to the table my personal count. So yes, I'm aware. If only it did not come packaged in a sissy mirror powder-box I'd love it. They flimsy keyboard with no travel, and the fragile glossy screen with no touch/stylus are deal-breakers for me. I did try use those at the store, no good.
fulafel 5y ago
From one point of view, non-x86 efficient laptops have been mainstream for Linux users for a long time in the form of ARM Chromebooks.
pieix 5y ago
The M1 Air not having fans is the real game changer for me. If you haven't used a laptop without fans you probably don't realize how good things could be.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
+1 absolutely correct. I bought an M1 MacBook Pro early this year and it is a beast, performance wise. I just started a new ML job and my company sent me a new Intel 17” MBP, and while it is beast-like, not a beast. One trick to M1 is installing the M1 ARM version of Homebrew, so programs and libraries installed are M1 native.
fjjhn33n3h 5y ago
AMD 5850U is almost as good as M1 and it beats it in power performance benchmarks as well in multicore performance: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-vs-Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MHz/4198vs4104 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v... Both have TDP of 15 WATT. I have Thinkpad P14S Gen 2 (AMD) and can work on the machine the whole day without charger and it never ever get hot.
- zuhsetaqi 5y ago
  TDP != actual power usage especially when they're pushed to the limit
dorfsmay 5y ago
I've been hoping to see a RiscV laptop for Linux, equivalent to the M1 Mac, but not seeing anything on the horizon.
ArtWomb 5y ago
>>> Apple Silicon M1 or nothing I've used ARM based chromebooks. As well as ARM embedded boards running linux as a desktop. But I am intrigued by the Mac Mini M1 with 6K out. I wish I could get a demo of the 6K 32" Pro XDR Display. At $5K its hard to justify, but it looks like the only 6K monitor available right now ;)
fvv 5y ago
M1 with official Linux will be perfect except for price (especially ram and storage price , I need 128gb ram and 2 tb ssd), I think m1 is 'cheap' because Apple is buying apple customers not just selling laptops..

Underphil 5y ago

Like so many people, I love the hardware but hate the software. Hoping that once Linux is solid on there, I'll be able to get one.

tim333 5y ago
From a practical point of view the software works pretty well (I've got M1 Air, Big Sur) but I can understand if people want independence from Apple. It seems that virtualized Ubuntu with UTM works ok: https://youtu.be/hnwK-nkXolc https://youtu.be/hnwK-nkXolc
BozeWolf 5y ago
I was in the same boat around 2012. After 11 years of linux on the desktop and crappy student laptop, I needed a proper laptop for freelance jobs. Bought a macbook to put linux on. Ruined macos on day one. Reinstalled macos. Got used to it. Loved that all the hardware and software just works. Never installed ubuntu desktop again. Would like to use linux again on the desktop, but macos is so nicely integrated with everything. The desktop experience is so much better than the gnome or kde version of the day. I code embedded c and web (python). Also do the occasional cad drawing and 3d printing. All this software just works on mac. Even corporate slack works okay, ms teams as well. Word, even! It sucks to be a linux desktop user or fanboy in professional environments. Not a mac fanboy, would switch if there was something better. One drawback is that docker is just awfully slow compared to running it on native linux.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." A reference to the freedom from corporate bondage you trade away for convenience in macos. (I don't have any significant issues with Ubuntu Mate, but I don't use it for many things however.)

conductr 5y ago

Is this user specific though? I mainly still use a 2013 MacBook Air and I’ve never had power management issues. I can work 10-12 hours on a full charge. Recharge is pretty quick. 90% of my usage is browser, text editor, light terminal, and a pretty basic dev environment. The only times I’ve hit performance issues is working with video editing and graphics. I don’t game and don’t edit videos , so that was a minor pothole on this long journey. If this is the main benefit of M1 I’m likely to be under welmed is what I’m thinking. I’ll upgrade to it next, but it’s not going to force me to upgrade. I expect at some point Apple will start making my device suck via MacOS updates like they’ve done with iOS and those devices.

crooked-v 5y ago

Also, the M1X laptops (probably) release Monday and will be even more ridiculous.

katbyte 5y ago
I’ve been waiting for years, finally time to replace my 2015!
foobarbaz33 5y ago
M1X will be a trade off. Trading battery life for speed. It will still have great battery life relative the dumpster fire of x86 laptops.
- cehrlich 5y ago
  If the M1X 16" keeps the battery size of the current model, which is the largest possible battery you can take on an airplane, it will run a bit shorter than the M1 Air at full throttle (but get more done in that time), but significantly longer than the M1 Air for casual use, because it's presumably using the exact same efficiency cores.
  - manmal 5y ago
    Depends on what they do with GPU. If they put in desktop-class(-ish) graphics, then that would impact battery life heavily (and make me super happy OTOH).
    - johnwalkr 5y ago
      It probably wouldn’t, at least not in every situation. It would probably be low power until more is needed.
    - cehrlich 5y ago
      You're actually right. MacBook Air M1: 49.9Wh | MacBook Pro 16" 2019: 100Wh The 16" MacBook Pro is rumored to have double the performance CPU cores, and either double or 4x the GPU cores. So for tasks that are strictly GPU bound, battery life could be about half of the M1 Air. Considering that this is the absolute worst case scenario battery life (assuming of course that they don't make the battery smaller), the new 16" Pro is looking pretty exciting.

deleted 5y ago

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Leherenn 5y ago

Is ARM really the reason the M1 is so much better than the current x86 CPUs? If you have a look at the competition (Qualcomm), it sounds to me that it's Apple expertise at designing a SoC and using a more advanced node that makes it such a good CPU, not really the architecture. Said another way, I highly doubt we will see a non-Apple ARM CPU outclass the x86 competition in such a way anytime soon, so saying "never x86 again" might not be very wise. ARM is not a magic bullet.

diroussel 5y ago
ARM isn’t _the_ reason. It is a reason. If we were to go back in time to before apple introduced it’s own SoC and before it had acquired chip design start ups, even before than ARM was on the table as that is what the iPhone ran. RISC-V wasn’t a thing back then. So the alternatives were MIPS, Power or maybe a home grown instruction set. So we just have to go with what the reality is now. The apple silicon has been well optimised for performance per watt. And it runs on an ARM instruction set that apple itself helped in the design of.
deadmutex 5y ago
100% agree. A lot of people asking for ARM based machines do not really realize that the reason is not because of ARM, but they just want faster/more efficient machines. I think to make a analogy for HN frontend sw devs, imagine a non-technical marketing person going to a developer and saying "I want this website in AMP, because AMP is fast.". And sure, a lot of sites with AMP framework are fast... but that doesn't mean that you have to build a site in AMP to make it fast. You could build a simple site with similar principles and get it fast too. Similarly, not all ARM laptops are fast. Even if the laptops hw is fast, you want something that can efficiently run x86 code as well for compatibility purposes for many years.
- NobodyNada 5y ago
  It’s true that ARM alone isn’t the reason for the M1’s performance, but it’s definitely a significant factor. x86 is old — modern x86 chips are still backwards-compatible with the original 8086 from 1978 — and it’s stuck with plenty of design decisions that might have been the correct choice sometime within the past 45 years but no longer today. Whereas the M1 only implements AArch64, a complete redesign of the ARM architecture from 2012, so it doesn’t have to deal with legacy architectural baggage. (We’ve known x86 was the wrong design since the 80’s — hence why there’s no Intel chips in smartphones — but it hasn’t been realistic for anybody except Apple to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to make a high-performance non-x86 chip.) Some examples: - x86 guarantees strong memory ordering on multi-processor systems, which adds completely unnecessary overhead to every memory access. arm64 uses a weak memory model instead, providing atomic instructions with relaxed or acquire/release semantics (see https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=28m19s https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=28m19s for a more detailed discussion). This significantly improves performance all around the board, but especially with reference counting operations (which are extremely common and often a bottleneck in code written in ObjC/Swift): https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128 https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128 > fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1 - x86 instruction decode is pretty awful, a significant bottleneck, and not parallelizable due to the haphazardly-designed variable-length CISC instruction set. arm64’s instruction set is highly regular and easy to decode, so Apple can decode up to 8 instructions per clock (as opposed to 4 for x86 chips). Most sources agree this is why the M1 can have such a big out-of-order-execution window and achieve such high instruction-level parallelism compared to Intel/AMD. - x86_64 has only 16 architectural registers, compared to 32 for arm64. This means the compiler has a much harder time generating efficient, parallelizable code and must resort to spilling registers much more often.

bo1024 5y ago

What are you doing on your laptop where you can see such a big difference? My x86 laptop (Purism Librem 14) has an all-day battery and plenty more performance than I need. But I don't do things like compile code all day. If I were running a really big compute task I'd use a desktop or cluster.

zrm 5y ago
This is what I don't get about high performance laptops. Low end Ryzen 3 laptops have four cores, single thread performance within a few percent of the fastest processors in existence and will do something like render a web page at a speed indistinguishable from instantaneous. The fastest laptops have twice that many cores. And if you actually try to use them, either half of them are low performance cores or they all clock down to a speed that makes them equivalent to a quad core desktop. Whereas for the same price as a high end laptop, you get a desktop with 12 or 16 high performance cores and >16GB memory which is so much faster for intensive tasks that the laptop should be embarrassed to show up. Why should I do anything other than buy an inexpensive laptop with a good screen and keyboard and a fast desktop I can access remotely for any kind of intensive workload?
- leetcrew 5y ago
  I do agree ultrabook + powerful desktop is the best combo for most people who actually need a powerful computer. that's what I ran for many years. there are a few reasons why you might want a powerful laptop though, mostly coming down the limitations of remote access. using a GUI over remote kinda sucks imo. even something like text editing is not as smooth as it would be locally. photo/video editing and especially anything 3D (CAD, gaming, etc.) is really painful. there's also the security implications of enabling remote desktop. it's not a showstopper, but it's something I'd rather not worry about for my personal computer. and finally, if you have the money for a powerful desktop and a powerful laptop, why not get both? anyways, I just gave away my old xps 13 and replaced it with a zephyrus g15. it's not nearly as fast as my 9700k + 1080ti desktop, but it runs most games acceptably at 1440p. c++ compilation is very fast, though obviously not comparable to an overclocked 9700k. the portability and overall fit and finish aren't as nice as the xps 13, but now that I'm not taking the laptop everywhere as a student, I don't find it to be much of a compromise.

harshitaneja 5y ago

Agreed. I hate that M1 is so good. I got an M1 macbook pro when my older laptop broke and I needed to temporarily deal with some iOS work. I bought it thinking I would regret it and have to replace it with another machine especially being used to 15inch devices. But it turned out to be such a great experience using this device without ever worrying about charging and rosetta2 worked so much better than expected. I hate that this device is so great that when I look at other options with linux support I just get drawn back to this. It is really frustrating to have such a great hardware be limited by the software, rather the userspace(kernel and drivers seem solid). MacOS is just so frustrating at times. Asahi team's linux support can't come fast enough.

mustache_kimono 5y ago
What do you feel like you're missing in userspace?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  - A good (not Homebrew and not quite Macports) package manager. - Ways to permanently disable Gatekeeper - Some kind of quick setup. On Linux I use a bootstrapping script, MacOS does not offer the same extensibility. - Real virtualization support like QEMU - Real container support (if I set up another local Docker host on a Mac I swear to god...) - Up-to-date coreutils - A way to install Git without dragging along a few gigs of dependencies - Ways to monitor my network usage and ensure Apple isn't spying on me - Real encryption (eg. Apple/NSA isn't holding a master key) - CUDA support - 32-bit app execution - A way to disable the hash that gets sent to Apple every time I open an app That's just the starter kit, if I sat down with some pen and paper I could probably keep going ad-infinitum.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    - A good (not Homebrew and not quite Macports) package manager. nix? - Some kind of quick setup. On Linux I use a bootstrapping script, MacOS does not offer the same extensibility. Apple mdm implies that the hooks exist, although I know notthing of using that and it very well might be insufficient. - Real virtualization support like QEMU Isn't hyperkit decent? I agree with the general thrust of your comment, though; just unsure of some details.

52-6F-62 5y ago

I just bought one and have to agree. I was aiming for the i9 because audio production tools hadn’t migrated fully but it wasn’t available anymore so I went with an M1. inside of a month any of the tools or plugins I’ve bought in the past have all updated for the m1. Including Waves plug-ins now. Outside of software work I run Logic as my primary DAW and it’s like there are no limits. It’s fantastic.

Joeri 5y ago

I was going to replace my thinkpad with a new thinkpad, but when apple released the M1 macbook air I had to change my mind. I paid the same that I would have paid for a T series, but got something that has the sleek thin and light build quality on par with an X1 with performance of a P series and battery life that hasn't existed on thinkpads ever since they dropped power bridge. Oh, and it is fanless. If my macbook air fell into the abyss I would replace it with another air right away, it is that good. If lenovo still made thinkpads like they used to: reasonably priced, easy to upgrade and repair, with large external batteries, and with top-notch keyboards, I might have opted for a thinkpad still. But they don't make those. All new thinkpads have so-so keyboards, they all have internal batteries (and often too small), and they're getting harder to upgrade and repair with every generation. Lenovo has chosen to chase after the macbook design, and that makes me less likely to buy thinkpads, because a thinkpad will never be as good a macbook as a macbook.

godDLL 5y ago
Not so, and here's why: Apple is chasing a target, and so does Lenovo. But Lenovo is chasing the way a MacBook used to be, which is good in my opinion. And Apple is skating wherever THE PUCK ARE THEY SKATING NOW SRSLY
Izkata 5y ago
> If lenovo still made thinkpads like they used to: [..] and with top-notch keyboards, I might have opted for a thinkpad still. But they don't make those. All new thinkpads have so-so keyboards I've seen this a few times and am curious: I got a Thinkpad at the end of 2019, and the keyboard is waaay better than the various HP, Dell, and Asus laptops I've had in the past. Did I get lucky or were all of those just way worse than I thought? What's the difference between old and current Thinkpad keyboards?
- Joeri 5y ago
  It depends on your definition of good, as for me most laptops have bad keyboards, and so-so is actually somewhat of a compliment. I do think thinkpad keyboards are still better than macbook keyboards, but not by as large a degree as they used to be. This article is a good summary of the keyboard situation: https://www.notebookcheck.net/X1-Carbon-Gen-9-Lenovo-has-to-be-careful-with-the-ThinkPad-keyboard.537996.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/X1-Carbon-Gen-9-Lenovo-has-to-...

mdp2021 5y ago

The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts: I use one third of that with Intel... Crunching some numbers, some benchmarks seem to place the M1 as three times faster. Through raw numbers, the M1 seems not much more "performant per watt" than the Pentium Silver - only slightly better. And, for a laptop, the importance is (in general) more on energy efficiency than in speed. Edit: danieldk rightly noted below that TDP is a "high load consumption estimate". Official data for the "situational" consumptions are a bit harder to find.

microtonal 5y ago
The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts That's the TDP. For light daily tasks (casual web browsing, e-mail, etc.) the M1 primarily relies on the energy-efficient Icestorm cores. While typing this comment and having some applications in the background (like Slack), package power use hovers between 40 and 300mW (roughly 100mW on average). The energy efficiency of M1 MacBook is remarkable. My wife had an M1 before I did. She was in some video meetings on battery for some hours, I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining.
- eertami 5y ago
  >I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining. Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. I have a 13" Linux laptop with the i7-1185g. I'm not going to pretend it matches the performance/watt of an M1, but a few hours of video calling makes a completely negligible difference to battery life for me. 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline. I've never been in a situation where I needed to get back to a charger, and can happily go the whole day of development and meetings with charge left over to spare.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    We should also compare the batteries to talk about "hours". This one is around 40Wh, according to `upower -d`; when it was new, I could do light work for 12..14h (Linux "desktop"). I have been trying getting some numbers from `powerstat`, intrigued by danieldk's results of 0.1W consumption: I am getting 3.7W during this browsing session. That 0.1W must be related to the CPU only. The result from `powerstat` is aggregate (if I raise the display lightness to an uncomfortable level the consumption raises to 4.5W). I do not know how to only get the consumption of the CPU. Trying to check... Edit: I am really not sure how to disaggregate consumption and find a number comparable to that 0.1W. Maybe, danieldk, you could provide instead the aggregate consumption - the total (not just CPU) average consumption of your system? And eertami? Just to get an idea.

smoldesu 5y ago

Lol

godDLL 5y ago
No, he's correct on the side of speed. But that only ticks one of seven.

godDLL 5y ago

That was a significant development, six years late to the table my personal count. So yes, I'm aware. If only it did not come packaged in a sissy mirror powder-box I'd love it. They flimsy keyboard with no travel, and the fragile glossy screen with no touch/stylus are deal-breakers for me. I did try use those at the store, no good.

fulafel 5y ago

From one point of view, non-x86 efficient laptops have been mainstream for Linux users for a long time in the form of ARM Chromebooks.

pieix 5y ago

The M1 Air not having fans is the real game changer for me. If you haven't used a laptop without fans you probably don't realize how good things could be.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

+1 absolutely correct. I bought an M1 MacBook Pro early this year and it is a beast, performance wise. I just started a new ML job and my company sent me a new Intel 17” MBP, and while it is beast-like, not a beast. One trick to M1 is installing the M1 ARM version of Homebrew, so programs and libraries installed are M1 native.

fjjhn33n3h 5y ago

AMD 5850U is almost as good as M1 and it beats it in power performance benchmarks as well in multicore performance: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-vs-Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MHz/4198vs4104 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v... Both have TDP of 15 WATT. I have Thinkpad P14S Gen 2 (AMD) and can work on the machine the whole day without charger and it never ever get hot.

zuhsetaqi 5y ago
TDP != actual power usage especially when they're pushed to the limit

dorfsmay 5y ago

I've been hoping to see a RiscV laptop for Linux, equivalent to the M1 Mac, but not seeing anything on the horizon.

ArtWomb 5y ago

>>> Apple Silicon M1 or nothing I've used ARM based chromebooks. As well as ARM embedded boards running linux as a desktop. But I am intrigued by the Mac Mini M1 with 6K out. I wish I could get a demo of the 6K 32" Pro XDR Display. At $5K its hard to justify, but it looks like the only 6K monitor available right now ;)

fvv 5y ago

M1 with official Linux will be perfect except for price (especially ram and storage price , I need 128gb ram and 2 tb ssd), I think m1 is 'cheap' because Apple is buying apple customers not just selling laptops..