10 ms·

In my usage, which is game development with Unity, I haven't really been particularly impressed with the performance improvements on my 10-core M1 Pro machine.

by aroman 5y ago

In my usage, which is game development with Unity, I haven't really been particularly impressed with the performance improvements on my 10-core M1 Pro machine. I'm sure most of the blame is due to Unity (the app is a buggy mess), but it definitely took the initial "wow this is magic" down to reality very quickly for me.

zibzab 5y ago
Unity is slow on any machine. With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. It reminds me of the 64-bit ARM hype when someone benchmaked encryption (because ARMv8 has AES instructions) and everyone were made to belive that the new iPhone would be 3-4 times faster.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  I've seen little to no hype based on synthetic benchmarks. M1 macs are just really damn fast for daily usage. My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" out of the water in every conceivable way. I'd elaborate but there seriously isn't any dimension of it that isn't an improvement. Maybe the smaller display?
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    > My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" That is the issue though. Intel macbooks were notoriously badly cooled. That hurts the performance a lot. If all you have used is that, of course you find the new one a lot better. However, compared to any other high end Intel/AMD laptop, you would not perceive this much difference in speed. Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      And weirdly one of the major design changes for the new M1 Pro & Max machines were significantly improved cooling. Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's....
      - gcanyon 5y ago
        100 watts? That implies that with serious use you could burn the battery to zero in an hour. Apple's graphs don't show more than 60 watts at peak, and no one is reporting heavy fan output even when running extended benchmarks.
        sz4kerto 5y ago
        There are reviews where they actually burn through the battery in an hour. This is not surprising: the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts, plus the display consumes tens of watts in HDR mode.
        masklinn 5y ago
        > the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts In a 16” at least, the Max can go up to 92W per anandtech’s initial test, and display + ram + rest brings the wallplug draw to 120.
        sz4kerto 5y ago
        You're correct (I couldn't look it up and wanted a safe figure that still proves my point :) )
        aroman 5y ago
        1. Yes, about 100 watts. From Anandtech[0]: > Finally, stressing out both CPU and GPU at the same time, the SoC goes up to 92W package power and 120W wall active power. 2. Yes, you can burn the battery quickly under heavy use. I've killed it easily in about 2 hours during heavy Unity work. 3. When I was doing that, I did experience heavy fan output, about as loud and as hot as my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. After the heavy utilization stopped, it cooled down much more quickly than the older Intel machine. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
        em500 5y ago
        The 14-inch MBP with M1 Pro (not Max) burns 69W under full load (including GPU), so it does run through its 70Wh battery in 1 hour and 9 minutes[1]. (The 16-inch Notebookcheck review is not published yet.) [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-Pro-Laptop-in-Review-How-much-Pro-do-you-get-with-the-base-model.576665.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-P... , in the "Battery Runtime" and "Power Consumption" sections near the bottom.
    - pram 5y ago
      What a load of shit lol. The XPS 15 9570 has similar throttling issues, down to the same fixes as a MBP 16 (undervolting, disabling HT, putting pads on the VRMs, redoing the paste)
    - f6v 5y ago
      > Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling. One visit to XPS owner’s subreddit was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying it.
      - MikusR 5y ago
        One visit to Louis Rossmann YouTube channel Louis was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying Apple laptops. It's almost like people that have no problems don't go around saying that (except for Apple users)
        EricE 5y ago
        I love Louis, but a lot of his complaints are overblown. Not all of them mind you - I agree with him far more than I don't.
    - iSnow 5y ago
      I was considering an XPS and read through the Dell subreddits. People were constantly complaining how their machine was throttled and even opened it up to apply better cooling paste, undervolted it and so on. I have a hard time believing that one company is doing miracle work in a small and light laptop. That's also true in the other direction - I don't really believe that Apple's machines deliver desktop performance on battery remaining cool and quiet over longer times...
      - PolCPP 5y ago
        The 13" one (9310) is a freaking toaster. Keyboard can easily reach 43ºC+ on the left side
    - ssijak 5y ago
      The one thing where M processors absolutely excel compared to competition is what you call "general responsiveness in UI", and it is not just the hardware but how they optimised it with their OS because now they have control over the whole stack.
    - joconde 5y ago
      My XPS' thermals are a disaster. After 5 minutes of any remotely intensive game, the UI became a slideshow, unusable even for basic browsing for a few minutes after closing the game. I hope they improved in 2019, mine was only from a year before that.
- midrus 5y ago
  It is not an "HN thing". These machines are damn fast in day to day use. Absolutely zero heat, zero usage of fans and incredible battery life too. I see a lot of hype and fanboys around here regarding certain techs, but these machines are objectively on a whole different league.
  - Maakuth 5y ago
    Saying "absolutely zero heat" is not effective in refuting claims of fanboyism. By quick google these chips have 90W maximum TDP. That is not zero.
  - aroman 5y ago
    Do you have one of the M1 Pros? Mine very much does gets hot and I can definitely hear the fans when I'm building a project, but both fronts are certainly improved vs the Intel Macs. Honestly, it gets about as hot and as loud as the Intel version, just far less frequently.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Huh, I made a comment about this issue just the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835) and had 5 commentators telling me that it has now been fixed, almost made me order a M1. But now you're saying it actually still runs as hot as before?
      - Toutouxc 5y ago
        You need to rephrase your question. Does M1 (any M1) still hit 90+°C at full utilization? Yes it does. Does the machine itself get warm/hot when working hard? The Air, yes (plain M1 but no fan). The 13" Pro, not really (plain M1 and has fan). The larger Pros, yes (have fans, but more powerful M1s). Do the machines get unbearably hot? Depends on what you consider unbearable. For some people, apparently not.
    - weatherlight 5y ago
      I have a m1 max and before it a 2020 m1, I still use an Intel i9 for work. With the M1s my fans only go on if Im gaming or using apps that are CPU intensive through Rosetta 2. My intel machine sounds like a leaf blower by comparison To get the most energy efficiency out of the M1s is to use binaries/programs that have been specifically compiled for the M1.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. The main thing driving this is that people are comparing a new M1 to their Intel Mac laptops with processors from ~2016 and then naturally it's a marked improvement because it's being compared to a five year old machine. You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system and they're competitive. They win some and lose others. Much was made about the M1 Max taking the single thread performance crown; for less than a month. Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. It's plausible that it will be AMD's again in a couple months when we get Zen 3 with 3D V-Cache. They're all within single digit percentages of each other and the winner is whoever released their top end processor most recently.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    > Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. I mean, yes, somewhat, in (almost comically) high power desktop configurations, depending on which benchmark you believe. This is of cold comfort to anyone who wants a fast laptop, though.
  - f6v 5y ago
    > You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system I compared my 2014 MBP to 2019 MBP and there was no marked difference. It was running hot and eating battery very fast. 2019 Intel Mac and 2020 M1 Mac are two completely different animals. Also, the price drop for a better-performing machine was jaw-dropping.
    - ohgodplsno 5y ago
      Apple selling you mid-range-3-year-old-intel CPUs (that are known to thermal throttle quite badly) at 50% markup, then robbing you slightly less hard on a product is not jaw dropping, it's merely you falling for their marketing three times in a row.
      - blitzar 5y ago
        Out of curiosity which laptop should I be looking at if I dont want to be robbed by the apple on a M1?
- nvarsj 5y ago
  Don't you think it's deserved? I haven't seriously used a macbook in nearly a decade now but the M1 is making me consider buying one. Desktop class performance in a laptop with very long battery life is just amazing. The only thing stopping me is OS X. Using it is super painful for me - it doesn't even have basic snap to edge or split window functionality. My workflow is heavily dependent on tiling WMs and it would affect my productivity.
  - ebawho44 5y ago
    https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I haven't used it myself however and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
    - nvarsj 5y ago
      Yeah I'm familiar with what is in OS X, I have had to use it a few times for work. The fullscreen approach is very clunky. And the window animations are incredibly slow. I'm used to dynamically moving windows around and tiling things quickly. I tried using yabai but it was so slow and buggy there was no point. I think magnet/rectangle helps but it is still a subpar experience.
      - howinteresting 5y ago
        I tried getting Macs to work for years with yabai etc and came to the same conclusion as you. It's garbage for my workflows. Linux is a million times better.
        nvarsj 5y ago
        I decided to get a fully spec'd out Thinkpad X13 AMD 2nd gen instead - 32gb ram, 1TB ssd, 8/16 cores, 16:10 2k screen. All for the whopping price of 1k GBP, a third the price of a similarly spec'd MBP.
  - mrctte 5y ago
    This app changes everything https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12
- Zababa 5y ago
  > With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. I wonder how much of that is due to a "finally, a good laptop" sentiment. I have used a lot of laptops over the years, and each and every one of them have been terrible in lots of ways, especially recently. If M1s "solve" the laptop problem, that would be great.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    They pretty much do. The M1 macbook is, unironically, the first laptop I've had that doesn't have any glitches. It's less powerful than a modern desktop, but not by much. More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      > More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail. UI scaling is also a big one. I have a Dell XPS 15 in 2014/2015 with Windows 8.1 and the UI scaling wasn't great.
dwaite 5y ago
You likely know this as a Unity developer, but my understanding is the native M1 support was added in 2021.2 , released a few weeks ago.
- jjcon 5y ago
  I’m still personally seeing quite a bit better performance on my old laptop with a dedicated gpu in Unity 21.2 - but the power draw is much much lower (consequently better battery life) on the Mac side which definitely has its place.
  - aroman 5y ago
    Are you comparing Windows vs Mac? If so I think that might have even more to do with perf than the hardware. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of Unity developers use it on Windows, and so it probably gets more love from Unity as a result.
    - jjcon 5y ago
      Thats possible but baking lights etc should come down to raw power unless theyve implemented something oddly
- aroman 5y ago
  Yes, I have been using that version exclusively. The non-native one is unbearably slow.

by aroman 5y ago

zibzab 5y ago

Unity is slow on any machine. With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. It reminds me of the 64-bit ARM hype when someone benchmaked encryption (because ARMv8 has AES instructions) and everyone were made to belive that the new iPhone would be 3-4 times faster.

BoorishBears 5y ago
I've seen little to no hype based on synthetic benchmarks. M1 macs are just really damn fast for daily usage. My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" out of the water in every conceivable way. I'd elaborate but there seriously isn't any dimension of it that isn't an improvement. Maybe the smaller display?
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  > My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" That is the issue though. Intel macbooks were notoriously badly cooled. That hurts the performance a lot. If all you have used is that, of course you find the new one a lot better. However, compared to any other high end Intel/AMD laptop, you would not perceive this much difference in speed. Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    And weirdly one of the major design changes for the new M1 Pro & Max machines were significantly improved cooling. Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's....
    - gcanyon 5y ago
      100 watts? That implies that with serious use you could burn the battery to zero in an hour. Apple's graphs don't show more than 60 watts at peak, and no one is reporting heavy fan output even when running extended benchmarks.
      - sz4kerto 5y ago
        There are reviews where they actually burn through the battery in an hour. This is not surprising: the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts, plus the display consumes tens of watts in HDR mode.
        masklinn 5y ago
        > the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts In a 16” at least, the Max can go up to 92W per anandtech’s initial test, and display + ram + rest brings the wallplug draw to 120.
        sz4kerto 5y ago
        You're correct (I couldn't look it up and wanted a safe figure that still proves my point :) )
      - aroman 5y ago
        1. Yes, about 100 watts. From Anandtech[0]: > Finally, stressing out both CPU and GPU at the same time, the SoC goes up to 92W package power and 120W wall active power. 2. Yes, you can burn the battery quickly under heavy use. I've killed it easily in about 2 hours during heavy Unity work. 3. When I was doing that, I did experience heavy fan output, about as loud and as hot as my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. After the heavy utilization stopped, it cooled down much more quickly than the older Intel machine. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
      - em500 5y ago
        The 14-inch MBP with M1 Pro (not Max) burns 69W under full load (including GPU), so it does run through its 70Wh battery in 1 hour and 9 minutes[1]. (The 16-inch Notebookcheck review is not published yet.) [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-Pro-Laptop-in-Review-How-much-Pro-do-you-get-with-the-base-model.576665.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-P... , in the "Battery Runtime" and "Power Consumption" sections near the bottom.
  - pram 5y ago
    What a load of shit lol. The XPS 15 9570 has similar throttling issues, down to the same fixes as a MBP 16 (undervolting, disabling HT, putting pads on the VRMs, redoing the paste)
  - f6v 5y ago
    > Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling. One visit to XPS owner’s subreddit was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying it.
    - MikusR 5y ago
      One visit to Louis Rossmann YouTube channel Louis was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying Apple laptops. It's almost like people that have no problems don't go around saying that (except for Apple users)
      - EricE 5y ago
        I love Louis, but a lot of his complaints are overblown. Not all of them mind you - I agree with him far more than I don't.
  - iSnow 5y ago
    I was considering an XPS and read through the Dell subreddits. People were constantly complaining how their machine was throttled and even opened it up to apply better cooling paste, undervolted it and so on. I have a hard time believing that one company is doing miracle work in a small and light laptop. That's also true in the other direction - I don't really believe that Apple's machines deliver desktop performance on battery remaining cool and quiet over longer times...
    - PolCPP 5y ago
      The 13" one (9310) is a freaking toaster. Keyboard can easily reach 43ºC+ on the left side
  - ssijak 5y ago
    The one thing where M processors absolutely excel compared to competition is what you call "general responsiveness in UI", and it is not just the hardware but how they optimised it with their OS because now they have control over the whole stack.
  - joconde 5y ago
    My XPS' thermals are a disaster. After 5 minutes of any remotely intensive game, the UI became a slideshow, unusable even for basic browsing for a few minutes after closing the game. I hope they improved in 2019, mine was only from a year before that.
midrus 5y ago
It is not an "HN thing". These machines are damn fast in day to day use. Absolutely zero heat, zero usage of fans and incredible battery life too. I see a lot of hype and fanboys around here regarding certain techs, but these machines are objectively on a whole different league.
- Maakuth 5y ago
  Saying "absolutely zero heat" is not effective in refuting claims of fanboyism. By quick google these chips have 90W maximum TDP. That is not zero.
- aroman 5y ago
  Do you have one of the M1 Pros? Mine very much does gets hot and I can definitely hear the fans when I'm building a project, but both fronts are certainly improved vs the Intel Macs. Honestly, it gets about as hot and as loud as the Intel version, just far less frequently.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Huh, I made a comment about this issue just the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835) and had 5 commentators telling me that it has now been fixed, almost made me order a M1. But now you're saying it actually still runs as hot as before?
    - Toutouxc 5y ago
      You need to rephrase your question. Does M1 (any M1) still hit 90+°C at full utilization? Yes it does. Does the machine itself get warm/hot when working hard? The Air, yes (plain M1 but no fan). The 13" Pro, not really (plain M1 and has fan). The larger Pros, yes (have fans, but more powerful M1s). Do the machines get unbearably hot? Depends on what you consider unbearable. For some people, apparently not.
  - weatherlight 5y ago
    I have a m1 max and before it a 2020 m1, I still use an Intel i9 for work. With the M1s my fans only go on if Im gaming or using apps that are CPU intensive through Rosetta 2. My intel machine sounds like a leaf blower by comparison To get the most energy efficiency out of the M1s is to use binaries/programs that have been specifically compiled for the M1.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. The main thing driving this is that people are comparing a new M1 to their Intel Mac laptops with processors from ~2016 and then naturally it's a marked improvement because it's being compared to a five year old machine. You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system and they're competitive. They win some and lose others. Much was made about the M1 Max taking the single thread performance crown; for less than a month. Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. It's plausible that it will be AMD's again in a couple months when we get Zen 3 with 3D V-Cache. They're all within single digit percentages of each other and the winner is whoever released their top end processor most recently.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. I mean, yes, somewhat, in (almost comically) high power desktop configurations, depending on which benchmark you believe. This is of cold comfort to anyone who wants a fast laptop, though.
- f6v 5y ago
  > You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system I compared my 2014 MBP to 2019 MBP and there was no marked difference. It was running hot and eating battery very fast. 2019 Intel Mac and 2020 M1 Mac are two completely different animals. Also, the price drop for a better-performing machine was jaw-dropping.
  - ohgodplsno 5y ago
    Apple selling you mid-range-3-year-old-intel CPUs (that are known to thermal throttle quite badly) at 50% markup, then robbing you slightly less hard on a product is not jaw dropping, it's merely you falling for their marketing three times in a row.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      Out of curiosity which laptop should I be looking at if I dont want to be robbed by the apple on a M1?
nvarsj 5y ago
Don't you think it's deserved? I haven't seriously used a macbook in nearly a decade now but the M1 is making me consider buying one. Desktop class performance in a laptop with very long battery life is just amazing. The only thing stopping me is OS X. Using it is super painful for me - it doesn't even have basic snap to edge or split window functionality. My workflow is heavily dependent on tiling WMs and it would affect my productivity.
- ebawho44 5y ago
  https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I haven't used it myself however and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
  - nvarsj 5y ago
    Yeah I'm familiar with what is in OS X, I have had to use it a few times for work. The fullscreen approach is very clunky. And the window animations are incredibly slow. I'm used to dynamically moving windows around and tiling things quickly. I tried using yabai but it was so slow and buggy there was no point. I think magnet/rectangle helps but it is still a subpar experience.
    - howinteresting 5y ago
      I tried getting Macs to work for years with yabai etc and came to the same conclusion as you. It's garbage for my workflows. Linux is a million times better.
      - nvarsj 5y ago
        I decided to get a fully spec'd out Thinkpad X13 AMD 2nd gen instead - 32gb ram, 1TB ssd, 8/16 cores, 16:10 2k screen. All for the whopping price of 1k GBP, a third the price of a similarly spec'd MBP.
- mrctte 5y ago
  This app changes everything https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12
Zababa 5y ago
> With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. I wonder how much of that is due to a "finally, a good laptop" sentiment. I have used a lot of laptops over the years, and each and every one of them have been terrible in lots of ways, especially recently. If M1s "solve" the laptop problem, that would be great.
- Filligree 5y ago
  They pretty much do. The M1 macbook is, unironically, the first laptop I've had that doesn't have any glitches. It's less powerful than a modern desktop, but not by much. More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail. UI scaling is also a big one. I have a Dell XPS 15 in 2014/2015 with Windows 8.1 and the UI scaling wasn't great.

dwaite 5y ago

You likely know this as a Unity developer, but my understanding is the native M1 support was added in 2021.2 , released a few weeks ago.

jjcon 5y ago
I’m still personally seeing quite a bit better performance on my old laptop with a dedicated gpu in Unity 21.2 - but the power draw is much much lower (consequently better battery life) on the Mac side which definitely has its place.
- aroman 5y ago
  Are you comparing Windows vs Mac? If so I think that might have even more to do with perf than the hardware. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of Unity developers use it on Windows, and so it probably gets more love from Unity as a result.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    Thats possible but baking lights etc should come down to raw power unless theyve implemented something oddly
aroman 5y ago
Yes, I have been using that version exclusively. The non-native one is unbearably slow.