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Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel
- ranjitcool1 5y ago
- rbanffy 5y agoWhat really impressed me in this was not the expected M1 to older x86 performance gap (that poor i9 must have been throttling for the whole benchmark while the fans were preparing the laptop for takeoff) but the fact you can get a much faster laptop with 4x as much memory for about the same price from Apple just a couple years later…
- grumpyprole 5y agoThe Intel chipsets were limited for a long time in that they could only support a maximum of 16GB of LPDDR ram. Yet another reason Apple must have been frustrated with Intel.
- bnt 5y agoIs there a reason Intel put that limitation in place?
- jiqiren 5y agoIncompetence.
- qayxc 5y agoMake that market segmentation instead. Intel intentionally limits consumer grade hardware in order to create distinct market segments - from overclocking to memory support and PCIe lanes.
- rbanffy 5y agoTrue, but that kind of mismanagement is what caused Apple’s migration to Intel in the first place. While it made sense for IBM, losing Apple made no business sense for Intel, as Apple was a valuable showcase partner.
- mhh__ 5y agoOf the management maybe, but it's not like the Intel staff who managed to pretty much stay competitive with the cutting edge despite them being stuck on 14nm for years forgot how to design a memory controller.
- robert_foss 5y agoProduct segmentation probably
- tcmb 5y agoThe price given in the article is not correct though, the 16" M1 Max 64GB is actually 3.900 USD (and I presume this is before sales tax, I'm from a country where advertised prices include VAT).
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoDid I miss it or did the author fail to mention the most important variable of this comparison, specifically, the frequency at which the memory of the AMD server CPU was operating at. If you're doing memory benchmarks, why omit such essential details like memory frequency, as this can have a bigger impact here than the CPU itself?
- masklinn 5y agoThe entire thing seems incredibly half-assed e.g. they're testing a 64 cores CPU on single-threaded workload (literally the only mentions of threads is that they "disable multithreading"), they repeatedly harp on the server being "over 50k" but the CPU is 5 so I can only assume most of the 50k are in the > 1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory which you apparently need to... bench hashmap lookups? The mac's pricing seems pretty bullshit as well as the lowest price to get 64GB is $3500 (Max with 24 GPU cores, and a measly 512GB SSD), which does not qualify as "around $3000" in my books.
- jhgb 5y agoSetting aside the fact that Threadripper is not really a server CPU, it tops at DDR4-3200 when it comes to memory support. Considering the custom build, it seems the most likely option. (As in, why would it use anything slower for no good reason?)
- glandium 5y agoThe Threadripper Pro has 1TB memory, which means it's likely ECC registered, which is slower at the same frequency, and it might not even be DDR4-3200 in the first place because it's rather new in ECC, and server hardware manufacturers like to use old stuff.
- ashvardanian 5y agoIts configured with the fastest memory possible on the Threadripper. The exact specs and RAM stick models match the ones mentioned in the preceding article, I have linked below. We didnt include those, as we don’t know the exact specs of RAM modules in MacBooks. https://unum.cloud/post/2021-11-25-ycsb/#our-toys https://unum.cloud/post/2021-11-25-ycsb/#our-toys
- Daniel_sk 5y agoI "downgraded" from a top spec Macbook Pro 2019 16" i9 9980HK with 64GB RAM to the new 14" M1 Pro with 32GB. Fans are at 0 RPM all the time, I haven't heard them yet. It compiles the same Android project without a sweat and with 0 RPM fan speed. The i9 was hitting 100C and maximum RPM in the same use case and took maybe three times longer. And the new macbook was about 25% cheaper than the 16" I bought in 2020. It's a completely different league - worth all the money I spent.
- thecompilr 5y agoThere is now doubt the M1 is very much cooler, but they also made the laptop much thicker to allow sufficient airflow without hitting the fans. I am pretty confident that this is the main reason to make it so much thicker than the Intel one
- tluyben2 5y agoI did the same but to an Air 16gb. Much cheaper, mostly faster and doesn't have the quirks I had with the 16". I had it replaced 3x and it's was still shit; overheated and 3x just completely died... It was the most expensive computer I bought in since the 90s (Sun or SGI were more expensive) and it was a total horror show. Apple did give me new ones no problems but they never worked well for me; fans always on and burning so hot that it was uncomfortable to work on. This new air is really fabulous; always snappy and it does not heat up at all. It's actually a bit too cold.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Daniel_sk 5y agoA colleague is working on the same project with an Air 16GB and doesn't complain. It's crazy that it doesn't even have active cooling and can be used for serious CPU intensive work. The 16" model was a big Apple failure. I had to use it in clamshell mode with an external monitor because having the macbook open with an external monitor would make the macbook run a lot hotter and the fans would spin much louder all the time. That was a pretty well known problem with the GPU and they never fixed it (probably some HW issue).
- ranguna 5y agoIn summary, apple made a better product than a two your old mac. 64 GB DDR5 M1 vs 16 GB DDR4 overheating i9 mac from 2019. This is indeed Apple to Apple, but not apples to apples.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kevingadd 5y agoI'd really love to find out how much of the m1's performance is due to the advantage of having a custom architecture designed to make Apple's refcounting mania actually perform well. I.e. somehow run all their arm code in a way that emulates the M1 instructions on a regular ARM chip with similar clocks, cache etc... probably very hard to do. Maybe you could patch a binary that came out of Apple's compiler to not use the new instructions? The atomics they use to do refcounting definitely have a measurable performance impact on x86.
- izacus 5y agoNah, most of the performance comes from: - Massive caches - Really really good power efficiency due to good manufacturing node - Massive RAM bandwidth - Very fast I/O performance of the builtin SSD It's a big, expensive chip to manufacture and it pays off with overall performance.
- saagarjha 5y agoThere are no "special" M1 refcounting instructions, they're just ARMv8.1 LSE atomics made to go really fast. (You can confirm this pretty easily: objc_retain uses cas.)
- pja 5y agoI think that’s the OP’s point? Apple optimised the snot out of their chip for the code they run. Vertical integration works, in other words?
- MaxikCZ 5y agoSure, vertical integration is nice, but why is it so hard - maybe even impossible, to achieve similar results without it? Windows is such an entrenched ecosystem with millions of PCs running it. The code running on most of them isn't complete blackbox. I find weird that Intel and AMD are not able, despite their cooperation with Microsoft, to achieve similar kinds of results.
- 5y ago
- ksec 5y agoNitpicks: >How a DDR5-powered MacBook..... LPDDR5, which was correctly labeled later in the article. LPDDR5 is not a variant of DDR5. Hence the title DDR5 powered is inaccurate. >Cores have massive L2 blocks for a total of 28 MB of L2. 24MB + 4MB. Only 24MB is shared between HP Cores. There is also an additional 48MB of System Level Cache on Max ( 24MB on Pro ). So in reality the cache difference on Mac system is the reason for most ( but not all ) of the performance difference. >Printing was done via the 5N TSMC lithography standard. N5. >Memory bus was upgraded to LPDDR5 and claims up to 400 GB/s of bandwidth. On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with both M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking.
- masklinn 5y ago> On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking. That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop, probably more relevant is that CPUs are not able to come anywhere near saturating memory bandwidths on the Max: Anandtech tested the memory subsystem[0] and it caps out at around 110 per performance cluster (which you only need 4 cores to reach, with 2 cores already coming close: individual cores reached 102GB/s each), plus around 20 for the efficiency cluster. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
- ksec 5y agoYes they are only really needed for the GPU. But then I dont want people to think M1 Pro has the same 400GB/s memory bandwidth as M1 Max just from reading the article. Again, nitpicking.
- ben-schaaf 5y ago> That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop It's about on-par with modern-ish dedicated laptop GPUs. The mid-range GTX 1060 mobile from 2016 does 200GB/s, a RTX 3070 mobile from this year does ~450GB/s.
- 5y ago
- jeroenhd 5y agoWhile the M1 is definitely impressive, Apple has been known for their lacking cooling designs and weird performance curves back in the Intel days. This comparison maybe Apples to Apples, but it's not really apples to apples. Modern Intel and even older Intel can bring a lot more to the table than the Mac Pro from a few years back could deliver because of Apple's design decisions. You could make the argument that you're just benchmarking Apple Macbooks to choose a platform to run macOS on, but then the datacenter CPU doesn't really add anything. If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU into the comparison, at least grab a modern Intel chip for your benchmarks. The 9980HK is from two years ago, back when Intel was already losing ground to AMD. The 10th, 11th and 12th gen processors made significant performance improvements since then (12900HK performing twice as well in some benchmarks compared to the 9980HK), at the cost of thermals and power usage. The M1 will probably still beat a modern Intel chip, but by a significantly smaller margin in terms of performance (battery usage, though, is a whole different story).
- carlycue 5y agoTim Cook grabbed the infinity gauntlet and said “Fine, I’ll do it myself”.
- oq_pmg 5y agoAnyone cares to share how M1s performs with virtualization tasks? Say Windows desktop or Linux cli?
- JyB 5y agoFlawlessly.
- Gigachad 5y agoDocker runs a linux VM and it destroys intel macbooks. I hardly notice it running on the M1. Flawless experience with minimal power drain.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoA coworker of mine is seeing their M1 performing about 2-4x slower than my Intel MacBook Pro where Docker is invoked. So YMMV
- acdha 5y agoThat sounds like they’re running x86 containers. I use Podman amd it’s very fast with ARM but notably slower when emulating x86 and there’s at least one case where this hit a JVM race condition in some old vendor code which still uses JDK8.
- teaearlgraycold 5y agoI'm able to use arm containers for my work and it doesn't seem any slower than what I'd expect from native performance on my M1.
- acdha 5y agoDitto: slowness is my cue to rebuild the container for both architectures
- kissiel 5y ago
- nottorp 5y agoFunny that everyone does benchmarks and goes ooh and aah at the bigger numbers. Or complains about apples to hazelnuts. How about this: I do NOT want a space heater on my desk or under my desk. I have a separate heating system thank you. Looks like the MxBlaBla chips can deliver good performance and stay cool. Now if Apple would hurry with the MxBlaBla desktops... I don't need a new laptop atm.
- forrestthewoods 5y agoI have the opposite complaint. I couldn’t care less about heat or battery life. I want the fastest possible machine, period. And too many articles about M1 discuss heat and efficiency which I just don’t care about.
- mekster 5y agoSo, just build a desktop or buy a huge laptop.
- forrestthewoods 5y agoI did. My work desktop is a Threadripper. A++++ would recommend. The fact that a laptop is even in the same discussion as desktop chips is crazy. The M1 is a seriously impressive piece of hardware. End of the day all I care about is how fast my chip runs. Different people care about different things, and that’s fine. I’m generally annoyed by reviews that don’t clearly compare desktop vs laptops parts. This is especially true for GPUs. Just give me all the data and I’ll decide if I care about price or energy use. It’s remarkably difficult to find a comparison between a laptop GPU and a desktop GPU. Which is an important comparison if you’re trying to decide between a laptop or a deskto.
- killjoywashere 5y agoAm I the only one not seeing legends in the bar charts?
- Terretta 5y agoTiny, on top of the bars.
- traceroute66 5y agoMight also be worth pointing out that there is no mention of "battery" in that blog post. The M1 Max is already a beast of a chip, and lots has been written on HN and elsewhere about how it knocks the socks off the competition. I'm not going to repeat all of the stuff that has already been written all over the internet. But the most impressive party piece of the new M1s is surely that they can knock the socks off the competition whilst running on battery and can do so for a decently sustained period of time. All of the remotely viable competition I am aware of needs to be plugged into the mains at all times otherwise you get a very throttled experience.
- brailsafe 5y agoApparently the Asus Zephyrus beats it on a number of benchmarks by a large margin, but I'm not sure if those were just GPU benchmarks, and I'm not sure if those were on battery tests. Linus Tech Tips did a recent comparison.
- izacus 5y agoIt's always telling that these benchmarks are done vs. old Intel chips inside the Mac and not the current competitors like latest AMD Ryzen series. Apple chips still win, but nowhere near with the same margin as those breathless marketing posts are trying to advertise.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- breakfastduck 5y agoOnly the majority of people getting M1s are upgrading from macs with those old intel chips, so they're also the most relevant to the customer.
- traceroute66 5y agoThe Asus probably also runs hotter and requires more use of fans. And I doubt the battery will last as long on intensive tasks. A big part of the M1 performance per watt efficiency is the SoC integrated design. I'm no motherboard designer but I think it would be nigh on impossible to replicate it using discrete component systems (which I assume is what the Asus is). Will caveat my comment here with a note that I haven't looked at comparisons for a while, only around the time the M1 was launched.
- howolduis 5y ago"$50K" is so vague and not useful for comparison.....
- moondev 5y agoAMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX with 1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rc_mob 5y agoAnyone else having their M1 freeze sometimes?
- eternalban 5y agoI have an Air M1 and it definitely hiccups once in a while. It is noticeable. I am guessing it is Rosetta related.
- sgarman 5y agoYea. This article is about the hardware which is great. The freezes, memory leaks and bugs are from the software and the latest mac os software really needs more time in the oven. I can't use firefox any more because WindowServer will eat up over 100% cpu and start allocating ram and and never releasing it until a crash or restart.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tiffanyh 5y agoI’ve always wondered, how much of the M1 gains comes from ALL components (not just the CPU but more importantly also the GPU, controllers, etc) on its SoC being fab’ed on the smallest industry node size that competitors can’t use yet. It’s not uncommon on x86 platforms for GPUs, memory controllers, etc to run on 1-2 generation old nodes while the CPU uses the latest tech.
- xyzzy21 5y agoThis is a key difference. The amount of power required to drive bond pad loads can be substantial and there's a major speed hit because you have to drive the larger capacitance of the load which only can be juiced with more power. Keeping it all on-chip is definitely a major factor because you have none of this sucking up power and speed (at the trade of power).
- Tagbert 5y agoSure, the fab size is part of the story, but we have also seen a general tendency for efficiency from Arm chips and the reason that they are used in mobile devices. Apple has also been willing to spend money on larger caches and wider buses in their SOCs to remove bottlenecks. Finally, Apple tunes the processor performance to optimize for processes that Mac OS uses a lot. That is possible because of their tight vertical integration and I have not seen on the more heterogenous Windows/Linux + Intel environment.
- MobileVet 5y agoDitto all the comments about swapping from 2019 MBP to 2021 MBP and being silent and powerful again. The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the line 2019 i9 would chew through battery on Zoom. I could barely get 1.5 hours… which makes the term ‘laptop’ a little silly. The 2021 can run long enough I don’t pay any attention to the battery, which is the point of a laptop - mobile computing. General computing is even better, people didn’t even bother bringing their power supplies to work anymore with the M1. They could go all day doing development and the occasional meeting. Power consumption and MagSafe are the hidden gems of the M1 models imho.
- beeboop 5y agoI never understood why zoom destroyed my work macbook pro's battery either. It was a max of about 90 min like you said. Seems ridiculous.
- MobileVet 5y agoRight? How is video decoding not an optimized chip level operation on modern systems? It’s network traffic and video decoding… it shouldn’t required an i9 going full bore.
- wuunderbar 5y agoThere's two components to a Zoom call: - Encoding: your own camera input. - Decoding: decoding multiple streams of video. Your CPU needs to do work on each on these, and depending on what codecs are used (and whether your CPU supports it) hardware acceleration may or may not be supported.
- MobileVet 5y agoFor sure, appreciate the break out. I am just shocked that as big as Zoom is, they don’t have an optimized client for MacBooks. I suppose the market is still far smaller than PC based systems… but come on, Zoom at el have the resources.
- lil_dispaches 5y ago
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoIs it worth getting the 14” MBP M1 Max or do you absolutely need 16” because of the wattage? The 16” seems really too big and heavy for me and I use 3090 for the GPU stuff.
- bitigchi 5y agoWatch the latest Linus Tech Tips video about this.
- ben7799 5y agoI haven't seen an M1Max yet.. but I've had a ton of 15", 17", and 16" MBP models over the last 10 years at work. All have generally been maxed out i7 models up to the latest one which is an i9 I got about 3-4 months ago right before the ARM ones came out. I'm totally on board with the narrative that the MacBook Pro has been going downhill for a long time and going to ARM is the ray of hope. At least in the case of my i9 16" they finally fixed the keyboard but it's a ridiculous space heater and it's only about 2x as fast as the 2018 i7 it replaced on a lot of tasks, and that's probably only because I was RAM limited on the 2018 one and am not on the 2021 one. The fan drives me bonkers as it pretty much runs full blast all day while I'm working. Lots of us on our team have seen the battery draining while it's plugged into the wall. Some of these benchmark games miss the point, the user experience for a "mobile workstation" user has just been going downhill for a long time and these new machines are finally starting to turn that around. I've had as 13" M1 MBP since launch last year FWIW and have never heard the fan come on, other than the fact it has a Touch Bar it's just about perfect for a personal machine. It feels much faster than the i9 for most real world tasks and the battery life resembles a kindle more than a laptop.
- e43gg34gg 5y agoThe new 12900HK from Intel beats M1 Pro in both single core performance and multicore performance: https://news.in-24.com/technology/414335.html https://news.in-24.com/technology/414335.html TDP: 35 - 45 watt but of course, it's better to compare with 3 years old CPU, so the results will be much more impressive.
- teaearlgraycold 5y ago> The Lenovo notebook with a Core i9-12900HK achieved 1878 points in the single-threading run of Geekbench 5.4.3, and 12,058 points in the multi-threading test. > A 14-inch MacBook Pro manages around 1750 (single threading) or 12,600 points (multithreading) Higher in single-threaded only.
- e43gg34gg 5y agoYes, on this laptop, only single core is faster, but on some other laptops the overall performance of the intel CPU is higher: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/82364/intel-core-i9-12900hk-mobile-cpu-performance-see-ya-apple-amd/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/82364/intel-core-i9-12900hk-m... On this laptop it achieves > 13000 points in Geekbench Multicore.
- lispm 5y agothat just means that it's getting faster, while still drawing a lot more power. My older i9-based Mac was additionally having thermal problems when the AMD graphics chip was used, which added another 20+ watts to the power consumption: use of external screens, video conferencing, ... The new MacBook Pro happens to vastly improve the power consumption of the CPU, the powerful GPU and the Thunderbolt interface.
- whalesalad 5y agoI’ve been wanting to build a threadripper workstation for a while - or at least a top-tier Ryzen. My experience jumping from my loaded 2018 MBP (Core i7, Radeon, 32GB memory) to an M1 mini w/ 1/2 the RAM has caused a paradigm shift in the way I think about computing. I abuse my machines too. I’m a freelance polyglot so on any given hour of the day I am working on Python, JS, design work, Clojure, Elixir, Ruby, scripting indesign, etc. One of the systems I operate runs millions of domain analysis operations a day and I tend to run a scaled-down version of the real system when developing. I do that for all clients, really. The MacBook Pro must essentially be viewed as a desktop. The fans are always on full blast. The disk access is slower so Docker container file system sync tends to suffer. It’s not a terrible machine in and of itself, but once I “upgraded” the difference was night and day. My M1 Mini has 16gb of ram but is otherwise stock. Assuming native ARM execution for a container, Docker is significantly faster at most things. Everything is faster. Running an Intel build of VSCode is the only thing that has ever stressed it, but I’ve never heard the fan. Disk performance is very impressive for such a commodity-grade machine. We just deployed one in a client site to perform Adobe InDesign imposition “as a service” for an on-demand print factory. It’s handling the work like a champ! As much as I’d love a new ARM MacBook Pro, the chassis is too big for me. Sounds petty, but the OG MacBook Air chassis is the ultimate mobile computer for me. So I think I’ll hold off and wait until Apple unveils their Mac Pro replacement. If we extrapolate things out even just a little - it should be a monster.
- vaxman 5y agoSuggest learning about Unified Memory Architecture (history, features and limitations) --not so much benchmarks of "$50K Server" from Armenia. TL;DR: If you're okay with the non-Windows world, there are few reasons (other than GPU performance) to buy new Intel or Chinese processors for consumer apps or professional bit-banging (image/video/audio/machine-learning). Likewise, there is NO reason to buy Apple SoC processors for mission critical IT (boxes that run backups, your CFO's workstation that still crunches the Board's spreadsheets or other client-side databases including QuickBooks) --those will all need to be on Intel Xeon processors with ECC memory and a battery/UPS until migrated to the Cloud. More than a year from now, I expect major Chinese manufacturers will release cheaper (RISC V based) UMA designs (which Apple is rumored to be exploring too) and more than two years from now, I expect Intel to release more expensive (Core based) UMA designs (for anyone wanting Windows). I think it is a foregone conclusion Microsoft will get into chip manufacturing (to diversify from Intel and Qualcomm and compete with Amazon and Google) too.
- cloudengineer94 5y agoComing from an Intel Macbook user to migrated to the M1 Air and then eventually to the M1 Pro I have to say the current Apple Silicon Macs are excellent for productivity and casual use. But for anyone interested in gaming you either get a console or need another gaming rig.
- marricks 5y agoCasual gaming is fine on them for me at least. Magic Arena or Civ5, performs well and totally quiet. I know this isn't most or even many gamers, but it's the gaming I did on my intel MacBook and it's way better on M1.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dainiusse 5y agoI an very happy with Apple doing that, but also keeping my fingers crossed for Intel. This company slept for too long, but I still think it is critical to have. And with these butkicks I hope they are going to show what they have. Of course... it will take some time. But we need competition, tsmc shouldn't have it all
- st3fan 5y agoFor the "Copying Memory" test - isn't the page size on M1 something non-standard? It may be worth it to also try 8KB and 16kB block sizes.
- diebeforei485 5y agoThis is just the beginning and there is still overlap with new Intel chips (though not at the same power consumption). I'm very excited for what future products (M2/M3 - Pro / Max) can do in terms of efficiency and performance.
- bfrog 5y agoMaybe I'm naive, but I really haven't seen a reason to jump off my core i7 6600 lenovo laptop or 4770k desktop, neither of which spin fans or kill batteries. I can run xilinx vivado, kicad, and gcc just as fine as a newer 18 core i9 I have for work. Having used a mac air with an intel chip which is incredibly slow in comparison I have to wonder if the issue isn't mac os x itself rather than the hardware involved.