3 ms·

I dunno man.. You're comparing a CPU which costs as much as the complete machine (or two M1 airs). It's not portable has a TDP of 280W. Still it's 30% slower si

I dunno man.. You're comparing a CPU which costs as much as the complete machine (or two M1 airs). It's not portable has a TDP of 280W. Still it's 30% slower single threaded. For multithreaded it's 2.7x as fast. So yeah, maybe for rendering it's faster, but it won't be as snappy as the M1. Then again, if you wanna use it for rendering, just buy 4 M1 macminis for the price of one CPU. Or 6 minis if you add all the other stuff you need.

maccard 5y ago
The claim was that laptops are on par with desktops, not that they're good replacement for many workflows. This is just flat out not true. > It's not portable has a TDP of 280W That doesn't bother me in the slightest for a workstation. > So yeah, maybe for rendering it's faster, but it won't be as snappy as the M1. Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated. It's not about "snappiness", it's about suitability for work. I upgraded from an 8700k to this machine and saw a 5x speedup (my compiles dropped from 30m to about 6 minutes).
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  > not that they're good replacement for many workflows. This is just flat out not true. it is a good replacement for many. It might not be the fastest of all, but that doesn't mean it's not a good replacement It's faster single threaded, and will be faster until you fully saturate more than around 14 threads. Couldn't find a linux compilation benchmark, but here a comparison with the M1 on compilation performance: https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-eigen https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-eigen Compilation test shows that it's even faster.
  - maccard 5y ago
    It looks like this is basically a serial benchmark, so yeah of course the higher raw clock speed will win out. The run is also less than a minute, so most laptops will happily burst for that long, however what happens if you throw a 5/10/15 minute compile at it? > Does It Scale Well With Increasing Cores? > No, based on the automated analysis of the collected public benchmark data, this test / test settings does not generally scale well with increasing CPU core counts. If your workload is compiling a single file serially, then sure this might be a great upgrade for you. I went through the copmpile benchmarks and the only other one that has an M1 mac and a 3970x on that site is build2 [0] which shows the m1 is 4x faster on a build that scales well with cores. FFMpeg [1] doesn't list the M1 in the test table, but it does have one benhmark [2] which is again quicker with the threadripper. [0] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build2 https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build2 [1] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-ffmpeg https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-ffmpeg [2] https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2201040-NE-FFMPEGBUI53 https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2201040-NE-FFMPEGBUI53
    - jhgb 5y ago
      One interesting thing would be to know how much of the performance improvement in some of the compile tests is due to the high-bandwidth memory interface on the M1 chip. Since the M1 chip has both different cores AND a quintuple memory bandwidth compared to Ryzen's/Threadripper's off-chip memory, if you consider things like cache misses, one has to wonder what's the contribution of both to the performance increases.
      - maccard 5y ago
        Completely agree, and I don't have an answer to that. However, all of that goes out the window if your macbook starts throttling. I don't doubt that an m1 chip with adequate cooling will outperform an x86 one, but at that point you're not on a laptop anymore
- jhgb 5y ago
  > Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated. Has OSL already been ported to GPUs? You're implying that OSL users such as film studios "don't care about performance" but I suspect this simply isn't true.
  - maccard 5y ago
    Sorry, I can't edit my original post to update but you're right. A large amount of commercial renderers and commercial rendering software is GPU accelerated which was what I was trying to refer to (and would like to update my comment to but can't). That said, given the render times for indiovidual frames a laptop is going to end up thermally throttling which will wipe out the single threaded gains, and being limited to very small amounts of ram is likely going to make using a current M1 Mac impossible for anything like OSL.

maccard 5y ago

The claim was that laptops are on par with desktops, not that they're good replacement for many workflows. This is just flat out not true. > It's not portable has a TDP of 280W That doesn't bother me in the slightest for a workstation. > So yeah, maybe for rendering it's faster, but it won't be as snappy as the M1. Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated. It's not about "snappiness", it's about suitability for work. I upgraded from an 8700k to this machine and saw a 5x speedup (my compiles dropped from 30m to about 6 minutes).

jbverschoor 5y ago
> not that they're good replacement for many workflows. This is just flat out not true. it is a good replacement for many. It might not be the fastest of all, but that doesn't mean it's not a good replacement It's faster single threaded, and will be faster until you fully saturate more than around 14 threads. Couldn't find a linux compilation benchmark, but here a comparison with the M1 on compilation performance: https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-eigen https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-eigen Compilation test shows that it's even faster.
- maccard 5y ago
  It looks like this is basically a serial benchmark, so yeah of course the higher raw clock speed will win out. The run is also less than a minute, so most laptops will happily burst for that long, however what happens if you throw a 5/10/15 minute compile at it? > Does It Scale Well With Increasing Cores? > No, based on the automated analysis of the collected public benchmark data, this test / test settings does not generally scale well with increasing CPU core counts. If your workload is compiling a single file serially, then sure this might be a great upgrade for you. I went through the copmpile benchmarks and the only other one that has an M1 mac and a 3970x on that site is build2 [0] which shows the m1 is 4x faster on a build that scales well with cores. FFMpeg [1] doesn't list the M1 in the test table, but it does have one benhmark [2] which is again quicker with the threadripper. [0] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build2 https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build2 [1] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-ffmpeg https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-ffmpeg [2] https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2201040-NE-FFMPEGBUI53 https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2201040-NE-FFMPEGBUI53
  - jhgb 5y ago
    One interesting thing would be to know how much of the performance improvement in some of the compile tests is due to the high-bandwidth memory interface on the M1 chip. Since the M1 chip has both different cores AND a quintuple memory bandwidth compared to Ryzen's/Threadripper's off-chip memory, if you consider things like cache misses, one has to wonder what's the contribution of both to the performance increases.
    - maccard 5y ago
      Completely agree, and I don't have an answer to that. However, all of that goes out the window if your macbook starts throttling. I don't doubt that an m1 chip with adequate cooling will outperform an x86 one, but at that point you're not on a laptop anymore
jhgb 5y ago
> Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated. Has OSL already been ported to GPUs? You're implying that OSL users such as film studios "don't care about performance" but I suspect this simply isn't true.
- maccard 5y ago
  Sorry, I can't edit my original post to update but you're right. A large amount of commercial renderers and commercial rendering software is GPU accelerated which was what I was trying to refer to (and would like to update my comment to but can't). That said, given the render times for indiovidual frames a laptop is going to end up thermally throttling which will wipe out the single threaded gains, and being limited to very small amounts of ram is likely going to make using a current M1 Mac impossible for anything like OSL.