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> "- This is with software rendering. Seriously, these CPUs are good. Better than some other ARM laptop GPUs. I would take this more as an indictment of ARM la

> "- This is with software rendering. Seriously, these CPUs are good. Better than some other ARM laptop GPUs. I would take this more as an indictment of ARM laptops rather than any "software rendering is magically fast" statement here. Modern Linuxes on most recent-ish (<5 years old) x86-64 CPUs can quite easily software render at the same speed and quality as that demonstration. This is a stronger statement of how far the project has come in terms of making everything operate smoothly on the M1, which is excellent (it's been what, a year?). My prediction: AsahiLinux will start becoming the Linux benchmark king in terms of "out of the box" performance, mostly due to the console effect that Apple's M1s offer them. There's such a limited set of hardware to target they will be able to focus more on stability and performance than other distributions.

grishka 5y ago
The M1 is really a beast though. I got an M1 Max in December, and the only times I've seen the beachball cursor it was due to an app doing something heavy on the UI thread. It also compiles Java so fast that milliseconds in gradle output are actually useful. Oh and it's able to play 4K 60 fps videos smoothly without even turning on the fans. This is truly madness. x86 is dead to me at this point. But then maybe anything is fast after using a 2012 retina MBP for almost 10 years.
- exdsq 5y ago
  I had a 16-core desktop and moved to the M1 Max and am just as happy - nothing kills it. PostgreSQL docker containers, intensive CPU scripts running, maybe a Minikube cluster, Slack, Chrome, RStudio, and I can still watch 4k video. It's awesome.
- ben-schaaf 5y ago
  Hardware decoding even at 8k is very common, intel has had 4k VP9 hardware decoders since 2016. Comparing the i7-3520M to something modern like an AMD 5800U the modern chip has ~2x single and ~4x multi-core performance, about the same compared to a M1 MB Air. Compared to 2012 they're all in the same ballpark.
  - grishka 5y ago
    I thought Apple didn't embrace VPx codecs because they were made by Google? Last time I looked, VideoToolbox only supported hardware-accelerated H264 and H265. So I assumed that all VP9 decoding must happen in software.
  - techie128 5y ago
    On my X1 Carbon with the 10th Gen Core i7 processor which also happen to have VP9 hardware decoders, the fans still spin up. They're not very audible but the machine gets warm to the touch. On my M1 MBP? 4K video playback does nothing to it. Absolutely dead quite, no fans spinning, cold to the touch all throughout.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Faster is better but I can give you a real world benchmark and impressions. My Ubuntu 32 GB i7-47xx SATA 2 laptop from 2014 upgraded with SSD runs a 500 spec Ruby on Rails test suite in 1 minute 15 seconds. My customer's M1 runs it in 50 seconds. The improvement is big but 25 seconds are not that long because we usually don't run the full test suite but only the tests of the code we're working on. Text editing, debugging etc would be fine also on a 2004 laptop. Of course if I had to run a 10x suite 250 seconds, 3 minutes, would be noticeable. Or if I worked with compiled languages and had to recompile large projects.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > My Ubuntu 32 GB i7-47xx SATA 2 laptop from 2014 upgraded with SSD runs a 500 spec Ruby on Rails test suite in 1 minute 15 seconds. My customer's M1 runs it in 50 seconds. That hardly sounds like a fair comparison: a computer from eight years ago is going to be slower than one from last year, after all. The only fair comparison is between machines at the same or similar price points. What's the best intel/amd laptop you can buy for the M1 money, and how does that laptop compare?
    - 411111111111111 5y ago
      Hasn't there been enough coverage for this already? The M1 chip is ahead in the performance/wattage, which makes them a significant upgrade to most other laptops - as these are always constrained by power and cooling. Though Intel has since improved their mobile chips and the difference is likely to be much less with the new laptops this year.
      - lelanthran 5y ago
        > Hasn't there been enough coverage for this already? I don't think I've seen any bang-per-buck comparisons; of course I have not looked very hard, so there's something for me to do later :-) > The M1 chip is ahead in the performance/wattage, I don't care. OP posted about performance with no regard to power efficiency, so I was wondering about the performace with no regard to power efficiency. As long as the laptop lasts 3 hours or so it's enough. I'm not going to spend 8 hours huddled over a small screen that I am squinting into, using a reduced keyboard with limited navigation keys. I can't see myself spending even 3 hours doing that, TBH. My neck hurts after only an hour using a laptop without an external monitor or keyboard. Since the thing is going to be plugged in for 99.9% of its use, I'm more interested in what performance difference I expect by going with the M1 over a similarly-priced Intel/AMD setup.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  On the other hand my wife has an M1 macbook air that I recommended she buys. And it's beachballing all the f*in time. I don't know if it's chrome or what, but it's odd to have both really fast build times in the CLI and the UI hanging constantly.
  - omnimus 5y ago
    I just got cheapest M1 air and i was really surprised. It compiles faster than my semi recent Xeon desktop. Like i dont even know how it is so fast. Everything is so fast. The only bad thing is macos Monterey. It looks like some amateurs are in charge of design.
  - methyl 5y ago
    Make sure you use native Chrome and not Rosetta emulated one, which can happen if you transfered data from another Mac.
    - newaccount74 5y ago
      That might cause minor performance degradations, but really shouldn't cause hangs.
      - methyl 5y ago
        It really does, not sure what’s the reason but the performance is much worse than just 20% hit Rosetta claims.
      - thebean11 5y ago
        It made a massive difference for me on an M1 Pro machine
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    I have an M1 Air and it very rarely beachballs. Music did that yesterday but I can't remember the last time I had one. Incidentally, I don't use Chrome and don't even have it installed. My main browser is Firefox (at any given time I have 2-3 Firefox profiles open with tens of tabs) and secondary browser is Safari.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  The M1 is pretty fast, but don't get fooled by the reviews claiming there to be no difference between the 8GB and 16GB models. When you run into forced swapping, the thing still grinds to a halt. Audio crackling is the least of your worries (happens when switching apps, for example), at worst the thing runs at 1 FPS for a minute.
  - grishka 5y ago
    Yeah well I got the 64 GB model for this exact reason. One can't have too much RAM, right?
weikju 5y ago
> I would take this more as an indictment of ARM laptops rather than any "software rendering is magically fast" statement here. I think that's the point of marcan42's Tweet - this is smooth even without GPU rendering, meaning the CPU is just that good.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The point of who you're replying to, is that this isn't exceptional at all. The reason you would care about GPU rendering of the UI is mainly for battery life.
  - weikju 5y ago
    thanks for clarifying.. perhaps I misread "indictment"
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    >The reason you would care about GPU rendering of the UI is mainly for battery life. It depends on the power draw of the CPU, which for the M1 family is unusually low. For instance, in today's Mac Studio review, Ars tested the power draw for various systems running a Handbrake encode with the CPUs running wide open. The plain M1 system was drawing 27 watts. The M1 Max was drawing 47 watts. The M1 Ultra was drawing 87 watts. The PC desktop running Alder Lake unlocked was drawing 300 watts. >Both the power-unlimited Core i9-12900 and the M1 Ultra performed roughly the same in our Handbrake video-encoding test, and the i9 did even better than the M1 Ultra in a handful of our CPU benchmarks. But measured at the wall, the Core i9 PC was drawing roughly 300 W of power the entire time the encoding task was running compared to the mid-80s for the M1 Ultra. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/mac-studio-review-a-nearly-perfect-workhorse-mac/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/mac-studio-review-a-...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
marcan_42 5y ago
It's not only the "console effect" for the OS though. It's the vertical integration of the hardware to begin with. It's just better than x86 platforms because Apple control everything and can make sure it works together well. It's been very apparent as we work on the platform just how well everything ties together internally. On x86 you have the CPU vendor, the chipset vendor, the hardware OEM, the storage vendor, the GPU vendor, etc. all fighting each other and it shows. No one company ends up having the motivation and control to make things tie well together. Granted, for little things like "Asahi Linux is probably the only third party distro on the planet to autodetect your laptop's keyboard layout on first boot", yeah, it helps that we're targeting a very specific platform (and the vendor cares about these thing and left the facilities in place for us to do that). But for stuff like good battery life and power management, you just can't achieve that if the hardware isn't well integrated to begin with, and we're already getting impressive battery life numbers with minimal OS support.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Could another vendor (Intel, AMD) achieve similar results? Is it possible within the IBM PC platform?
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    It's very possible; we'll have to see how the 5800X3D does. One thing that the M1 has that the competition doesn't is just more cache closer to the CPU. The M1 Ultra, if it holds that it's just two Maxes glued together, has 48MB of L2 cache.[1] AMD's newer 96MB VCache system in the 5800X3D is still L3 cache, with only 4MB of L2 cache.[2] But that's a top of the line not-quite-released processor. AMD's current high-end (5950X) only has 8MB of L2 and 64MB of L3.[3] Meanwhile Intel's 12900HK only has 24MB of their Smart Cache[4], and the 12700K has 25 but with 12MB marked for L2[5]. It's not clear to me that cache is the be all and end all but it does seem to be a significant factor, especially if AMD's claims around the boost 96MB of L3 cache is going to give it are anything remotely correct. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... [2]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d [3]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x [4]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/132215/intel-core-i912900hk-processor-24m-cache-up-to-5-00-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/132215/... [5]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/134594/intel-core-i712700k-processor-25m-cache-up-to-5-00-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/134594/...

grishka 5y ago

The M1 is really a beast though. I got an M1 Max in December, and the only times I've seen the beachball cursor it was due to an app doing something heavy on the UI thread. It also compiles Java so fast that milliseconds in gradle output are actually useful. Oh and it's able to play 4K 60 fps videos smoothly without even turning on the fans. This is truly madness. x86 is dead to me at this point. But then maybe anything is fast after using a 2012 retina MBP for almost 10 years.

exdsq 5y ago
I had a 16-core desktop and moved to the M1 Max and am just as happy - nothing kills it. PostgreSQL docker containers, intensive CPU scripts running, maybe a Minikube cluster, Slack, Chrome, RStudio, and I can still watch 4k video. It's awesome.
ben-schaaf 5y ago
Hardware decoding even at 8k is very common, intel has had 4k VP9 hardware decoders since 2016. Comparing the i7-3520M to something modern like an AMD 5800U the modern chip has ~2x single and ~4x multi-core performance, about the same compared to a M1 MB Air. Compared to 2012 they're all in the same ballpark.
- grishka 5y ago
  I thought Apple didn't embrace VPx codecs because they were made by Google? Last time I looked, VideoToolbox only supported hardware-accelerated H264 and H265. So I assumed that all VP9 decoding must happen in software.
- techie128 5y ago
  On my X1 Carbon with the 10th Gen Core i7 processor which also happen to have VP9 hardware decoders, the fans still spin up. They're not very audible but the machine gets warm to the touch. On my M1 MBP? 4K video playback does nothing to it. Absolutely dead quite, no fans spinning, cold to the touch all throughout.
pmontra 5y ago
Faster is better but I can give you a real world benchmark and impressions. My Ubuntu 32 GB i7-47xx SATA 2 laptop from 2014 upgraded with SSD runs a 500 spec Ruby on Rails test suite in 1 minute 15 seconds. My customer's M1 runs it in 50 seconds. The improvement is big but 25 seconds are not that long because we usually don't run the full test suite but only the tests of the code we're working on. Text editing, debugging etc would be fine also on a 2004 laptop. Of course if I had to run a 10x suite 250 seconds, 3 minutes, would be noticeable. Or if I worked with compiled languages and had to recompile large projects.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > My Ubuntu 32 GB i7-47xx SATA 2 laptop from 2014 upgraded with SSD runs a 500 spec Ruby on Rails test suite in 1 minute 15 seconds. My customer's M1 runs it in 50 seconds. That hardly sounds like a fair comparison: a computer from eight years ago is going to be slower than one from last year, after all. The only fair comparison is between machines at the same or similar price points. What's the best intel/amd laptop you can buy for the M1 money, and how does that laptop compare?
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    Hasn't there been enough coverage for this already? The M1 chip is ahead in the performance/wattage, which makes them a significant upgrade to most other laptops - as these are always constrained by power and cooling. Though Intel has since improved their mobile chips and the difference is likely to be much less with the new laptops this year.
    - lelanthran 5y ago
      > Hasn't there been enough coverage for this already? I don't think I've seen any bang-per-buck comparisons; of course I have not looked very hard, so there's something for me to do later :-) > The M1 chip is ahead in the performance/wattage, I don't care. OP posted about performance with no regard to power efficiency, so I was wondering about the performace with no regard to power efficiency. As long as the laptop lasts 3 hours or so it's enough. I'm not going to spend 8 hours huddled over a small screen that I am squinting into, using a reduced keyboard with limited navigation keys. I can't see myself spending even 3 hours doing that, TBH. My neck hurts after only an hour using a laptop without an external monitor or keyboard. Since the thing is going to be plugged in for 99.9% of its use, I'm more interested in what performance difference I expect by going with the M1 over a similarly-priced Intel/AMD setup.
rjzzleep 5y ago
On the other hand my wife has an M1 macbook air that I recommended she buys. And it's beachballing all the f*in time. I don't know if it's chrome or what, but it's odd to have both really fast build times in the CLI and the UI hanging constantly.
- omnimus 5y ago
  I just got cheapest M1 air and i was really surprised. It compiles faster than my semi recent Xeon desktop. Like i dont even know how it is so fast. Everything is so fast. The only bad thing is macos Monterey. It looks like some amateurs are in charge of design.
- methyl 5y ago
  Make sure you use native Chrome and not Rosetta emulated one, which can happen if you transfered data from another Mac.
  - newaccount74 5y ago
    That might cause minor performance degradations, but really shouldn't cause hangs.
    - methyl 5y ago
      It really does, not sure what’s the reason but the performance is much worse than just 20% hit Rosetta claims.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      It made a massive difference for me on an M1 Pro machine
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  I have an M1 Air and it very rarely beachballs. Music did that yesterday but I can't remember the last time I had one. Incidentally, I don't use Chrome and don't even have it installed. My main browser is Firefox (at any given time I have 2-3 Firefox profiles open with tens of tabs) and secondary browser is Safari.
solarkraft 5y ago
The M1 is pretty fast, but don't get fooled by the reviews claiming there to be no difference between the 8GB and 16GB models. When you run into forced swapping, the thing still grinds to a halt. Audio crackling is the least of your worries (happens when switching apps, for example), at worst the thing runs at 1 FPS for a minute.
- grishka 5y ago
  Yeah well I got the 64 GB model for this exact reason. One can't have too much RAM, right?

weikju 5y ago

> I would take this more as an indictment of ARM laptops rather than any "software rendering is magically fast" statement here. I think that's the point of marcan42's Tweet - this is smooth even without GPU rendering, meaning the CPU is just that good.

sudosysgen 5y ago
The point of who you're replying to, is that this isn't exceptional at all. The reason you would care about GPU rendering of the UI is mainly for battery life.
- weikju 5y ago
  thanks for clarifying.. perhaps I misread "indictment"
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >The reason you would care about GPU rendering of the UI is mainly for battery life. It depends on the power draw of the CPU, which for the M1 family is unusually low. For instance, in today's Mac Studio review, Ars tested the power draw for various systems running a Handbrake encode with the CPUs running wide open. The plain M1 system was drawing 27 watts. The M1 Max was drawing 47 watts. The M1 Ultra was drawing 87 watts. The PC desktop running Alder Lake unlocked was drawing 300 watts. >Both the power-unlimited Core i9-12900 and the M1 Ultra performed roughly the same in our Handbrake video-encoding test, and the i9 did even better than the M1 Ultra in a handful of our CPU benchmarks. But measured at the wall, the Core i9 PC was drawing roughly 300 W of power the entire time the encoding task was running compared to the mid-80s for the M1 Ultra. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/mac-studio-review-a-nearly-perfect-workhorse-mac/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/mac-studio-review-a-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

marcan_42 5y ago

It's not only the "console effect" for the OS though. It's the vertical integration of the hardware to begin with. It's just better than x86 platforms because Apple control everything and can make sure it works together well. It's been very apparent as we work on the platform just how well everything ties together internally. On x86 you have the CPU vendor, the chipset vendor, the hardware OEM, the storage vendor, the GPU vendor, etc. all fighting each other and it shows. No one company ends up having the motivation and control to make things tie well together. Granted, for little things like "Asahi Linux is probably the only third party distro on the planet to autodetect your laptop's keyboard layout on first boot", yeah, it helps that we're targeting a very specific platform (and the vendor cares about these thing and left the facilities in place for us to do that). But for stuff like good battery life and power management, you just can't achieve that if the hardware isn't well integrated to begin with, and we're already getting impressive battery life numbers with minimal OS support.

solarkraft 5y ago
Could another vendor (Intel, AMD) achieve similar results? Is it possible within the IBM PC platform?
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  It's very possible; we'll have to see how the 5800X3D does. One thing that the M1 has that the competition doesn't is just more cache closer to the CPU. The M1 Ultra, if it holds that it's just two Maxes glued together, has 48MB of L2 cache.[1] AMD's newer 96MB VCache system in the 5800X3D is still L3 cache, with only 4MB of L2 cache.[2] But that's a top of the line not-quite-released processor. AMD's current high-end (5950X) only has 8MB of L2 and 64MB of L3.[3] Meanwhile Intel's 12900HK only has 24MB of their Smart Cache[4], and the 12700K has 25 but with 12MB marked for L2[5]. It's not clear to me that cache is the be all and end all but it does seem to be a significant factor, especially if AMD's claims around the boost 96MB of L3 cache is going to give it are anything remotely correct. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... [2]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d [3]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x [4]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/132215/intel-core-i912900hk-processor-24m-cache-up-to-5-00-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/132215/... [5]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/134594/intel-core-i712700k-processor-25m-cache-up-to-5-00-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/134594/...