4 ms·

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 R

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.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    The consensus results I've been seeing appear to be - Intel Alder lake has vastly better idle and low-performance task power draw than before but still not quiiite as good as M1. It can boost to slightly faster peak speeds but at a MASSIVE power draw disadvantage, like 4x more power then M1 to reach 5% more performance - AMD which is on more comparable TSMC processes gets comparable power/performance draw, but AMD have not yet cracked idle power draw and it's still worse than even Intel And Apple is about to release M2
  - schaefer 5y ago
    Remember, this is about running Linux on the M1. So if we’re going to talk about the 12th Gen Intel laptop chips expected later this year we also have to talk about Linux support on that chip. I hope I’m wrong, but last I heard the Linux scheduler hasn’t caught up with 12th gen performance and efficacy cores. —- Then there’s the whole other topic that some of us would prefer to be on arm over x86. I’m keeping an eye out for native Linux support for the latest snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 laptops that are coming out (ThinkPad X13s and friends). So far I’ve heard nothing. Which might suggest that M1 might stay ahead of the curve in terms of the community hacking to support these boards.
    - schaefer 5y ago
      The forthcoming Linux kernel 5.18 will include initial support for intel's Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) [1]. This may bring linux performance on intel 12th gen (Alder Lake) processors to par with their performance on Windows 11. It will be fun to see how quickly HFI support finds it's way into Hypervisors like Xen. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-HFI-For-Linux-5.18 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-HF...
  - codedokode 5y ago
    I don't understand why we should compare performance in artificial benchmarks to power consumption. Electricity is cheap and I assume that most laptop users have a wall socket nearby. Instead, it makes sense to compare typical user performance (not CPU instruction count) versus price. For example, let's say CPU A has 32 cores each capable to perform 1B instructions and costs $1000, and CPU B has 4 cores with same speed, but costs $100. Let's say typical task for a machine is browsing social network sites. If this task uses only 4 cores and a user can browse same number of web pages per unit time then effectively both A and B have the same performance, but CPU A has 10 times worse typical performance per dollar. A metric in this case should be not the count of executed instructions, but for example, a count of web pages viewed by user per unit time, or share of time spent actually viewing pages (and not waiting for them to load). Of course, you can make similar metrics for other uses - for example, a time taken by illustrator to draw a picture, or count of written lines of code per unit time for a programmer. All divided by hardware cost. That's the type of comparison I would like to see. Would Apple be winning in such fair and realistic benchmark is an open question. I doubt that.
    - pmontra 5y ago
      > Electricity is cheap Ugh, not in Europe, especially not now https://euenergy.live/ https://euenergy.live/ And even in the USA it seems it depends from where you live https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
      - lelanthran 5y ago
        Maybe he meant "Cheap" compared to the extra cost of an M1 over a similarly performing AMD/Intel laptop? What's the break-even point where your savings from electricity offsets the extra cost of an M1? A year? Two years?
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      > I don't understand why we should compare performance in artificial benchmarks to power consumption. Electricity is cheap Battery life, fan noise, and throttling due to excess heat are all reasons to care about power consumption.
- pmontra 5y ago
  I know it's not fair but that wasn't my point. My goal was to show how much or how little a real world workload improved over the years. My assessment is that I'm not going out to buy a M1 laptop now even if there were ones not from Apple or a new Intel/AMD. I'll still wait until my current one starts dying or I have to do something it can't do. I replaced the previous one from 2006 when I started to work with VMs and containers and I needed more than 4 GB RAM. The new laptop (my current one) was 3 times faster on the same workloads and it had a HDD at the time.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > I know it's not fair but that wasn't my point. I apologise. I interpreted what you said as evidence for how fast the M1 is. > My goal was to show how much or how little a real world workload improved over the years. Agreed. I am only now looking a desktop replacement for my 2011 first-gen i7, and the only reason is because I recently started doing Java and C# development on my personal machines, and the IDEs + compilation times are terrible. Also, trying to run VS under Linux on this machine is a total waste of time. If it weren't for the Java and C# requirement I wouldn't even bother.

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.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  The consensus results I've been seeing appear to be - Intel Alder lake has vastly better idle and low-performance task power draw than before but still not quiiite as good as M1. It can boost to slightly faster peak speeds but at a MASSIVE power draw disadvantage, like 4x more power then M1 to reach 5% more performance - AMD which is on more comparable TSMC processes gets comparable power/performance draw, but AMD have not yet cracked idle power draw and it's still worse than even Intel And Apple is about to release M2
- schaefer 5y ago
  Remember, this is about running Linux on the M1. So if we’re going to talk about the 12th Gen Intel laptop chips expected later this year we also have to talk about Linux support on that chip. I hope I’m wrong, but last I heard the Linux scheduler hasn’t caught up with 12th gen performance and efficacy cores. —- Then there’s the whole other topic that some of us would prefer to be on arm over x86. I’m keeping an eye out for native Linux support for the latest snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 laptops that are coming out (ThinkPad X13s and friends). So far I’ve heard nothing. Which might suggest that M1 might stay ahead of the curve in terms of the community hacking to support these boards.
  - schaefer 5y ago
    The forthcoming Linux kernel 5.18 will include initial support for intel's Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) [1]. This may bring linux performance on intel 12th gen (Alder Lake) processors to par with their performance on Windows 11. It will be fun to see how quickly HFI support finds it's way into Hypervisors like Xen. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-HFI-For-Linux-5.18 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-HF...
- codedokode 5y ago
  I don't understand why we should compare performance in artificial benchmarks to power consumption. Electricity is cheap and I assume that most laptop users have a wall socket nearby. Instead, it makes sense to compare typical user performance (not CPU instruction count) versus price. For example, let's say CPU A has 32 cores each capable to perform 1B instructions and costs $1000, and CPU B has 4 cores with same speed, but costs $100. Let's say typical task for a machine is browsing social network sites. If this task uses only 4 cores and a user can browse same number of web pages per unit time then effectively both A and B have the same performance, but CPU A has 10 times worse typical performance per dollar. A metric in this case should be not the count of executed instructions, but for example, a count of web pages viewed by user per unit time, or share of time spent actually viewing pages (and not waiting for them to load). Of course, you can make similar metrics for other uses - for example, a time taken by illustrator to draw a picture, or count of written lines of code per unit time for a programmer. All divided by hardware cost. That's the type of comparison I would like to see. Would Apple be winning in such fair and realistic benchmark is an open question. I doubt that.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    > Electricity is cheap Ugh, not in Europe, especially not now https://euenergy.live/ https://euenergy.live/ And even in the USA it seems it depends from where you live https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
    - lelanthran 5y ago
      Maybe he meant "Cheap" compared to the extra cost of an M1 over a similarly performing AMD/Intel laptop? What's the break-even point where your savings from electricity offsets the extra cost of an M1? A year? Two years?
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    > I don't understand why we should compare performance in artificial benchmarks to power consumption. Electricity is cheap Battery life, fan noise, and throttling due to excess heat are all reasons to care about power consumption.
pmontra 5y ago
I know it's not fair but that wasn't my point. My goal was to show how much or how little a real world workload improved over the years. My assessment is that I'm not going out to buy a M1 laptop now even if there were ones not from Apple or a new Intel/AMD. I'll still wait until my current one starts dying or I have to do something it can't do. I replaced the previous one from 2006 when I started to work with VMs and containers and I needed more than 4 GB RAM. The new laptop (my current one) was 3 times faster on the same workloads and it had a HDD at the time.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > I know it's not fair but that wasn't my point. I apologise. I interpreted what you said as evidence for how fast the M1 is. > My goal was to show how much or how little a real world workload improved over the years. Agreed. I am only now looking a desktop replacement for my 2011 first-gen i7, and the only reason is because I recently started doing Java and C# development on my personal machines, and the IDEs + compilation times are terrible. Also, trying to run VS under Linux on this machine is a total waste of time. If it weren't for the Java and C# requirement I wouldn't even bother.