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>> The Ryzen setup has twice the cpu cores That may explain why is crushes Apple on some benchmarks. I wonder what causes Apple to crush Ryzen on other ones. T

>> The Ryzen setup has twice the cpu cores That may explain why is crushes Apple on some benchmarks. I wonder what causes Apple to crush Ryzen on other ones. This was the strangest comparison I've ever seen with large wins going to both contenders.

minimaul 4y ago
With cross-arch benchmarks like this, you find a lot of software that has hyper-optimised x86_64 implementations does better on AMD/Intel because of that. It skews the numbers and makes a good comparison really annoying to do, unless you do your own comparison on your own workloads.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  The exact same binary saw crushing victors in different directions, though, depending on what it was testing. Look at the GNU Radio results for example.
  - minimaul 4y ago
    It's not the exact same binary - that's the point. It is different instruction sets, with potentially different optimisations. They're even compiled with different compilers - what looks like a GCC 12.1.1 snapshot for x86, and GCC 12.1.0 for ARM64. It might be the same C, it might have hand-coded assembly for important bits in x86 but not in ARM, or vice versa, it might be just one specific algorithm executes particularly well on one CPU rather than the other, it might be that the slightly different version of GCC did a new optimisation. edit: they're also comparing an actively cooled laptop to a passive one - so you would expect M2 to throttle in longer benchmarks, for extra distortion. The methodology is flawed. It lets you cherry pick some individual results, and if your particular usecase is in there, great. But you don't know what state the M2 was in when a test started (eg if it was already hot and throttling, etc). It's basically impossible to draw any useful generalised conclusions from these benchmarks.
    - kllrnohj 4y ago
      > It's not the exact same binary - that's the point I think you misunderstood. "GNU Radio" on M2 was sometimes screamingly fast, and sometimes embarrassingly slow, depending on which test it was. I'm not saying that "GNU Radio" was the same on M2 and AMD, obviously it's not. I'm saying the performance results for GNU Radio specifically were insanely inconsistent - M2 won by a stupidly huge amount in one of the GNU radio results, and AMD by an equally absurd margin in the other GNU radio results. Same "GNU Radio" compiled binary on the respective platforms, huge swings in performance depending on what that binary was doing. There were a couple other similar examples, where performance for the same program swung wildly depending on the exact task.
      - minimaul 4y ago
        That's not necessarily unexpected and still follows most of what I've said - if one particular algorithm is hand-optimised and one isn't, you will see wild swings - especially if one has been hand-vectorised and one is failing to auto-vectorise during compilation.
    - olyjohn 4y ago
      Picking individual use cases is exactly how you should be reviewing benchmarks. You should be picking a laptop based on what you do. If you don't do certain things, why would you care that some other CPU is faster at what you are not doing? If you're looking for a "general" comparison, there is none. General usage of a laptop computer for who? What do you consider general usage? What exactly are you looking for? For 99% of what people do, they won't even be able to tell apart a Celeron from an M2. Why do you think we have things like discreet GPUs? You buy certain hardware for certain tasks. Or do you just want to say that your CPU is better than someone else's? Who gives a shit? That's really all you get from a "general" performance review, a bunch of vague crap. This review was great. It shows what Linux users can expect under certain workloads on two laptops that cost the same amount of money. You can then decide which one is best for you as a Linux user who may be interested in an M2.
      - minimaul 4y ago
leeter 4y ago
Without examining the behavior of the specific wins my guess is memory. The M1 and M2 have amazing memory bandwidth. That's something their design needs as clock for clock they would be massively pipeline starved if they didn't because of how wide the apple design is.

minimaul 4y ago

With cross-arch benchmarks like this, you find a lot of software that has hyper-optimised x86_64 implementations does better on AMD/Intel because of that. It skews the numbers and makes a good comparison really annoying to do, unless you do your own comparison on your own workloads.

kllrnohj 4y ago
The exact same binary saw crushing victors in different directions, though, depending on what it was testing. Look at the GNU Radio results for example.
- minimaul 4y ago
  It's not the exact same binary - that's the point. It is different instruction sets, with potentially different optimisations. They're even compiled with different compilers - what looks like a GCC 12.1.1 snapshot for x86, and GCC 12.1.0 for ARM64. It might be the same C, it might have hand-coded assembly for important bits in x86 but not in ARM, or vice versa, it might be just one specific algorithm executes particularly well on one CPU rather than the other, it might be that the slightly different version of GCC did a new optimisation. edit: they're also comparing an actively cooled laptop to a passive one - so you would expect M2 to throttle in longer benchmarks, for extra distortion. The methodology is flawed. It lets you cherry pick some individual results, and if your particular usecase is in there, great. But you don't know what state the M2 was in when a test started (eg if it was already hot and throttling, etc). It's basically impossible to draw any useful generalised conclusions from these benchmarks.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    > It's not the exact same binary - that's the point I think you misunderstood. "GNU Radio" on M2 was sometimes screamingly fast, and sometimes embarrassingly slow, depending on which test it was. I'm not saying that "GNU Radio" was the same on M2 and AMD, obviously it's not. I'm saying the performance results for GNU Radio specifically were insanely inconsistent - M2 won by a stupidly huge amount in one of the GNU radio results, and AMD by an equally absurd margin in the other GNU radio results. Same "GNU Radio" compiled binary on the respective platforms, huge swings in performance depending on what that binary was doing. There were a couple other similar examples, where performance for the same program swung wildly depending on the exact task.
    - minimaul 4y ago
      That's not necessarily unexpected and still follows most of what I've said - if one particular algorithm is hand-optimised and one isn't, you will see wild swings - especially if one has been hand-vectorised and one is failing to auto-vectorise during compilation.
  - olyjohn 4y ago
    Picking individual use cases is exactly how you should be reviewing benchmarks. You should be picking a laptop based on what you do. If you don't do certain things, why would you care that some other CPU is faster at what you are not doing? If you're looking for a "general" comparison, there is none. General usage of a laptop computer for who? What do you consider general usage? What exactly are you looking for? For 99% of what people do, they won't even be able to tell apart a Celeron from an M2. Why do you think we have things like discreet GPUs? You buy certain hardware for certain tasks. Or do you just want to say that your CPU is better than someone else's? Who gives a shit? That's really all you get from a "general" performance review, a bunch of vague crap. This review was great. It shows what Linux users can expect under certain workloads on two laptops that cost the same amount of money. You can then decide which one is best for you as a Linux user who may be interested in an M2.
    - minimaul 4y ago

leeter 4y ago

Without examining the behavior of the specific wins my guess is memory. The M1 and M2 have amazing memory bandwidth. That's something their design needs as clock for clock they would be massively pipeline starved if they didn't because of how wide the apple design is.