5 ms·

M1 is particularly spectacular when compared to other chips with similar thermal characteristics. i7-3770K has TDP of 77 W, without a GPU, so it has 7-8 times t

M1 is particularly spectacular when compared to other chips with similar thermal characteristics. i7-3770K has TDP of 77 W, without a GPU, so it has 7-8 times the power budget of M1 for the CPU. In raw performance, M1 cannot match workstation-class CPUs. Since Apple was almost exclusively offering only ultra-mobile Intel chips with horribly dated GPUs, M1 was a giant leap in their offering, but in the desktop PC market there are more powerful chips available. And even some old ones can perform quite well.

dijit 4y ago
I don't even think it's as cut and dry as all that. I have an M2 Macbook air (IE; fanless little thing) but it completely desicrates the memory of its predecessor (Precision 5520 w/ Xeon E3-1505m v6) which has a 45W TDP.. (IE. double and a bit). In single core it continues to readily beat my Theadripper 3970x workstation which has a 280W TDP... (more than 12x the TDP of the M2, though it definitely beats it in multi-core...) I think something else is at play here. Be it a terrible filesystem or (as mentioned in another comment: the use of efficiency cores for compilation).
- sz4kerto 4y ago
  New Ryzen CPUs behave extremely interestingly when you manually apply TDP limits. As I mentioned in a sibling post in this thread, my 7950X is TDP limited to 105 watts (from the 170 watts factory default), and it loses around 8%-10% performance under perfectly multithreaded loads (and nothing if only e.g. half the cores or less are utilised). It is also possible to limit it to 65 watts, at which you lose around 20% or so but that's still very-very fast. At 105 watts it's around as fast as an M1 Ultra, which draws ~ 60 watts if all cores are used. Significant difference, but not something that's a very big problem in workstations. The 7950X is also competitive when limited to 65 watts -- it's barely underperforms the M1 Ultra.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  I don't think it's an efficiency core thing. On ~the same machine (I have a smaller SSD, but otherwise identical): > time make -j real 0m8.716s user 0m29.786s sys 0m15.102s > time taskpolicy -c background make -j real 0m42.196s user 1m13.041s sys 0m30.957s (The latter command forces use of the efficiency cores, the former is allowed use everything) One thing that _is_ notable is that it isn't really managing great parallelism (particularly visible in the efficiency core one). (Only looking at the actual build, as IME autoconf has remained reassuringly slow for the last 20 years, in defiance of all progress in CPUs, so I'm not at all surprised by that one...)
- mhh__ 4y ago
  A threadripper isn't a single thread monster, M1 should smash it (and does)
- zamalek 4y ago
  > Theadripper 3970x workstation which has a 280W TDP Is your RAM running at 3600MT/s (i.e. IF @ 1800MHz)? If not, that's 30% loss for some workloads. Also, compilation is a multi-threaded process. It doesn't make sense to blame things on single core perf.
brigade 4y ago
It’s also a decade older and benchmarks at half the performance. I’d bet that 90% of the issue is that make, /bin/sh, and autotools all use fork() on macOS instead of posix_spawn() (I think that’s still the case…), and fork is slow on macOS. But not quite slow enough to get all that fixed by default.
jeswin 4y ago
> M1 is particularly spectacular when compared to other chips with similar thermal characteristics. i7-3770K has TDP of 77 W, without a GPU, so it has 7-8 times the power budget of M1 for the CPU. Performance doesn't scale linearly with TDP, and that's always been the case. Take any laptop vs desktop CPU, and you'd see the same ratios at play.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  Its even less meaningful in this particular case as the M1 has a working temperature of ~100°C, whereas the intel targets ~65°C. Nonetheless, the M1 will most definitely be drawing much less power, its essentially an Atom processor after all. Its just gonna be hard to really put a number on it - even if you could read out the consumption from the BIOS, as they're doing things differently (integrated GPU and SSD controller for the apple silicone chips etc)
  - dijit 4y ago
    > intel targets ~65°C are you certain you arent swapping these? Intel CPUs are famously running up to 100C before stopping their boost clock. One need only watch a single episode of Linus Tech Tips. people have reported barely any cooling requirements on the M1 and M2s comparitively.
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      Yes, i'm sure. It would've taken you about 20 seconds to find it out yourself too, as the Intel 3770K has a published spreadsheet which clearly states the working temperature. The M1 doesn't, but there are enough unofficial sources to confirm the 100°C too. Including LTTs own video. Its a quiet old model, and consumer CPUs of that generation where generally targeting ~60-70°C. Nowadays they're all going for 95-100°C, wherever its Intel, AMD or Apple
      - brigade 4y ago
        Tcase is different than Tjunction. Tjunction has been around 100 since like Yonah at least.
nikanj 4y ago
In an Apple laptop, the real killer is being able to work for more than 5 minutes without thermal throttling. The i9 in a Macbook pro is plenty fast for 2 minutes, then slows to a crawl because the laptop was designed to be slim, not fast

dijit 4y ago

I don't even think it's as cut and dry as all that. I have an M2 Macbook air (IE; fanless little thing) but it completely desicrates the memory of its predecessor (Precision 5520 w/ Xeon E3-1505m v6) which has a 45W TDP.. (IE. double and a bit). In single core it continues to readily beat my Theadripper 3970x workstation which has a 280W TDP... (more than 12x the TDP of the M2, though it definitely beats it in multi-core...) I think something else is at play here. Be it a terrible filesystem or (as mentioned in another comment: the use of efficiency cores for compilation).

sz4kerto 4y ago
New Ryzen CPUs behave extremely interestingly when you manually apply TDP limits. As I mentioned in a sibling post in this thread, my 7950X is TDP limited to 105 watts (from the 170 watts factory default), and it loses around 8%-10% performance under perfectly multithreaded loads (and nothing if only e.g. half the cores or less are utilised). It is also possible to limit it to 65 watts, at which you lose around 20% or so but that's still very-very fast. At 105 watts it's around as fast as an M1 Ultra, which draws ~ 60 watts if all cores are used. Significant difference, but not something that's a very big problem in workstations. The 7950X is also competitive when limited to 65 watts -- it's barely underperforms the M1 Ultra.
rsynnott 4y ago
I don't think it's an efficiency core thing. On ~the same machine (I have a smaller SSD, but otherwise identical): > time make -j real 0m8.716s user 0m29.786s sys 0m15.102s > time taskpolicy -c background make -j real 0m42.196s user 1m13.041s sys 0m30.957s (The latter command forces use of the efficiency cores, the former is allowed use everything) One thing that _is_ notable is that it isn't really managing great parallelism (particularly visible in the efficiency core one). (Only looking at the actual build, as IME autoconf has remained reassuringly slow for the last 20 years, in defiance of all progress in CPUs, so I'm not at all surprised by that one...)
mhh__ 4y ago
A threadripper isn't a single thread monster, M1 should smash it (and does)
zamalek 4y ago
> Theadripper 3970x workstation which has a 280W TDP Is your RAM running at 3600MT/s (i.e. IF @ 1800MHz)? If not, that's 30% loss for some workloads. Also, compilation is a multi-threaded process. It doesn't make sense to blame things on single core perf.

brigade 4y ago

It’s also a decade older and benchmarks at half the performance. I’d bet that 90% of the issue is that make, /bin/sh, and autotools all use fork() on macOS instead of posix_spawn() (I think that’s still the case…), and fork is slow on macOS. But not quite slow enough to get all that fixed by default.

jeswin 4y ago

> M1 is particularly spectacular when compared to other chips with similar thermal characteristics. i7-3770K has TDP of 77 W, without a GPU, so it has 7-8 times the power budget of M1 for the CPU. Performance doesn't scale linearly with TDP, and that's always been the case. Take any laptop vs desktop CPU, and you'd see the same ratios at play.

411111111111111 4y ago
Its even less meaningful in this particular case as the M1 has a working temperature of ~100°C, whereas the intel targets ~65°C. Nonetheless, the M1 will most definitely be drawing much less power, its essentially an Atom processor after all. Its just gonna be hard to really put a number on it - even if you could read out the consumption from the BIOS, as they're doing things differently (integrated GPU and SSD controller for the apple silicone chips etc)
- dijit 4y ago
  > intel targets ~65°C are you certain you arent swapping these? Intel CPUs are famously running up to 100C before stopping their boost clock. One need only watch a single episode of Linus Tech Tips. people have reported barely any cooling requirements on the M1 and M2s comparitively.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    Yes, i'm sure. It would've taken you about 20 seconds to find it out yourself too, as the Intel 3770K has a published spreadsheet which clearly states the working temperature. The M1 doesn't, but there are enough unofficial sources to confirm the 100°C too. Including LTTs own video. Its a quiet old model, and consumer CPUs of that generation where generally targeting ~60-70°C. Nowadays they're all going for 95-100°C, wherever its Intel, AMD or Apple
    - brigade 4y ago
      Tcase is different than Tjunction. Tjunction has been around 100 since like Yonah at least.

nikanj 4y ago

In an Apple laptop, the real killer is being able to work for more than 5 minutes without thermal throttling. The i9 in a Macbook pro is plenty fast for 2 minutes, then slows to a crawl because the laptop was designed to be slim, not fast