4 ms·

When my colleagues got their M1s, they were about as fast as the then 6 years old 4 core i5 I was using at the time. That is somewhat impressive, but I find it

When my colleagues got their M1s, they were about as fast as the then 6 years old 4 core i5 I was using at the time. That is somewhat impressive, but I find it hard to believe that a reasonable desktop was only half as fast as an M1. I'm thinking if that difference was due to Windows' slow file system rather than the machine itself. For instance there's is a large performance delta between Windows and Linux when compiling JavaScript.

xcv123 3y ago
> they were about as fast as the then 6 years old 4 core i5 I was using at the time No they were faster than your old quad core i5. My M1 Pro laptop has a Geekbench 6 score of 12,626. My Ryzen 5600X desktop (6 cores, faster than a quad i5) has a Geekbench score of 8,583.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Stop using Geekbench to "prove" how fast your CPU is. It's one aspect of benchmarking, not the totality. It doesn't cover the vast majority of generic benchmarks. It covers "common use case" ones, which is exactly what the Apple engineers target. That's not a bad thing, but as mentioned in the OP there are over a hundred things it sucks at, and a few dozen more it barely keeps up at. Even if it's awesome at executing JS code.
  - xcv123 3y ago
    Benchmarks (or any timed CPU performance tests) are precisely how we prove how fast CPUs are. No need for quotes on "prove". It's an objective measure, an actual proof. Geekbench 6 is one suite of tests that is reliable and has provided a useful measure for comparing production server VM performance at my job. It accurately predicted the performance of real server work loads. I would rather use Geekbench or any random benchmarking suite than rely on some guy commenting that he thinks/feels his ancient quad i5 is as fast as the M1 (not even close).
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      > It's an objective measure, an actual proof. Geekbench 6 is one suite of tests that is reliable Did I say it wasn't useful? I said it's only useful if you're trying to measure a single set of metrics versus a broad spectrum. As is clear from the 100+ tests it doesn't compare to a generation old Ryzen architecture at. I also clearly said that it was a useful metric for what many M-series users are actually looking for ("common use cases such as JavaScript execution and visual compositing"). You should really learn to comprehend entire thoughts versus the idea/sentence/strawman you make up in your head.
      - xcv123 3y ago
        > You should really learn to comprehend entire thoughts Both of these replies from you are poorly written, hence you're getting downvoted by others. You should learn to form clearer thoughts that are worth communicating, and work on your writing.
        deaddodo 3y ago
        I'm being downvoted for being a smarmy ass. I accept that. Now feel free to introspectively accept your own faults. Particularly your pigheaded inability to argue in good faith and/or comprehend basic English. PS - you didn't need two messages for that. All it does is reinforce your insecurity and necessity to "be right". Next time, just edit your post. Or better yet, post and move on. It's an internet comment from an anonymous person, no need to let it live rent free in your head.
        xcv123 3y ago
        Wow. You have issues. > PS - you didn't need two messages for that. I only wrote one message for that. Anyway, put that aside. The benchmark suite at Phoronix is biased to AMD due to a lot of tests being optimized for x86 instructions (AVX).
        deaddodo 3y ago
dijit 3y ago
Ironic, as I consider the filesystem on MacOS to be one of it's huge weaknesses. Performance on Linux on equivalent hardware has always been far superior (on intel macs)
wood_spirit 3y ago
Compiling code is something that the M1 excelled at. My guess that a lot of that was excellent memory performance compared to what was normal in desktops at the time.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  I don't understand "compiling code" as a metric. Do you mean Swift and Objective-C? Or do you mean general things like Rust and C++? Based on multiple benchmarks, the Ryzen 6000 series and Alder Lake series should outperform the M2 Ultra pretty drastically (200-300%, which is well above the M3 general uplift of 20%) unless there's a severe disk bottleneck, which is going to be more of a SSD/PCIe issue than a CPU one (and something that can be configured/improved on PCs).
  - wood_spirit 3y ago
    I was talking about when the first generation M1 came out and it was faster than normal contemporary desktops at developer stuff like compiling Java and c/c++ and objectiveC (was this before iOS went swift? I can’t remember). Lots of devs got one and praised it to bits on HN. And my builds were basically twice as fast. These days, due to various constraints with tooling my current company still uses, I’m on a new x86 MBP, and it feels slower and hotter and noisier. But it’s not a desktop.
  - inkyoto 3y ago
    > Based on multiple benchmarks, the Ryzen 6000 series and Alder Lake series should outperform the M2 Ultra pretty drastically (200-300%, which is well above the M3 general uplift of 20%) unless there's a severe disk bottleneck, which is going to be more of a SSD/PCIe issue than a CPU one (and something that can be configured/improved on PCs). Compilation is strongly memory bound, especially large builds. Rust and Haskell compilers regularly clock a upward of 70 Gb/sec of the memory throughput on the parallel builds of some small to most medium size code bases. Large C++ builds should be the same. Synthetic benchmarks are a poor reflection of such workloads. Having said that, it does not matter how fast is the CPU if it stalls on the memory access, if e.g. the memory bus is not wide enough. Max's 512-bit wide memory bus at 400Gb/sec and Ultra's 1024-bit memory bus at 800Gb/sec can feed the L2 cache much faster resulting in a more even CPU core utilisation and the workload spread.

xcv123 3y ago

> they were about as fast as the then 6 years old 4 core i5 I was using at the time No they were faster than your old quad core i5. My M1 Pro laptop has a Geekbench 6 score of 12,626. My Ryzen 5600X desktop (6 cores, faster than a quad i5) has a Geekbench score of 8,583.

deaddodo 3y ago
Stop using Geekbench to "prove" how fast your CPU is. It's one aspect of benchmarking, not the totality. It doesn't cover the vast majority of generic benchmarks. It covers "common use case" ones, which is exactly what the Apple engineers target. That's not a bad thing, but as mentioned in the OP there are over a hundred things it sucks at, and a few dozen more it barely keeps up at. Even if it's awesome at executing JS code.
- xcv123 3y ago
  Benchmarks (or any timed CPU performance tests) are precisely how we prove how fast CPUs are. No need for quotes on "prove". It's an objective measure, an actual proof. Geekbench 6 is one suite of tests that is reliable and has provided a useful measure for comparing production server VM performance at my job. It accurately predicted the performance of real server work loads. I would rather use Geekbench or any random benchmarking suite than rely on some guy commenting that he thinks/feels his ancient quad i5 is as fast as the M1 (not even close).
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > It's an objective measure, an actual proof. Geekbench 6 is one suite of tests that is reliable Did I say it wasn't useful? I said it's only useful if you're trying to measure a single set of metrics versus a broad spectrum. As is clear from the 100+ tests it doesn't compare to a generation old Ryzen architecture at. I also clearly said that it was a useful metric for what many M-series users are actually looking for ("common use cases such as JavaScript execution and visual compositing"). You should really learn to comprehend entire thoughts versus the idea/sentence/strawman you make up in your head.
    - xcv123 3y ago
      > You should really learn to comprehend entire thoughts Both of these replies from you are poorly written, hence you're getting downvoted by others. You should learn to form clearer thoughts that are worth communicating, and work on your writing.
      - deaddodo 3y ago
        I'm being downvoted for being a smarmy ass. I accept that. Now feel free to introspectively accept your own faults. Particularly your pigheaded inability to argue in good faith and/or comprehend basic English. PS - you didn't need two messages for that. All it does is reinforce your insecurity and necessity to "be right". Next time, just edit your post. Or better yet, post and move on. It's an internet comment from an anonymous person, no need to let it live rent free in your head.
        xcv123 3y ago
        Wow. You have issues. > PS - you didn't need two messages for that. I only wrote one message for that. Anyway, put that aside. The benchmark suite at Phoronix is biased to AMD due to a lot of tests being optimized for x86 instructions (AVX).
        deaddodo 3y ago

dijit 3y ago

Ironic, as I consider the filesystem on MacOS to be one of it's huge weaknesses. Performance on Linux on equivalent hardware has always been far superior (on intel macs)

wood_spirit 3y ago

Compiling code is something that the M1 excelled at. My guess that a lot of that was excellent memory performance compared to what was normal in desktops at the time.

deaddodo 3y ago
I don't understand "compiling code" as a metric. Do you mean Swift and Objective-C? Or do you mean general things like Rust and C++? Based on multiple benchmarks, the Ryzen 6000 series and Alder Lake series should outperform the M2 Ultra pretty drastically (200-300%, which is well above the M3 general uplift of 20%) unless there's a severe disk bottleneck, which is going to be more of a SSD/PCIe issue than a CPU one (and something that can be configured/improved on PCs).
- wood_spirit 3y ago
  I was talking about when the first generation M1 came out and it was faster than normal contemporary desktops at developer stuff like compiling Java and c/c++ and objectiveC (was this before iOS went swift? I can’t remember). Lots of devs got one and praised it to bits on HN. And my builds were basically twice as fast. These days, due to various constraints with tooling my current company still uses, I’m on a new x86 MBP, and it feels slower and hotter and noisier. But it’s not a desktop.
- inkyoto 3y ago
  > Based on multiple benchmarks, the Ryzen 6000 series and Alder Lake series should outperform the M2 Ultra pretty drastically (200-300%, which is well above the M3 general uplift of 20%) unless there's a severe disk bottleneck, which is going to be more of a SSD/PCIe issue than a CPU one (and something that can be configured/improved on PCs). Compilation is strongly memory bound, especially large builds. Rust and Haskell compilers regularly clock a upward of 70 Gb/sec of the memory throughput on the parallel builds of some small to most medium size code bases. Large C++ builds should be the same. Synthetic benchmarks are a poor reflection of such workloads. Having said that, it does not matter how fast is the CPU if it stalls on the memory access, if e.g. the memory bus is not wide enough. Max's 512-bit wide memory bus at 400Gb/sec and Ultra's 1024-bit memory bus at 800Gb/sec can feed the L2 cache much faster resulting in a more even CPU core utilisation and the workload spread.