20 ms·
M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
- stuff4ben 3y agoThis is good to know. I worry about the longevity of these new M-series processors from Apple since they're so (relatively) new. What is the usable lifespan of a base M1-MacBook Air for example? I guess I'll find out since I just bought one for my kid who is a junior in HS and I'm hoping this will last until they graduate college.
- dewote 3y agoFor context my M1 Air feels as good as the day I bought it and it's just about to hit 3 years old. I kept my previous 2014 MBP for 6 years and I can't see this one being any different.
- jghn 3y agoSame. The only issue I have w/ my original M1 Air is that I was impatient and got the 8GB model because I could get it into my hands a month faster. But that's not something that's changed over time. Every new release I drool over getting the new shiny but the reality is that for my personal laptop it's AOK for almost everything I do. Sometimes a bit slow and frustrating due to the RAM but again, that's on me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Detrytus 3y agoI'm running Windows (ARM) virtual machine on M1 Air, and it's constantly thermally throttled. It was hitting 95 Celsius degrees sometimes. I even bought one of those cooling pads with three fans, to make up for the lack of cooling in the laptop itself, so it is now down to 65 Celsius degress. Makes my life little more bearable, but I'm switching to M3 Macbook pro (with proper cooling) ASAP.
- andreasley 3y agoFor a while now, the lifespan of Apple devices has mostly been limited by Apple stopping to provide software updates. Most Macs from 20 years ago still work fine today. If some component died, it was usually the hard drive or the power supply in my experience. Apple Silicon will definitely be the architecture best supported by Apple for the foreseeable future. There is no downside to it in terms or reliability or longevity.
- kmmlng 3y agoTo make a somewhat exaggerated comparison: horses still work fine today, but it really doesn't make sense for people to be using them anymore outside of niche use cases or as a hobby. Sure, macs from 20 years ago still work "fine", but the reason they aren't widely used anymore is not the lack of software updates.
- charrondev 3y agoI’ve got a 16 inch Pro with 32g of RAM and I can see myself using this for development work at least a decade. I tend to run it with a large external 4k 120hz screen and don’t see the need to upgrade for better IO for a long time and the thing is very, very fast.
- SXX 3y agoI bought M1 Air 256GB with 16GB RAM on release for light web development and professional 2D gamedev on Unity. Still using it till now and it's really really durable hardware and I've been usign it daily for 3+ years. With so little RAM had to sacrifice ability to properly run VMs, but yet till this day there just no comparable hardware on market. 8GB versions though... Certainly Apple should be damned for selling laptops with 8GB RAM in 2023 when my x220i ran 16GB in 2011. At some point they will all become e-waste due too little RAM or dead soldered SSD because of extreme swapping.
- stuff4ben 3y ago8GB of RAM ought to be enough for anybody right? I'm hoping that's true for someone who spends most of their time in Google Docs or Word and the occasional light web browsing. This MBA replaced a Chromebook which really was on its last legs.
- alpaca128 3y agoI'm using an M2 Air with 16GB and M1 Mini with 8GB. On the 8GB machine I have to restart Firefox every few days because otherwise it completely fills up RAM + Swap and the entire system starts getting sluggish. It's a very noticeable bottleneck while on the 16GB Macbook I don't really think about memory usage. I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks.
- stuff4ben 3y ago> I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks. Which is basically all my kids do. Less than 10 tabs, nothing else.
- Synaesthesia 3y agoI’m a heavy user often do 50 tabs and lots of apps in the background. 8gb M1 air is really fast for me.
- stetrain 3y agoFrom my experience with M1, M1 Max, and M2 Max laptops, I think the only real limitation to useful longevity of the M1 machines is configured RAM and Apple's willingness to provide software updates. A point in its favor is that Apple is still selling the M1 MacBook Air new today as their entry level laptop, which is now 3 years old. And it's still a great machine with better performance and battery life than a lot of competitors and it's completely fanless. I expect Apple to push for dropping new OS support for Intel machines fairly quickly, but the countdown clock on M1 support probably doesn't even start until they stop selling them as new. My previous Intel MacBook Pro was still perfectly serviceable 8 years after purchase when I traded it in, although it wasn't going to receive major OS updates going forward. The only time I've had issues with my M1 MacBook Air 8GB is when I temporarily tried using it as a real dev machine while waiting for a backordered company laptop. As soon as you really hit that RAM ceiling due to running docker and big IDEs you really feel the performance drop, but until that point it was perfectly competent, and again this is a fully fanless machine.
- troupe 3y agoMy experience with buying lower end intel based Macbook Airs is that they generally last 10 years before we replace them. Usually this comes down to asking if it is worth replacing the battery or better to invest in a new machine. I'm assuming the M processors will be similar.
- kalleboo 3y agoFor me at least the longevity is already far better than the Intel MacBooks Pro. I bought the 2017 and 2019 models and for my use those felt obsolete from day 1, with 2 hour battery life and permanent full-speed fans and CPU throttling. I have a M1 Pro since release day and I don't see myself wanting to replace this until probably the M5 is out.
- cubefox 3y agoThis seems to be a lot of effort to rationalize the surprisingly small performance increase from M2 to M3. Initially the assumption was that M2 to M3 would be a bigger step than M1 to M2, not a smaller one. Perhaps TSMC 3nm is showing the limits of scaling?
- Olreich 3y agoScaling based on node size has been limited for a long time. It feels like it started at 13nm that every shrink was getting less and less performance uplift, but it's likely it's been going on for longer and we just had much more room for improvement on chip design.
- scrlk 3y agoIt's a mixture of several problems: * TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive) * Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last few years * Tim Cook trying to push the average selling price up to keep revenue growth going in the face of sales declines (e.g. hobbling memory bandwidth, reducing the number of performance cores for M3 Pro) I don't expect there to be a M1 style generational leap for a long time, expect 2010s Intel style yearly performance gains from here on out.
- pier25 3y agoThe GPU is increasing a lot though. Another point is the CPU improvements are constant. In about two years the base M3 is now on par with the M1 Max.
- hajile 3y agoThe GPU is critical to future profits though. Apple really wants your monthly subscription to Apple Arcade and they want to expand in other game areas which is why they've been paying AAA companies to optimize for Mac. This also ties into their VR headset where gaming will be one of the core features.
- 3y ago
- aeonik 3y agoThe graph needs a legend. Explaining the graph in the several paragraphs below and then cross referencing shape names and spatial relationships, is not a fun game to play.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoFeels like we’ve gone from “it’s just better, it’s obviously better you can see with your eyes and feel it as you use it” when M1/2 dropped. To trying to justify why the M3 is 20% faster than the M1 and the M2 was also 20% faster than the M1 and weirdly Apple is only comparing it to their older processor. Like people, maybe it’s just an underwhelming update… no need to pretend it’s not.
- dmix 3y agoEvery Apple update that’s not a new product/major revision people rush to HN to say how underwhelmed they are. This says more about the high bar they set for announcements and people’s own expectations… rather than how steady and efficient progress works in reality. This is what product iterations look like, M2 only came out a year ago and M3 is a notable speed increase and just as important bump in battery life (22hrs is insane for the performance you get). They compared to M1 and intel because people almost always wait 1-2 cycles before upgrading because MacBooks easily last 2yrs under heavy use and it’s an expensive upgrade.
- runjake 3y ago1. I think you set your expectations too high. 2. I assume Apple compared the M3 to M1 because most of the customers they are targeting are still on the M1. M2 customers bought a computer less than a year ago and that pool of people is relatively small compared to the number on M1 today.
- mcphage 3y ago> I think you set your expectations too high. Well, they did announce it in an event called "scary fast". I mean there's always marketing exaggeration, but I did expect more than trying to understand if it's even faster at all. Otherwise I'm not entirely certain what the point was.
- whynotminot 3y agoLiterally the only point of confusion here is M3 Pro versus M2 Pro, where Apple seems to have simply made different choices around what the Pro chip should be. M3 Max is a massive gain over M2 Max. And M3 is a nice improvement over M2. Hope that helps.
- jmull 3y agoIt seems like the M3 favors efficiency and thermals over raw power. This makes sense for the devices they've put it in. I wonder if we're going to see different processors (M3X or M4) for the next release of the pro desktops, that favor power over thermals and efficiency? Maybe there will be a kind of tick-tock, with odd numbered processors favoring efficiency and even numbered processors for power? M3, M5, M7 for the laptops M4, M6, M8 for the pro desktops ?
- pohl 3y agoDoesn't prioritizing efficiency and thermals make sense for any device? Even a desktop has moments when it's doing almost nothing but has tasks that can adequately be handled by an E core where powering up a P core is overkill. Doesn't being efficient mean that more of the thermal budget can be held in reserve for when it's actually needed? Don't desktop users desire for their powerful machine to also be quiet?
- jeffbee 3y agoThe blue-logo CPU company gives you a choice. You can adopt their most aggressive power profiles and get marginal performance gains if you want them. Or, you can tune them down to levels where they are pretty fast and fairly quiet. Or, you can dial them all the way down to their most efficient operating point, which pretty much nobody wants because that point is around 1W/core and they are pretty slow. Apple is dictating how much power the CPU is allowed to draw and they don't let it scale up. They are also making a static choice about how much die area and power to spend on the GPU, which might not suit every user. I know I personally don't give a rip about the GPU in my M2 mac mini, beyond the fact that it can draw things on the screen.
- diffeomorphism 3y agoNot really, no. Case in point: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-9-7940HS-analysis-Zen4-Phoenix-is-ideally-as-efficient-as-Apple.713395.0.html#toc-6 https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-9-7940HS-analysis-Ze... Adjusting the TDP from 80W all the way down to 35W costs you relatively little in performance and gives you about the same efficiency as an M2 Pro. That is not done because it does not sell. > Don't desktop users desire for their powerful machine to also be quiet? No. That is not an "also" but an "instead". People claim they would make that trade-off but that is just not the case. Same for "make it heavier but give me more battery life".
- Dritzzka 3y agoApple needs to stop explaining stats in vague weeb speak and just give us what the actual compile times in GCC are. >Then again, that takes courage.
- pcf 3y agoI asked Claude.ai to summarise this discussion for me, and below is its expanded summary of the discussions related to Apple Silicon and the M1/M2/M3 chip generations. ON M3 PERFORMANCE GAINS: The jump from M2 to M3 seems smaller than M1 to M2, especially for the regular M3 chip. Some speculate this shows limits in further scaling down process nodes. The M3 Pro reduced performance cores from 8 to 6 compared to M2 Pro, suggesting a focus on efficiency, yields and costs rather than maximum performance. But the M3 Max increased performance cores from 8 to 12 versus M2 Max. It matches or exceeds the M2 Ultra, indicating significant gains at the high end. The M3 line overall shows Apple is diversifying core configurations across the range. This makes comparing performance gains more complex than simple core counts. There is debate around how much benchmarks like Geekbench reflect real-world usage. Things like frequency management and cluster configurations affect multicore performance. The 20-30% gains over M2 may seem small yearly, but comparing to M1 shows solid doubling of performance over 2 years. ON EFFICIENCY CORES: Some argue the M3 wasted the process shrink on just frequency gains rather than wider cores or gains in other areas. But others note efficiency is still improved. The regular M3 efficiency cores clock higher while using the same power as M1's. Efficiency cores handle lightweight threads well, not just background tasks. Their performance can be significant when frequencies are maximized. ON THERMAL MANAGEMENT AND BATTERY LIFE: The M3 line generally favors efficiency and thermal management over peak performance. This suits laptop use cases well. But it's unclear if a future M4 will tune for performance over efficiency in desktop models, or just add more cores. Either way, the 22 hour battery life on M3 Air is seen as a major achievement showing efficiency strides.
- whynotminot 3y agoGiven what appears to be a reduced performance focus for the M3 Pro chip, and the M3 Max has taken off to the stratosphere in both performance and unfortunately price, I’m wondering if for a lot of professional users if getting a refurbished M2 Max machine is actually the best price to performance move right now. Really looking forward to some detailed M3 Pro analysis.
- lincpa 3y ago[dead]
- asylteltine 3y agoAnd yet the air can’t support more than one monitor. I know Apple is a small company with only a few engineers so it must have been too hard. Sarcasm obviously. As an Apple enthusiast it’s so annoying how they sniff farts.
- sneak 3y agoThe Air is not the computer for people who use a lot of external monitors. 99.9%+ of MBAir users will never connect even one external monitor. They make a small MacBook Pro that is suited for that task.
- Detrytus 3y agoAnd yet it's a dick move from Apple to artificially limit number of external screens supported.
- sneak 3y agoLots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is. It is Apple’s best selling computer by quite a bit. They sell metric assloads of the $999 base model each fall when school starts. IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price.
- user_7832 3y ago> Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is. > IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price. It is possible for your comment to be correct while the poster above is also correct. The M chips are amazing, but let's not pretend that Apple doesn't knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions. "But that would make it more expensive." Yes it would... by pennies. It is a bit ridiculous to sell a phone as expensive as the current iphones and limit them to USB 2.
- sfmike 3y agois efficient cores just lower clock or how could 3 6 efficient and 6 performance be worse, is it possible it could be better as its more efficient while also faster and just calling it efficient cores? After all isn't that an arbitrary semantic term?
- reliablereason 3y agoThey take up a smaller size of the chip. Which could be seen as an indication that those cores have less caching and less parts for prefetching and stuff like that. The efficiency core would do less things per cycle but also use less power per cycle. The performance cores would do 3 instructions in a cycle but the efficiency core might only do half an instruction.
- bloopernova 3y agoI want a better system load metric now that we've got heterogenous cores in CPUs. The Pixel 8 Pro has 3 types, efficiency, performance, and one single ultra performance core. If your efficiency cores are always close to max usage, but your performance cores are idle, is your system being heavily or barely used? I understand that system load isn't really a useful metric between systems, but it's useful to compare on a single system I think. I just want a better at-a-glance thing to communicate to me if my computer is under or overloaded. (Additionally, do you have to specify that a particular app can run on efficiency cores, or does the process scheduler do it all without input from a human?)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tootyskooty 3y agoSounds like power usage might fit the bill.
- zamadatix 3y agoRaw power usage is very skewed. Getting that last 20% of performance the chip is capable of might take as much power as the first 80% did, and not each type of workload may have the same skew depending on which components are being stressed and how. Say you did have an adjusted map of power<->utilization though, it still assumes "system utilization" means "how much of the total possible capacity of this system is being utilized". This is a valid take, if you can get such a mapping, but it's not necessarily the only valid take of what system load is.
- cduzz 3y agoIsn't this just a subset of the existing capacity monitoring problem where I want to know how loaded a multi-core system is under the following scenario: Some critical path, single-threaded task is at 100% of capacity of a core; the system has 10 cores -- is my system at 10% utilization or 100% utilization?
- 3y ago
- flashback2199 3y agoI don't see apple silicon in macs having been the right decision a decade from now because competing toe to toe with the entire semis industry on architecture has never worked before except in iphone where they had a huge first mover advantage.
- larkost 3y agoI think the argument that this might not be great in the long run is worth considering, but in the short run I think that their results over the last few years are nothing short of astonishing. Specifically their laptops, especially when not plugged into a power source, have both stunning performance and battery life at the same time. Yes there are competitor chips from AMD and the like that are faster when plugged in, but at a power budget that mean they are severely throttled when unplugged. This is what Apple cares about, and at this point they are unmatched. Apple likes to have fast desktop machines (and they do), but they don't care about that nearly as much as they care about laptops-in-laptop-mode. We are a couple of years into this, and Intel is making noises about trying to match this, but has not yet, and Apple seems to be pulling further ahead in specifically this area. And they have a huge overlap in this focus in the development of the related processors for their iPhones/iPads/AppleTV products, and the upcoming headset. A lot of the development work gets largely reused in that other space, making Apples ROI even better. So long as their is a big enough market that cares about that (and from the look of sales, there is), Apple's strategy seems to be a winning one.
- flashback2199 3y agoThey are making themselves more different from the rest of the market instead of "the same but better" which brought people back to the mac in the first place. It used to be as a normal person you bought the latest Mac and it came with the latest i7 and you didn't even think about it and none of your friends on PC could say anything bad about it because it was the same chip they had. Now it's like woo M chip is so different and fast look at my new Mac guys and then your friends who have PC say actually it's not faster it's just more power efficient and now the seed of wondering if Apple is really better has been planted whether or not it's totally true. I've already started seeing this happen on forums. The average person buying a Mac doesn't want to have to think about the nuances of specs and once they start digging into specs they might find themselves buying a PC instead. But we'll see, maybe the past won't repeat itself this time.
- jader201 3y agoIt’s ridiculous that the base and Pro only support 1 and 2 external displays, respectively. Want 3 monitors? Have to pay for the Max. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/02/m3-chip-still-supports-one-external-display/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/02/m3-chip-still-supports-...
- lvl102 3y agoIt’s called command right arrow. Try it. I think someone did a study and found people cannot use more than two. Everything else you’re better off using desktop management.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoFrom what I know, this isn't some artificial limitation that Apple imposes. Adding support has a cost that most customers don't need to pay. Regardless, most people aren't going to be plugging in three monitors into their laptops, so most people aren't going to care about this.
- runjake 3y ago> Adding support has a cost that most customers don't need to pay. It also adds heat, battery consumption, and space. For a chip that will also be used in iPads. Still I wished the base M3 chip supported at least two external displays. Or at least let you use two by disabling the internal display (eg. clamshell mode or whatever). > most people aren't going to be plugging in three monitors into their laptops, so most people aren't going to care about this. Last summer (2022), or thereabouts, I got a survey request from Apple where they asked how much I cared about external monitor support, followed by subsequent questions about the number of external displays that was important to me. So, Apple's looking at it.
- ChrisLTD 3y agoIt's entirely Apple's choice to use the M chips in iPads. And if that means they need to compromise on laptop performance or features, they should change course.
- swader999 3y agoMy metrics are simple: Does the fan turn on? Can it go faster than I think and type? M2 with lots of ram has been a dream.
- wkat4242 3y agoThis guy is becoming too much of an apple apologist for me. I've seen him defending pretty bad decisions like John Gruber (who always was) so I've stopped following him like I have Gruber. Also, because I've disagreed so much with Apple's decisions in the past years I've abandoned their ecosystem altogether so I'm also much less invested in the topic. Though I still use a Mac for work as a "least bad" option. Too bad because he did have good technical insights.
- wkat4242 3y agoPs I know this is a kinda hot take but everything Apple has rubbed me the wrong way the past 10 years and I'm less and less aligned with Apple fans. I know this doesn't apply to everyone. In 2004 I moved to Mac because it was a powerful and configurable Unix OS with the benefit of a consistent UI (nothing on Linux was there then, it was a mess) and major commercial apps like Office and Photoshop. The latter are still true but the platform is so locked-in that most of its features are useless to me as a multi-OS person. And the hardware is quite locked down as well which simply doesn't work for me. A lot of the reasons for this are not user-centric but commercial.
- seec 3y agoI agree. There is more of us by the day. Don't worry, Apple is going to feel it soon enough. We will see in 10 years, Apple strategy will look very stupid because you will be able to get what are today's 2.5K powerful gaming computers for about 1K. Apple computers will be like Porsches, very nice and all but unless you got free money, really not something most people would consider buying. In other words, a niche; very pretty, but still a tiny market.
- exabrial 3y agoI think I'll hold out to the M4 and make sure memory bandwidth and latency is restored to it's previous value.
- GeekyBear 3y agoGiven that Intel and AMD tend to choke the memory bandwidth on anything below their server chips, this seems short sighted. The M3 Pro's "reduced memory bandwidth" is still double the memory bandwidth you see on Intel and AMD's HEDT chips. Step up to the M3 Max and you're looking at five times the memory bandwidth of Intel and AMD's chips.
- exabrial 3y agoFair point, I think what I'm saying is I'm currently at an M1. I think waiting for an M4 will be another 10x leap. Apple is hellbent to release something new every year, so I think my M1 should last me quite a long time.
- throwaway49594 3y agoYou're comparing strictly CPU memory bandwidth to CPU + GPU. If you add CPU + GPU bandwidth for a PC you'll get similar numbers.
- buildbot 3y agoYour PC can't use the GPU memory bandwidth for the CPU whatsoever. So why would you add the bandwidth?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fredgrott 3y agoFor context, a desktop intel 13900 to 1400 combined with at least a NVIDIA 4060 beats it...System76 Thelio Mira for example. Both in Single and Multicores and GPU memory bandwidth
- Synaesthesia 3y agoYes but only just and it used 5-10x more power.
- pram 3y agoThis is my favorite genre of Apple Silicon posts. Someone who can’t tell the difference between a laptop and a 30lb desktop.
- fh9302 3y agoThey are basically equal while the Intel CPU uses significantly more power. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-13900k https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-13900... https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/3364975 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/3364975
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gtvwill 3y agoDevices get a fail for repairability. So yes there is more to performance than cores. For instance the entire Mac lineup are mostly unrepairable e-waste in the making with excessively wasteful design choices behind them. The company has a about as much ethics as wet tea towel. A facade of good intentions masking greed. I couldn't care less if their laptops get an hour extra battery or are a few seconds faster. The company is scum from an ethics and waste standpoint. Surprises me so many can turn a blind eye to it for 3 months of chart topping numbers.
- musha68k 3y agoAs a user of many Apple Silicon generations in different / mostly top configurations by now I’m obviously a big fan. One thing that I have “observed” though (with no data to back it up): it seems to me as if under heavy load / resource over-provisioning the Intel systems from before seemed to recover more gracefully? I wonder if it’s just me, the particular OS version I had been using at the time or some other thing I’m missing? Again, no idea if this is actually the case / for other workflows than mine. I would be curious to know if anyone else had made the same observation potentially with actual “high load performance” data to back it up?
- lilyball 3y agoRight now I have an intel laptop for work and an apple silicon laptop for personal use. The workloads I do on these machines is different so comparisons are a bit hard to do, but I've seen the intel laptop exhibit poor behavior under load that I've never seen from the apple silicon machine.
- scarface_74 3y agoBy “load” you could easily mean “running Microsoft Teams”.