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M3 CPU cores have become more versatile
- seec 3y agoThe Apple spin doctors are hard at work. This is one way to see things. The way I see it, is that M3 performance cores are faster in some situations but also not that much faster. The efficiency cores are almost as fast as M1 cores but also the conditions to get there are specific. Since they actually removed performance cores, the overall real-world performance is actually not very enticing. It is somewhat better in some cases but mostly equivalent and sometimes even worse, which is just ridiculous considering the price increase. All this is happening while they significantly increased frequency across the board and they benefit from state-of-the-art fab process. The M3 E cores have 85% of the frequency of the M1 P cores; it is absolutely nothing special that they have about 85% of their performance. Similarly, the M3 P cores use 20% more frequency, so their "performance increase" isn't really something to write home about. In fact, what we can see is that already at the 3rd generation, their chips use enough power at a large density that they became challenging to cool. Plenty of M3 users are complaining about heat and noise just like in the intel days. Their absurd focus on efficiency cores also makes their desktop computers even less valuable than they had already become under apple silicon. They were already overpriced but you are now paying even more for dumb compromised efficiency cores that have no reason to exist on computer plugged into the wall. Their GPUs are still stupidly underpowered for the asking price and their architecture too different enough that porting stuff is more trouble than it could be worth for most developers (as we have recently seen with the cancelation of various software on macOS). Meanwhile Intel just released their first try at an efficient mobile chip and not only they are pretty close but thanks to their GPU investment during covid they even managed to make entry level chips that make low end Apple Silicons SKUs like a pretty bad deal, especially if you are even remotely interested in gaming. There are laptop now going out at the asking price of a base MacBook Air with not only twice the memory/storage but also double the gaming (and every other workload that is close to that) performance at a close enough efficiency and very similar form factor. It seems that we are now in the post AS hype where the situation feels a lot like the PowerPC days. They will pretend they are faster but in fact in most case do much worse at twice the price. Apple needs to revise their commercial strategy or they are in trouble...
- jtrn 3y agoI think some cold water on the hype is good; I just feel this is a bit too negative. It seems that there are many areas where the M3 is doing a good job of increasing both performance in general, and also performance per wattø: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M3-SoC-analyzed-Increased-performance-and-improved-efficiency.766789.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M3-SoC-analyzed-Increase... I also haven't gotten the same impression as you with regard to temperatures. Mostly, people seem to think it's very good, but a bit harder to cool the 14" versus the 16", and this seems to be backed up by actual battery life when unplugged. Example: https://youtu.be/E9IJ7nOAZyM?si=xI6vR2Y8f0sr8dgo&t=743 https://youtu.be/E9IJ7nOAZyM?si=xI6vR2Y8f0sr8dgo&t=743 I know that you didn't say that it's twice as bad as its competitors when it comes to performance and temperature (you were making an analogy to the PowerPC), but right now, it actually seems to be the other way around, where almost every other hardware architecture is using twice as much power for the same performance compared to Apple silicon (on PC at least, it seems a lot closer in on mobile where Qualcomm exists). I think you can choose to view the GPU pricing from many angle. For instance, the value in relationship to token per second in large language inference seems to be high on the M3 compared to equivalent hardware needed to run it using any Nvidia GPUs. Unless you also think that Nvidia GPUs are also stupidly overpriced Of course. Am I understanding you correctly that you feel the jump from M2 to M3 is not bringing much to the table? Or do you think that the M3 is overpraised compared to other CPU/GPU architectures? Or both? I would love it if you have some links to people that review it with a bit more critical eye on performance per watt and such, as I don't think an assertion that "People are complaining about temperature" can be refuted, so it might be better to focus on actual measurements and temperatures compared to previous generations or computer models.
- pants2 3y agoGreat investigation and data. While the M3 Pro looked pretty disappointing at first because of the loss in P core count, it looks like the huge strides have been made with the E core performance, so it's not the downgrade that one might think. I own a 16" M1 Pro for work and a 16" M3 Pro for play, and wow I can really tell a difference in both performance and battery life. It's a nice upgrade.
- als0 3y agoBattery life must be hard to compare because presumably the battery life on the M1 Pro must have degraded by about 10% by now, which is quite a significant difference in capacity compared to a brand new 16" MacBook.
- FlyingAvatar 3y agoYeah, my M1 Pro's battery has 525 cycles on it and has lost 16% of its capacity. (Edit: Actually, mine is M1 Max, FWIW.)
- lambdaba 3y agoThat is remarkably low, isn't it? I mean, saying this as an (ex) ThinkPad user :P. Did you take any special care with it?
- askonomm 3y agoThe M series macbooks are amazing machines. I don't want to take away from them at all, but I recently realized I can get the same power that a 3k Macbook pro has with about 1k when I build my own PC (excluding the screen), and with it full upgradeability making for a much better bang for a buck, and illustrating how ridiculous the MacBook prices are. I mean they charge $400 for an extra terabyte of storage, when I can get around 6TB for the same price. But, unfortunately you can't build your own notebooks that would remain compact and decent, so now I just use a cheap laptop as a thin client that remotely connects to my PC.
- com2kid 3y agoFor people wanting to do LLM work at home, a fully loaded MacBook has more memory available to it than anything else a consumer can buy. All in a laptop form factor (versus Nvidia GPUs). A small market, sure, but one they have on lock down.
- LoganDark 3y agoNot to mention that this memory is also VRAM. You can have over 100GB of it, in an age where just 80GB of VRAM in a single card costs over $13,000.
- ric2b 3y agoYou can do the same with any integrated GPU on an Intel or AMD processor. Actually you can go well beyond that amount of memory.
- wtallis 3y agoThe integrated GPUs Intel and AMD are shipping don't really have enough performance to be worth the trouble, and the configs that support 100+ GB of RAM and have integrated GPUs don't have much memory bandwidth (running at speeds like 6400MT/s is a lot harder with multiple ranks of memory).
- sroussey 3y agoGame mode runs stuff on E cores at high frequencies which might be mother way to test them.
- deagle50 3y agoI wish the e cores would ramp up before the p cores get loaded. Maybe we can use this mode when plugged in, if there were a way to manually toggle it.
- pornel 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if E cores running at their max frequency had worse performance per watt than P cores running normally, so such ramp up before use of P cores wouldn't make sense.
- w10-1 3y agoIn sum, all as promised: - E cores can go slower, to save more energy - E cores can go faster, to reduce the need to move a workload to a P core - P cores go faster overall, as expected for a new chip Left untested is the real new feature in the M3 chips, dynamic memory resizing. In earlier M chips, memory allocations were fixed per app, and now they can change. Net result should be slightly more overhead for dynamic indirection, but better usage of available memory (i.e., fewer stories about how many apps you have open when you compile). This is where user-level scenarios might be more illuminating than micro-benchmarks. Whether this stops people complaining about paying for more memory remains to be seen. It's a real achievement that we're back to paying $2-3K for high-end machines for serious work.
- wtallis 3y agoI think the memory reallocation feature you're talking about is a GPU feature, not anything to do with the CPU cores. And probably not anything to do with DRAM at all but rather caches or registers within the GPU.
- dagmx 3y ago> In earlier M chips, memory allocations were fixed per app, and now they can change. This isn’t correct. You’re confusing the CPU and very specific GPU behaviour. Memory allocations on the CPU side have always been dynamic. Memory allocations on the GPU are also semi-dynamic even on earlier GPU generations. What is new, is the ability to 1. Dynamically adjust GPU memory caches to different purposes, whereas every other GPU (not just Apple) will have specific caches for different GPU functionality. 2. Dynamically adjust register usage on the GPU cores, whereas other GPUs will use the maximal number of registers a shader might need even if they go unused in a branch.
- hypercube33 3y agoI'm really hung up on why Apple won't do what Intel has done with their freaky Intel Radeon NUC or new Xeon chips which is to on package some high bandwidth ram and allow expansion to ddr5 as a slower ram tier. we are stuck on apple with apps that want 8gb plus like chrome and then they want to gpu accelerate which eats more of the ram and I don't get how you can buy anything configured like this with less than 32gb of memory and expect long life out of it.
- lincpa 3y ago[dead]