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Nice. Lots of people still claim that M1 is super duper fast but now we're at almost twice the performance!
by porphyra 1y ago
Nice. Lots of people still claim that M1 is super duper fast but now we're at almost twice the performance!
- mpalmer 1y agoM1 is still fast, the speed of its successors does not change that.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoI use one for software development and it's great. Sometimes rust builds are slow and I'd love to force that to be faster with hardware (optimizing build time would be a huge undertaking with not-so-great returns), otherwise I'm totally content. I also have an M2 Max with 32GB of RAM that still feels like magic. I've never had computers that felt so fast for so long.
- pylotlight 1y agoI dunno, working with M1 daily I struggle with resource contention and slow py/js builds. I'd love something faster when work provides me with updated device.
- dontdoxxme 1y agoSounds like you need to spend some time optimising your build. Faster hardware just makes developers lazy. I'm still on an M1 and it's fine, although I do have 32GB.
- dangus 1y agoTo be fair, for all you know they’re building something pretty crazy that justifies high resource consumption. Faster hardware doesn’t exclusively make developers lazy, it also opens up capability.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoThat's the thing. It's not a trivial project. I've already put a lot of time into optimizations and the returns are diminishing now.
- dangus 1y agoIn the age of AI it seems wild to blame developers for being “lazy” and needing more resources. Like, if I were buying a new workstation right now, I’d want to be shelling out $2000 so that I could get something like a Ryzen AI 395+ with 128GB of fast RAM for local AI, or an equivalent Mac Studio. That’s definitely not because I’m “lazy,” it’s because I can’t run a decent model on a raspberry pi
- mrheosuper 1y agoCould you clarify more, AFAIK there is no M1 with 32gb ram machine.
- flkenosad 1y agoM1 Pro
- mrheosuper 1y agoWell it's quite different from the M1. Please don't mix it. It like saying i3 and i7 is the same if they are on the same generation.
- astrange 1y agoIt's not that different. It has more cores but they're the same cores.
- mrheosuper 1y agoAnd higher power limit, exactly like i3 and i5 and i7. Same core architecture, just different in clock, power and core count.
- saagarjha 1y agoI think they have the same microarchitecture but are slightly different (in, like, the number of address bits)
- sudoshred 1y agoMy m1 16gb pro gets throttled (and manually restarted) every time vs code hits 100gb ram usage when running jest unit tests. Don’t know who to blame but 99% sure the problem is my source code and not the machine.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago100gb ram usage? Why not build a pc?
- gigatexal 1y agoChrome eats all my resources too and I have 128GB of ram. Some pages like ClickUp and the Google cloud console (bigquery) eat something like 3-5GB
- raddan 1y agoYou’re chewing through 100GB of RAM on unit tests? What is filling your RAM? Are you sure that you don’t have a memory leak somewhere?
- sudoshred 1y agoI’m certain it’s a memory leak, just not sure solving the problem is worth my time.
- fouc 1y agoyou could try moving your dev environment & docker into a linux VM.. could do something similar to this: https://medium.com/carvago-development/my-docker-on-macos-part-1-setup-ubuntu-virtual-machine-both-intel-and-apple-silicon-cpu-5d886af0ebba https://medium.com/carvago-development/my-docker-on-macos-pa... I mention this because I'm guessing you might be using Desktop Docker which is kinda slow.
- noname120 1y agoOr maybe just switch to OrbStack: https://orbstack.dev/ https://orbstack.dev/
- hombre_fatal 1y agoWon’t change how slow it is to run docker containers in VMs on macOS.
- michelb 1y agoOSX file I/O is really, really slow with large amounts of small files. Wondering if Apple will ever fix that.
- asa400 1y agoSame here. I have an M1 Max with 64GB and the only time I notice a slowdown is doing Rust release builds with `lto = true` and `codegen-units = 1`, which makes complete sense. Otherwise there is _plenty_ of multicore performance for debug builds, webdev, web browsing, etc., often all at once.
- necovek 1y agoFill out your SSD to 90% or more (and keep it there), and you'll understand how quickly things can go south.
- moi2388 1y agoWhy would I ever do that?
- necovek 1y agoYou paid for that capacity to be able to use it?
- moi2388 1y agoI pay so that I only fill up to 50% usually
- necovek 1y agoThis requires you either being very good at predicting your storage needs, your storage not growing over time (no growing photo collection?), and being aware how flash wear affects SSDs and how wear levelling works. If you fail at these, you can even trash your SSD and need replacing the whole laptop due to it being soldered in.
- necovek 1y agoI have i7-4790k that still seems to score almost 1500 on single core benchmark: that thing felt fast for decade+.
- biinjo 1y agoBut it burns a hole in your lap while doing so probably.
- 71bw 1y agoAnd yet, it allows the user to experience true freedom unlike Apple's offerings.
- biinjo 1y agoCare to elaborate on this? I get that iOS is a closed system but I’ve never felt limited by Apple in what I can do with my Macbook.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoI guess the hardware is extremely locked down. That part is a drag. Application sharing limitations (needing to publish to the app store, more or less) still feels wrong after all these years. There's more but those are the ones that bother me with any frequency
- biinjo 1y agoNeed to publish to the app store? I have precisely zero app store applications installed. All just downloaded DMGs from the vendor’s website.
- 71bw 1y agoThere is no decent option on an alternative operating system. I do not like macOS and its many quirks, especially its extremely gatekept nature, including the system being SURE that what IT wants is the best for me; I understand that this might be an approach that some people prefer, but in my case it's the equivalent of showing a bull a red cloth. I will say this - and most will not like this - that I'd go out and buy a M* MacBook if they still kept Boot Camp around and let me install Windows 11 ARM on it. I've heard Linux is pretty OK nowadays, but I have some... ideological differences with the staff behind Asahi and it is still a wonky hack that Apple can put their foot down on any day.
- rafaelmn 1y agoNot really - I bought an M4 Air to check how my dev ecosystem (.NET) would run on the ARM/Apple silicon and while its usable its noticeably slowing me down in my day to day with Rider. I will be getting the M5 pro because the performance is a bottleneck for me (even incremental builds take a while). Also I regret not getting at least 30gb ram (Amazon only had 24gb configurations) because with docker running I constantly hit the memory pressure thresholds . Which is not to say that the Air is a bad device, its an amazing laptop (especially for the price, I have not seen a single Windows laptop with this build quality even at 2x price) and the performance is good - that if I was doing something like VSCode and node/frontend only it would be more than enough. But also people here oversell its capabilities, if you need anything more CPU/Memory intensive PRO is a must, and the "Apple needs less ram because of the fast IO/memory" argument is a myth.
- saagarjha 1y agoHave you checked what is slowing it down?
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoI wonder if it’s Docker as it runs in a VM on macOS.
- rafaelmn 1y agoYou can control how much RAM gets allocated to the Docker VM and I keep that at 2GB which is not that much. I am not running stuff inside docker locally just using it to boot up stuff like pg/rmq/redis
- rafaelmn 1y agoJust everything syphoning down RAM, standard office/desktop stuff like Slack, Chrome, Mail, Calendar, Messages, a few IMs will easily eat up over 12 GB, then add in VSCode, Rider, Docker (which I cap at 2 GB ram) - I am swapping gigabytes when I have multiple tools running. But even when I kill all processes and just run a build you can see lack of cores slow the build down enough that it is noticeable. Investing into a 48gb ram/pro version will definitely be worth it for the improved experience, I can get by in the meantime by working more on my desktop workstation.
- tedk-42 1y agoA car that travels 0-60 MPH in 2 seconds is fast A car that does this in 4 seconds is still fast (though twice as slow)
- onionisafruit 1y agoIf they both top out at 60 they are equally fast. One just had better acceleration than the other
- dzhiurgis 1y agoTop speed hardly matters for cars. Acceleration is where fun is. Not sure this applies to CPUs at all.
- jychang 1y agoAny cpu can run at 100ghz for 1 cycle. The trick is getting it to run at 100ghz forever
- saagarjha 1y agoI think the speed of light would like to have a word with you.
- pmontra 1y agoCornering speed is where real fun is. And danger.
- hbogert 1y agoAcceleration is actually a thing. The CPU needs to ramp up cycles fast if it wants to feel snappy. It needs to wind down as soon as no significant workload is there anymore. All needed for good efficiency
- sib 1y agoYes - typically the (US English, at least) jargon is "quick" for acceleration and "fast" for top speed...
- j45 1y agoM1 is still fast for a lot, more so when it's cooled.
- jackothy 1y agoWhat is that, 6 years for less than a doubling? Nothing against the Apple chips themselves, but gone are the days of Moore...
- epicureanideal 1y agoNot necessarily. If single core speed doubled but we also doubled or tripled the number of cores, doesn’t that count as keeping up with Moore?
- jl6 1y agoM1 has 16bn transistors, M4 has 28bn. Increasing the core count is useful for some applications (particularly GPU cores), but there are still many critical workloads that are gated by single-threaded performance.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoThat's not what was being talked about. Moore's law was never about single threaded performance, it was about transistor count and transistor cost, but people misunderstood it when single threaded performance was increasing exponentially.
- jl6 1y agoGP mentions cores and the article is about benchmarks. The relationship between transistor count, core count, and performance, is exactly on topic.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoSingle core performance and transistor count are not the same thing and have been disconnected for two decades.
- jl6 1y ago
- gpm 1y agoI claim that the M1 (macbook air) is fast. I also claim it's about half the speed of my similarly priced desktop of the same vintage for slow tasks that I care about. So I guess we've caught up with the desktop now. Actually I assume we caught up awhile ago if I used the beefy multi core MX-Ultra variants they released, really just the base model has caught up. On the other hand I could have spent four times as much for twice as many cores on my desktop as well.
- Panzer04 1y agoYou can buy laptops with essentially identical CPU performance to desktop plugged in nowadays, so long as you aren't thinking of thread ripper. On the move laptops will always be a bit slow because all the tricks to save idle usage don't help much when you're actually putting them to work.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoI feel no need to upgrade, especially now that you can have applecare yearly subscription.
- para_parolu 1y agoI use m1 max and m4 max every day. Don’t see difference in speed at all. Regular tasks are equally fast. Rust compiler is equally slow
- matwood 1y agoI bought an M1 Max with 64GB of ram on the gamble it would last awhile because future M series would be evolutionary not revolutionary again. It seems like it's paid off since there's never a time it feels slow. I may end up upgrading to the M5 just to go down in screen size because I travel more than I did when I bought the 16" one.
- sgt101 1y agoI had a 16' m1 pro until July when work had an M3 with 2GB more ram going free and I thought it would be smart to take it, in the past when I had had a three+ year old machine and upgraded everything was super better.. but this time I don't notice any difference at all in almost any application. The only place I feel it is when I am running a local llm - I do get appreciably more tokens per second.
- raydev 1y agoSame. My M1 Max only shows it age when building a few massive C++ projects, the M4 cuts down compile times to a quarter so I feel like I'm missing out there, but not enough to put down another$4k yet. Compared to every Intel MBP I went through, where they would show their age after about 2-3 years, and every action/compile required more and more fans and throttling, the M1 is still a magical processor.
- yesnomaybe 1y agoHave an M1 Pro 32GB which recently started feeling slower. VSCode multiple tabs is a problem. Generally the UI feels less snappy. I've switched now to a desktop Linux, using an 8C/16T AMD Ryzen 7 9700X with 64GB. it's like night and day. but it is software related. Apple just slows everything down with their animations and UI patterns. Probably to nudge people to acquire faster newer hardware. The change to Linux is a change in lifestyle, but it comes with a lot of freedom and options.