3 ms·

These processors are good all around. The P cores kick butt too. I ran a performance test back in October comparing M4 laptops against high-end Windows desktop

• murderfs 8mo ago
  This is likely more of a Windows filesystem benchmark than anything else: there are fundamental restrictions on how fast file access can be on Windows due to filesystem filter drivers. I would bet that if you tried again with Linux (or even in WSL2, as long as you stay in the WSL filesystem image), you'd see significantly improved results.
  • philistine 8mo ago
    Which still wouldn’t beat the Apple Silicon chips. Apple rules the roost.
    • Kuinox 8mo ago
      https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
      • philistine 8mo ago
        You click on laptop and somehow that's a gotcha, I click on single thread and the M5 is at the very top. What is that?
        • Kuinox 8mo ago
          You are seeing basically the lithography node used to make the CPU. Since Apple books more capacity than anyone else, they have their chip 5-6 months ahead of the market, you'll see chips with similar performance by core.
          • philistine 8mo ago
            And what about the M3 Ultra, that sits at number 3 and came out ten months ago? Why was it not beaten five months ago? Might I add that the M3 Ultra is on an older node than the M5. And what about the A19 Pro, which is better at single core than every desktop chip in the world, and happens to be inside a phone! Apple has the best silicon team in the world. They choose perf per watt over pure perf, which means they don't win on multi-core, but they're simply the best in the world in the most complicated, difficult, and impossible metric to game: single core perf.
            • Kuinox 8mo ago
              It's bench score on single thread is 0.6% better than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which have a lower TDP and was released 6 months before. Boths use the same lithography node. If you look at the chip by their lithography node, the Apple silicons are the same than the others...
              • SR2Z 8mo ago
                Apple's M-series chips are fantastic, but I do agree with you that it's mostly a combination of newer process and lots of cache. Even when they were new, they competed with AMD's high end desktop chips. Many years later, they're still excellent in the laptop power range - but not in the desktop power range, where chips with a lot of cache match it in single core performance and obliterate it in multicore. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ryzen_7_9800x3d https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ry...
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                • MindSpunk 8mo ago
                  Alternatively, in the same socket and without the 3D stacked cache: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ryzen_9_9950x https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ry... with double the cores. And in laptop form compared with a m4 max: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4_max_14_cpu_32_gpu-vs-amd_ryzen_ai_max_plus_395 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4_max_14_cp...
• cubefox 8mo ago
  Here is a more recent comparison with Intel's new Panther Lake chips: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/panther-lake-is-intels-m1-moment-but-can-it-beat-apple-silicon-we-put-these-new-chips-to-the-test https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/panther-lake-is-int...
  • sys_64738 8mo ago
    Are the Intel systems plugged in when running those tests? Usually when Apple machines do the tests then the difference between battery/plugged in is small if any.
  • dagmx 8mo ago
    Which still come out behind other than multi core, while using substantially more power. Those panther lake comparisons are from the top end PTL to the base M series. If they were compared to their comparative SKUs they’d be even further behind.
    • cubefox 8mo ago
      The article said the M5 has significantly higher single core CPU performance, Panther Lake has significantly higher GPU performance. The Panther Lake devices had OLED screens, which consume significantly more power than LCDs, so they were at a disadvantage. This was all mentioned in the article.
      • PunchyHamster 8mo ago
        So useless for what most laptops are used - working
      • dagmx 8mo ago
        Again, the Panther Lake devices here are the top end of Panther lake comparing against the base level M5. See the chart here for what the intel SKUs are: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3023938/intels-core-ultra-series-3-cpu-names-are-different-now-heres-what-they-mean.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/3023938/intels-core-ultra-se... They consume more power at the chip level. You can see this in Intels spec sheets. The base recommended power envelope of the PTL is the maximum power envelope of the M5. They’re completely different tiers. You’re comparing a 25-85W tier chip to a 5W-25W chip. They also only win when it comes to multi core whether that’s CPU or GPU. If they were fairly compared to the correct SoC (an M4 Pro) they’d come out behind on both multicore CPU and GPU. This was all mentioned in my comment addressing the article. This is the trick that apples competitors are using, by comparing across SKU ranges to grab the headlines. PTL is a strong chip, no doubt, but it’s still behind Apple across all the metrics in a like for like comparison.
• etrvic 8mo ago
  From your article it seems like you benchmark compile times. I am not an expert on the subject, but I don't see the point in comparing ARM compilation times with Intel. There are probably different tricks involved in compilation and the instructions set are not the same.
  • tom_ 8mo ago
    I've often been suspicious of this too, having noticed that building one of my projects on Apple Silicon is way quicker than I'd expect relative to x64, given relative test suite run times and relative PassMark numbers. I don't know how to set up a proper cross compile setup on Apple Silicon, so I tried compiling the same code on 2 macOS systems and 1 Linux system, running the corresponding test suite, and getting some numbers. It's not exactly conclusive, and if I was doing this properly properly then I'd try a bit harder to make everything match up, but it does indeed look like using clang to build x64 code is more expensive - for whatever reason - than using it to build ARM code. Systems, including clang version and single-core PassMark: M4 Max Mac Studio, clang-1700.6.3.2 (PassMark: 5000) x64 i7-5557U Macbook Pro, clang-1500.1.0.2.5 (PassMark: 2290) x64 AMD 2990WX Linux desktop, clang-20 (PassMark: 2431) Single thread build times (in seconds). Code is a bunch of C++, plus some FOSS dependencies that are C, everything built with optimisation enabled: Mac Studio: 365 x64 Macbook Pro: 1705 x64 Linux: 1422 (Linux time excludes build times for some of the FOSS dependencies, which on Linux come prebuilt via the package manager.) Single thread test suite times (in seconds), an approximate indication of relative single thread performance: Mac Studio: 120 x64 Macbook Pro: 350 x64 Linux: 309 Build time/test time makes it look like ARM clang is an outlier: Mac Studio: 3.04 x64 Macbook Pro: 4.87 x64 Linux: 4.60 (The Linux value is flattered here, as it excludes dependency build times, as above. The C dependencies don't add much when building in parallel, but, looking at the above numbers, I wonder if they'd add up to enough when built in series to make the x64 figures the same.)
    • tom_ 8mo ago
      After tweaking the build process to build the same dependencies from source on Linux as on macOS: x64 Linux build: 1514 x64 Linux test: 307 x64 Linux build/test: 4.93 (Again, not a perfect test, as it still won't be exactly the same code, but the numbers are nevertheless pretty close!)
• wpm 8mo ago
  My M4 mini is probably the fastest computer/watt in my home. And it was the cheapest. Not even a bad little gaming machine on the rare occasion