3 ms·

Sure. Insofar as Apple Silicon beats these things, "I'll take less powerful hardware if it means I'm not stuck with the Apple ecosystem" is a perfectly reasonab

by pdpi 8mo ago

Sure. Insofar as Apple Silicon beats these things, "I'll take less powerful hardware if it means I'm not stuck with the Apple ecosystem" is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make. Two things, though. First, I don't like making blind tradeoffs. If what I need (for whatever reason) is a really beefy ARM CPU, I'd like to know what the "Apple-less tax" costs me (if anything!) Second, the status quo is that Apple Silicon is the undisputed king of ARM CPU performance, so it's the obvious benchmark to compare this thing against. Providing that context is just basic journalistic practice, even if just to say "but it's irrelevant because we can't use the hardware without the software".

amelius 8mo ago
Let's say my company makes systems for in-flight entertainment, with content from my company. I am looking for a CPU. I don't want to confront my users with "Please enter your Apple ID" or any other unexpected messages that I have no control over. Is Apple M series an option for me?
- rick_dalton 8mo ago
  The X925 core is used in chips like the gb10 for the nvidia dgx spark. So it is relevant to compare to apple silicon performance imo. The mac studio is pretty much a competitor to it.
- ghosty141 8mo ago
  Why should it be? All he is saying: We currently have products in a similar product category (arm based desktop computers) that are widely used and have known benchmark scores (and general reviews) and it would make sense if I publish a new cpu for the same product category ("Reaching Desktop Performance" implies that) that I'd compare it to the known alternatives. In the end you can just run Asahi on your macbook, the OS is not that relevant here. A comparison to macbooks running Asahi Linux would be fine.
  - amelius 8mo ago
    But why would an article address _their_ specific usecase?
    - buran77 8mo ago
      > But why would an article address _their_ specific usecase? amelius, if anyone had specific requirements, it was you with your "systems for in-flight entertainment". OP asked a very reasonable question for a very generic comparison to the 800-pound gorilla in the consumer CPU world in general, and ARM CPU world in particular. If the article can reference AMD's Zen 5 cores and Intel's Lion/Sunny Cove, they could have made at least a brief reference to M-series CPUs. As a reader and potential buyer of any of them, I find it would have been a very useful comparison.
      - amelius 8mo ago
        In industry, people want to take computing parts and build products with them. This is not possible with Apple parts. That's what my example was about. It was only specific because I wanted to have a concrete example.
        buran77 8mo ago
        > In industry Talk about specifics, eh? Didn't you just argue against an article addressing "_their_" specific usecase? In a store people will ask "is this better than an Apple?". And I'll tell you one more thing, when I was in the industry and taking computing parts to build products with them I did not form an opinion by reading internet reviews. I haven't met anyone who did.
  - GoblinSlayer 8mo ago
    Does Apple allow benchmarks on Asahi Linux?
    - vlovich123 7mo ago
      Believe it or not Apple has no say about this
- buran77 8mo ago
  This CPU will end up in products that are competing against Apple's in the market. People will look at and choose between two products with X925 or M4/5. It's a very obvious parallel and a big oversight for the article. For better or worse if you make a (high end) consumer CPU it will be judged against the M-series, just like if you make a high end phone it will be judged against the iPhone.
bluGill 8mo ago
Why do you need ARM? There is nothing magic, most CPUs are an internal instruction set with a decoder on top. bad as x86 is, decoding is not the issue. they can make lower power use x86 if they want. They can also make mips or riskv chips that are good.
- pdpi 8mo ago
  There's nothing special about ARM, sure. Hence "for whatever reason". Still, ARM is a known quantity, and the leading alternative to x86 for desktop CPUs. The article is titled "reaching desktop performance". We know how Apple's hardware performs on native workloads. We know how it performs emulating x86 workloads (and why). Surely "... and this is how this hardware measures up against the other guys trying to achieve the exact same thing" is a relevant comparison? I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?"
  - GoblinSlayer 8mo ago
    If you know how your favorite CPUs (and you can have many, even ppc) work in desktop performance units, then you have the numbers to compare. Are you sure you can migrate from Apple?
  - wamatt 8mo ago
    >I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?" You're not. IMHO it's a fairly obvious, narrow and uncontroversial observation (and hence why its the top comment). That said, I personally still enjoyed the back and forth as many others one could imagine. There can be value in the counterarguments from multiple other usernames, as this facilitates sharpening reasoning for the conclusion from readers. (even when the original premise stays in tact) The lack of others agreeing could be the result of many reasons. IMHO, a not insignificant one could be the incentive structure skews heavily towards lurking as HN rightfully disincentives "me too" type replies and not everyone always has something interesting to add 2c not an epistemologist ymmv
- amluto 7mo ago
jayd16 8mo ago
The problem is you can't really compare things apples to apples anyway. You're always comparing different builds and different OSes to get a sense of CPU performance.
__alexs 7mo ago
> the status quo is that Apple Silicon is the undisputed king of ARM CPU performance If your metric is single thread performance yes but on just about anything else Graviton 4 wins.
guerrilla 7mo ago
Are M* chips even beating AMD anyway?
- jakogut 7mo ago
  On average according to Geekbench, the M5 compared to the 9950X is ~17% faster in single thread performance and ~30% slower in multithread performance. Individual benchmarks tell the bigger picture. These two are optimized for different use cases, with Apple heavily leaning towards low latency single thread throughput with low sustained power usage. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16833358?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16833358?baseli... EDIT: The M4 Max compares much more closely https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16834801?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16834801?baseli...
  - guerrilla 7mo ago
    Alright, thanks. Seems like a tradeoff issue.
  - pdpi 7mo ago
    That M4 Max is in a laptop. The Mac Studio version is a couple percent faster still: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839304?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839304?baseli... The M3 Ultra sacrifices a bunch of single-thread performance for not that much of a multithreaded gain: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839654?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839654?baseli...
rbanffy 7mo ago
> Apple Silicon is the undisputed king of ARM CPU performance The cores, yes, but you can get an AmpereOne with 192 ARM cores (or rent out beefier machines from AWS and Azure). If you need to run macOS, then you are tied to Apple, but if all you want is ARM (for, say, emulated embedded hardware development), you have other options in the ARM ecosystem. I'm actually surprised Ampere maxes out at 192 cores when Intel Xeon 6+ has parts with 288 cores on a single socket (and that can go up to 4 sockets). I wonder how many cores you'd need to make htop crash.

by pdpi 8mo ago

amelius 8mo ago

Let's say my company makes systems for in-flight entertainment, with content from my company. I am looking for a CPU. I don't want to confront my users with "Please enter your Apple ID" or any other unexpected messages that I have no control over. Is Apple M series an option for me?

rick_dalton 8mo ago
The X925 core is used in chips like the gb10 for the nvidia dgx spark. So it is relevant to compare to apple silicon performance imo. The mac studio is pretty much a competitor to it.
ghosty141 8mo ago
Why should it be? All he is saying: We currently have products in a similar product category (arm based desktop computers) that are widely used and have known benchmark scores (and general reviews) and it would make sense if I publish a new cpu for the same product category ("Reaching Desktop Performance" implies that) that I'd compare it to the known alternatives. In the end you can just run Asahi on your macbook, the OS is not that relevant here. A comparison to macbooks running Asahi Linux would be fine.
- amelius 8mo ago
  But why would an article address _their_ specific usecase?
  - buran77 8mo ago
    > But why would an article address _their_ specific usecase? amelius, if anyone had specific requirements, it was you with your "systems for in-flight entertainment". OP asked a very reasonable question for a very generic comparison to the 800-pound gorilla in the consumer CPU world in general, and ARM CPU world in particular. If the article can reference AMD's Zen 5 cores and Intel's Lion/Sunny Cove, they could have made at least a brief reference to M-series CPUs. As a reader and potential buyer of any of them, I find it would have been a very useful comparison.
    - amelius 8mo ago
      In industry, people want to take computing parts and build products with them. This is not possible with Apple parts. That's what my example was about. It was only specific because I wanted to have a concrete example.
      - buran77 8mo ago
        > In industry Talk about specifics, eh? Didn't you just argue against an article addressing "_their_" specific usecase? In a store people will ask "is this better than an Apple?". And I'll tell you one more thing, when I was in the industry and taking computing parts to build products with them I did not form an opinion by reading internet reviews. I haven't met anyone who did.
- GoblinSlayer 8mo ago
  Does Apple allow benchmarks on Asahi Linux?
  - vlovich123 7mo ago
    Believe it or not Apple has no say about this
buran77 8mo ago
This CPU will end up in products that are competing against Apple's in the market. People will look at and choose between two products with X925 or M4/5. It's a very obvious parallel and a big oversight for the article. For better or worse if you make a (high end) consumer CPU it will be judged against the M-series, just like if you make a high end phone it will be judged against the iPhone.

bluGill 8mo ago

Why do you need ARM? There is nothing magic, most CPUs are an internal instruction set with a decoder on top. bad as x86 is, decoding is not the issue. they can make lower power use x86 if they want. They can also make mips or riskv chips that are good.

pdpi 8mo ago
There's nothing special about ARM, sure. Hence "for whatever reason". Still, ARM is a known quantity, and the leading alternative to x86 for desktop CPUs. The article is titled "reaching desktop performance". We know how Apple's hardware performs on native workloads. We know how it performs emulating x86 workloads (and why). Surely "... and this is how this hardware measures up against the other guys trying to achieve the exact same thing" is a relevant comparison? I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?"
- GoblinSlayer 8mo ago
  If you know how your favorite CPUs (and you can have many, even ppc) work in desktop performance units, then you have the numbers to compare. Are you sure you can migrate from Apple?
- wamatt 8mo ago
  >I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?" You're not. IMHO it's a fairly obvious, narrow and uncontroversial observation (and hence why its the top comment). That said, I personally still enjoyed the back and forth as many others one could imagine. There can be value in the counterarguments from multiple other usernames, as this facilitates sharpening reasoning for the conclusion from readers. (even when the original premise stays in tact) The lack of others agreeing could be the result of many reasons. IMHO, a not insignificant one could be the incentive structure skews heavily towards lurking as HN rightfully disincentives "me too" type replies and not everyone always has something interesting to add 2c not an epistemologist ymmv
amluto 7mo ago

jayd16 8mo ago

The problem is you can't really compare things apples to apples anyway. You're always comparing different builds and different OSes to get a sense of CPU performance.

__alexs 7mo ago

> the status quo is that Apple Silicon is the undisputed king of ARM CPU performance If your metric is single thread performance yes but on just about anything else Graviton 4 wins.

guerrilla 7mo ago

Are M* chips even beating AMD anyway?

jakogut 7mo ago
On average according to Geekbench, the M5 compared to the 9950X is ~17% faster in single thread performance and ~30% slower in multithread performance. Individual benchmarks tell the bigger picture. These two are optimized for different use cases, with Apple heavily leaning towards low latency single thread throughput with low sustained power usage. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16833358?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16833358?baseli... EDIT: The M4 Max compares much more closely https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16834801?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16834801?baseli...
- guerrilla 7mo ago
  Alright, thanks. Seems like a tradeoff issue.
- pdpi 7mo ago
  That M4 Max is in a laptop. The Mac Studio version is a couple percent faster still: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839304?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839304?baseli... The M3 Ultra sacrifices a bunch of single-thread performance for not that much of a multithreaded gain: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839654?baseline=15249230 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839654?baseli...

rbanffy 7mo ago

> Apple Silicon is the undisputed king of ARM CPU performance The cores, yes, but you can get an AmpereOne with 192 ARM cores (or rent out beefier machines from AWS and Azure). If you need to run macOS, then you are tied to Apple, but if all you want is ARM (for, say, emulated embedded hardware development), you have other options in the ARM ecosystem. I'm actually surprised Ampere maxes out at 192 cores when Intel Xeon 6+ has parts with 288 cores on a single socket (and that can go up to 4 sockets). I wonder how many cores you'd need to make htop crash.