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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

I really want to see the Apple Silicon under some real world load running a current gen AAA video game in 4K ultra settings while streaming with OBS, playing music, and having Chrome open with 100+ tabs. Because that's what my current PC does for example so I'm really curious about everything (performance, temps etc.)

To some extent it's just hard to believe that the iPhone CPU is better in every thing compared to the current gen top of the line Intel and AMD desktop CPUs.

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Chrome open with 100+ tabs

Bit off topic, but I don't use Chrome so I wonder: do you mean 100+ visited i.e. active tabs, or are you counting all of them, or doesn't Chrome have a distinction between those cases like e.g. Firefox does (i.e. when starting the application it doesn't actually load all tabs until you activate them - so once opened perfomance wise it doesn't matter a lot if it's 10+ or 100+ tabs)?

I'm pretty sure that Chrome does have a distinction between loaded and unloaded tabs (suspended tabs, maybe?), but it definitely manages tabs in a different way from Firefox and Safari. Both Chrome and Firefox can trivially handle 100 suspended tabs on any machine; both would struggle with that many active tabs if the machine didn't have enough RAM to fit them all.

This metric really only has to do with the amount of memory that a machine has, in my experience.

Chrome will suspend/discard inactive tabs when when the memory pressure is high, and reload it back when you activate the tab again, so you probably can open 1000 tabs and leave it alone without much impact (this feature is exposed as an api and can be triggered by extensions: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/tabs#method-discard ). But when you activate them all I imagine it would consume too much system resource.

1. iPad Pro humiliates PCs and Macs on some media tasks,

2. We haven't seen any real product yet, only the dev kit. The new Macs will be much more powerful than any existing Apple Arm products. We'll see.

A small tip, if I may: you can separate the list items with a newline to make them show up on their individual lines:

  1. Like so,

  2. for example.

will render as:

1. Like so,

2. for example.

Which tasks are those? I have a 2020 iPad Pro and want to see this.

Lightroom on the 2017 iPad Pro vs a 2017 iMac.

I was under the impression modern browsers suspend background tabs to some extent?

But anyway, you're talking about a very specific use case that only partially generalises.

I'm typing this on an 2014 11" MacBook Air 6,1 i5-4260U CPU @ 1.40GHz, 2001 Mhz, 2C / 4T with 4GB RAM running Windows 10 with two Chromium Edge and Firefox, 2D CAD and vector graphics programs running.

Apple likely won’t optimize their own chips for your use case at first (I expect the iMac Pro or Mac Pro will stay Intel for at least two years), but for cost, low heat and high battery. Imagine a slim MacBook with no fan.

You mean.. the 11” MacBook? It already is slim as a phone and has no fan.

It has been discontinued. They might reintroduce it with Apple Silicon.

>I really want to see the Apple Silicon under some real world load running a current gen AAA video game in 4K ultra settings while streaming with OBS

AFAIK apple CPUs are on-par with high performance desktop class x86 CPUs, but only in integer performance. AAA gaming would probably perform badly since it has plenty of floating point operations.

edit: *in single thread performance

Apple CPUs are nowhere close to things like Ryzen or Thread ripper when it comes to multi-threaded performance. Moreover, most modern games can make use of at the very least 4 to 8 threads nowadays, so I would expect Apple silicon to fair poorly on most game benchmarks (assuming they were ported to ARM, of course).

Thanks, edited.

You left out running Z3 in your list of tasks. Did you read the article?

That's a bizarre comparison. The AMD CPU doesn't do OBS with AAA games; the GPU and VRAM does that.

AMD has APUs.

CPU matter for AAA games. Different CPUs gets you different fps on these games so clearly they are used.

And there's nothing bizare in OP's real world scenario. Mine is even worse.

I also have multiple Linux OS running on Docker, Windows on a virtual machine with 4 CPU threads dedicated to it and native Windows running Ubuntu over WSL2 performing some tasks. I don't turn any of that off while I'm playing game and streaming.

for the downvoters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcYA-H3qpTI

This. While I can appreciate that Apple is taking a huge risk in creating their own chips, I cannot believe that the performance of the chips will be on par with current x86_64 chipsets based on Apple's past. In all honestly, the vast majority of Apple's clientele for computers are businesses, who basically just use them for basic web browsing/office work, which isn't a high bar to meet the needs for.

"the vast majority of Apple's clientele for computers are businesses"

I'm sorry? What?!

I suggest you pick up an iPad and try doing something demanding on it.

I don't know of a single employee of a serious actual business that has been issued an Apple anything. Not a laptop, desktop, or phone. I don't know of a single person that, when given the choice of what to use for work, has chosen Apple unless they already were entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.

The vast majority of Apple's customers are Apple fans, people who merely wish to think different, nothing more, nothing less.

Edit: Don't downvote just to disagree. Comment and state your reasoning on why you think I'm wrong. If you work for a company that only issues Apple devices, please speak up with your experience on how this went, and, if possible, why the company didn't go with Windows or Linux computers instead.

For the comments that try to bring up software development roles: most software developers I know either use Windows or use Linux on the desktop, and loath OSX worse than I do. Very few prefer OSX.

The few people I know that prefer OSX (and will die on that hill) are frontend developers.

Do you consider software engineering to be a "serious actual business", or are you going to gatekeep it to match whatever your notion of one is until they can only use software that is Windows-only?

If you're throwing around anecdotes, then my most recent workplaces allocated Macbooks, and Apple peripherals, to every non-technical person in the office (~2/3rds of the workforce). I know plenty of individuals who, upon starting a software engineering role, were immediately shipped Macbooks to use for work.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is proof that "Apple's main clientele is business", but it certainly wouldn't surprise me. And it's not true that offices don't allocate Apples to workers.

lol, apple fans chuckle. Typing this from my work macbook.

When I was at Facebook the majority of employees used Mac Book Pros for work (I was an exception because I worked on VR stuff which was Windows only). It seems like the majority of Silicon Valley big tech and unicorn startups have a large (if not majority) population of employees using Apple products for development. I understand that many employees prefer or need Linux or Windows, however.

That seems to be the only places where MBPs are almost part of the dress code to work there. The HN community has a disproportional representation of such employment, and sometimes the Apple echo chamber shows up strongly because of it.

It even happened at Microsoft until the Surface program was finally given a proper go ahead by Nadella. A lot of former MBP users seem to love the Surfacebook, so they succeeded in making a functional yet veblen good in the same vein that a MBP is.

Apple's A12Z Under Rosetta Outperforms Microsoft's Native Arm-Based Surface Pro X:

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/29/apple-rosetta-2-a12z-be...

Yes, but how well does it perform against something that isn't what might be their slowest (but thinnest and most portable, but somehow not cheapest) model?

Apparently, a Surface with a Ryzen 4800U exists and is coming out really soon.

The comparison isn't realistic because Apple's acquisition of PA Semi was a brilliant move, and no one makes an ARM that is anywhere near that level of performance, not even Qualcomm. I agree with Apple's decision to put their ARM on the desktop as their answer to the Intel dilemma.

In this case, an ARM vs ARM comparison is not an apples to apples comparison, Apple does not license their design to anyone else, ergo, the only way to make a fair comparison is to use the best commonly available part, which currently, is Zen 2 parts.

I expect a Zen 2 to crush a 2 year old Apple ARM, but I also expect a future Apple desktop and laptop design to keep up with Zen 3. I actually hope Apple can win the fight, but I also wish Apple would license their CPU to other manufacturers to promote the general adoption of more architectures in this space.

Lol calling a MacBook a Veblen good? Oh my lord you're a trip.

"A veblen good is a good for which demand increases as the price increases, because of its exclusive nature and appeal as a status symbol." -- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/veblen-good.asp

I know what it is. That's why I'm laughing at you.

Amazon also has a disproportionate number of MacBooks even though we can choose either a MacBook or a Windows PC.

As far as Surface sells.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/24/editorial-why-mic...

> The vast majority of Apple's customers are Apple fans, people who merely wish to think different, nothing more, nothing less.

That is one of the most absurd takes I have ever seen by an Apple hater. Even haters usually acknowledge that Macs are used extensively in software development, scientific research, film editing, design work, and education. And Apple is the fourth largest PC maker in the world, so they’re also used just about everywhere else at least a little bit.

> I don't know of a single employee of a serious actual business that has been issued an Apple anything. Not a laptop, desktop, or phone. I don't know of a single person that, when given the choice of what to use for work, has chosen Apple unless they already were entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.

What are you doing on this website because you clearly don't work in software.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Mac+at+NASA&prmd=inmv&source...

Of course DiabloD3 chose to ignore this.

The most rabid anti-Mac people I've met, when pressed, knew zero or close to zero about MacOS. Basically, fear-of-the-unknown was what it was.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

At least in the tech world, I have found this varies massively by location. Every single job I’ve had in San Francisco has been 99% Apple MacBooks in use by all eng employees and I’ve had to fight really hard to be allowed to use a PC. But I’ve also had plenty of eng jobs outside of the bay area and those tend to be on PCs with the occasional Mac user, often stereotypically a designer. It’s kind of astounding how completely different the world is when you get outside of the bay area bubble, and most of my tech friends in San Francisco don’t seem to understand that, and give me crap for preferring to use a PC.

Every job I've ever had has issued me a Mac. Mac Pros are heavily used by academics and Macbooks by developers. I would have preferred Linux myself, but OSX is way better than Windows, that's for sure.

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