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Comment by JohnHaugeland | Hacker News Reader

I love how every time someone wants to say the M1 is fast, they actively avoid comparing it to Intel or AMD, except in some nonsensical way like "single core performance"

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Go buy an M1 machine, use it for a week, and return it. Except you won't return it, because you'll recognize it's amazing beyond its benchmarks.

And single core performance can't be discounted - turns out, it's often a huge component of user experience. Lots of software out there that hasn't been, or can't be, multithreaded.

It only runs macos, so I'll definitely return mine.

And Linux and OpenBSD

There are so many issues with the current implimentation that I think saying "it runs" is a bit of a stretch. I'll give it to you when you have a hardware-accelerated desktop, until then "it runs" Linux as much as a toaster SOC can "run" Linux.

That is being worked on too:

https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-2.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-3.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-4.html

I look forward to when it's ready, then.

Sounds like you haven’t used Asahi at all. The software rendering is actually very functional and perfectly usable for programming. It’s just multimedia/gaming where it fails.

Why would you ever spend $6000 on $300 of parts to run an operating system that could be run on a regular computer?

Where’d the $6k number come from? You can get an M1 machine starting in the $700 range.

Literally the only thing an M1 MacBook would be useful for me is web browsing. The hardware is totally wasted by the OS. I have an Intel MacBook Pro 16, but the M1 MacBooks have an impressive GPU that's only useful for extremely niche applications. If Apple ever added Vulkan support which would quickly allow proton/wine/dxvk to work, it would be something to consider.

> Go buy an M1 machine, use it for a week, and return it. Except you won't return it, because you'll recognize it's amazing beyond its benchmarks.

I bought it and it's... fine? Maybe you need to buy a good non-Apple computer to see that they can also be "amazing beyond benchmarks".

Cool with the fanyboism.

I’d actually love to do this, what should I buy?

For me it seems to be the latency rather than raw speed. It's like how a sprinter can get off the line far quicker than a muscle car even if it's not going to win over a mile. For 90% of what I do, the snappiness of things on the M1 beats raw high end performance. It feels like when I first got an SSD.

Actually I would, because there are much cheaper alternatives to deal with 3D graphics programming.

Macs are fine as long as I get them from the job, I am not paying for them privately.

> Go buy an M1 machine, use it for a week, and return it.

I did.

> And single core performance can't be discounted

It doesn't support the speed claims made about the machine, and as a result, it can.

> turns out, it's often a huge component of user experience.

Yes, and as soon as it's pointed out that the M1 doesn't win on single core performance either, the goalpost moves to performance per watt.

And when it's pointed out that the M1 doesn't win there either, it moves to battery life.

And then ...

The point is, M1 only looks good before hard numbers are revealed.

You know, like when they said it was faster than a 3090, and it's actually slower than a 2060?

I did that. When I bought our first M1 Mac, it was faster in multi-core Rust builds than my Ryzen 3700X workstation. I have since upgraded to an M1 Pro and a Ryzen 5900X. The 5900X is faster (12 cores vs. 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores), but not by much. For example, building one of my Rust projects:

M1 Pro:

    ~ % cargo install --force finalfrontier
    [...]
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 16.25s

5900X:

    ~ % cargo install --force finalfrontier
    [...]
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 11.61s

If we count the two efficiency cores as being as powerful as a single performance core, the performance, the per-core performance is on-par ((9/12.) * 16.25 = 12.1875).

In other tasks, the M1 Pro blows the Ryzen 5900 away. For example, the M1 Pro reaches 2685 GFLOP/s in matrix multiplication, while the Ryzen 5900X peaks at 1555 GFLOP/s [1].

Oh and all of that while the Ryzen CPU alone consumes 120W during builds and needs a big loud fan (Noctua), while the MacBook Pro is inaudible and runs on battery. The MacBook I can throw in my backpack and use everywhere. The best computer is the one that's with you.

(And no, mobile Ryzen doesn't even come close. I had a ThinkPad with a high-end Ryzen CPU last year, and builds where much slower than even the vanilla M1.)

[1] https://github.com/danieldk/gemm-benchmark#1-to-16-threads

The point here is not so much the M1 side, but the Graviton side - if you're developing on an M1-based Mac and comfortable deploying to ARM stuff anyways, you may as well go for it.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

Once you factor in the costs on AWS, Graviton2 crushes x86.

Well that's a handy graph.

"Once you factor the costs on Amazon hosting, the Amazon chip wins"

When you do anything that isn't related to pricing at the manufacturing vendor, it doesn't, though

I've seen tons of such comparisons over the last year. Also, I don't consider single-core performance nonsensical since it correlates highly with some real-world uses like Web browsing. Intel is currently winning in single-core performance, so if people were cherry-picking benchmarks to show the M1 in a good light they'd choose something else.

Intel with decades of experience is barely "winning" against Apple's first desktop chip.

Yeah, slight disparity there!

And that's completely discounting the whole power thing. If Apple were ever to develop a desktop chip that chucked efficiency out the window and focused on raw performance by throwing as much power and cooling as possible at the chip? Things would probably get spicy indeed. If only Apple had a desktop chassis optimized for maximizing power and cooling. Oh wait, they do with the Mac Pro - and it's the only Mac not yet migrated to Apple Silicon.

I'm sure Intel is sleeping well with their "lead" :)

> Intel with decades of experience is barely "winning" against Apple's first desktop chip.

That's because Apple's benchmarks are against seven year old Intel chips.

Wait'll you look at a benchmark made by a skeptic.

> If Apple were ever to develop a desktop chip that chucked efficiency out the window and focused on raw performance by throwing as much power and cooling as possible at the chip? Things would probably get spicy indeed.

Sure thing. Call us when they do.

> I'm sure Intel is sleeping well with their "lead" :)

Well, no. They have real competitors, like AMD and TSMC and so on.

Alternatively you know compare a $5000 machine to a $500 cpu instead of the prosumer or pro part that would make an apt comparison.

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