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Comment by randomopining | Hacker News Reader

Is this thing actually faster than a cheap Ryzen build for browsing? Like a 5600g that are super cheap now

Yes: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-5-5600g https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022 (same chip as in the cheaper Mini; the Mini has a fan so it should run a _little_ faster there)

Though for web browsing both presumably fall solidly under "good enough".

If I was signing up for Tech Support for Relatives, though, I'd _definitely_ go with the Mac; you don't want to be getting phonecalls about Windows 12 or whatever in 2027.

M1 was faster than a 5600g, I think, but you can get a 5-series micro PC for cheaper than even the cheapest Mac Mini. For 'browsing' operations, I suspect it wouldn't matter much. There may be some advantage to using macOS vs. Windows, if this is aiding a family member... since I assume the IT support burden would be lower.

Apples M chips are stupid fast at browsing the web because they have some native CPU instructions for JavaScript that x86_64 chips don’t.

Actually, it's the reverse. The JS spec accidentally baked in the x86 description of int/float conversion.

This is done a LOT in JS because the JITs are actually using integers instead of floats all over the place for improved performance.

The ARM "JS" instruction just encodes the x86 semantics into hardware making the conversion several times faster than doing it in software.

They’re fast but that’s not usually why. ARM added some functions which could help with math-limited code:

https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...

Most JavaScript isn’t dependent on that specific a feature for performance, however. In most cases what matters more is that they have great memory performance and handle branch-heavy code well.

Assuming you use Safari. For older relatives, probably not a bad assumption, but an important distinction to make nonetheless.

Mozilla also implemented it. I believe Chrome/v8 have as well, but I know there was some work there to avoid accidentally enabling it on older ARM chips which don't have support for it.

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