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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

"As fast" on specific curated use cases. Show me an Apple chip that beats any laptop on 7zip.

I don’t know about 7zip specifically, but the iPad Pro seems to beat even some MacBook Pros on some benchmarks.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/12/ipad-pro-vs-macbook-air...

Given that Amazon was able to get there, what makes you think Apple can't? I would struggle to believe that Annapurna Labs has any significant advantage over PA Semi given the track record PA has had since joining Apple, and the fact they had nearly a decade head-start.

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

not sure, what they are measuring though - random Xeon from spec.org: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2017q3/cpu2006-20170... ; at most 30% higher frequency, yet twice as fast. Well...

Is this a joke, what kind of usage benchmark is 7zipping large numbers of files?

I think the point is that it won’t be as fast in applications that Apple didn’t anticipate.

I believe it is what the poster you are replying to would call "a specific curated use case."

(Semi-seriously, I don't know anyone who uses a Unix(-like) system who uses 7zip, although I'm sure they're out there. For the record, I just unzipped a 120M archive on both my 2020 Core i7 MacBook Air and my 2018 (last-gen) iPad Pro and as near as I can tell the iPad was faster actually extracting the files, but had an extra second or so of overhead from the UI.)

> I don't know anyone who uses a Unix(-like) system who uses 7zip

7zip is an implementation of LZMA, like xz. So, different names and file format details, but essentially the same algorithm.

Correct. 7zip is a LZMA compressor. The common equivalent command line tool on Linux is xz.

Linux distributions have been using xz compression for all packages (replacing gzip). So to the question of how relevant is xz/lzma/7zip performance to day to day task, is it's a lot relevant.

The successor will probably be zstd in the coming years. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-3...

You can find a 7zip for UNIX here [1].

[1] http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/

>>> They already have a mobile chip that is as fast as an active-thermally cooled notebook chip.

>> "As fast" on specific curated use cases. Show me an Apple chip that beats any laptop on 7zip.

> Is this a joke, what kind of usage benchmark is 7zipping large numbers of files?

A benchmark that Apple is unlikely to have implemented specific optimizations for, which therefore is a better test of the general purpose performance of the chip.

The situation being claimed here is sort of like if someone cited a DES benchmark to claim that Deep Crack's DES cracking chips (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker) were faster than a contemporary 1998 Pentium II.

A benchmark that probably relies as much on disk access speeds as CPU?

> A benchmark that probably relies as much on disk access speeds as CPU?

If true, that's just a nitpick that doesn't affect the overall point of the GGGP, though.

Nope, 7zip is using LZMA algorithm for compression, which is around a few MB/s on the fastest CPU. It's heavily CPU bound.

edit: Just tried compressing a large file, ultra setting on my desktop i5 CPU, it's running at 3 MB/s on 1 core.

One large file could be CPU bound, many small files (which is partly why you zip/jar things up) is disk bound.

Apple ships a framework for doing lzma and other compression algorithms. I doubt they will be taken by surprise

Not true. the bottleneck is going to be compression not disk access.

Actually the zip algorithm is a perfect candidate for dedicated silicon of a dedicated instruction.

I read about a chip that had that feature yesterday but I can’t find the link unfortunately.

this is something that's looking at getting moved to storage controllers on motherboards, ex: PS5/Xbox consoles so that compressed data can be streamed directly to the GPU. Hopefully we'll start to get this type of tech after it's been proven in the console space.

Intel QAT supports gzip compression.

How about JavaScript execution? https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449

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