I’m kind of sick of video encode/decode perf comparisons though as it is invariably just software vs hardware, and unsurprisingly hardware is vastly faster.
WebKit compile time:
"2020 13-inch MacBook Pro with Intel CPU: 46 minutes and 10 seconds
M1 MacBook Pro: 20 minutes and 43 seconds"
And even more fascinating:
"2019 Mac Pro (Intel 12-Core 3.3GHz CPU): 20 minutes and 11 seconds
M1 Mac mini: 19 minutes 32 seconds"
Some other measurements of some other compilations show the advantage of many core Intels but with more cores and much more electricity spent:
https://build2.org/blog/apple-m1-compilation.xhtml
"time sh ./build2-install-0.13.0.sh --local --yes ~/install
163s"
"As the first point of reference, let's compare it to my workstation with an 8-core Intel Xeon E-2288G (essentially i9-9900K plus ECC). It does the same build using vanilla Clang in 131s. While E-2288 is faster, M1's performance is nevertheless impressive. Especially when you consider that during the build the workstation is belching hot air and screaming like an airplane about to take off while M1 is whisper-quiet with barely warm air coming from its exhaust."
It seems that in the comparable power envelope M1 remains better:
"CPU CORES/THREADS TIME
Apple M1 4+4 163s
AMD Ryzen 4700U 8/8 222s
Intel Core 1165G 4/8 295s"
IMO this bit right here is worthy of highlighting again:
> Especially when you consider that during the build the workstation is belching hot air and screaming like an airplane about to take off while M1 is whisper-quiet with barely warm air coming from its exhaust.
I have never run a significant amount of compilation on any machine that didn't hit heat issues. So either the M1 is doing very well at managing heat, or Clang is doing incredibly poorly at exploiting the full system. In either case this makes the M1 look like something special.