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Comment by okamiueru | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little bit confused why there are so many comparisons between M1 and older apple hardware. It seems like a weekly occurrence on HN. I think it's great that the M1 performs well. However, posts like these, and in general the comments I read, make me feel a bit uncomfortable. So, take this with a grain of salt, but I feel like there is a strong desire to confirm the idea that the M1 is a beast. This has been reinforced by quite a lot of misleading advertisement.

So, personally, I like to work on a desktop computer. I don't care all that much about the power efficiency as I do about performance. So, I was curious, and ran the same test on a regular good top-end desktop hardware, and the same test took 2 minutes and 53 seconds. In other words 4.3x faster, or "78% faster" if using the same metric. Compared to the M1 time it would be 3.1x and 68% respectively.

Just to be clear. This isn't a comment that "with my beefy computer I can outperform the M1". My desktop environment is not something I can commute with. My point is nothing more than, maybe to add some interesting data-points that I find are hard to come by. I seem to always see the M1 be compared to older apple hardware. Maybe that's all you wish to know. If MacOS is a must-have, then I suppose it doesn't really matter what else exists. And this is fine, I have no objection to it.

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I think what people are excited about is not the actual benchmark but the potential of the path we now are clearly on.

When you see “M1 beats XXXXX at XXXXX task” I don’t think anyone really cares that much about that task, but it usually makes you think, “crap, imagine what their proper MacBook Pro pro / Mac Pro chip is going to be able to do. Or what it will do in 3 years...?

Also, everyone just loves watching Intel suffer.

Also 5 or 10 watts versus 125 watt power draw. No matter how you slice it. The BBC acorn has grown up to be a monster.

Really one of my favorite examples of why public sector investment is a Good Thing.

I still love that movie with the hobbit guy about the BBC acorn. That was great.

Micro Men! Great little TV movie, and really interesting story of the rivalry between UK golden-age home computing giants Sinclair and Acorn (Acorn being the company behind the BBC micro, and also originally the "A" in "ARM").

Oh thank you, I never heard those name before so I had a hard time following this part of the thread.

( do some more search, adding “micro” )

Ok, so it IS a British Broadcasting Corporation spawn.

Ha. Excellent. I had no idea.

Thanks for spelling it out, I was about to reject the idea as funny but unlikely.

Me neither! Here's a link to the movie: https://archive.org/details/MicroMen720p2009

Wait wait wait… Gloating for no good reason about public investment is one of my favorite activities.

I have a hard time following the connection with M1 processors?

bbc contracted acorn to produce an educational computer to go hand-in-hand with a tv program. it was a smashing success and made them so much more money than anything else they'd been doing. they birthed arm.

Ah thanks yeah I was researching that. I had absolutely no idea. And I’ve been using those nifty fuckers since a while now. Ha.

It made them the only money they ever made, but in the end they had to default on payback of 3mil pounds of royalties to BBC thanks to typical 80s mismanagement (oh hi Commodore).

Not unlike real acorns.

Ohhhhhhh I think I'm getting it. Then they grow up into a big tree and that's where Apples come from?

Well, apples don't come from oaks. Unless you count oak apples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_apple

Though not sure how that would fit into the metaphor.

No, acorns turn into oak trees. To get apple trees you need apple seeds.

You get those from core dumps.

"RJ-45 ends are not "network seeds" and should not be scattered under floor tiles in an effort to cultivate a server farm."

- https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2gt7x5/just_sysad...

I believe a lot of people don't hear the fans because they're wearing headphones. For the rest of us that like a quiet room, the arm CPUs sound like a godsend.

I say "sound" because I don't feel like an early adopter much; don't have one yet.

> For the rest of us that like a quiet room, the arm CPUs sound like a godsend.

Got an M1 Pro and normal daily use just doesn't trigger the fans. I can do it by, e.g., charging whilst playing Minecraft or running something that uses all 8 cores at full speed for more than two minutes-ish (`wireguard-vanity-address`, Blender render, etc.) but it's an oddity to hear them these days.

> I believe a lot of people don't hear the fans because they're wearing headphones. For the rest of us that like a quiet room

You’re completely focusing on fan noise here, but of course it also enables tiny devices with great battery life and - this isn’t completely irrelevant when you run your computer for a significant part of the day - lowered electricity cost.

Oh, and I believe these processors have quite some head room before they will reach the physical thermal limits others have already run into, so expect some more raw performance on better cooled systems.

> You’re completely focusing on fan noise here, but of course it also enables tiny devices with great battery life

You're optimistic there. Where's my iPhone with a 7 day battery? Last time i had a phone that lasted 7 days it was a Nokia 6210 with a b&w screen.

> and - this isn’t completely irrelevant when you run your computer for a significant part of the day - lowered electricity cost.

I care about that too, but prolly not worth mentioning on an US centric site.

> I care about that too, but prolly not worth mentioning on an US centric site.

Always funny to see a European head to a "US-Centric" site just to constantly take jabs at the US, which your posting history confirms.

But HN is more California (and Bay Area)-centric, if you're being technical; which is generally considered energy and eco-conscious:

https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/america-s-10-most-energy-e...

For future reference, and to realign your stereotypes.

> Always funny to see a European head to a "US-Centric" site just to constantly take jabs at the US, which your posting history confirms.

Oh well, good job Trump. But we're getting political so let's shut up.

> Also, everyone just loves watching Intel suffer.

This is such a weird fucking statement.

Apple literally think they own your hardware after you buy it, and Intel are the evil ones?

I don't really do fanboyism, currently own Mac, windows, Linux, Intel, amd, android, iPhone, switch and PlayStation.

I just use what I use but I don't get so attached, apple has been lacking for years. M1 is ok but honestly it feels like they've only just caught up to everyone else.

Intel has played dirty for years, both with AMD and its own customers for years. It's not about Apple.

That's legit reason for Intel to be blamed, but also I want to praise Intel for massive contributing for OSS. I wish AMD also increase contributes for OSS as increasing shares and profits.

>This is such a weird fucking statement.

Not if you've been in the industry for long enough. And it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Apple, the "everyone just loves watching Intel suffer" (or more charitably, "watching Intel get a bit of comeuppance and much needed kick in the arse") bit stands on its own no matter who is dishing out the suffering because Intel has been a big PITA for everybody since the late 90s/early 00s. Intel is pretty much single-handedly responsible for lack of widespread ECC memory for example. They've nickle and dimed everyone and feature gated important functionality for pricing power and basically just exploited the ever living shit out of their dominant CPU position. And the last time they were getting threatened in terms of that position, they bought themselves what they needed with illegal tactics denying AMD a chance to get the ball rolling, dooming us to another 10-12 years before they could go for it again. And Intel has been this way for ages and ages. People still remember everything that went down around Itanium and how it choked off promising alternatives.

So yeah. Intel have indeed been the evil ones, and in a way that's been a lot harder to avoid than Apple which you might stop and recall has in fact always had only a tiny minority of the PC market. I mean, if you want to talk about Apple specifically:

>Apple literally think they own your hardware after you buy it, and Intel are the evil ones?

That's kind of amusing given the access Intel has given themselves at a deep level on every CPU.

>M1 is ok but honestly it feels like they've only just caught up to everyone else

This is just you being silly. "Only just caught up"? They were using Intel before so they were by definition the same as everyone else. What they've done in mobile CPU design has been genuinely remarkable. And that in turn is a genuinely good thing in general whether you use them or not, same as with AMD. We're already seeing Intel sluggishly but seriously start to respond and shift.

Intel built a fairly open platform whereas Apple is and always has been the China of tech.

> ...given the access Intel has given themselves at a deep level on every CPU.

And they use that to stop end users from doing what?

Meanwhile Apple will have you paying them yearly to sign apps as they continue to build a dystopian new world order where only they control everything you can do with your own hardware. I honestly hope that their marketshare keeps growing in all categories though. The more successful they are the better chance people will rebel against them. You can't run an app business in the United States without dealing with Apple. Whatever Intel has done is hardly comparable.

> ...as they continue to build a dystopian new world order where only they control everything you can do with your own hardware

Well, the new M1 computers have a built-in ability to run third-party OSes. It is not an oversight but rather something Apple intended to do and spend effort implementing in a way that fits their security model. That they did not provide any hardware documentation to go with it, is another thing.

Maybe reconsider the metaphor

It's perfectly accurate.

Thank you. Yeah I never really had much to say about intel. They sell processor, sometime, rarely, I buy processor. I do look up what make sense to buy, or not, at that specific time.

And most of the time I forgot I did it in a matter of weeks.

I’m not sure what it’s in my current machines. It work really well.

On the other side, for some reasons all my work computers have been macs for a solid 10 years now. Basically after the intel shift.

And boy oh boy I had moment of annoyance toward Apple.

Despite all of the 14nm++++++ ridiculousness, 2020 was Intel's best year ever[1].

I think Intel has a huge challenge ahead but one thing that's helped them is that Skylake was competitive enough to get them through the process node mistakes (at least to this point). Maybe what we've learned is that fewer chip buyers care about performance and power tradeoffs than imagined (or at least, than I thought).

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/263559/intels-net-revenu...

My comment every time someone mentions Intel best year yet:

Commodore reported 7-year record revenue with good profit 4 years before going bankrupt. https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-financial-history-1978-19...

the historic revenue charts for the two companies are completely different though

As did Blackberry! And countless other "innovators dilemma" examples.

Intel's a little different though. It's not like consumer sentiment has changed like in the case of the C64->PC or BB->iPhone. AMD and ARM are strong competitors but Intel is in this position because they made a major technical misstep. Maybe more like Microsoft and the Longhorn/Vista debacle. I don't think we can conclusively say Intel or even x86 can't be competitive when they get their process figured out.

Commodore didnt go out of business because of C64, if anything C64 kept them afloat far longer than they should of lasted. They actually still sold ~150K C64 in 1994! Commodore went bankrupt because they kept selling 1981 released c64 and 1985 released Amigas all the way to 1994 with almost no upgrades. They did plenty of updates, like new C64 cases, or Amiga 600. A600 had same cpu, same mhz, same Dual Density floppy as 1985 A1000.

Intel has been selling same 4 core CPUs for almost 10 years now, only last year finally releasing something able to compete with Ryzens on $/core count.

I think it’s hard to exclude power efficiency since that’s a constraint that matters for a lot of people and is particularly relevant on laptops.

The other noticeable thing for me I think is driver related: instant wake, instant resolution change.

It’s noticeably nicer to use.

Is it faster than a desktop? No, but comparing it to a desktop feels like the weirder comparison to me.

So for development in various ecosystems, would you say the M based is superior to Intel based in terms of efficiency and performance?

I think I might have been misunderstood here. I sort of feared I would be, as I have some experience in this regard. I don't really have an opinion on what is nicer, and I also don't mind people liking their stuff, if anything it makes my happy to know.

I also agree that it is weird to compare it to a desktop. In fact, my larger point is that I feel these benchmarks, and subsequent comment discussions, tend to imply this comparison. And, I don't see the harm in then showing what those numbers would be. If power consumption isn't important, I sure would like to know.

Even in terms of power efficiency AMD is in the same ballpark with their 4 and 5 U-series mobile parts, particularly when comparing multicore benchmarks on their 8 core/16 thread CPUs.

M1 is really most impressive when compared to Intel parts and especially when compared to the underspec’ed Intel parts that Apple used to ship.

Yes, the M1 is good but I’m honestly just tired of hearing about it. The story seems to be about the decline of Intel’s fab supremacy more than anything.

It's kind of a joke at this point. Talking about the runtime of something on a dual 7742 and someone pipes up with "Have you tried M1, foocloud has them available, it's so much faster".

Single threaded performance is on par with AMD 5xxx series parts. Consider that Apple is using the 5nm process while AMD is using the 7nm process.

I'm not sure how it compares in terms of power efficiency though I'd expect the ARM chips to be more efficient both because of the transistor size and the ARM CPU not needing to support instructions from the 60s.

I'm very excited to see a new competitor in the CPU game and I'm a big fan of ARM, hopefully we will see further disruption but in the PC space.

Imagine a 128 core desktop CPU. It will be interesting to see how software has to evolve in order to maximise utilization of the quantity of threads.

> [...] and the ARM CPU not needing to support instructions from the 60s.

Apparently, those weird instructions only take up a teeny-tiny amount of space on the CPU and are basically implemented in micro-code.

To be backwards compatible those instructions just need to be supported, but they don't need to be fast. So they are implemented such that they don't get in the way much.

Is it really a competitor given they don't sell their chips? For Intel maybe, given they lost the Apple market, but it doesn't look like it changed anything for the other players.

There's been a lot of comments about how ARM is going to revolutionise everything, but that doesn't seem to be the case for the chips you can actually buy (e.g. Qualcomm Vs AMD). Honestly, I don't see the M1 as a statement about how good ARM compared to x64, but how good Apple is compared to the rest of the field.

> It will be interesting to see how software has to evolve in order to maximise utilization of the quantity of threads.

Not only this, but the PHP/Python/Javascript kiddos will need to learn:

1. Languages that get closer to the metal. 2. Utilize those languages to make their applications aware of data locality, temporality, and branching.

The bottleneck of the future is memory and pipeline stalls. Spraying objects all over the heap is one of the dumbest things you can do with modern processors, but developers do it all the time. This needs to get fixed.

I believe it's often on HN because there hasn't been a major "jump" in computing/processing power like this in over a decade. I do remember when every year's PC was significantly faster and yearn those years, as probably many here, and see this as a very exciting moment.

I only use a laptop, like many others, and I believe it's very fair to compare M1 vs last generation Intel. Why? Because both are Apple computers (few differences in screen brightness, colors, etc), same OS (few differences in optimization, stability, support, etc) and similar constrains from being a laptop (thermal, power, etc). Intel's year over year improvements are minimal, so "last year" Intel vs "this year" m1 is a fair comparison. It'll not be so when we get to m3+, but even m2 would be fair-ish game and gain more from comparing an Apple Intel computer vs Apple m2 than comparing it with a totally different windows machine.

Doesn't that imply you're only limiting yourself to apple hardware? Seems like the logical conclusion if the M1 is this "jump" in computational power, yet being three times slower in the very same test I ran?

I’m going to guess your desktop isn’t running on a 15 watt SoC. If it were, then we’d have something to talk about

That's a good point. Yet for how long can the M1 sustain maximum performance, even with fans? And at what temperatures?

Regardless, it's good to see some innovation--no matter how much hype is involved.

I'm no expert, but with a 15W power draw the answer to the "how long" question is likely to be "perpetually" with active cooling. Now, Apple tends to let its processors run very hot before throttling (I had an old i5 MacBook which easily hit 98C), but again, a 15W power draw means there isn't all that much energy to push into whatever heat sink or cooling solution they want to use. (In the real world it's rather more complicated, with different load intensity on different parts of the SoC, but still)

Is it a good point though? I mean, I've already said that in my situation, I do not care about power consumption. I'm not saying this isn't a good feature of the M1, it is just irrelevant when you're plugged in, and you can dissipate the heat. Both of these are the case when I work, so I would consider it to have no downsides, with a 3x speedup. Likewise, this is not relevant for those who have such power constraint, that need to work on 10 hour long train rides. I'm not sure what is so difficult about accepting these constraints, since most replies so far to my post about "if power consumption isn't relevant to you" with "well, the power consumption is much better".

The point here was the nostalgic "I miss the days when computer performance increased noticeably", which apparently hasn't happened for a while, until the M1 came along. If it is performance you're after, the only way that sentiment could hold true, was if you limiting yourself to the rather poor performance in older apple hardware. Just think about it... if a 1.33 speedup would give this feeling, imagine what a 4x speedup would feel like.

So, it's not that I think the M1 is bad. It's that these posts that keep popping up, week after week on Hacker News, which go to some lengths to show how the M1 is 30% faster at some heavy work load than the older, and much worse Intel processors. It just seems strange.

No, I'm just saying that if you want to compare apples to apples (only the processor), well Apple just did that and changed mainly the processor, so if we compare two Apple machines with different processors we can see the jump in performance much better.

I'd be very happy to see comparison of other ultrabooks with the m1, but AFAIK everyone who "beats" the m1 are desktop workstations and not ultrabooks.

You logic doesn't follow. You start out by saying "no", but what you immediately follow up with, is the answer "yes" to my question.

True all day battery life while holding it's own against Intel desktop-class perf is super exciting. (I'm aware that some Intel chips go faster, but see eg [1] -- not near the price point.)

You could get that battery life before, but not without tradeoffs you really felt.

I can barely feel the perf difference between my 2015 mbp and my 2019; I'm dorkily excited to get a new laptop and actually feel a perf bump. It kind of feels like the 90s again.

And separately excited for what happens when Apple makes an m2 or whatever with more thermal budget to compete in the desktop space.

[1] https://techjourneyman.com/blog/apple-m1-vs-intel-core-i9/

I remember when the XBOX and PS2 were out. I never got into console gaming, so I was very much on the sidelines. From that perspective it was amazing how passionate people got about a consumer product that realistically should form no part of anyone’s identity. Since then I’ve seen the same pattern over and over again. I don’t really get it. Kudos to modern marketing I guess.

I dunno about the marketing, but I for one was excited about the first consumer devices capable of realtime, immersive 3D worlds. I played a lot of 16 player halo in college classrooms on big screen projectors. It was exciting.

I guess maybe the point I was trying to make wasn’t explicit enough. Getting excited about either one, understandable. Getting into serious and sustained arguments about which one was better like they were political parties or religions, not as understandable.

More understandable for anyone who was around for the virtually identical Sega vs Nintendo wars of the 80s and 90s.

I think it’s partly down to money.

If you’re on a tight budget and can only afford one, you don’t want to feel as though you’ve made the wrong choice and are missing out.

If you can afford to buy both then it’s not as big of a deal.

What Apple has proven with M1 and Rosetta is you can actually quite elegantly support legacy x86 programs, while leaving little on the table, and make use of all of the advantages of ARM/RISC based architectures.

I'm interested if AMD/Intel will respond with their own beefed up desktop profile RISC/ARM processors.

I wouldn't call x86-64 all that legacy (it's like, recently legacy) and that's all Rosetta supports. But performance is not that bad even if you stack something like WINE on top to handle i386 programs.

There’s videos on YouTube of people playing Windows games (like GTAV) through parallels via Rosetta 2.

Performance isn’t amazing, but it blows my mind that it works at all!

Is that really Rosetta and not qemu? I didn’t think it supported VMs.

It may be an 'older model' but it's only from 2019. It's only one year behind the current 16" MBP. So I think comparing a 2 year old top of the line, maxed out MBP to a current lowest end entry level MBP, and see the low end model blow away the high end maxed out beast, is a reasonable thing to be impressed with.

There are two important things here:

1. If the smallest laptop chips are this efficient what do you think a full fat desktop chip will look like? 2. I think desktop/workstation is the only category where energy usage isn’t that important, it’s probably less than $100 per year with our usage patterns (don’t quote me on that)P. But for server and laptop it’s very important (for totally different reasons).

(Realistically it’s probably a max performance vs efficient trade off, but that may be in part because we’ve not seen any large apple chips, so we don’t know how it scales)s

Well, we know that AMD's chips - which use the next largest TSMC node compared to Apple's - have a lot of diminishing returns from increasing the available power envelope above M1-like ultraportable levels, at least in the kinds of core counts you typically find in consumer desktops. So it's possible that even if Apple did ship a full desktop chip in a system with proper cooling, it wouldn't be that much faster. (It's also likely that they just won't bother, Apple being Apple.)

I don't think you realize how far ahead the M1 actually is... it's about processing power per watt. The desktop you used actually 1) has a fan 2) is probably consuming many more than 15 watts 3) would burn my lap if it was anywhere near it.

The implications are huge. Think about the competitive advantage a data center that operated with no cooling requirements and much lower power requirements would be if it got the same (or better!) performance than an equivalent intel based one.

It's not just faster, its faster than equivalent parts AND way more efficient.

The disconnect here is exactly what I'm referring to in my post. I'm at a loss for words, especially considering I've already addressed your main point. Also, what do you mean by "not just faster"? What are "equivalent parts"?

When they make the desktop pro version its going to slap. This is a 15 watt part! You may not care about efficiency so then wait and see what the desktop part looks like.

It's generally not that simple - you can't scale a 15w part to 150w and get 10x the performance, there's other factors at play.

With the m1 chip you pretty much can, the heat is low enough that you can just add more transistors to the die and give it more juice and it will fly. It seems the days of intel are numbered, not even i9 processors can compete against it now.

What did you test was most probably wasnt compiled for m1 or just a rare thing. Until M1 i didnt buy single Apple product. But M1 is clearly superior. You feel the difference clearly just by browsing web. There isnt even need to test anyhting someone who used decent intel/amd laptop and m1 laptop in short period of time will realize the difference.

Same as for me. I was interested in macos but 2k bucks is something that stoping me all that time :)

I bought in 2019 ThinkPad t490 (for nearly 1k $) after my Dell n5110 it's just wow. Speed, touchpad. And then two weeks ago I decided to give it a try to Macbook Air and bought minimal 8/256.

And this machine slightly (IMO something 2x in indexing my phpstorm project) faster then my t490 with i5-8265U 24/256 BUT its silent and cold and battery life. After full working 10h day I have 30-40% And I was shocked that 8 gigs is enough for me, on ThinkPad I used at least 10-12 gigs for my work.

I just bought minimum to try macos and planned to switch to 16 gig version or go back to ThinkPad, but now I can use it at least next couple of years

No regrets from switching

Understand where you're coming from but there also seems to be a weird section of the audience that, for whatever reason, doesn't like to compare apples to apples.

I wouldn't expect large numbers of benchmarks of intels new mobile chip against AMDs fastest desktop chip so I don't know why people find it unusual in this particular circumstance.

I’m usually already committed to macOS and want to know if the upgrade is “worth it”. But, for this, I’m more interested in perceived performance than real performance and, generally, the non-M1 post-2015 or so MacBooks feel slower than my older MacBooks ever did.

These benchmarks don’t threaten other ecosystems and show a strong value proposition for others who own the older, hot and noisy MacBooks. Especially in its form factor. Especially with its battery life. What’s wrong with that?

the best metric would be power to cost ratio. If you're compiling faster than the M1, how much more or less is your build in comparison?

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