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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Great detailed benchmarking.

This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops.

But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of news outlets were suggesting it would.

In fact, a lot of the GPU tests here show more or less what I’ve seen: That Apple has matched the power/performance of other leading-edge GPU hardware:

> Pretty much what we would expect, with the M1 Max having about 8x less performance, but at 8x less power, so performance per watt is surprisingly quite comparable between the two.

This is actually an impressive accomplishment out of Apple. I’m just afraid it might get overshadowed by the fact that it doesn’t live up to some of the fairly extreme performance claims that got tossed around in the days following the launch.

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But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this.

Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.

There were really similar discussions in mid-2020 when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips launched, because they were beating Intel desktop chips.

That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for Macbook users (and Mac Mini users).

It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)

I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.

Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak.

I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks.

Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too.

I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing fruit.

Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.

By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for anything, they're somehow punishing everybody else with "penalties."

What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else?

At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with their unique vertical integration.

SSE/AVX/etc aren't optimizations for a single application, they're optimizations for specific kinds of math instructions. Any application using that processor can use them, and they're overall pretty general instructions.

Hyper-optimizing for a particular application means the way that particular application works gets accelerated, but not things in general. Sure, if a browser behaved identically to Safari, it too would potentially experience the speed up barring any weird microcode/firmware that only allows those extensions to be used by Apple-signed binaries which is a whole 'nother level of nightmare. Stepping outside of that highly optimized path is essentially a penalty though as it by definition wouldn't be so highly optimized. And once that optimized path has been etched into the silicon, there's no real updating it unless we move to CPUs being more like FPGAs which isn't likely to happen.

When they make optimizations for something, and then _artificially limit_ access to those optimizations (for applications that absolutely could utilize them) for purely commercial or marketing reasons, then yes, absolutely they're punishing.

Intel doesn't forbid compilers from generating code for SSE or AVX.

Apple _does_ forbid Chrome from using energy management and other APIs for no other reason than to keep it less efficient than Safari.

I didn't realize Safari made such heavy use of private APIs.

That is unfair and I would not support that behavior whether talking about private software APIs or private hardware instructions. What I was half-assedly imagining wouldn't be anything like that.

(Although, FWIW, Chrome has private APIs too: https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail... Different use case, but still.)

That's already the case, though. The battery life difference using Safari versus Firefox/Chrome is staggering. Sure, you don't have an option to buy a FF/Chrome mac atm, but you've definitely bought one where safari is the only decently efficient browser.

Is that really due to the hardware or because of the overall behavior of the two browsers? Isn't Safari better battery-wise than Chrome even on Intel Macs? IIRC Edge has better efficiency in Windows than Chrome, so its not surprising me Chrome is less efficient. Its a bloated shadow of its original self.

macOS has a bunch of energy management and performance-related "private" APIs and libraries that Safari is allowed to call, but Chrome is not.

Can you point me to information about this? The Google results are a bit polluted with (hilariously enough) articles about Google's recent restriction of Chrome's private APIs.

I've been having trouble figuring out exactly which private bits and bobs Webkit might be taking advantage of on MacOS.

That's the second time you have made that assertion in this discussion. Can you be more specific please? I have not seen any evidence of that, but I am very interested.

I would also like to see some documentation on these private apis. Sounds fascinating I wonder what they’re doing differently? Are they exposing the same kind of abstractions but the public api is purposely slower? Why would they not want all apps to use less battery life?

Yeah, that's my question.

Other commenters are suggesting that Apple's intent is to keep Chrome and other third-party apps from matching Safari's energy efficiency.

But as you say, I'm not sure that makes strategic sense. If that is true, Apple is essentially crippling most Mac use cases just to benefit Safari. That really would not seem to be in Apple's best interests.

I am a developer, but not a iOS/MacOS developer. So I have followed this sort of thing only very loosely over the years.

But whenever I have heard about grumblings about private Apple-only APIs being used by blessed first-party Apple apps on iOS, it seems to me that the explanation was always that the private APIs either:

1. posed some sort of security issue

2. were simply not yet stable enough to expose to third-party apps

As every developer knows, publicly exposing any API represents a maintenance burden: you're committing to support that API and keep it stable for X number of years. In general you see this kind of pattern a lot: a platform developer dogfoods APIs internally for some period of time before they're stable enough to expose publicly.

Most of the time the hardware accelerators are available for everyone to use, if they program to it. Ex ffmpeg and other media encoding engines all have the ability to write coders / decoders against certain hardware accelerators. You can choose CPU coders, Nvidia specific ones, etc.

Except that they locked access to the hardware accelerators via their APIs. The Neural Accelerator is only available through CoreML and even some of the benchmarks show features that are not available to the public (int8)

Sure, that's been the case in the past and maybe that's what JohnBooty meant with his comment, but his comment specifically pointed out a particular browser so I took it to mean CPU extensions targeted for how Safari operates. Like, specific ways Safari handles Javascript or rendering with all of its specific quirks etched into silicon. Other browser manufacturers would have to pretty much behave like Safari or else run as a penalty on legacy instruction sets.

That already happens though given that different hardware has different support for hardware accelerated playback of video.

E.g even on the M1 Pro/Max, you're going to get much better performance and battery if you're using a video editor that supports prores decoding.

I get that, but that's a bit more general than saying Safari will run faster than Chrome because Apple made Safari-specific application instructions rather than H.264 will be more power efficient than Theora on a given CPU. Any browser could support any particular hardware's video decoders, but only Safari behaves exactly like Safari. The person I was replying to was writing specifically about CPU instructions to enhance the performance of Safari in particular, not of all browsers in general.

The things that take up time and energy in browsers - i.e. things like garbage collection, JIT compilation, and so on - are already things that CPUs are hyper-specialized for. And the code that is ultimately intended to execute is also well-specialized for CPUs.

It's already possible to target GPUs in-browser directly; and most older HTML primitives were recast in terms of GPU operations around the time of the original iPhone. The only thing I can think of that's still been left on the table is rendering vector geometry on-GPU; but most sites don't redraw so much as to make this a huge performance win.

Video decode has been offloaded to hardware for decades as well. The only reason to decode video on-CPU is if you're decoding crazy-old formats[0] that don't have hardware decoder blocks present for them.

The other huge problem is networking - which is also heavily hardware-optimized and has been for a while. Large assets mean keeping your Wi-Fi or LTE baseband on for longer. You could mitigate this with compression; which can be hardware optimized... though I'm not sure how much of a benefit that provides outside of game consoles[1].

[0] In my personal experience: I wrote a Sorenson H.263 decoder for Ruffle. Right now it not only executes on-CPU, but blocks the event loop main thread. However, the video files in question are so low-quality that this isn't a significant problem for most Flash movies and everything works fine (though I do want to try on-GPU video decoding at some point).

[1] Current-gen game consoles (PS5/XSeries) have hardware decompression blocks. However, the intent is to quickly decompress gigabytes worth of data quickly; most websites aren't nearly that bloated.

This is a wonderful and informative reply. Thank you so much - i really appreciate the time you spent writing this.

> I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak.

I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest, which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but a duopoly isn't necessarily what I would consider a good market condition for progress (as we've seen with iOS vs Android). Lots of different experiments with feedback from people on what they find good would be much preferable, and while a constrained CPU such as Apple's isn't perfect, it does represent more choice and pressure on other players to evolve in ways they may have been resistant to previously.

> And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too.

RIP the general purpose computer. :(

    > And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with 
    > Slack and select other app makers so that they can 
    > be a part of the "Marathon" program too.

    RIP the general purpose computer. :(

Haha. I was truly truly not thinking along any such lines.

Since heterogenuous cores are now a mainstream thing, with a mixture of full-throttle and performance-minded cores on a single die, and the performance cores may be hitting a wall until we get to smaller processes, perhaps the next frontier could be efficiency.

Remember how some software proudly displayed those "optimized for MMX" or "optimized for 3DNow!" badges back in the day? What if there was something like that for apps that optimized for those efficiency cores, and what if the efficiency cores met them halfway by implementing some app-friendly stuff in hardware? Sort of like how some common Javascript string ops have dedicated CPU hardware dedicated to them now.

Anyway, yeah. I'm probably just re-inventing CISC all over again, badly.

> Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari.

I don't think that would be worth it. What's the point of 36 hours of battery life? How often do you need more than 12 hours of life on battery? Increasing the maximum battery life only makes sense when it also increases battery life for the more power-hungry workload (which is where you're likely to reach the limit), why bother building dedicated hardware for a specific workload that's already beyond what you need?

Many parts of the world don't have stable electricity, reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet, and as you approach much longer periods you massively increase convenience.

Those parts of the world aren't generally spending multiple thousands of American dollars on a laptop.

You'd be surprised. Additionally, that also includes parts of the US as well.

I don’t think regions susceptible to black/brown outs and power outages are the intended market of an M1 Mac, though that could change.

Aren’t many companies normally located in the Silicon Valley now migrating to Texas, where the electricity infrastructure is wonky at best.

Texas is pretty average when it comes to electricity reliability in the US even though it experiences some of the most diverse weather in the US. Not too many states experience both tornadoes and hurricanes on a regular basis. Its biggest challenge it currently faces is winterization measures due to climate change. Things just weren't designed to get as cold as it did in February, which was a exceptionally rare event historically. I've lived in Texas nearly my whole life, it has never been that cold for that long since I've been here.

There's a gap between no stable electricity and 20+ hours without electricity, so what fraction of Apple customers do you expect to live in this tiny niche, like 0.1%? In such situation you'd use an external battery anyway…

> reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet

You're going to need a looooooooooooooooong time for the electricity usage reduction to compensate for the enormous energy cost of manufacturing a new laptop. If you care about the climate, don't buy a new laptop if your previous one is still running fine, there's just no way energy efficiency is going to be worth it.

We know (more or less) exactly what the Pro desktop chips will be, in the same way that these laptop chips weren't much of a surprise - they'll be basically exactly this, but bigger. More of it.

They can't get that much bigger. The Max is already over 400mm^2. For comparison, the biggest chips are around 600. Apple can't realistically get much bigger than this since yield already drops off a cliff at 600. Getting bigger than that will be tough for them since it isn't clear that apple has put R&D into interconnect tech needed to make effective multi-chip modules.

They are probably going to do two M1 Max chips in the imac, so basically take the existing m1 max, and double it (at least for multicore perf, who knows how single-threaded will play out).

They almost certainly will not do this and it would be a NUMA nightmare if they did.

Not sure why you were downvoted for this.

Considering that some of the magic in these things is the shared, local memory with a very wide bus it would seem obvious that trying to go multi chip would indeed be a massive headache in this regard

Check out this[0] link to see why the thought is Apple is doing exactly that.

[0]: https://architosh.com/2021/10/apples-new-m1-pro-is-chop-vers...

That isn't what that article is saying.

It looks like they were designed for chiplets from the start. So desktops could simply be the existing chips stacked.

Is this true? I was curious and searched around for sources, but it looks like all of the news outlets screwed up and thought the M1 Pro was going to be a chiplet based device called the M1X.

All of the M1 devices have been monolithic dies so far.

There were a lot of people saying things like this after the M1 too. I'm not expecting another huge leap with whatever comes next in the M-series, but I won't be surprised if there is one either.

They didn't really improve the M1 with the Pro and Max chips though. They really just added more cores to the SIP, which doesn't necessarily improve performance so much as it makes more performance available.

I wouldn't say M1 max is another leap. It's mostly scaling for linear performance gains.

When you look at it from a compute perspective, sure. But from a power perspective, it is indeed a leap.

Maybe not next year, but TSMC’s 3nm isn’t that far off.

The rumors are that the M1 supersized version they are putting in the new Mac Pro is 20 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores, which would place it at a little under twice the performance of a 3090. Not saying that Nvidia can't catch up with a hypothetical 4090 next year but it'll be a tall order.

I'll believe it when I see it.

The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.

The path forward is simple then. 512 GPU cores.

Dumb question here: Can you get more performance from the same number of cores by giving them more power?

Not a dumb question at all. You can to an extent, but the returns diminish quickly. It isn't linear.

This fact however makes "performance per watt" comparisons misleading between different processors designed for different environments (e.g. M1 vs AMD Desktop). It takes a more power to get that much extra perf, conversely and the more under-appreciate part IMO reducing the speed a little can save a ton of power/heat if the chip is currently running at the higher power portion of the curve.

On a desktop machine most people would want them to tune for performance at quite a substantial power efficiency cost so of course a desktop chip most probably is less power efficient per unit of compute. You don't need to power it with a battery after all and there's heaps more cooling capacity in a bigger form factor so why optimise for that?

That's just not true. 3dmark shows it having a little under half the performance of a 3090 with the largest GPU, with it getting a score of 18,000 vs a 3090 having around 42,000. Scaling up linearly by a factor of 4 would lead to a comparison of 72k vs 42k, or a little less than twice as much.

It's not going to scale linearly though. The Max has 400mb of memory bandwidth. If you attempt to use as much as possible, as single Max chip uses 220-240mb/sec. The remainder is likely because they planned to use multiple chips in later products. But 2 Maxs will completely saturate it... so that's going to be a bottleneck if they try 4 Maxs. And there would be little point going above 4.

For comparison, the 3090 has almost 1TB of memory bandwidth.

Aren’t you assuming they won’t scale the memory bandwidth?

Yes, that's the way that works. To scale memory bandwidth, you would need a new chip. It wouldn't be an M1 Max anymore. If rumors of them using multiple m1 maxs is true, then they have 400mb/sec of memory bandwidth.

> they have 400mb/sec of memory bandwidth

Per chiplet.

If they improve the architecture at the same time, perhaps feasible?

RAM is not on package in the way iPhones are. Bandwidth should not be meaningfully affected by the placement of RAMs; perhaps slight latency improvement. It simply has many memory channels.

They got something like 15% increase in integer performance, up to 37% increase some benchmarks, and 8% overall performance increase.

Zen 2 was a must-have upgrade over Zen+ and it was a 10% IPC increase.

They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid. As you can see in the benchmark - lower power, proportionally lower performance.

To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's just that Apples marketing hype is so over the top, and so many people buy into it so hard that people (such as me) still feel the need to bring it down to earth.

> lower power, proportionally lower performance

Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly better on average. Only one of the examples in this post really talked about power usage and that example also says that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler and still achieves a similar performance per watt.

If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech:

> In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

For laptop usage, it's an amazing feat.

But it's kind of a strained comparison. Power usage doesn't scale linearly with performance for any CPU (power consumption scales with the square of voltage) so squeezing the last 20% of performance out of a desktop chip could require doubling the power consumption. Which is actually find for a desktop because I really don't care if my CPU consumes 100-200W for a few minutes while doing a compile. But trying to compare performance-per-watt between two parts tuned for different parts of the power/efficiency curve is always going to be misleading.

If we wanted to compare straight across, comparing to AMD's mobile Ryzen parts would make more sense.

AMD has a 35W mobile part that isn't all that far behind the M1 parts: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445

The Anandtech review[1] also compares it to the Ryzen 5980HS, which is the one you linked. The M1 Max absolutely crushes that chip as well, in some of the benchmarks it's more than 2x better. I don't understand the argument people are making saying it doesn't make sense to compare it to a desktop chip. The point is that the M1 Max is actually outperforming desktop chips in a mobile form factor. It may eliminate the need for a separate desktop workstation for a lot of people. Other mobile chips are not competitive at all to the M1 Pro/Max currently.

Even using Geekbench as the benchmark, we see that the M1 Pro multicore score is around 12650, which is 58% better than the Ryzen 9 5980HS you linked.

1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

The 5980HS is a 35W part and will not sustain more than 42W for 5 minutes and then only 35W. The M1 Max's CPU alone will happily draw and sustain 62W.

In other news, processor that draws more power on a more efficient process is faster. More news at seven.

The m1 max is also not actually faster in general: https://www.notebookcheck.net/M1-Max-vs-R9-5980HS-vs-M1-Pro_...

I assume SPECfp specifically scales really well with memory bandwidth/latency.

Regardless, I was talking about GPU performance in my comment (because GP was talking about GPU performance) which all of the replies seem to be ignoring.

Ah, if you care about GPU performance you have to compare it to a dGPU. The M1 Max GPU by itself can draw 65-70W, which makes it more power hungry than an RTX 3060 Max-Q, which is slightly more powerful (despite 8nm vs 5nm), which is a GPU you'd expect in a 1000$ computer.

The one advantage of the M1 Max's GPU is more memory.

> They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid.

The third party testing does show that the comparison is valid.

>The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

Apple's marketing page for the new MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max strictly mentions laptops and laptop GPUs in its comparisons. Apple makes no comparison to desktop systems directly. At most they make general comparisons to the power curves of PC CPUs and GPUs, but mostly when introducing the M1 and explaining why they built it.

Not just that it's even comparable to a desktop but that it also has excellent battery life. You've been able to get portable desktop replacements before, but they were power hungry even when barely doing anything.

> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing.

Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing.

But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to. So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a desktop for me.

I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to have it.

> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this.

The problem with this take is this:

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613

This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the last few hundred MHz of clock speed uses a ton of power, and that's it.

But then you have this:

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666

Nearly double the multi-threaded performance at the same TDP, because it has twice as many cores and it only has to give back the last few hundred MHz of base clock to do it.

A laptop with performance largely equivalent to <= 8-core desktops wasn't a novelty. What a desktop really gets you is the ability to have a lot more cores.

I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon.

So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try to make a point. OK, you win that one. I'm talking about what the SoC as a whole does while running near-silently off a battery.

Yes, a desktop gives you the ability to have more CPU cores. I'm sure that's what we'll get from whatever Apple decides to ship for its true Pro desktops.

The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing.

People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months away when the M1 was released, but Zen 2 desktops were only a single digit percentage faster than Zen 2 laptops, so how does it compare to Zen 3 desktops?

Meanwhile the primary real advantage of the M1 is that it uses less power. Compared to PC laptops, it's a somewhat less power. There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life (and no matter how little the CPU uses, you still have to run the screen and everything else), so the practical impact of this isn't enormous, but it's there. But if you compare the power consumption to PC desktops, OMFG! Except that nobody really cares about the power consumption of PC desktops. That's why they triple the power consumption to eek out 8% more performance.

A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but people keep publishing SPEC benchmarks for comparison with PCs. Part of this is that a lot of the ordinary benchmark software either doesn't run on Mac at all or there was no native ARM version available yet. But SPEC was put together by a consortium of server vendors. Their incentive is show that their POWER and Xeon processors are worth the fat premium over regular desktop CPUs. So the suite skews heavy to benchmarks limited by memory bandwidth, because big servers will have like 16 times more memory channels than a desktop.

Then Apple shows up with this SoC that has a ton of memory bandwidth because it's necessary to feed the GPU and it stomps all over those specific benchmarks. Then it's OMFG again even though those results aren't actually typical because most workloads aren't limited by memory bandwidth.

It's not a bad chip. The level of hype is just extraordinary.

If you don't like SPEC then look at workload benchmarks like video rendering or code compilation. The M series chips acquit themselves quite well.

> There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life

Not when they're actually doing anything. To compete with what the M series chips bring, you need a discrete GPU and a very hungry CPU. Such a machine does not get 9+ hours of battery life.

> The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing.

Right, you already had something like this in multiple discrete components that consume a huge amount of battery life when cobbled together into one system. My entire point has been that the impressiveness of the M series chips comes from their efficiency and what they are able to do holistically in a single SoC.

> A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is

Sigh. Alright I know what I'm dealing with now. Good day to you sir!

> If you don't like SPEC then look at workload benchmarks like video rendering or code compilation. The M series chips acquit themselves quite well.

Then you get results that are equivalent rather than superior.

> Not when they're actually doing anything.

Yes, when they're actually doing anything. The M1 Macbooks get around 16 hours. Under the same kind of load a similarly performing PC laptop might get around 10 hours. Other PC laptops will get 16 hours (or more) by having a lower TDP and then being slower, especially on multi-threaded workloads.

This obviously only matters to people who care about not just long, but very long battery life, and very high performance, and aren't willing to make the weight trade off of getting one with a bigger battery.

> My entire point has been that the impressiveness of the M series chips comes from their efficiency and what they are able to do holistically in a single SoC.

It has very little to do with being in a single SoC. The CPU being able to use the memory bandwidth which is there for the GPU is a neat parlor trick but it only matters if memory bandwidth is the bottleneck, which it usually isn't.

> Sigh. Alright I know what I'm dealing with now.

You don't think that Apple has excellent marketing? They've done this for decades. They make a competitive product and then convince their customers that alternatives are dramatically inferior by pointing to narrow edge cases.

> It has very little to do with being in a single SoC.

The part where the efficiency is radically better than competing parts has everything to do with it being an integrated SoC.

> Then you get results that are equivalent rather than superior.

Equivalent to what? Your desktop at 5+ times the wattage? A Windows laptop with half the battery life and twice the weight?

> Yes, when they're actually doing anything. The M1 Macbooks get around 16 hours. Under the same kind of load a similarly performing PC laptop might get around 10 hours. Other PC laptops will get 16 hours (or more) by having a lower TDP and then being slower, especially on multi-threaded workloads.

Ok this is so ambiguous as to be nearly meaningless. 10 hours of what? At the least you're conceding that in this undefined workload the MacBook gets 6 more hours, which again, has been my whole point. The holistic efficiency is the whole story.

> This obviously only matters to people who care about not just long, but very long battery life, and very high performance, and aren't willing to make the weight trade off of getting one with a bigger battery.

"Only people who want better performance and better battery life should get an Apple Laptop" ... is that basically what you're saying here? Because we might just finally be in agreement.

If you don't care about performance or battery life or weight there are plenty of Windows options available. This is true.

> The part where the efficiency is radically better than competing parts has everything to do with it being an integrated SoC.

What makes you think that? The CPU is about the same speed as other CPUs, the GPU is about the same speed as other GPUs, and it uses less power in no small part because it's the first thing to use TSMC 5nm.

Being an SoC allows you to save a certain amount of overlap, e.g. you don't need separate memory controllers for the CPU and GPU, but none of that stuff uses a significant amount of power.

> If you don't care about performance or battery life or weight there are plenty of Windows options available.

It's not matter of not caring. You can get PC laptops with similar performance and similar weight and 10 hours of battery life instead of 16. Ten hours is not exactly oppressive. If you really, really need sixteen, you can trade it against weight or performance at your option -- it's not necessary to do both.

Or you could wait a few months for PC laptops on TSMC 5nm which will have better power efficiency.

> Being an SoC allows you to save a certain amount of overlap, e.g. you don't need separate memory controllers for the CPU and GPU, but none of that stuff uses a significant amount of power.

It absolutely uses more power to have things on separate dies. Why do you think monolithic designs like this are preferred for mobile first products? It's certainly not because it's cheaper or easier. SoCs like this typically have lower yields and higher costs--you do it because in return you can squeeze out better power and efficiency while also saving space on the board.

> It's not matter of not caring. You can get PC laptops with similar performance and similar weight and 10 hours of battery life instead of 16.

This is just so emphatically not true though. Like I'm going to need to see the workload you're referencing where a device with similar benchmarks across the board (CPU and GPU) gets 10 hours of real world battery life without weighing 5 lbs.

Like I have in my possession as a daily driver a 2020 MacBook Pro that uses an Intel IceLake chip--fairly recent tech! If I'm doing my actual work on it--a bit of Docker, Chrome, and an IDE--I'm lucky to make it much past lunch. A fairly recent Intel chip, that gets positively embarrassed performance-wise by an M1, and can barely turn in 6 hours of real usage.

I want to see this system you have that performs like an M1 and turns in 10 hours of real world battery usage.

> Or you could wait a few months for PC laptops on TSMC 5nm which will have better power efficiency.

You could have already had it for well over a year now with Apple. And by the time this mythical laptop you're speaking of arrives, Apple might have already moved on to the next node. But hey, it's your life not mine. Keep waiting if it pleases you.

Laptop Zen and desktop Zen are basically the same in single core. The big difference is you're not more than 8 fast cores. The M1 Max also has basically 8 fast cores.

It used to be different, but now frequency is so close to the absolute limits that adding more power doesn't help single core performance that much.

I don't understand why people keep talking about power performance per watt, do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the performance scales linearly?

The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700 and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ). 5900x cost $480.

The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their machines "docked" 90% of the time.

    do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would 
    perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w

It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This should be pretty easy to extrapolate by comparing M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max power consumption and performance relative to the # of GPU cores.

I would certainly like to see Apple go nuts and make a true, cost-and-power-consumption-are-no-object world destroying GPU. If only as a halo product. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

I think increasing cores/power limits just gets you up to some other bottleneck.

At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more performance.

Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern.

The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern.

Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits.

If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.

> The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life.

Yeah, all pretty major concerns?

The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything.

I admit it's a pedantic comment but I was pulled in by use of "literally everything".

The other ways to mitigate those things have pretty significant downsides. For instance, maybe you can stick a bigger battery in there to improve battery life, sure. But now it's heavier and more expensive.

    The point is at best I care about perf/watt 
    indirectly and the things I do care about can 
    be improved in other ways

Not necessarily, at least not for single core performance. Even if you're willing to accept unbounded power consumption and waste heat, the die size of the CPU itself won't be increasing at the same rate.

You fairly quickly learn that dissipating kilowatts of watts of heat from something as tiny as a CPU die (or, more accurately, one particular subset of functional units from in a CPU core) is awfully difficult.

At some point, the CPU/GPU/etc need to be kept under a certain temp, which sets an upper bound on watts. So, no escaping watts/performance....

> and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything.

Okay, noise, _maybe_, but how are you proposing to improve heat and battery life without improving perf/watt? Your options for battery life are either to reduce performance, or to increase battery size (but, well, good luck with that; the 16" MBP is already as big as a laptop battery can practically be, as if it was any bigger you wouldn't be allowed take it on a plane). Your only option to reduce heat without improving perf/watt would be to reduce performance.

    Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. 
    It's a derivative concern.

    The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually 
    care about noise, heat and battery life.

In 10 years this is one of the more confusing I've ever seen on HN. You care about noise, heat, and battery life but you don't care about performance/watt? Performance/watt is a "derivative" concern, but somehow those metrics aren't?

Presumably, all you really care about is raw performance then?

Well, OK, fair enough. We can all care about different things. But even though, performance/watt still rules: for all practical purposes the watts part constrains the performance part.

For a given power supply and cooling system, you can only draw and dissipate X number of watts. So you are back to the question of how much performance the system can provide given X watts.

Even no-compromises cooling solutions most would consider highly impractical (involving liquid nitrogen etc) run into this issue at some point. So yeah, you actually do care about performance/watt?

One reason: try to work alongside a 3080 or 3090 running at full power for awhile, and you will understand. Especially if you don't have really good AC in your work area during summer. =)

But you only need like 12% of the power to match Apple?

You can downclock your GPU as much as you want and get better perf/watt, which is what most crypto miners do

Why would I run it at full power? I could have M1 Max-beating performance while staying well under 70, and modern Nvidia cards will happily idle around 30c when driving hi-res displays.

> Does the performance scales linearly?

On GPUs, pretty much. It’s even called embarrassingly parallel for this reason.

At some point you hit bandwidth limitations, right? Unless each core has local, dedicated memory they will need to access the GPU's shared memory for various things right?

PCIe 4.0+ is capable of ~31504MB/s on an x16 interface. Besides that, you might run into memory issues, but I honestly haven't seen a memory-bottlenecked workload on GPUs outside of the crypto mining scene.

>At some point you hit bandwidth limitations

Yes, with HBM3 you could go up to 5TB/s and in the future 6.4TB/s. To give a comparison a 3980 RTX Ti has ~900 GB/s with GDDR6x.

But just with everything we hit TDP or cost ceiling well before any technical barriers.

Battery life, energy costs, waste heat... take your pick.

>do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the performance scales linearly?

The answer is yes. Scaling with more cores running at the same frequency giving unlimited bandwidth. Yes it is pretty much linear for GPU.

I guess that is why most of the discussions is so tiring. Because this fact is not known.

I do fully expect to be blown away by the performance of the M1 Max when I finally receive mine as I'm coming from a 2012 MBP. I'm getting tired of the entire system grinding to a halt when I open one of those 25k-line classes in android studio. Probably even the regular M1 would handle this much better.

It's kind of hard to compete with raw power if you don't want a space heater of a device (hint: not wanted in laptop form factor).

However, part of me thinks this is Apple doing iterative rollout best - they could have created a 20-core desktop version of this in 2021 but will likely delay that to next year for the new Mac Pro and iMac Pro.

I wonder if it could perform much better than 1/8 of the 3090 on memory bound applications, given that its 400GB/s bandwidth is 1/2.34 that of the 3090's 936 GB/s...

It's a laptop with integrated graphics, not a desktop with high-end high-wattage discrete graphics. Astounding how far they've come and that's version 1.

I was like you at first, seeing that my chrome speeds don't feel that fast, then I did my first XCode build. Holly.. it is so much faster than my 2017 Macbook Pro.

Super fast builds, and A huge productivity boost. I think it shows that if software is optimized for it, M1 can be/feel crazy fast.

Unfortunately, anything running with Roseta, will not feel that fast, as it's performance will be hobbled by the emulation layer.

Note that one part of this is that llvm is significantly faster to generate code for arm64 than for x86_64. I'm not saying that accounts for all the difference, but it helps.

Yet even still under Rosetta, my M1 Pro can handle more than twice as much "stuff" in my Ableton projects vs. my 2018 MBP, all while barely heating up and without _any_ fan noise (whereas my 2018 MBP starts sounding like a jet engine almost immediately after opening any sizeable project).

So for me, its performance completely lives up to the hype. I don't think I'll need a new machine for a loooong time.

Imagine how much better it will be with the native build: https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/live-111-apple-silicon-suppo...

The main issue with that is a looot of plugins I rely on day to day still haven't been updated with native support, so they wouldn't be usable while running Live native. I really don't understand the hold up since some of my plugins were updated almost immediately after the original M1 was released.

> so they wouldn't be usable while running Live native

Live still doesn't have built-in bit bridging? (Of course, bit bridging doesn't come free.)

Even the M1 port of Chrome is clunky, but then again chrome has always been clunky with MacOS.

Firefox's M1 port actually got me to finally start transitioning out of chrome after being a fairly devoted chrome user since it released. It's the only third party browser on M1 macs that comes close to Safari in speed and handles window size changes (especially when video is playing) leagues better than Chrome.

Chrome completely crashes a few times a week on my M1 Max laptop. Very frustrating. Not even necessarily when I'm doing something actively, or intensively. I can have HN open as my only tab, be reading an article and I look back at the screen and Chrome has gone.

Do you run virtual machines on it?

For M1

Pretty sure the panegyric performance claims are from Mac people comparing it to the rather sad previous generation of Macbooks.

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