Compiling LLVM eats a lot of memory for instance. 16Gb is not really enough to take full advantage of the number of CPUs in a modern laptop.
Is this a laptop for everyone? Not necessarily, but for certain classes of users it's manna from heaven.
No $2000 laptop in 2020 should have only quad core cpus.
The M1 16gb will run circles around the i7-1185g7 (highest spec chip framework sells) compiling llvm with 64gb of ram.
Only using a shitload of idle VMs will have any apparent benefit over M1 MacBook pros.
The cpu is just too limiting for the 64gb of ram argument.
I have an M1 MBP and an 1185g7 based Linux laptop. Single core benchmarks, the i7 comes out slightly ahead. Multi core benchmarks, the M1 comes out slightly ahead. There are no circles being run around in performance - only in battery efficiency. For day to day developer usage, testing things literally side by side, I find absolutely no discernible difference in speed.
The M1 does win for battery life, but the battery still lasts for a full work day in my i7 laptop. Honestly at home I always reach for the Linux laptop, because I don't really need the battery life. But for going out and about away from power, the M1 MBP has advantages. Sadly the software (personally) lets it down, I'd probably use the MBP more if it has better Linux support in the future.
It will run circles around the 1185g7 compiling large codebases.
Passmarks across hundreds of benches show a 25% single and 40% multithreaded performance boost over the 1185g7.
I’ve got an i9 8/16 laptop chip and the 13” M1 is trading blows with my laptop despite 2-3x the thermal headroom and considerably less cores/threads across all workloads.
The i9 Apple laptops were notorious for not having a cooling system that could match the heat output of the CPU & throttling almost instantly.
Modern Intel laptop CPUs are no where near the performance / W of the M1, but they are considerably better than those that Apple stuffed into their laptops a few years ago with inadequate cooling I believe.
The only problem with the first generation framework laptop is intel’s quad core CPU because of thermal and power problems associated with their process nodes.
Hex core is really the lowest I will go now for anything over $1000. If this was a Ryzen 5800u, I’d have bought one already.
FWIW, Cinebench multi-core benchmark is around 20% faster for me on the M1.
[0]: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100076/0100/a64-inst...
Many of us spend substantial periods of time writing up the technical documentation in Confluence or use JIRA. Confluence alone loads approximately 22Mb of mangled and compacted JavaScript for each open page in a separate browser tab.
Before M1, Confluence and JIRA were the single most source of a sustained battery drain, irrespective of the browser. On M1 based laptops, the battery impact is so negligible that it can be considered non-existent. How much of this subjected experience can be attributed just to the the ARM 8.3 JavaScript hardware acceleration is an interesting question as the JavaScript browser performance on Intel CPU's has also been affected by Spectre and Meltdown mitigations in the CPU microcode.
LLVM builds eat memory in my experience & end up swapping if you don’t play games with the build system to reduce the parallelism of memory intensive parts of the build.
If you’ve got a VM or two sitting around then obviously that makes things worse.
It’s often tempting to dismiss a product that doesn’t meet your own personal use cases but it’s a bit naive.
It’s actually fun to see products get popular that I know I wouldn’t buy myself. It doesn’t make them bad it just makes them not for me right now.
I’m sure there are other 'workstation-ish' jobs that people would happily run on their laptop if it had > 16Gb memory. 64Gb is quite the leap.
2) If you need 64Gb just sometimes, swapping on M1 MBP is insanely fast.
Also, you want to ignore 400 Gb/s provided by Apple's 64Gb memory, but... you know.