But then maybe anything is fast after using a 2012 retina MBP for almost 10 years.
You'll then get a bunch of stack traces that show you where the process is spending time. To diagnose beachballs, the only interesting thing is the main thread (the first one).
Sometimes you can see from the method names where it's hanging.
Incidentally, I don't use Chrome and don't even have it installed. My main browser is Firefox (at any given time I have 2-3 Firefox profiles open with tens of tabs) and secondary browser is Safari.
Of course if I had to run a 10x suite 250 seconds, 3 minutes, would be noticeable. Or if I worked with compiled languages and had to recompile large projects.
That hardly sounds like a fair comparison: a computer from eight years ago is going to be slower than one from last year, after all.
The only fair comparison is between machines at the same or similar price points. What's the best intel/amd laptop you can buy for the M1 money, and how does that laptop compare?
Though Intel has since improved their mobile chips and the difference is likely to be much less with the new laptops this year.
- Intel Alder lake has vastly better idle and low-performance task power draw than before but still not quiiite as good as M1. It can boost to slightly faster peak speeds but at a MASSIVE power draw disadvantage, like 4x more power then M1 to reach 5% more performance
- AMD which is on more comparable TSMC processes gets comparable power/performance draw, but AMD have not yet cracked idle power draw and it's still worse than even Intel
And Apple is about to release M2
I don't think I've seen any bang-per-buck comparisons; of course I have not looked very hard, so there's something for me to do later :-)
> The M1 chip is ahead in the performance/wattage,
I don't care. OP posted about performance with no regard to power efficiency, so I was wondering about the performace with no regard to power efficiency.
As long as the laptop lasts 3 hours or so it's enough. I'm not going to spend 8 hours huddled over a small screen that I am squinting into, using a reduced keyboard with limited navigation keys. I can't see myself spending even 3 hours doing that, TBH. My neck hurts after only an hour using a laptop without an external monitor or keyboard.
Since the thing is going to be plugged in for 99.9% of its use, I'm more interested in what performance difference I expect by going with the M1 over a similarly-priced Intel/AMD setup.
For example, let's say CPU A has 32 cores each capable to perform 1B instructions and costs $1000, and CPU B has 4 cores with same speed, but costs $100. Let's say typical task for a machine is browsing social network sites. If this task uses only 4 cores and a user can browse same number of web pages per unit time then effectively both A and B have the same performance, but CPU A has 10 times worse typical performance per dollar.
A metric in this case should be not the count of executed instructions, but for example, a count of web pages viewed by user per unit time, or share of time spent actually viewing pages (and not waiting for them to load).
Of course, you can make similar metrics for other uses - for example, a time taken by illustrator to draw a picture, or count of written lines of code per unit time for a programmer. All divided by hardware cost.
That's the type of comparison I would like to see. Would Apple be winning in such fair and realistic benchmark is an open question. I doubt that.
Battery life, fan noise, and throttling due to excess heat are all reasons to care about power consumption.
Ugh, not in Europe, especially not now
And even in the USA it seems it depends from where you live
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
What's the break-even point where your savings from electricity offsets the extra cost of an M1? A year? Two years?
I hope I’m wrong, but last I heard the Linux scheduler hasn’t caught up with 12th gen performance and efficacy cores.
—- Then there’s the whole other topic that some of us would prefer to be on arm over x86. I’m keeping an eye out for native Linux support for the latest snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 laptops that are coming out (ThinkPad X13s and friends). So far I’ve heard nothing. Which might suggest that M1 might stay ahead of the curve in terms of the community hacking to support these boards.
It will be fun to see how quickly HFI support finds it's way into Hypervisors like Xen.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-HF...
My assessment is that I'm not going out to buy a M1 laptop now even if there were ones not from Apple or a new Intel/AMD. I'll still wait until my current one starts dying or I have to do something it can't do. I replaced the previous one from 2006 when I started to work with VMs and containers and I needed more than 4 GB RAM. The new laptop (my current one) was 3 times faster on the same workloads and it had a HDD at the time.
I apologise. I interpreted what you said as evidence for how fast the M1 is.
> My goal was to show how much or how little a real world workload improved over the years.
Agreed. I am only now looking a desktop replacement for my 2011 first-gen i7, and the only reason is because I recently started doing Java and C# development on my personal machines, and the IDEs + compilation times are terrible.
Also, trying to run VS under Linux on this machine is a total waste of time. If it weren't for the Java and C# requirement I wouldn't even bother.