AWS Graviton vs. M1 vs. M1 Pro Node.js Benchmarks

However on desktop where power usage isn't an issue, Intel 12th gen performance has pulled ahead of AMD. Theoretically even on laptops too but I suspect they have the common problem of powerful Intel cpus in laptops where they cooling just can't hack it and they throttle to make it worthless getting top end Intel. So I believe AMD is still better on laptops presently.

Also, the AM4 socket is at the end of its life. Intel’s LGA 1700 is expected to be used for two more CPU generations, so there’s an upgrade path.

You make it sound like the reviewers mindlessly regurgitate Apple’s material. Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s have numbers very close to Apple’s figures.

Now, you get diminishing returns in a lot of daily tasks so perceived performance is not proportional to benchmark scores (a 2x speedup when you open an application is not very meaningful when it took 0.5s anyway). But it does not mean that the reviews were inaccurate.

> But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.

More like leapfrogging. Which is fine, AMD and Intel are doing it all the time and the world is not ending for either company.

The narrative is that it is faster than anything else at equivalent power consumption. Sure, you can get overclocked i9s that are faster, but not in a laptop with a ~1 day battery life.

> Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.

We’ll see. As usual, the truth will be in the numbers.

It’s not completely absurd that something larger than a 3090 with vastly better memory bandwidth could be competitive. The M1 is going to be worse at things like ray tracing, most probably, but the 3090 itself is not more magic than M1s.

I don't know. The M1 Macs (we have two of them now) accomplish what Intel/AMD spent 2013+ trying and largely failing to do - maximizing battery life without compromising on performance. The suckers are fast. They're not the fastest kits of hardware out there, but they're certainly within shooting distance.

They do this without having a bulky chassis, multiple fans running constantly, or needing to be tethered to a power chord. They've been available for close to a year and a half now(?) and, unless if I've missed something, Intel/AMD still don't have a viable competitor.

Now, I completely agree that the software environment still hasn't completely caught up. But for my use case that's ok - give me a working shell terminal, web browser, and word processor, and I'm happy. I'm also lucky enough that I have a very well equipped remote system that I can push my actual work to. If I had to use my laptop for development, it may very well be a different story, but that's the trade off you make for being an early adopter.

I'll chime in here. I have the same experience (Julia, R, JS, and a little bit of C/Python). I have an M1 laptop that I use constantly, but I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to remote into my working environment.

If I had to use my M1 laptop has my main development machine, I would think very hard about trying to pick up a T14 or something similar.

Same. Java, Go, and web dev is my every day. Not an exactly fair comparison, but my first M1 MBA replaced a 2017 MBP, and it cut my java test suit times in half. 16GB wasn't quite enough RAM for all I do so now I'm a 64gb MBP M1.

I've thought about building a Ryzen desktop and just running linux, but I don't want to split between two machines and need to be mobile.

It’s an i9-12900k on a Z690 motherboard (tons of these, I got a gigabyte model). I got a terabyte of nice NVME and 64GB of memory; made it out the door for about $1600 with a case, taxes, and everything. I didn’t buy a graphics card because I don’t need to drive anything other than some text editors and browser windows, and it’s really not a buyers market right now. I’ll probably pick up something in a year or so.

If you’ve never built a computer, highly recommend! It’s really not difficult, though can take time and it can be frustrating. Really rewarding when you boot it for the first time, though.

For best compatibility (and lots of other reasons) I recommend Fedora - it usually has a much more up to date kernel than most other distros.

FL Studio also has a build for ARM, but it runs each non-ARM plugin in a wrapper which somehow uses an entire CPU core. After loading more than a couple of plugins I see something that is otherwise unheard of on my M1 Macbook - 1000% CPU usage and fans at full speed.

So I stick to running the app via Rosetta - higher-than-average CPU usage in general, but it means my plugins behave.

I guess the risk of data loss is acceptable .

My point is that companies like Native Instruments have vastly more resources and developers than one individual developer, and still very few of their supposedly flagship products are M1 compatible. It's been a year and a half, and Massive X still isn't updated. You'd think they would toss at least one developer at it. I guess that maybe points to organizational rot more than anything (I guess Massive X generally being an outdated flop is also evidence of this), but the point stands.

Except it didn’t happen overnight, Apple announced it 6 months in advance. There has been affordable hardware available for porting since june 2020, almost 2 years ago. If a developer hasn’t gotten around to it by now, I doubt it is a priority for them, let alone their top priority.

The fact remains though that a loooot of producers use Macbook Pros, and I'm assuming many will be upgrading to M1s within the next couple years. I'm genuinely curious when the pressures will actually force these large organizations to take the transition seriously.

That is a strange way to put it. Rosetta 2 (and orig.) is not virtualization, it is emulation, though there is a half-decent argument that Rosetta 2 (and orig.) is not emulation either -- it is recompilation.

In one of our projects the benchmarks look like this to run our test suite for a web app using volume mounts:

- 2020 Intel MBP (10th gen CPU, 32GB of memory, SSD): 37 seconds

- First generation M1 MBP: 31 seconds

- WSL 2: 3 seconds

The WSL 2 box is an old workstation I have from 6-7 years ago with an i5 3.2ghz CPU, 16gb of RAM and one of the first SSDs. All in all it was about $800.

The WSL 2 box is so fast for Docker because the volume performance is pretty much as good as native Linux. It's really fast.

I did look at Windows alternatives at the time but ultimately decided that I wanted to remain on Mac.

What I'd absolutely buy is a 16" MacBook Air, like an Apple version of the LG Gram.

Edit: For comparison, the 16" LG Gram with a discrete Nvidia GPU is exactly as light as the 13" M1 MacBook Air, and supposedly it has great battery life. And all those ports...sigh...

Personally, 15" is about the minimum screen I'll accept if I'm going to do actual work on it, and at that size I expect the choices to be sparse to none. Certainly not cheap.

Incredibly large and complex programs are deployed on user devices all the time and most of the time all is needed a "Next Next Next" or copy to a folder.

Yeah, sure you may need a specific runtime to be installed but that can be achieved through a deployment script too. Remember installing DirectX when installing a new game?

Sure, there are cases where specific app may need specific version of it and another app may need a completely incompatible version however this is more of an edge case.

Containers are definitely very powerful in some cases but I find it very distasteful to make EVERYTING into a container. It's not like apps are deployed on a server with custom version of Linux made by North Korea and the other one on a Nintendo. Most of the time, it's the exact same environment everywhere or it is a few command away from being exactly the same.

> When we speak about comparative metrics, it is also important to avoid saying commonly misunderstood things like “workload A is 15% slower than workload B”. Instead of saying “faster” it is helpful to speak in terms of latency or throughput, because both may be used to describe “speed” but they are in direct opposition to each other. Speaking in terms of relative percentages is often misleading. What does A (90) is 10% lower than B (100) mean if we don’t know their actual values? Many people would think that B is 1.1 * A, but in this case, 1.1 * 90 = 99. It is generally better to describe comparative measurements in terms of ratios rather than relative percentages.

> The phrase workload A is 20% slower than workload B can be more clearly stated as workload A was measured to have a throughput of 4:5 that of workload B. Even though many people will see that and immediately translate it to “80%” in their heads, the chances of improperly reasoning about the difference are lower.

> The test suite is embaressingly “parallel”. Each test can run on its own core so the more cores we have the faster the tests will run.

This is all anyone should care about, but I digress...

Yes you'd need the 16gb ram build but you wouldn't really need a 32gb one.

So, why not build two different Docker images that are the same except for arch? It seems that the problem isn’t the difference between dev and production environments, but the way Docker is being used. Sure, run an arch specific test before moving something to production, that makes sense. But for development, just use the Docker image that matches the dev arch. This seems like a much easier problem than the author is making it out to be.

Before Docker, I don’t think this would have been an issue.

That's because Apple's benchmarks are against seven year old Intel chips.

Wait'll you look at a benchmark made by a skeptic.

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> If Apple were ever to develop a desktop chip that chucked efficiency out the window and focused on raw performance by throwing as much power and cooling as possible at the chip? Things would probably get spicy indeed.

Sure thing. Call us when they do.

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> I'm sure Intel is sleeping well with their "lead" :)

Well, no. They have real competitors, like AMD and TSMC and so on.