Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

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As someone with both an M1 and various intel and AMD machines.

The M1 tends to outclass most laptops (primary in single thread based workloads) but they are well down the ladder of performance in comparison to what is possible to put in a desktop form factor.

The mac studio seems to take a nice bite out of those options as well, but its not a laptop either, and depending on workload its quite likely still loses pretty bad if the desktop is tuned to the workload (aka toss a couple 3090's in, or a threadripper/etc for massively parallel stuff, or faster disks, etc).

People who are stuck in the laptop mindset, seem to forget that desktops have a lot of add in card/etc flexibility for workload tuning. Need a 100Gbit network card, just plug it in, need 2T ram pick a motherboard with support/etc.

Think about what this (somewhat randomly picked) motherboard can do, that you can't get from an apple device.

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards...

I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.

I've built a 5900x with 64GB high speed ram, 2x NVME 4.0 because my 2018 i9 Macbook pro was hot garbage and would crawl when working on a project with a bunch of docker microservices.

I regret this decision now because the new M1 MBP would do everything I need and I wouldn't have to worry about SSH workflows, keeping my PC/internet up while I'm away/traveling, having to work on two separate devices and migrate over all the time, two keyboard layouts (Mac/PC).

I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).

> I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.

What do you think happened when the people with powerful workstations got sent home during covid?

Obviously for some employers the answer was SSH, or taking a workstation home - but for other places (e.g. CAD users), the answer was 'mobile workstation' laptops.

The answer for many games studios was Citrix/Parsec and ilk, maybe some of the smaller ones allowed people to take PC's home...

Nobody was getting workstation grade laptops.

(speaking from experience).

> maybe some of the smaller ones allowed people to take PC's home...

I worked for a large studio at the time and anyone who could carry a workstation home could take it.

>I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).

Eh, YMMV. I have an M1 and an i7-1185g7 based Linux laptop. Honestly, I never use the M1. Side by side, there is no noticeable speed difference for my day to day work. The M1 is more efficient, that's for sure - but my Intel laptop already has "all day" battery life. If I need to spend more than 8 hours working without access to power, the M1 wins - but I never see that situation happening (to me).

The biggest thing that turns me away from the M1 is the lack of Linux support, which I understand is also a personal preference thing. Also the M1 MBP is slightly bulkier despite the same screen size.

I never need any of that though, or any additional performance. I need to have about twenty browser tabs and a few electron apps open. If it can handle that smoothly without painful latency we're good.

I don't forget what desktops can do I just don't care and would rather be able to work from the couch when I feel like it.

That and desktop cooling tends to be lightyears ahead of laptop cooling; you can thrash a desktop for a long time before hitting a thermal limit, unlike most laptops.

A good desktop should never hit its thermal limit no matter how long you thrash it. 24-hour 100% CPU/GPU torture tests are standard whenever I build a PC.

Depends what you are doing with it. In single-threaded tasks, I noticed my M1 Pro can outperform my gaming PC (5950x).

That is also however a VERY old processor at this point even if it was probably the best thing Intel has ever made (comparatively for the time)

5950X is probably referring to latest AMD flagship desktop CPU [1]

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x

ahhhh nvm then. Should that not absolutely destroy an m1 though?

Not really, Apple is one generation ahead of AMD in manufacturing process at TSMC.

According to Passmark even the 10 core M1 Max gets absolutely destroyed by the 5950X just like I thought. Great chips for mobile use due to power savings but the top desktop chips still are all of course much faster at the expensive of extra watts.

OP was talking about single core performance.

It depends on the benchmark the 5950X is faster single threaded in a number of benchmarks but the converse is also true.

But, it does tend to win overwhelmingly in multi threaded.

Slightly, although less so if you have code you can compile yourself and use -march=native. The M1 is heavily default optimized for the M1, random x86 binaries are generally optimized for something like a Pentium 4. Just tweaking this one thing, can easily double perf.

Also, as someone who owns both, make sure the 5950 is actually turbo'ing correctly. Mine was a real pain to get it up to speed, despite having a seriously overkill water cooler.

I got an M1 on loan while my Intel Mac was in the shop and I was terribly unimpressed. Only 8 GB of ram was part of the problem, but I just didn't notice any performance improvement between it and my Intel Mac.

I went from a 16" MacBook Pro with an i9 and 32 GB of RAM to the MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and my build times at work were almost exactly the same. But the single-core speed makes everything _feel_ so much faster than the stupid slow i9 cores. (At less than half the price, and without a fan!)

In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)

It's worth noting that if your workload is still on x86, it's running through Rosetta emulation and it's significantly slower. I've heard of a few people having similar "what's all the fuss about" to "wow this is great" transitions after their key applications get fully ported to ARM.

I had the 16" Intel i9 MBP with 64Gb and recently got the new M1 Max with 64GB (had to wait almost two months after ordering) and it's not even close. I used to have to be quick about closing things in the back ground etc. Force closing things etc. Fans were always loud. New M1 I have NEVER heard the fans. It just works. And works well. No beach balls waiting. Just works.

My company gave me a i9 MBP for work, but I use my own personal M1 Macbook Air instead as it's so much better; no fan noise or smell of cooking thermal paste! Also and sites nicely under the 45" 4K QLED screen that I use as a main monitor.

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