Windows running in VM on M2 is faster than native Windows on x86.
Such a shame for Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.
Such a shame for Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.
> Windows running in VM on M2 is faster than native Windows on x86.
Which x86? 12th gen Intel? 11th gen Intel? Ryzen 6000? These are all wildly different processors. This comment is absurd. It's also "Windows ARM version running in a VM on M2", not x86 windows which is the only thing you'd care about running in VM on MacOS if you were actually going to do this for some reason.
But also wouldn't be possible without good work from Parallels.
Background at: https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2022/07/just-released-vm...
(Disclaimer: I work at VMware - but not on Fusion)
VMWare Fusion is an afterthought of a multi-billion dollar company.
Not true these days. "In December 2018, Parallels became part of the Corel Corporation and joins an impressive collection of industry-leading brands, including CorelDRAW®, WinZip® and MindManager®. Parallels has offices in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia."
If the article is true (and that's a big if, given Max Tech's history of tech reporting), instead of blaming the above companies I'd just congratulate Apple and thank them for putting the bar higher. AMD recent processors are still great on the desktop, and an absolute blast on the server, with extremely attractive value for money ratio.
Yes they are truly great but point to consider is they are just competing against Intel. Don't get wrong I love what AMD has done recently with Ryzen but we need ARM based servers which has perf per watt competing with M1/M2
Intel has no real excuse since they use their own fabs and spun their wheels on 14nm for half a decade.
We have them? Graviton instances are priced pretty competitively compared to similar x86 EC2 instances. A lot of people don't use Graviton though (myself included) for a number of reasons. A lot of software hasn't been ported over to aarch64 yet, and even when it is it can lack the optimization that x86 enjoys (especially with programs leveraging AVX et. al). Furthermore, the CPUs that Amazon use seem to be bottlenecked by low IO bandwidth, which makes for some janky benchmarks when comparing simple database operations.
I think we'll eventually see a return to RISC architectures, but ARM's value proposition hasn't made a lot of sense on the server. It's still encumbered with proprietary licenses that make it extremely hard for CPU manufacturers to compete in the server market. It still hasn't figured out all of it's hardware-acceleration quirks, and you don't get any Rosetta 2 fairy dust on Linux (not that you'd want to use it in prod anyways). All in all, x86 is still the set-and-forget king, and probably more stable than ARM alternatives. I'm hopeful that RISC-V will finally put x86 in it's grave, but that's going to be a couple years out...
In my own workloads. Which are not burst, but first sustained CPU, and then sustained I/O, at about 5MB/s.
So, it is cheaper for Amazon, as they use half the power, but not cheaper for end users.
I was shopping for a laptop a month ago and considering the M2 MacBook. The CPU performance is definitely impressive, but I ended up getting a Razer Blade 14 because it absolutely decimates the MacBook in GPU performance and gaming related stuff, unless you go top of the line MacBook Pro which would have been about $1200 more and couldn't run most games. If you don't need a great GPU I would definitely go with a MacBook, but if you need one you're just not going to beat an RTX 3080 and an AMD Ryzen.
I'm not sure I'd call it niche. No I'm not playing counterstrike in a coffee shop, but it can be fun to bring it over to a friends house. I haven't bought a desktop since 2014, I like having the freedom to work from anywhere and not have to move files between computers all the time. When I have it at home I have it hooked into 3 monitors and a full size keyboard, and it runs pretty quiet, so it's not really any different from having a desktop in that regard.
YMMV though. Most of what I do with a computer even besides games needs a very powerful GPU. If you're working with docker and webdev I'd just get a macbook. My only point is that apple doesn't have a pure monopoly on performance, as impressive as their new silicon is there's some things it's still not so good at.
For mobile computing + gaming I replaced my discreet gpu Macbook Pro with an M2 Air + SteamDeck and I'm enjoying everything a lot more.
But I absolutely work on the go, and need the battery life I get from the Mac so I’m not constantly looking for a place to charge.
You can also put a much faster CPU and GPU in a workstation than a laptop, if you have enough headroom for 105W TDP CPU and 350W TDP GPU.
I believe - it will OBLITERATE M2.
Also doesn't really obliterate the M2:
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022
Seems like multi-core scores are all over the map (probably depending on the cooling of the laptop), but not really impressive when comparing to a passively cooled CPU. Single-core scores are meh compared to the M2.
Here is my result:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16820778
Given that I didn't stop anything and was playing Dota 2 while running it ...
Still, I believe at some point once newer iterations of X86-64 drop support for legacy instructions (they still have to support code running on 8080/8086 through 486) - we will have smaller, more efficient X86-64 chips.
Actually, it is darn impressive that the latest Intel/AMD chips keep up with the brand new M1/M2 chips that have zero legacy instructions and the Intel/AMD chips carry 50 years of legacy :)
Here are the results on Performance Power Plan - https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16821908
Summarized results - https://i.imgur.com/X5vKtFn.png
Overall, with the new results - AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is 18% slower in Single Core, 4% faster in Multi Core.
Not that bad ...
4% faster for 2.5x more power isn't a win. The fact that 95% of users care more about that 18% single-threaded performance makes this even worse.
Don't forget we are comparing last-gen AMD vs current gen M2.
M2 on Mac makes 1884/8717, but on Paralles -> 1681/7260.
So, the penalty is 11% on single, 17% on multi because of running on Windows via Paralles.
APPLE M1 average Single Core is 1706, average multi is 7421 on MAC.
If we apply the above penalty becomes -> 1706/7421 -> 1522/6180.
AMD 5900HX average Single Core is 1413, average multi is 7656.
So, AMD - 1413/7656 | Apple M1 - 1522/6180 -> Amd is 8% slower in single, 19% faster in multi.
The TDP according to AMD's website is "45+W" which they clarify to be a cTDP up to 54w TDP.
4% is probably close to noise level, so essentially you are a couple of percentage points faster on multicore with TWICE the total power envelope. Think about that.
And almost 1/5th slower in single core.
Also, you went from "It will OBLITERATE M2" to moving the goal post "not that bad" pretty quickly. I love it.
But still, pointless to me - I don't care about power efficiency, battery life or any synthetic benchmarks.
I have two concerns with a laptop:
1. Can it run the latest Visual Studio at blazing fast speed?
2. Can it run Dota 2 on Full HD @ >144 fps?
So far ... M2 doesn't fulfill fully neither point 1 nor point 2 :)
Don't get too excited about it. The old compatibility is going to be tiny in the die space compared to even basic Intel extensions. And it's not just the old code - new code may well contain a "mov al..." so you can't just drop it. All of those instructions will stay with us for decades.
(Apparently I’m wrong, leaving my original gaffe in place.)
Once you try M1/M2 Macs it's very hard to go back to pretty much any hardware.
I agree that M1/M2 Macs are good, but I implore everyone to not get sucked into and stuck into the Apple ecosystem. Nothing good can come out of tech dominance.
So much this. Every time I hear something good about the M1/M2 it's interesting but it's like "aah, such a shame I can never use it without loosing my sanity due to all of the strings it has attached".
Context: There are some Linux users who want to use the hardware (so they can enjoy the M1/2 whatever) so there are efforts to get it running as a Linux machine (Asahi Linux), which would certainly keep me far more sane - but I still abhor giving money to Apple for the hardware (even 2nd hand which supports resale value and thus retail value)... I also don't trust that they wont simply pull the rug on such efforts in future by doing some kind of over the wire firmware update to brick those machines. Why do business with people who don't like you, it's just going to be a constant fight.
Every time an article comes up reminding me of how great the M1/M2 laptops are, I think about maybe getting a used one in a few years to run Debian on, but the soldered on SSD worries me (especially since early Apple software issues burned through erase cycles).
Those processors will be able to run Windows and linux. More efficiency for non apple ecosystem. I consider that win for everyone
Actually, I'm not sure why Apple would be the "supporting tech dominance" choice here as opposed to Intel.
The fact that M1/M2 can run something is almost irrelevant. It can because Apple allows you to run it and can stop that at any moment. It wouldn't be the first time they would decide something like that out of the blue.
The lead Asahi Linux developer has addressed this point.
>Okay, it's been over a year, and it's time to end the nonsense speculation.
I have heard from several Apple employees that:
Apple explicitly engineered 3rd party OS support in, and it is a hard policy requirement that it continue to work.
Yes, I shouldn't expect Raspberry to run non-ARM software... but why exactly shouldn't I? Where are the trillion-upon-trillion-dollar players like Google, Samsung and others with their Rosetta-like translation layers? And Qualcomm with competitive CPUs?
For what its worth, there are some rosetta like options on RPi - you can run x86 containers in QEMU, for example. Its just again you've bought a 35 dollar computer - its not going to be fast enough to be performant for most tasks when translating (in real time!) software written for a completely different CPU architecture.
> https://gist.github.com/Sitin/bfa5e770b80ab4b8740c88e648666c...
Linux is being developed mostly by trillion-dollar corporations. Intel. Google. Samsung. etc.
ARM chips are designed and produced by Samsung, Qualcomm etc.
You'd think they would:
- come up with a competitive chip, and
- Rosetta-like software
that even "$35 dollar hobbyist computer" would be able to do this with, quote "powerful 64-bit CPU".
Alas.
And no, I'm not buying the whole "you shouldn't expect". Because, as it turns out, I can't expect this from any computer, be it hobbyist, educational, family, gamer, professional, or whatever adjectives you can put in front of it. Except Apple.
If you want Broadcom to release a CPU that's on par with the M1, half of your Pi's circuit board will be just the CPU die's BGA pins.
Intel's (and others') price gouging and market segmentation does not in any way imply that it's possible to manufacture an i7/i9/R7/R9/M1 at $20 a piece.
--- start quote ---
Because, as it turns out, I can't expect this from any computer, be it hobbyist, educational, family, gamer, professional, or whatever adjectives you can put in front of it. Except Apple.
--- end quote ---
The other side of the puzzle is software. I'm pretty sure there is a lot of headroom in the rpi hardware, if only someone re-write and re-optimize the os and software for it.
That's part of the magic of Mac - they got to hire as many people to optimize the os as they did to build the chip / computer itself.
Surprisingly performant and very impressive.
It's great at emulating arcades! that's totally non-arm software.
The dance between hardware, software, and devices, and its consistency, is a measurable good. To me, this is the "magic sauce" of Apple that makes them successful.
But, to agree with your point, my general rule is: Apple hardware, with third party services (besides iCloud). And, a PC or console for gaming. :)
The major use-case I can think of for building a rosetta-like x86 translation layer for the Pi is to run Windows software. All the relevant Linux software can, or has been, ported to ARM. Do you think the average user of Windows software is going to be happy with the performance of an x86 emulator running on a $35 ARM computer with barely enough memory to run a few Chrome tabs?