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Comment by pants2 | Hacker News Reader

Great investigation and data. While the M3 Pro looked pretty disappointing at first because of the loss in P core count, it looks like the huge strides have been made with the E core performance, so it's not the downgrade that one might think.

I own a 16" M1 Pro for work and a 16" M3 Pro for play, and wow I can really tell a difference in both performance and battery life. It's a nice upgrade.

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I'm really wondering if I should push for an M3 upgrade from the M1 Max I have now; it is a 2021 model ...

I'll probably hold out for the M4.

I just ordered M3 Max Macbook Pro, currently own M1 Macbook Air. The one thing that I found the Air lacking is running VM with Windows 11, which I need for work. All those translation and virtualization layers add up and CPU temp rises to 95 Celsius sometimes, visibly slowing down. I decided I need a laptop with active cooling.

If you have M1 Max, and a fan, then there's probably no point in upgrading.

Are you expecting significantly improved efficiencies when running Windows VMs with the M3 Max Macbook Pro?

That’s pretty much the only reason I bought it. Other than the cool, “space black” color :-) Benchmarks look promising

Are these Arm windows 11 or x86-64?

ARM, occasionally running x86 windows software

I traded an M1 Pro for an M3 Max and my AMD64 Linux containers seem to be MUCH faster, so this would probably carry over to Windows VMs.

Apple M1 does not support hardware assisted nested virtualization. If someone was trying to run WSL from Windows, that would be horribly inefficient on M1 vs M3.

Is there actually a way to use nested virtualization on the M2 or M3 yet? As far as I can tell both Parallels and VMWare are still saying they don't have that feature.

No, it needs hardware support for that. It needs another level of virtualized MMU, which Apple didn’t build in. That might come with the M4 generation only.

Here's someone claiming that the required hardware support is already there since M2: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/466761/is-nested-v...

I'm no expert so I cannot tell how reliable that info is.

They also say

> will cause the CPU to pause the guest hypervisor, and let the host hypervisor running at EL2 decide whether and how to proceed. That is a big part in enabling nested virtualisation. There are other details, for example related to memory and interrupt management.

And they don’t elaborate on whether these "further details" were implemented or not; I would guess they’re not implemented, or else Apple would have mentioned it at a WWDC workshop. I might be wrong here though.

I'd be curious to see single/multi benchmarks of Rosetta 2-emulated code running across the various Apple Silicon CPU.

My impression from the M1 was that only P cores could go into the stricter memory mode used for Rosetta 2 emulation.

There is always Windows on some vdi platform like Win365 or Amazon or Citrix etc so you're not tying up your devices resources. the downside is it's absolutely not available offline and can have a monthly expense.

The P core drop is apparently kind of a downgrade for audio production. Some DAWs only use the performance cores and Logic is one of them. This means you can utilize more tracks with an M1 Pro.

Is that possible? You can set priority to background and your process will be restricted to E cores, but last I checked other processes will favor P cores but will be spilled to E if everything is loaded. I also don’t remember an API to query the core layout (to only spawn as many workers as there are P cores).

But maybe that was added since?

IIRC there are sysctls that list the number of cores of each type, and their cache sizes. So an application can check how many P cores there are, and choose to only spawn that many threads.

Yeah but it just means that software needs to tweak some parameters on M3 to slow spilling to E cores. In fact, a good system would always spill to E cores ands just let completion rates drive acceptance of work stealing.

This is not actually the case: this can be changed within Logic Pro's settings.

Are you saying the performance regression isn't real because there's a workaround for the bug?

You can set the number of cores utilized by default in the settings, yes. But Logic will only fully utilize the performance cores. I made a mistake and over-stated by saying it would only use performance cores. The conclusion isn't different though. M1 Pro will handle more tracks currently.

See here: https://youtu.be/FSqX4bt9to4?si=6KBj5vNra3rEITWI&t=439

That's crazy talk! You must be holding it wrong :)

Battery life must be hard to compare because presumably the battery life on the M1 Pro must have degraded by about 10% by now, which is quite a significant difference in capacity compared to a brand new 16" MacBook.

Yeah, my M1 Pro's battery has 525 cycles on it and has lost 16% of its capacity.

(Edit: Actually, mine is M1 Max, FWIW.)

That is remarkably low, isn't it? I mean, saying this as an (ex) ThinkPad user :P. Did you take any special care with it?

How old was the Thinkpad? I used to expect a laptop battery to be borderline useless after 4 years or so, but my 2016 MBP is coming up on 8, and the battery is doing surprisingly okay. It reports 70% capacity, and that feels about right.

I can't say exactly, but it degraded remarkably quickly. Maybe someone else can chime in with a different experience, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as good as what I read from MacBook users, especially M-series.

I got the ThinkPad brand new, and it was a relatively recent model.

My Thinkpad 470s battery is close to its death (1h30 autonomy editing text, doing CAD or websurfing), after 5 years of heavy use.

"Special care" on OS X is to use Al Dente.app, which limits the charge at 80% so as to not damage the battery.

https://apphousekitchen.com/

Isn’t that option built into MacOS now? Since Ventura I think.

Yes: the MacBook eventually learns to stop charging and keep at 80%. (it took a month for mine)

You can override it to fully charge.

It has a supposedly intelligent thing which works about the same as iOS, meaning not well and not reliably.

iOS has gained a hard limit toggle, but macOS has yet to. Aldente does that job.

The built-in option is a step in the right direction, but doesn't provide any way for a user to specify that the battery doesn't need to be charged to 100% if the OS thinks it needs to be. In my experience, it usually ends up charging the battery 100% every night, then letting it discharge to 80% during the day.

I’ve had it never charge, and sit reliably at 80% for weeks. Then when I unplugged it the schedule was ruined and it reverted to charging at night. Overcomplicated for no reason lol

I can't recommend Al Dente enough. Apparently I'm only at 134 cycles with 92% capacity*. M1 max is 26 months old. I have used a work computer for large portions of time obviously.

* TBH the capacity seems a bit low for my cycle count. Possible I've let it sit around 30% for too long at points. Such is the scourge of living in San Diego with the highest kWH rates in the country and only trying to charge at night or on weekends. I cry inside when I see people quoting 12c/kWh. Try 50c-1.20 depending on time of day/year.

I’m pretty sure they’re rated for 1000 cycles. Idk if that’s good or bad. Or what’s expected to happen when it’s beyond that.

1000 cycles is when it’s expected to drop to ~80% of original capacity. Still plenty of use left after that.

You can check the rated cycle counts for most Macbooks on the following Apple Support page:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102888

Most recent Macbooks should last for 1000 full cycles. Though I'm pretty sure you can brick your battery quickly by keeping it at 100% charge all the time or if you use it in a very hot environment.

I have the original M1 air that I got the day it released in 2020. In a typical week, I will let my battery discharge to less than 10% twice and recharge it to 100%. I've logged 458 cycles and lost 11% of my capacity. Not too bad.

Where are you getting the cycle count?

I have an M1 Air, I got it new and use it heavily. I see "battery health" is "normal" and "max capacity" is 90%, but I don't see a count of charge cycles.

You can check the cycle count using the System Information app in the power section. Option-click on the Apple logo is a convenient shortcut to open System Information.

There is also the third-party Coconut Battery app that gives you other nice statistics and keeps track of battery health if you open it occasionally.

https://coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

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