Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

High performance doing what? Everyone in high-performance computing is using Linux, my dude. Unless you're a studio who needs specific Mac workflows, or maybe you're doing LLM work?

Great perf-to-watt, but absolutely locked down so you can't do anything meaningful in the embedded space. I'm not over here mounting a max specced Mac Mini just to get that perf-to-watt.

We're using low TDP x86-64 when we need that.

View on HN

building Ardour (.org) from source:

16 core Ryzen Threadripper 2950X: 9min

M3 macbook pro: 4min

Pretty meaningful when your life revolves around building Ardour.

Sure, but isn't that just comparing an obsolete CPU against a state-of-the-art CPU? I can't see attributing that to the ISA.

A scratch, optimized build of Ardour on a Ryzen 9 9950X takes 1m51s.

the machine is less than 4 years old!

anyway, the point was about the obsolesence or other of the ISA. It was about the claim that various versions of apple silicon are no good for performance, only for perf-per-watt or some related variance.

2018 vs 2023 CPUs targetting entirely different segments.

Oh, I suspect they target exactly the same segments. The expectations of those segments have moved, however.

I agree with your second point, but misstating the age of a 6-year-old CPU as 4 years old will tend to throw off the equations, considering how fast this field moves. I would also note that the Zen/Zen+ CPUs were truly awful. Ryzen and EPYC did not have a good implementation until Zen 2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com