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Comment by LorenDB | Hacker News Reader

How many people does this actually affect? Gamers are better off with AMD X3D chips, and most productivity workloads need good multicore performance. Obviously MR is great silicon and I don't want to downplay that, but I'm not sure that best singlecore performance is an overly useful metric for the people who need performance.

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Single core performance is what I need as a developer for quick compilation or updates of Javascript in the browser, when working on a Clojure/ClojureScript app. This affects me a lot.

It affects the millions of people that buy the machine by way of longevity.

Usually when I see advances, it's less about future proofing and more about obsoletion of old hardware. A more exaggerated case of this was in the 90s, people would upgrade to a 200 MHz p1 thinking they were future proofing but in a couple years you had 500Mhz P2s.

Based on my limited knowledge. Most applications aren’t great at using all cores, so single-core performance is really important most of the time.

Yep. And even if they can use multiple threads, faster single threaded performance means each of those multiple threads gets done faster.

There’s a reason consumer CPUs aren’t slower with 1024 cores instead.

People who browse the web and want that fastest javascript performance they can get.

Or users of Slack, Spotify, Teams.. you name it. But I don't want to make an excuse that Electron-like frameworks should be encouraged to be used even more if we have super single core computers available.

Even if we ignore them, most tasks people do on a computer end up being heavily influenced by single threaded performance.

Amdahl's law is still in control. For a great mini users single threaded performance is extremely important.

But for a javascript (browser or electron) workload the new 16 Gb as the starting ram still isn't enough :)

> Gamers are better off with AMD X3D chips

Yeah but then you'd have to use Windows. I'd rather just play whatever games can be emulated and take the performance penalty.

It helps that most AAAs put me to sleep...

The problem with the M chips is that you have to use macOS (or tinker with Asahi two generations behind). They are great hardware, but just not an option at all for me for that reason.

There's nothing stopping you from using Linux.

> Yeah but then you'd have to use Windows.

Why? Linux gaming has been great since Wine.

Even better now with Valve investment.

Surely leagues better than gaming with macOS.

Sir, you are not a real gamer(tm) either. Use a puny alternative OS and lose 3 fps, Valve support or not? Unacceptable!

As for Linux, I abandoned it as the main GUI OS for Macs about 10 years ago. I have linux and windows boxes but the only ones with displays/keyboards are the macs and it will stay that way.

I have all 3 OSs each on their own hardware:)

4 if you count steamdeck.

I do the real gaming, not some subpar emulated crap or anemic macOS steam library.

It is definitely not a given you lose FPS on Linux. It is not uncommon for games to give better FPS on Linux. It will all end up depending on the exact games you want to play.

That explains your comment then, lots of things changed from 10 years ago and gaming on Linux is pretty good now. The last games you can't play are the ones with strong anti-cheats basically. You can't compare that to the Mac situation where you can't play anything.

Good thing that at least the poster I replied to didn’t take it seriously :)

Mac OS is amazing, using a Mac for games is not a good idea. Most AAA, AA, and indie games don't run on Mac.

How is it amazing? In my experience it is full of bugs and bad design choices if you ever dare to steer from the path Apple expects masses to take. If you try to use workspaces/desktops to the full extent, you know.

Mac OS was awful. OS X was amazing. macOS feels like increasingly typical design-by-committee rudderless crapware by a company who wishes it didn't have to exist alongside iOS.

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