Re:16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world...
by unsigner on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @04:33PM
(#25130172)
People are celebrating a kickass electric bicycle doubling the range of all the existing ones, and you demand to be shown it scaled up to the same power+price budget as an open pit mining truck, hauling dirt in three shifts. It might or might not happen, but the electric bicycle is still impressive.
Re:16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world...
by spronkey on Thursday November 19, 2020 @06:00AM
(#25148256)
Well, it's more like people celebrating an electric scooter that has twice the range of the electric bike.
Not saying it isn't a novel form of transport or equally useful in most cases, but... we're comparing a very stripped-down SoC to systems that have vastly more complexity for several different reasons - not least the ability to support more modular CPU/memory/GPU configurations.
Rework the existing x86 cores that we have into similar configurations and we'll likely see pretty substantial efficiency gains there too.
If you want a more realistic sense of how the M1 performs relative to x86 peers in raw, equivalent workloads, there are some cinebench numbers appearing out there:
https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/146878-apple-m1-cinebench-r2...
I am way more interested in non-accelerated, deeply out-of-order instruction processing capabilities if we are talking about a "new era of computing". Being able to compile to ARM faster than x86_64 and having super fast HW codecs for processing special unicorn byte streams are not very compelling arguments in this context.
Show me an ARM chip scaled up to the same power+price budget as an Epyc 7742, throw them both at a 24 hour SAP benchmark, and then I will start paying attention if the numbers get close.