I think some of the exaggeration has come from people who only use Apple products basically seeing what the cutting edge actually is, e.g. We've historically been the same performance or worse, now our tribe is the fastest - spurred on by much faster benchmarks.

Anyway I look forward to websites slowing down as M1 becomes more popular amongst Devs who shouldn't need anything that fast in the first place (ideally)

>Anyway I look forward to websites slowing down as M1 becomes more popular amongst Devs who shouldn't need anything that fast in the first place (ideally)

Yup. The "new" Reddit redesign is totally unusable on all my computers except the M1 Air. Not looking forward to more web developers getting their hands on these things.

Reddit seem to be run by a Manchurian candidate of sorts - half the time on mobile I'm genuinely thinking to myself "Do you want the traffic or not?"

They really want you to use the App so they can foist more ads upon you.

I am more than happy to read ads if the app wasn't so awful.

If HN was to (say) show me ads for various programming-y things I wouldn't be all that bothered as long as the core UX wasn't ruined.

Reddit's tech feels like a Jockey who's lost control of his horse

That’s why I use Apollo for Reddit browsing on iOS. It’s all native, as fast as you’d expect, and follows all of Apple’s UX conventions.

The redesign has absolutely no resource management. They don't load and unload media when its no longer in the viewport either from scrolling or opening a thread, and the redesign infinitely scrolls.

Plus thread view is a modal over the feed unless you navigate directly to its URL, so often times you'll have media loading and running in the thread view while other media may still be playing back in the feed.

I don't think that's the only source of the insane memory leak in Safari in particular (you will get into the GBs if you leave a media-heavy feed open past 10 minutes or so), but its gotta be a big contributor.

That doesn't sound so good, but I can do one better. The 4 FP EUs/core on the M1 (x64 has 2) that likely lead to this result might also lead other languages to use more floats and doubles.

I thought M1s SIMD throughput was lower?

It is, but the Firestorm cores can do 2x more scalar FP executions per clock than Zen 3. Still, for a full browser benchmark like Speedometer 2, I would've liked to see better results from 5800H/U given their large cache bumps from last gen.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

I wrote my thoughts on this a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873887

Basically, you have to remember how slow and power-hungry Mac laptops before the M1-based laptops were. They were not using the latest available technology, and the M1 switched to using the latest available technology. So for Mac laptop users, it's a giant leap. For everyone else, not as amazing a leap, but still a very good chip.

The M1 still has a clear lead in single-core performance and that at a much lower clock speed than the competition. That is the big leap in performance. There are still far to many things which depend on single core performance. This is why a Threadripper with 64 cores really shines only for very compute-intensive parallel work loads. It will be very interesting, how the performance of Apple Silicon will be, once they go to 8 or 16 high performance cores.

A bit part of this is Apple's best intel laptop (the 16") is still on a 9th gen intel. So comparing a 2020 m1 on 5nm vs a 14nm 2018 chip isn't fair. It's real if you're an apple user, and upgrade from a 16" MBP to their m1, but it's not fair.

Plus, intel isn't even the x86 leader now. 7nm zen2 is a much better comparison.

Another part of this is that I think the intel line will probably be on "maintenance mode" at Apple for now; the best and brightest engineers are probably all working on Apple Silicon products...

In this case, I think Apple does as well. It seems extremely focused on Mac/iOS user workloads and by all means does them extremely well. That it matches or beats x86 general purpose CPUs in synthetic benchmarks is an added bonus.

I think interestingly enough, the M1 does this w/ much of the die devoted to neural engine widgets

Also the fact that it works with existing software out of the box.

For as much as Macbooks are touted to be developer laptops, they should have homebrew, python, and all the other dev tools available natively from launch day.