M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari's experimental WebGPU

Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by purephase on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @09:57PM (#26338080)

Getting buyers remorse since I just picked up the i9 macbook pro. I passed on the M1 since I need the RAM. I just wish you could use 32gb with the initial release.

It sounds like it's coming in the new few months now. I just couldn't hold out. Oh well.

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Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by tluyben2 on Thursday March 04, 2021 @12:24AM (#26338956)

I did the same thing but my wife got the m1 8gb: after trying it out and seeing similar performance for a fraction of the price, I rapidly sold my i9. Just in time as here prices for Intel macs are dropping fast.

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Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by alwayssmh on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:14PM (#26338178)

because of the fundamental difference in architecture, one should not compare ram size of an intel based mac against the ram of a M1 based mac.

it's like comparing fuel tank sizes between two cars when one of them has a much more fuel efficient engine.

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Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by TheBigSalad on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:38PM (#26338322)

Does the M1 make programs use less RAM somehow?

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Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by imwillofficial on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:00PM (#26338446)

I don’t know how, but similar workloads between my intel MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Air show about half the ram usage on the M1

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Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by Eric_WVGG on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:28PM (#26338615)

The M1 seems to be designed around the retain/release cycles that are at the core of everything Apple has been building on going all the way back to NeXTSTEP

https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1326238434235568128?s...

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Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by blep-arsh on Thursday March 04, 2021 @12:17AM (#26338918)

This tweet has nothing to do with RAM usage. Maybe about the performance of (uncontended) atomic operations if I'm reading this corectly.

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Re:M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari... by alwayssmh on Thursday March 04, 2021 @12:02AM (#26338837)

possibly yes due to how it now sits closer to the cpu and other components. Utilization is also different.

See: https://www.howtogeek.com/701804/how-unified-memory-speeds-u...

the current concern is how all these impact SSD(harddisk) life and health due to how swap memory is managed. It may be the reason why Apple priced such a breakthrough technology so competitively.

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