I knew back in 2011 I was buying something that was going to be pretty future proof, but 10 years... I would have laughed at you.
The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind.
My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only gave Windows four (of my 16) cores. Literally 3/4 of the processor was unused for months, and I didn’t notice any slow performance the entire time.
Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.
Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.
The unfortunate part is, when it freezes, it does the beachball for a full minute before I successfully execute a “switch to activity monitor / s click topmost process / force quit / confirm” sequence. Each step takes around 45 seconds to complete. I assume Apple QA never tested the extreme edges of workloads.
One poor guy on Twitter is already up to 18% of his SSD lifetime, in the first three months of having an M1. We had a heart to heart about how silly it was that the drive will die within a year, that Apple better replace it under warranty, and so on. But it’s a coin toss whether he’ll just have to eat the cost and buy a new one: https://twitter.com/_wli/status/1364934834229977090?s=21
> I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.
When I'm in development mode with all cylinders firing, I have a single Eclipse window in CDT perspective, a couple of terminal tabs, Zeal (or Dash) for documentation and a couple of firefox tabs for documentation not available in Zeal.
Music is either supplied by a single YouTube tab or Spotify, and that's it.
The most unfortunate component is CPU in my case. I try to ooze every single bit of performance from it while running the application. Memory controller comes the second due to transfer operations but, I neither max out the RAM or cause system to do heavy swapping.
I'm always kind of conscious about the hardware resources of the system and minimize my resource usage habitually, without killing productivity.
The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
Unfortunately, and somewhat sadly, and melanchololy, I must report that I've been at OS version 11.2.3 (the latest) and run almost zero Rosetta apps: KeepassX, Beyond Compare, and Optimal Layout; of those, Optimal Layout has read 100GB, which is almost nothing.
In comparison, my kernel_task process is at 43TB bytes written, and WindowServer is at 8TB read.
So, as with cancer, there are multiple contributing factors, and hopefully Apple will ship an update to fix it... someday.
> around 35 macvim windows
You do you, but I'd wager you could probably trim some of that low hanging fat
How many eyes do you have?
(If you haven’t looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check your smartmon to see whether you’re affected.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I
The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
Safari is best, but Firefox is also pretty decent nowadays.
And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mode. Maybe it's time to give it yet another shot. :)
Maybe an hour into testing Safari and I look at Activity Monitor and see that https://calendar.google.com is consuming 1 GB of RAM and https://docs.google.com 865 MB. :o
Don't know if the numbers are comparable but in Chrome's Task Manager the numbers are 224 MB and 121 MB respectively.
Edit: This might be an old (unfixed) issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6640430 ... This sucks because I have a specific doc and the calendar that I always keep open in pinned tabs. There are some other sites with seemingly quite high RAM usage as well. Well at least nothing is lagging so I guess I'll just chug on and see what happens.
Edit2: This behavior is just insane. I closed those two tabs and suddenly Gmail shoots up from out of the blue to 1.22 GB?! Then I reopen the two previous tabs (doc/calendar) again and Gmail stays the same while Calendar goes on a diet and sits at 187 MB (doc at 983). This is super weird. I'll just keep them open and see how it behaves overall, might just be wonky numbers?
Nice that they've got built-in tracking protection now, I guess, but I left Twitter running in a tab overnight and when I woke up Safari was reporting over a gb of memory use for that tab alone. Something in how they cache or handle JS for some of these long-running services, or maybe having to do with service workers ?, Safari just seems to consume a lot of memory. It's not a huge issue I guess, with the way the M1 never seems to have any memory pressure issues, but it's part of why I remember switching off Safari in the first place.
If anyone knows why Safari seems to consume more memory with these long-running processes, I'd be real curious to know why...
And yeah I mean even though Activity Monitor is reporting high RAM usage I don't seem to have any memory pressure issues so it might not be that big of a deal (MBP 2015 w/ 8 GB RAM).
I'm actually considering getting an M1 myself next week. Have been waiting for the initial kinks to get sorted out and most apps ported to it and I think it's time now. :) SSD wear seems to have been resolved with the latest Big Sur versions and fewer Rosetta apps and now even ST4 beta has an M1 build.
My justifications are that I'll get an excuse to upgrade to 16 GB RAM and I'll get touch ID so I can have a more secure password and not have to type it all the time. And with the stellar performance and battery life of the M1 I can just keep using Chrome (Brave). :P
New tabs are opening in weird places, really faaaar to the right skipping between 6-7 (unrelated) tabs. Really cumbersome to navigate.
Horrible selection of extensions still. Really missing searching for any tab with Cmd+Shift+K (I often have ~100 tabs open across multiple windows) that I get with the Tab Switcher extension.
There's a Noscript equivalent extension but it costs $3...
And I can't initiate a search with "url bar -> you[tab]<searchterm>[enter]" (for a Youtube search).
Meh. Safari just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I sat down for a week or two and wrote a bunch of extensions myself but I don't see the value in that.
On the plus side Safari does seem snappy but then again I only have ~30 tabs open (across 6 windows) currently. So I might give it a win on speed but it definitely loses in overall usability.
Will try again in a year or so.
Edit: OH SHIT this is a definite dealbraker - apparently I can't select multiple tabs by Shift-clicking to pull them out into a new window. That completely kills my workflow of separating topics into different windows, and/or closing tabs in bulk.
Edit2: Wtf, how didn't I notice this earlier - I cannot see the URL when hovering over a link. How does anyone consider this within the realm of good UX?
But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a majority of the time. There’s no value to this at all.
That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through.
One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.
I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no reason to upgrade.
The best part is that it was a drop in replacement for my 2700X. I already had a great Noctua air cooler so I was all set.
I want to work with Rust more and when I get to that point I'll likely start gathering money for a TR Pro but until then, and me mostly working with dynamical languages, even old-ish i7 CPUs are more than adequate.
Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away from happening.
As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.
But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a very low prio.
It's funny how today's computers could theoretically handle a user's workload for decades yet Apple builds them to fall apart after four years. There was a Hackernews story recently about a guy faffing around with old 68k Macs from the late 80s, he said that those old Macs were rated by Apple to last for fifteen years. And yet they come from an era of much more rapid utility decay for computer hardware, when a computer would be utterly obsolete after just a few years.
It's true that a lot of people are just fine with a a 10-year old i5 or an i7. Hell, a lot of store owners and front-end offices grumble at an i3 CPU because it's still too powerful for the daily activities of the staff.
But when it comes to routinely compiling C / C++ / Rust then you need all the power and hardware innovation you can get.
Still, I am impressed by how much I have gotten out of my machine.
CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.
You're desperately moving the goal post to ridiculous places. It's like claiming that walking on the moon is supposed to be considered normal just because the technology has been ready for a long time.
That claim is irrelevant, isn't it? I mean, what good does a "technically it's possible" claim do if a) no, it's clearly not possible outside exceptionally rare circumstances b) the average consumer device is way behind any of those outlandish claims.
The fact alone that you're talking about using/adding a nonstandard and exceptional battery is more than enough to throw out that claim.
I have considered replacing it with something smaller, now that all of my files are on a NAS and I don't need room for 5-6 drives in this machine. But I just don't feel like I would be getting enough of an improvement over what I already have, even with hefty new parts.
My laptop is a 2011 vintage X220i, and that is starting to feel a little bit behind, mostly thanks to the i3 inside. But it connects to 5GHz WiFi and is fast enough for browsing and video playback, so for now it keeps on truckin'.
Actually the best upgrade would be a decently powerful 12-14" laptop paired with an eGPU dock. That setup would handily replace both machines, but eGPUs just aren't a mature configuration yet, especially combined with Linux. Maybe in a few years.
I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.
Aside from gaming it can last another 10 years.
For longevity, I keep it on its side and replaced the bottom lid with an aluminum mesh lid. This has made it near silent for 80% of my tasks (programmer centric). I also regularly clean out the fan.
Turns out that the old desktop won by a solid 10% margin! A whole decade of new Intel generations still can't make up for the disadvantage of using a mobile CPU.
P.S. The e590 barely survived 2 years and is dead now (broken USB-C charging port).
It'll be replaced come August-ish with a 32-core Zen 3 Threadripper (with 256GB of ECC). Though in a few years I'll likely put an M3 Mac Mini alongside it to figure out when I'll feel comfortable going to ARM full time, as all my customers (and their applications) are still native x86 only... for now.
Isn't this essentially what Apple's observation was (and hence their spec choices)?
Ah yes, the exaggerated funny phrase. On a serious note, the performance difference from an i7 7th generation (7700k) to an i7 10th generation (10700k) felt quite impressive.
[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...
The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.
You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
If I have an M1 and they're selling M5's, I'm continually reminded that my rig is out of date.
Samsung quickly learned to play the same trick with their yearly Galaxy S and Galaxy Note releases. That decision probably contributed to the market share they've been enjoying.
6400 6500 6600 6600k random assortment of numbers and letters!
It hardly works! The consumer still has to do just as much work!
We consumers have it easy, though. Go find some Xeon or EPYC model numbers and try to figure out which digit means what. They make absolutely no sense.
You can probably get pretty far by adding the 3/5/7 to the generation number and sorting by the sum.
That's why we have iPhone 7/8/9...13 and similarly for Samsung etc.
If your i3/i5/i7 designation gives no clues then that's not helpful.
iX-YYZZZ[Suffix]
X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better
Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops
ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better, more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing.
Suffixes:
H = "High Performance" - laptop CPUs with higher perf and higher energy usage. The fastest laptop chips in a given gen previously got branded "HQ" (originally the Q meant quad core), but otherwise HQ = H.
U = "Ultra portable" - laptop CPUs with lower perf and energy usage. Usually can boost well for short tasks, so you might not notice if the most intensive thing you do is compiling code but fall flat for longer workloads such as gaming.
Y = Lowest power usage - These are all garbage, to be honest. You might have one in your windows tablet or netbook.
M = "Mobile" - dead these days, as the H chips replaced them, there were a couple of gens where H and M co-existed with H > M > U.
G_N_ - Integrated graphics rating. All G3 cpus in the same gen will have the same igpu. This only exists on tenth gen/eleventh gen 10nm chips. These chips are more efficient than H/U series chips at the same perf, but don't yet reach the performance peaks of the H series due to lower clock speeds.
K - Unlocked overclockable CPUs, mostly desktop chips, but HK chips for laptops exist too.
F - No integrated GPU. Mostly desktop only.
T - Power efficient desktop CPU (thanks mehlmao)
These suffixes can be combined, e.g. HK for overclockable laptop cpus or KF for desktop cpus with overclocking and no IGPU.
---
So the rule of thumb version for a laptop buyer is H = high power, U/Gx = better battery life, within that, pick highest perf ranking number (ZZZ) within your budget. Deduct 1-2 positions per generation out of date. If you need to compare cross-gen or vs AMD, you need to go look at reviews.
The G numbers in particular are pretty meaningless to consumers. Basically all Intel iGPUs fall into a bucket that is "Good enough for windows or esports titles, not good enough for new or recent AAA games".
Other features are more of interest to DIY builders, nobody is going to sell you a laptop with no igpu and no dgpu, and if you're not interested enough to read up on this, you certainly don't care about overclocking.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/69114/i...
- At one point everyone upgraded their PC every few years anyway.
- Just having Intel on the box was sufficiently impressive to make the sale.
Now they really need to push their latest CPUs as the latest and greatest.
I like the Lake names but I've never understood from a marketing perspective (what have chips got to do with lakes - were they designed near these lakes?) they feel more like code names that accidentally got leaked.
Even ARM, if it wants to displace Intel, it will be selling cloud pizza boxes or phones to replace those that get stolen/broken.
>The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.
there are i7s that are terrible
there are i5s that are terrible
there are decent i3s
"i3" "i5" "i7" doesn't tell you anything itself about perf
That was me trying to play games on laptops with 'i7' about a dozen years ago.
Comparing the performance of laptop and desktop is a niche case. Most people know whether they want a laptop or a desktop and then choose among those categories.
I think you will find many people thinking that is a very useful thing to compare.
But if you're thinking "Should I upgrade my 6 year old i7 system?" or "Will I notice the difference from spending an extra $200 on my CPU?" these days it isn't easy to come up with a sure answer.
That's over a 4x performance difference in 10 years, it's not quite the good old days of Moore's law, but it's still an exponential improvement.
If looking at all the points shows the time it takes to double is way longer than it used to be you're probably on the top of the S.
Which, ok, we know we're headed to an S-curve instead. There are limitations on what we can do on silicon, right?
It's just that the CISC/Intel S-curve is way lower than the ARM/M1 S-curve. Intel got used to leaving a margin of performance sitting on the table because it'll be faster next year. They got lazy. As chip gains have slowed those margins have started to add up.
I still do C++, .NET and Java programming on it just fine, use Office, Adobe software, and it is docker free.
I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.