Linux On The Apple M1 Preparing Better Performance With In-Development CPUFreq Driver

[tunnelblick]

That's not the fastest Intel chip.

The new Alder Lake based laptops are comfortably faster than the M1 - the downside is they use twice as much power to do that.

And who would be able to have already bought a laptop with that CPU? We are not talking about tech reviewers here but people that bought a laptop from a store.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Currently Apple holds a virtual monopoly in ARM desktop/laptop market.
The benefit of the M1 is its massively lower power consumption when compared to most x86 processors, while still offering a lot of performance (when compared to 99% of ARM chips out there).

The only competitors to Apple are Ampere and Qualcomm, but the former only caters to servers (and even so, their cores don't run at M1 speeds) and the latter hasn't reached M1 levels of performance yet.

Yours is a more realistic viewpoint. People see some of these performance figures and think it translates into a worlds better experience in day to day basic computing tasks, but you won't notice any performance difference there. Apple silicon offers very competitive single threaded performance and more cores than what we are accustomed to in mobile from x86. 8 real cores with good ST performance are going to crush 4 cores with hyperthreading in heavily threaded workloads. That's kind of a no-shit Sherlock stat. A comparison against a 15W 8 core Zen 3 is much less of a slam dunk. But as you said, It's the perf/watt that make these machines really nice. Wonderful battery life, and my lap doesn't feel like I have a toaster on it. The GPU performance is also great for a non dGPU. Then there's the great screen, better webcam, etc.

tl;dr: I don't really notice any meaningful performance benefit for basic daily tasks between my 14" MBP, a 2020 i7 MBP, or older gear like my T480 with an 8th gen i5 (or truthfully, even older laptops going back to Haswell i7 with DDR3 and SATA SSDs). I do notice the battery life, thermals, and acoustics being vastly superior. And yes, if you give these SoCs room to stretch their legs with workloads that can leverage all the cores and/or the GPU, the performance is awesome as well, especially considering the packaging. Even this "low spec" base model with 8 cores offers nearly double the single threaded performance of a 14nm Broadwell Xeon 2690v4 and 78% of the multi-threaded performance in Cinebench R23. An absurd comparison against an old 135W 14 core / 28 thread server CPU, but this feels like good progress in 6 years. And I can't wait for QC/NUVIA to give us something similar outside of the Apple ecosystem.

[amxfonseca]

tl;dr: I don't really notice any meaningful performance benefit for basic daily tasks between my 14" MBP, a 2020 i7 MBP, or older gear like my T480 with an 8th gen i5 (or truthfully, even older laptops going back to Haswell i7 with DDR3 and SATA SSDs). I do notice the battery life, thermals, and acoustics being vastly superior. And yes, if you give these SoCs room to stretch their legs with workloads that can leverage all the cores and/or the GPU, the performance is awesome as well, especially considering the packaging. Even this "low spec" base model with 8 cores offers nearly double the single threaded performance of a 14nm Broadwell Xeon 2690v4 and 78% of the multi-threaded performance in Cinebench R23. An absurd comparison against an old 135W 14 core / 28 thread server CPU, but this feels like good progress in 6 years. And I can't wait for QC/NUVIA to give us something similar outside of the Apple ecosystem.

I share the same opinion. Not that of a big boost for daily tasks. But the noise and thermals are insanely good compared with my 2018 Intel machine. But when I compile code I do notice the big difference in time.

In general is a good machine if you can deal with macOS part. The instant wakes from sleep, the screen is also good, and even the speakers are quite impressive (although I don't rely on them for music, but it's good to use on meetings or to watch some random YouTube videos).

The performance is definitely there, so no need to talk about that. I am curious if Apple can keep it going for future models. I mean, they seem to manage to keep the iPhone SoCs competitive.

The only downsides is of course the upgradability. I mean, for the RAM is understandable. You won't be able to make 400GBps memory upgradable. That memory needs to be glued to the SoC to achieve such speeds and keep power consumption under control. There's a reason we don't upgrade GPU memory. But the SSD would be achievable.

[smitty3268]

And who would be able to have already bought a laptop with that CPU? We are not talking about tech reviewers here but people that bought a laptop from a store.

I admittedly haven't followed the laptop market that closely, since I'm not buying. I did check out dell.com which the original poster had mentioned as wanting to purchase from and it looked like they were available to buy. Says I would receive one in 2 weeks if I bought now which i figured was standard shipping, but maybe that's just the first date they're available to anyone.

Anyway, I still think it's interesting information to inject into the conversation given the context was about how x86 was hopelessly outgunned and only ARM laptops were worth buying.

[mdedetrich]

I share the same opinion. Not that of a big boost for daily tasks. But the noise and thermals are insanely good compared with my 2018 Intel machine. But when I compile code I do notice the big difference in time.

iirc I read online that the main reason code compiles so fast on the M1 is less to do with the CPU (although that definitely helps) but rather the ridiculously high memory bandwidth and low latency on the M1 SOC.

Compilers generally work with massive datasets and so being able to very quickly move data from memory into the SoC and having a large L1/L2/L3 cache really helps

[Developer12]

iirc I read online that the main reason code compiles so fast on the M1 is less to do with the CPU (although that definitely helps) but rather the ridiculously high memory bandwidth and low latency on the M1 SOC.

Compilers generally work with massive datasets and so being able to very quickly move data from memory into the SoC and having a large L1/L2/L3 cache really helps

To be fair, that's also an advantage only the M1 has.

[mdedetrich]

To be fair, that's also an advantage only the M1 has.

Well that and the M1's CPU is much more power efficient than any other x86 laptop out there. Its not the fastest, I believe a fully unlock K series laptop CPU can beat the M1 in this regard however you will only find that in thick 15" + laptop bricks that need to be that big in order to cool the machine due to how much power/heat it uses.

I mean the M1 has been out for a while now, its gotten so many reviews that its pretty much a fact now. Those SoC's given a more reasonable laptop like thermal/power budget has no competition really. Thats why the thermals/acoustics/battery life of the laptop is so good, its as performant as a good Intel laptop CPU but using like half the power.

AMD x86's CPU's are also quite power efficient, more than Intel's but they still can't compete against the M1.

[tunnelblick]

I admittedly haven't followed the laptop market that closely, since I'm not buying. I did check out dell.com which the original poster had mentioned as wanting to purchase from and it looked like they were available to buy. Says I would receive one in 2 weeks if I bought now which i figured was standard shipping, but maybe that's just the first date they're available to anyone.

Anyway, I still think it's interesting information to inject into the conversation given the context was about how x86 was hopelessly outgunned and only ARM laptops were worth buying.

Nah, there are plenty reasons to not buy an M1 which is also the only performant arm chip in a laptop. The rest is locked to Windows or Chromebook, have very low performance or, like the Pinebook "Pro", is only low on performance.
There is also plenty reasons to go with an x86, mainly and foremost compatibility as well as an actual market where you can choose several different vendors and models.