M1 Macs Reviewed

[leadeater]

13 hours ago, Spindel said:

This actually works unlike HT/SMT, I hate it that OSs shows HT/SMT as logical cores. IT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! But that’s a different topic.

Um no that is how it works, logical cores are logical, they don't mean physical cores. It's a useable execution thread pipeline capability at the chip level.

 

M1 has no SMT so does not really have logical cores at all, if reported as logical cores it's 1 to 1 relationship of logical cores to physical cores. The common term and naming for logical cores was introduced because of SMT, it was created and named for this exact thing.

[Spindel]

I did a test now.

 

I have a monster excel sheet (weights in on 105 MB on disc), with a lot of excel functions in it. 

When I take the first column with functions (column G from row 3 through 196522) and copy paste it through to column BJ it took my old computer about 7 minutes to process the action (and remember that it was an really old iMac with a core i5 4670). My crappy work issued laptop from 2019 was about the same but during the process it would render the laptop unresponsive (the laptop is a really weak POS but with an power envelope of about 15 W on the CPU  ).

 

It took about 2 minutes now on excel through rosetta on the M1 Mini and no unresponsiveness from the system.  

[Bombastinator]

That is one irony of this chip.  It makes a really powerful case for bigLITTLE.  It makes me think the next iteration of intel stuff might be more interesting than I previously thought for all it being at intel14. I’m not sure how to abbreviate biglittle.  The new intel thing is supposed to be 8 and 8, while M1 is 4 and 4. I’ve heard m1x or whatever it winds up being called is rumored at 8 and 4.

[Spindel]

The bad.

 

My home office got a degree colder because the Mini runs so cool and winter is coming 

[Arika]

38 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

That is one irony of this chip.  It makes a really powerful case for bigLITTLE.  It makes me think the next iteration of intel stuff might be more interesting than I previously thought for all it being at intel14. I’m not sure how to abbreviate biglittle.  The new intel thing is supposed to be 8 and 8, while M1 is 4 and 4. I’ve heard m1x or whatever it winds up being called is rumored at 8 and 4.

agreed, even if we don't see a big surge in interest for ARM on windows, i can only hope that we start to see more implementations of big.LITTLE on all x86 mobile computers.

[Video Beagle]

19 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

  Both sides seem to agree that actual testing in a suite of apps will show the speed of the device though.  Has this been done?

I'm hoping @GabenJr's tests do this.

[saltycaramel]

From 6:30, the M1 just casually cruising thru Dolphin at 4K 60fps without breaking a sweat, and this is using Rosetta.

 

 

[TheReal1980]

Emulation on emulation and it still runs this good, I wonder how much he was pushing the hardware.

I am VERY impressed Tim Apple.

[saltycaramel]

You can see supposedly CPU and GPU utilization in the meters on the left side of the screen. 

 

Rosetta is more of a binary translation (sometimes done completely before-hand at first launch, sometimes just-in-time too) than emulation.

 

Native ARM Dolphin would be even faster indeed.

 

Here the A12Z, the grandfather of the M1, aka the “M0”, is seen running ARM Dolphin natively

 

And that video was shot before this change in iOS

https://twitter.com/rileytestut/status/1324492062503231488?s=21

 

[Video Beagle]

1 minute ago, saltycaramel said:

Native ARM Dolphin would be even faster indeed.

Dolphin is a game emulator?

[saltycaramel]

1 minute ago, Video Beagle said:

Dolphin is a game emulator?

Yes, for Nintendo Gamecube and Wii games.

Sometimes used as a kind of benchmark too.