[nessex]

The most impressive part to me is how the m1 compares to the 3900X. I’ve got a mere 3600X and every laptop I owned or worked on over the past year is noticeably and painfully slower than the 3600X. It’s been a relief to get home and turn on my desktop. It doesn’t matter if the laptops I’m using are very recent i7’s and i9’s, the desktop is always very noticeably faster.

I got my m1 MacBook Pro 16GB yesterday and was pretty confused to find that Rust compilation felt faster than the desktop. To go from recent Intel laptops taking two to three times longer to compile Rust than my budget desktop despite the laptops' whiny fans and extreme heat, to having my desktop be sightly outclassed by an ice cold laptop on battery (which got at least 15 hours of use, including said compiling, with no need to charge) is a world changer. I can’t remember the last time a laptop was this close to desktop performance for my everyday workflow.

Now that I think about it, I haven’t even tried optimising compile times on the MacBook like I usually do with Rust projects. My desktop would have been running lld at least to make its compilation significantly faster, and the MacBook more than kept up in spite of the handicap.

[dijit]

No doubt that the 3600x is impressive- but Desktop class CPUs will outperform laptop ones almost always (due to the significantly higher power draw and thermal envelope).

My 7 year old desktop goes toe-to-toe with my top of the line MacBook Pro from 2020 and in almost all benchmarks crushes it.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4930K-vs...

[dis-sys]

your 4930k from 7 years ago is a 130w processor for PC enthusiasts, it was a top of the line product back in its days with a $600 price tag. most regular desktop users wouldn't buy that processor, e.g. I bought a 4770k at half of your 4930k price in 2013.

on the other hand, your mentioned 1065G7 is a 15w processor that doesn't really represent what a laptop processor can do in 2019/2020. laptop processors like i7-10875H would be a far better apple-to-apple comparison in case you still want to make your claims above. the reality here is that at much lower power draw and thermal envelope (45w vs 130w), laptop processor like 10875H would crush 4930k in both single core and multi core settings.

[hokkos]

For rust it is just that llvm has les work to do on arm than x86, less passes, less complex register optimisation.

[andrewmackrodt]

I don't have an m1 yet but have a similar experience with laptops performing extremely poorly compared to desktops (to be expected) but also poorly compared to my older Apple MacBooks. I have a 2015 13" MBP that will perform a compilation task quicker than my 2019 XPS.

The much older CPU in the MBP has a much faster base clock of 2.4GHz vs 1.3GHz in the XPS. What I find frustrating is that the XPS will throttle down to base clocks for any workload sustaining about 10 seconds, even if the temperature is reasonable, e.g. 50C.

In Windows I can work around this a little using ThrottleStop but I'm primarily a Linux user and haven't found a reliable way to bypass Intel's turbo limits with my Ice Lake CPU. Linux also has annoying bugs where the CPU will limit itself to base clock when connected to AC but then turbo up to 4.1GHz when the AC is unplugged, baffling.

Glad to hear about your positive results with m1, it's for sure a purchase I'll be making in 2021.

[secmask]

> Linux also has annoying bugs where the CPU will limit itself to base clock when connected to AC but then turbo up to 4.1GHz when the AC is unplugged, baffling

I had got same issue with my dell before, it caused by trouble with charger(I have replaced it 3 times). I actually get a lot of power issue with dell laptop, my an other dell can't fall to deep sleep. I won't pick a dell anymore >:< .