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by hajmo97 1246 days ago
Does someone of you use the whole potential that this kind of chip offers ? What do you use it for ?
3 comments

I use it to have Xcode reboot faster after it crashes.
This is exactly what makes Apple engineers get up every day, to deliver a better chip for this kind of use cases :D
Specced out M1 (except storage):

* 32GB RAM would not have been sufficient, glad I went for 64.

* CPU is exceptional, but significant gains would be seen with more power (or code/process optimisation): unit tests (Robolectric) still break the 'flow' threshold (1s). Xcode compiles + full test suite runs break the 'attention' threshold (10s).

* GPU is occasionally useful, but I don't do much ML/video work

Usage:

* I have enough RAM to keep 3 IDEs open + various electron apps + Office Suite + Windows/Ubuntu VM + 2/3 phone emulators + up to a few hundred Chrome Tabs. Fans are silent and laptop is cold.

* Fans spin heavily when running a full unit test suite (JVM/Android)

* Fans spin heavily when gaming (via Parallels)

* Fans spin slightly when running Stable Diffusion

No, but that’s why I love it so much.

For my daily coding workflow, the fan never even spins. This is Docker, many containers, many many windows.

With docker on, battery lasts a fair bit. Without it on, running on bare metal, could last me days.