[mcny]

I thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”.

I don’t mind that it has nothing to show for all the talk once you throw out the need to basically sip power (like a notebook computer).

Is this something inherent with ARM though? Why can’t there be ARM based desktop and server computers that need a kilowatt of power at peak? Like how much more performance can you get for each additional watt of power? (I don’t know. I’m genuinely asking.)

[numpad0]

I was one told that memory and bus bandwidth often creates disparity between benchmark and application performances in ARM CPUs. That was years ago and supposedly don’t apply to custom designs like M2, but maybe both Intel and AMD are still advantageous in that region?

[astrange]

No, M2's memory bandwidth is much better than theirs since it's a unified memory design. (Latency isn't any better though.)

[GeekyBear]

> I thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”.

When running native code.

Look at the performance of Microsoft's ARM Surface Pro when running emulated code.

> My frustration with this computer wasn’t a workload thing. It didn’t start out fast and gradually slow down as I opened more things and started more processes. It was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to finish.

I’d have only Slack open, and switching between channels would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background, would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another four seconds before I could finally press play. When I typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led to all kinds of typos (because my words weren’t coming out until well after I’d written them). I’d try to watch YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the audio continued. I’d use the Surface Pen to annotate a PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or not show up at all. I’d try to open Lightroom, and it would freeze multiple times and then crash.

It quickly became clear that I should try to stick to apps that were running natively on Arm.

https://www.theverge.com/23421326/microsoft-surface-pro-9-ar...

[saagarjha]

Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant?

[GeekyBear]

> Apple consistently advertised gaming performance without any substance to it.

> Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant?

It should be pretty obvious that emulating x86 slows performance, regardless of whose ARM OS we're discussing.

[saagarjha]

Ok, but their performance characteristics are pretty different.

[astrange]

Rosetta is much more efficient than this translator, partially through hardware acceleration.