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by pxmpxm 1071 days ago
This is the exact kind of PR bamboozlement I was alluding to - literally none of the above is correct:

M1 memory latency is 100ns, which wasn't really competitive with amd/intel at the time (70 something nano). Any SSD read be an order of magnitude slower than reading from ram - something to the tune of 5gb/s version vs 70gb/s for the SOC ram. For comparison, the intel trashcan mac pro clocked in at 60gb/sec a decade prior.

Reference:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

2 comments

See, this is the thing about M1: I don’t care about your numbers (which I have no doubt are true), I care about my personal experience with the magic cold $999 aluminum slab that runs circles around everything I owned before.

Reading these always feels like winning an F1 race, then being gaslit about how that’s not possible because of inferior cylinder design.

And all it takes is some Apple PR magic to make you disregard objective measures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Not Apple PR magic, but true firsthand experience. Objectively, this is the computer that makes me happiest and most productive. It could run on a 6MHz slime mold processor for all I care.
> This is the kind of PR bamboozlement I was alluding to - literally none of the above is correct

I'm basing my knowledge on discussions with other developers on rwkv.cpp because we were talking about how performance scales with the number of tokens per iteration. Memory speed/bandwidth came up and some things about M1 were said. Sorry about that.