Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Schnort

macrumors regular
Oct 24, 2013
204
61
90% of programming is debugging. Well, something like that. A lot. A programmer trying to chase down a bug will tweak one or two source files and try that to see if it fixes the problem. This can go on all night. This is where the compiler gets the most use. That is why it matters.
Yes, I program for a living and have for 30 years. I get the importance of incremental compiling.

What I don't really see is how/why the M1 would specifically be better at it than any other platform. What strength(s) is "incremental compiling" playing to or what weakness(es) is it exposing?

Somebody above stated the "M1 was a giant leap forward" with respect to incremental builds and I don't see technically why this would be the case. Faster SSD performance? Closer memory? Larger cache?

BTW, I've found the longest part of incremental building is many times firing up the build system to detect dependencies and what's out of date and needs to be built. (Make is particularly slow at this unless you turn off implicit rules).
 

dmccloud

macrumors 68040
Sep 7, 2009
3,138
1,899
Anchorage, AK
Your case is clearly a corner one. It would be rather strange if most of the computer work was done in coffee shops. It is my observation that most laptop users move them between home and office (that is if they even have to go to office, not many do nowadays) and park them to some sort of a docking station connected to one wide or multiple monitors. When at office they may occasionally bring the laptop to the meeting, but modern conference rooms have plenty of power outlets and even if they don’t, the meetings don't typically last for more than an hour. People who spend more time at the meetings are usually managerial types who don't need powerful laptops to begin with.

You completely (perhaps intentionally so) omitted a HUGE segment of the userbase - students. They're using their laptops in class, at coffee shops, the library, etc. Walk around any college campus and compare the number of Macs to everything else, you might be surprised at just how much things skew towards the Mac there. The days of having to work "at" a desk were long gone even before COVID forced thousands upon thousands of people to work from home. the central tenet of having a laptop is the ability to take it anywhere, essentially bringing your office with you. Yet you seem to believe that a portable computer is meant to be used stationary and always plugged into power. In that case, you want a desktop, not a laptop.
 

dmccloud

macrumors 68040
Sep 7, 2009
3,138
1,899
Anchorage, AK
As said already, in most cases to be productive one needs to plug in the laptop - to work with a proper monitor. The power then comes as a bonus. People whose job does not require a monitor usually do the work that does not require powerful computer either.

Let's take a look at just some of the professions where the ability to work remote and/or away from an office is not only a plus, but in some cases absolutely necessary:

- Real Estate
- Hospitals
- Field Services and maintenance (telecommunications, energy, transportation industries to name a few)
- Construction
- Engineering
- Aviation (look at how many pilots are using iPads to store flight charts and logs)

That's just a few I could think of in 30 seconds.

I'm asking for timed examples for his use case from a credible source and not excuses from an unknown.

The irony of you calling out anyone as an "unknown" when your accuracy is worse than a blind man throwing darts from three feet away.
 

falainber

macrumors 68040
Mar 16, 2016
3,539
4,136
Wild West
Let's take a look at just some of the professions where the ability to work remote and/or away from an office is not only a plus, but in some cases absolutely necessary:

- Real Estate
- Hospitals
- Field Services and maintenance (telecommunications, energy, transportation industries to name a few)
- Construction
- Engineering
- Aviation (look at how many pilots are using iPads to store flight charts and logs)

That's just a few I could think of in 30 seconds.



The irony of you calling out anyone as an "unknown" when your accuracy is worse than a blind man throwing darts from three feet away.
Very few people in the categories you listed use the laptops. Most engineers work at the desk. I have never seen a laptop (at least not the laptop not connected to power outlet) or a tablet in the hospital or any medical/dentist office. As far as I can see they prefer computers stationary placed on the desks or special stands. It's almost exclusively mini-desktops from Dell, HP or Aser with a monitor (or two). Tablets are not laptops (and we are talking about the laptops). Students are a fair game. They do need the laptops
 

dmccloud

macrumors 68040
Sep 7, 2009
3,138
1,899
Anchorage, AK
Very few people in the categories you listed use the laptops. Most engineers work at the desk. I have never seen a laptop (at least not the laptop not connected to power outlet) or a tablet in the hospital or any medical/dentist office. As far as I can see they prefer computers stationary placed on the desks or special stands. It's almost exclusively mini-desktops from Dell, HP or Aser with a monitor (or two). Tablets are not laptops (and we are talking about the laptops). Students are a fair game. They do need the laptops

Real estate agents don't use laptops when they're showing houses to clients, meeting them at a bank or title company or even at a coffee shop? I see that all the time here. You also clearly do not understand how many engineers work in the field instead of at a desk in an office environment. In prior jobs, I've personally sold hundreds, if not thousands of laptops to these individuals because they were NOT going to be working at a desk in an office all of the time. I never said anything about tablets, so I find it curious that you attempted to shift the focus there.
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Oct 24, 2014
10,619
11,293
I was talking about incremental builds and you are bringing clean linux kernel benchmarks? Besides, those particular results are clearly nonsensical, surely even you can see it. They contradict other compile benchmarks done by Phoronix. They either do a single-core build on M2 or maybe have some weird Docker setup.

Just say so if you have no proof to back up your claims. No need for excuses. And, Phoronix can help you understand "make -j 1".
 
Last edited:

Sydde

macrumors 68030
Aug 17, 2009
2,563
7,061
IOKWARDI
Just say so if you have no proof to back up your claims.
What you provided is not proof. It is some numbers that look pretty random. It shows a Kaby Lake i7 being twice as fast as an Apple M2. Somehow I find it hard to take that seriously.
 

mr_roboto

macrumors 6502a
Sep 30, 2020
856
1,866
Yes, I program for a living and have for 30 years. I get the importance of incremental compiling.

What I don't really see is how/why the M1 would specifically be better at it than any other platform. What strength(s) is "incremental compiling" playing to or what weakness(es) is it exposing?

Somebody above stated the "M1 was a giant leap forward" with respect to incremental builds and I don't see technically why this would be the case. Faster SSD performance? Closer memory? Larger cache?
At launch, M1's "Firestorm" performance core was one of the highest performance CPU cores in the world, bar none. So it ran single-thread loads very well, and C compilation was a particular strength. Furthermore, because a Firestorm core uses about 5W maximum, that high ST performance is available even in thermally constrained machines like the fanless M1 Air. And since it uses so little power, many programmers have found they can work for 8 hours or more on an Air doing incremental build / test cycles even though it's an ultralight laptop with a relatively small battery.

So, that's why you'll see many devs get effusive about M1. For many, the M1 Air was a revolutionary machine. They got performance as good as or better than the big, hot Intel-powered bricks they were lugging around before, and with better battery life to boot.

(Since its release in 2020, M1 has lost its share of the ST performance crown, and M2 hasn't retaken it. But the way Intel leapfrogged M1/M2's single-thread performance was by throwing absurd amounts of electrical/thermal power at the problem, meaning there's still not really anything quite like the Apple Silicon Air machines in the Intel world.)
 
  • Like
Reactions: ahurst and jdb8167

dmccloud

macrumors 68040
Sep 7, 2009
3,138
1,899
Anchorage, AK
Just say so if you have no proof to back up your claims. No need for excuses. And, Phoronix can help you understand "make -j 1".

Take that comment, turn it around, and point it at your own claims. You have a track record of spouting off things as "fact" which are either made-up, based on extremely faulty methodology, or just ignorant of how things actually work in the real world.
 

widEyed

macrumors regular
Aug 18, 2009
175
68
The 'Memory used' readout in Activity Monitor doesn't tell you much - if Mac OS sees RAM sitting around doing nothing it will use it for things like file cache. The important figure is the "memory pressure" which will show if the system is having to do a lot of swapping to disc, which is what kills performance.


If you actually needed a 16MB MBP in the past then, no, you probably shouldn't get an 8MB M2/M3. Apple silicon is efficient, but it's not magic. Anyhow, the Studio starts at 32GB and anything with a M1/M2 Pro starts at 16GB. I'd rather hope that the release of the M3 sees the end of the 8GB models - its 2023 (maybe 2024 before we see M3) and 16GB is not an unreasonable minimum spec for a laptop costing the thick end of $2000.


Two 4K displays is a lot of pixels to shift - and if you're using scaled mode everything is being rendered at 5K internally and then downsampled by the GPU. Bear in mind that, although the GPU in the base M1/M2 may thrash Intel's integrated graphics that's a pretty low bar, and while it hits above its weight, it's not a particularly powerful GPU in the grander scheme of things. If I wanted two 4K or better displays (esp. to run in scaled mode) for any sort of graphical work I'd probably be looking at a Mx Pro, at least (if not for the better GPU, because it had the extra ports to connect the things to & offered the possibility of a 3rd display). Which makes the 8GB thing irrelevant.

The base M1/2 (non-pro/max) is, after all, the entry level Apple Silicon processor for the MBA and lowest-end Mini, so it's quite optimistic to see it as the 'modern equivalent' of a higher-price-point (when new) Intel Mac.

thanks @theluggage. yes i did watch a video years ago about scaling on M1 but i’ve always used native scaling for monitors anyhow. rarely change it for a very specific reason and not when i’m using production software with heavy loads. safari and firefox seem to be some of the biggest memory swap hogs (and so cpu too) i’m running most days. i need to learn to close 50 tabs fearlessly. i’ve start using Safari tab groups which is helping, great feature, who uses bookmarks but this is like permanently opened bookmarks!
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.