[kwlug-disc] m1 RISC silicon: impression

[Jason Eckert]

I've been using a Mac Mini M1 (16GB RAM) for over a month now to do
curriculum development for a new program that includes iOS development (so
students will need to have an M1 Mac as we don't know how long before Apple
ditches support for Intel).

The platform is more impressive than I expected. I've been using it as my
main workstation to see what the student experience will be going through
each course in our new program.

Long story short, during a typical day I run a lot of things and have been
keeping them open to see if I could impact the performance. I've been
keeping a few web browsers with plenty of tabs open, as well as Slack,
VScode, Office, Adobe CC and GitHub Desktop and it doesn't even hit the
system. Everything is unexplainably snappy, and both %user and %sys remain
low.

ARM-compiled versions of Photoshop and Illustrator run faster than on my i9
MBP, and Android apps also compile in under a quarter of the time.
The VMs we make (ARM versions of Fedora and Ubuntu) run lightning fast in
UTM/Qemu (we don't use XAMPP since students should know how to stage a
proper Linux server environment for what they need). Brew times are also
much faster than on Intel.

I did explore Rosetta (running Intel apps), and the experience is
hit-and-miss. Some run fine (but not any faster than Intel), while others
run noticeably slower and have a big hit on %sys and memory usage. One
example of this is the Microsoft Teams app (which doesn't have an ARM
version for macOS yet). Luckily, Microsoft Edge has a native ARM version
for macOS and you can run Microsoft Teams as an Edge app flawlessly with
all the features of the standalone app (even during a video call, it barely
impacts %user, %sys and memory). The only things I run in Rosetta currently
are Logitech Options (for my mouse) and Adobe Bridge. Everything else I
installed already has a native ARM version for macOS.

I've had to eat all of the Apple-ARM jokes I've made this past year. Boo.

On Sat, Nov 6, 2021 at 6:40 PM Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:

> Yes. I'm considering buying a new macbook once Asahi Linux has a working
> GPU driver. The new thicker, heavier Macbooks with more ports and better
> repairability have tweaked my interest.
>
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2021, at 6:27 PM, Mikalai Birukou via kwlug-disc wrote:
> > My developer got a new apple with m1. We ran version of our soft with
> > scrypt KPDF algorithm in javascript, totally non-optimized. We ran the
> > x64 version first, and it went like regular linux x64 on x64 processor.
> > Then we tried m1 version on this m1 chip, and we didn't really notice
> > that part of the program with the progress bar. Stark difference. My
> > hope that whole RISC industry will pick lessons from m1.
> >
> >
> >
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