Hector Martin

Once we have more real-world app tests to use as comparisons, we'll have a better idea of how the *practical* performance of the M1 compares with the current x86 crop.

All this said, it looks like Apple has gone all-in on the "desktop experience". The really strong single-core perf (I wonder how much of that can be attributed to "x86 legacy garbage still has a cost"?), the awesome SSD, GPU, etc.

It's no wonder the M1 Macs are beating the pants off of the previous Intel offering there. But Intel has been *sucking badly* for years, and there are a pile of improvements other than the CPU.

As for Rosetta 2, it's good, but I'm still *really* curious how it'll do in the audio domain. We're talking lots of floating point processing with some integer mixed in, written by lots of different teams, some scalar, some vector, *definitely* a lot of it not well optimized.

And with hard realtime constraints - if the JIT fires off anything substantial in the audio processing thread, you *will* get a dropout - and even if it's not substantial, you'll probably get a pile of priority inversion hazards that will cause inconsistent dropouts.

So it looks like for day-to-day stuff Mac users can probably be confident that they won't lose much vs. their older Intel Mac under Rosetta 2, and gain in many instances. But I wouldn't put my money on M1+R2 for all workloads yet.

It'll be interesting to see these performance details worked out in more detail; e.g. people have talked about M1 being way faster at ObjC object management, so presumably it has *way* faster atomics. That matters a lot for some kinds of software, and not at all for others.

But the question is how, and why - presumably their bus system is tighter than typical x86 ones? I'm looking forward to a deeper dive, and whether AMD/Intel care to improve this in the future.