For many linear algebra heavy workflows, (numpy, R, Julia, etc.) I expect that AMD and especially Intel processors with AVX-512 will crush the M1 on real-world benchmarks. But this isn’t a reflection of RISC vs CISC, and Apple could choose to add hardware acceleration for wider instructions and hopefully will in the future.
It looks like simdjson doesn't support AVX-512, so there couldn't be a direct comparison with this article. I recently got a Tiger Lake laptop, though, so if anyone has a good means for comparison I'd be interested.
But then again, if your workflow is linear algebra heavy, shouldn't you be doing that on a workstation or a cluster and not your little MacBook? Given you are probably doing that over Jupyter notebooks, SSH, or some cloud IDE, then the new ARM MacBooks will provide a better user experience?
> But then again, if your workflow is linear algebra heavy, shouldn't you be doing that on a workstation or a cluster and not your little MacBook?
Blender, Gimp / Photoshop, Video Editing, LTSpice / PSpice and Matlab come to mind. These are consumer-ish workflows that benefit from linear algebra, but people want to do them on their laptops.
Hell, people are doing video editing on their PHONES these days, due to the convenience.
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Workstations and clusters are not affordable for the vast majority of users.
GPUs probably are affordable however. But these programs aren't really operating on GPUs yet (I mean, Blender and some Video Editing programs are... but LTSpice / Matlab are CPU-only still)
Clusters are affordable, given that cloud hosting is a commodity now. Digital Ocean, for instance, charge nothing for traffic between nodes if they are hosted at the same data centre.
I think we effectively agree with each other and the author. The M1 is better day-to-day processor but not a AMD/Intel killer for (edit: some) compute-heavy workflows...(yet?). Discussion more pertinent for Mac Pro, where current M1 would be worse than last gen Intel for some common workflows on those devices.
>if your workflow is linear algebra heavy, shouldn't you be doing that on a workstation or a cluster and not your little MacBook?
Not necessarily, such math & ML inference workloads are done even done on a Raspberry pi, other ARM SBCs for numerous CV and other projects requiring edge compute.
