Comment by genxy
2 months ago
I worked at a hyperscaler when the M1 came out. A MacBook Air M1, running a Linux VM was faster and more energy efficient than anything we had in the data center.
2 months ago
I worked at a hyperscaler when the M1 came out. A MacBook Air M1, running a Linux VM was faster and more energy efficient than anything we had in the data center.
I'm certainly willing to believe the M1 was the most energy efficient, but your data center didnt have anything faster than a laptop?
Nope, across all benchmarks, Linux running in a VM on the M1 had higher perf (4 cores) than any instance type I launched across Intel, AMD and Arm. Triad, coremark, openfoam, verilator, etc. This may have changed, but my hunch is this is still probably true with M5 vs all the cloud providers.
That's not especially surprising for low thread counts. e.g. if you look at the current Geekbench single core charts, the fastest device across Android/iOS/Mac/PC is the M5 MacBook Pro. Second-fastest is the M5 iPad Pro. The fastest PC CPU (9950X3D) is about 80% the performance of the M5. (And the 9950X3D is about on par with the A18 in the iPhone 16 from 2024.)
(All the usual caveats about geekbench scores apply, but they're not nothing.)