To go another layer deeper in analysis though, it is still >20% faster on the thermally throttled M1 MacBook Air. That's a laptop without a fan, and it's still faster than an i9 with a fan.
This right here. I was so skeptical of getting an Air. And yes, during heavy compile sessions with make -j8, it can hang after a half hour or so. But (a) you can make -j7 instead, and (b) it’s impressive how long it lasts without hitting that point.
I’ve been thinking of doing the cooling mod too, where you pop open the back and add a thermal pad to the cpu. It increases conductivity with the back of the case, letting you roast your legs while you work, aka cool the cpu. :)
Do any of the laptop cooler systems with fans help the M1 Air thermal issues? I used one on an older 2011 MBP, and it definitely helped that laptop. It might have just been a placebo of getting the laptop off of a flat surface to allow air to circulate around it, but the fans could only help in that.
> And yes, during heavy compile sessions with make -j8, it can hang after a half hour or so
You bought a computer that crashes reliably when used "heavily"? I mean, if you heard that same statement from an individual PC user in past decades, you'd roll your eyes about the ridiculous overclockers and go back to work on your slightly slower but actually reliable development machine.
But this isn't a too-l33t-for-her-own-good overclocker. It's Apple Computer! Jobs is clearly still directing the reality distortion effect from the grave.
Well, depends on your definition of "literally hang." It does indeed literally hang (i.e. system becomes unusable, activity monitor impossible to open) for minutes on end if you're not careful; a fact I was somewhat dismayed to discover.
But it's rare enough that I just don't care much. The performance in other areas is too good to gripe about "if I run make -j8 for an hour, it'll hang for a few minutes."
Geez. It ran 11% slower when it had to throttle a bit. That is not crashing. The only reality distortion occurring is a misreading of the article and overstatement of the effects of the reduced cooling in the Air.
Statement upthread, and confirmed in another comment, is about a system that really does "hang" when presented with heavy load. I'm responding to the commenter I quoted, not the linked article.
It's running out of memory and that's when the memory pressure becomes notable enough to affect the terminal app. The same would happen on any other system - in fact it'll become unusable more quickly on Intel.
That seems unlikely. In fact kernel builds don't really produce much memory pressure, no more than a 1-200 MB per parallel make process in general. (The final link takes more, but that doesn't really parallelize anyway).
I don't know about kernel builds, but memory pressure is the usual limiting factor when building for macOS/iOS builds when you step up parallelization like this.
Another possibility is system bugs that can be exposed when it thermal limits because it will stop running background QoS tasks, and things waiting on them will hang. It's pretty hard to stress it to that level.
I have done both these things by building compilers on M1. The memory pressure wasn't always from the host compiler but rather tools like dsymutil that may not be perfectly optimized themselves.
I would say it's unreasonable to expect 'make -j8' to perform well on a low-end laptop (M1 is a low end CPU) and that the system should be picking the -j number for you.
there should be a term like “reality distortion field” that describes whatever it is that gets people to come out of the woodwork and nit pick acceptable performance compromises in Apple products
To be fair, a fan takes away from potential heatsink space and eliminates contact from heatsink to shell. A fan based cooling system can actually be worse than a fanless setup... especially if they're the Macbooks with constrained intakes. (virtually all of them)
