Ryzen 5800X vs. M1: Programming benchmarks

Thanks for sharing some programming-centric benchmarks using modern CPUs. I always wish that CPU reviewers would stop churning out pages of graphs with synthetic benchmark workloads and instead post things that actually matter, like compile times and other programming benchmarks.<p>The M1 processor is extremely impressive for the price and power envelope. However, I&#x27;m noticing a lot of people have taken Apple&#x27;s marketing material a bit too literally and assumed that it somehow beats any and every desktop CPU out there, which is clearly not the case.<p>Moreover, as the author mentions: A significant portion of Apple&#x27;s lead came from buying exclusivity on TSMC&#x27;s 5nm process through the end of the year. It will be interesting to see how AMD stacks up as they roll out 5nm parts in the future, compared to Apple&#x27;s scaled up M1 successors.<p>Exciting times. It&#x27;s good to have some progress in CPU technologies again after years of Intel stagnation.

The most impressive part to me is how the m1 compares to the 3900X. I’ve got a mere 3600X and every laptop I owned or worked on over the past year is noticeably and painfully slower than the 3600X. It’s been a relief to get home and turn on my desktop. It doesn’t matter if the laptops I’m using are very recent i7’s and i9’s, the desktop is always very noticeably faster.<p>I got my m1 MacBook Pro 16GB yesterday and was pretty confused to find that Rust compilation felt faster than the desktop. To go from recent Intel laptops taking two to three times longer to compile Rust than my budget desktop despite the laptops&#x27; whiny fans and extreme heat, to having my desktop be sightly outclassed by an ice cold laptop on battery (which got at least 15 hours of use, including said compiling, with no need to charge) is a world changer. I can’t remember the last time a laptop was this close to desktop performance for my everyday workflow.<p>Now that I think about it, I haven’t even tried optimising compile times on the MacBook like I usually do with Rust projects. My desktop would have been running lld at least to make its compilation significantly faster, and the MacBook more than kept up in spite of the handicap.

I come away from this way more impressed by the M1 than I was going in. It&#x27;s a comparison of a ~$700 stock, low end full computer Vs. $700 for high end CPU only. And the high end CPU has overclocking tweaks enabled, and overclocked memory.<p>The M1 generally keeps up quite well, which blows my mind. The power use difference Is pretty big as well.<p>Yeah, it would be great if Apple was totally open source.<p>But this is going to push the entire industry to do way better.

Last year i replaced my aging mac pro with a 3900x amd Hackintosh. The cpu upgrade was hard to believe. Everything felt fast in a way even my 2019 air failed to achieve.<p>The idea that the laptop-grade M1 is keeping pace in these tests with the processor in my desktop is mind blowing. Sure the 5800x was tuned for these tests. Sure the M1 is on 5nm. All of this is missing the point: Intel created a huge market opportunity and 2 of the best poised companies to take advantage of it have.<p>Computer consumers are winning big thanks to TSMC in 2020. Let&#x27;s all hope intel can turn things around and keep the space competitive.

I&#x27;m glad someone finally started comparing state of the art vs state of art.<p>Most comparisons have been M1 vs the frankly dated Intel offerings with the previous Mac product line.<p>So things to remember would be that power&#x2F;performance is not linear and so 5800 like CPU could be scaled back in power consumption without sacrificing the same proportion of it&#x27;s performance. Also, 5800X is on TSMC 7nm process where as M1 is on the 5nm; this difference will have a measurable impact on performance and power consumption.

This isn&#x27;t an apples to apples comparison like the author says, because the package power (37W) of the Ryzen is still quite a bit higher than the M1&#x27;s. You can see it right there in the graph from Anandtech.<p>The 5800X is a beast of a CPU. The IPC improvements over the previous generation really are incredible. It&#x27;s not surprising to me at all that it beats the M1 in several benchmarks. However, it&#x27;s not the same class of device at all.

To summarise: Top-of-the-line desktop computer barely beats an ultraslim passively cooled laptop.

I’m just sitting here wondering why a mobile chip from a 1100$ fan-less notebook is even a challenging contender in this race

I&#x27;m still impressed how fast Intel was overtaken by AMD and now Apple. Benchmarks don&#x27;t even bother including Intel.

Please note that M1 MBP with 16GB of RAM is being compared to Ryzen 5800X machine with 64GB of RAM. GC-driven memory management performance (I am looking at you Java) can tangibly affect the benchmarking results.

Those are single core benchmarks, the wow effect is because you are comparing on single core benchmarks 4 core against 24 core cpu , the 5800x with only 4 cores enabled would probably still beat the m1 , probably even with one

Regarding the 5nm vs 7nm thing, I expect apple to be at least 1 node or intra-node improvement (eg: 5nm vs 5nm+ or 4nm) ahead for foreseeable future. They pay TSMC pretty penny to have access to cutting edge nodes. Not much different from how Intel had node advantage over others albeit here apple paying for it so at-least others aren&#x27;t locked out of it for too long.

I&#x27;m a huge AMD fan. Been waiting all year for my dream Ryzen laptop but just given in to a MacBook Air M1.<p>I have no regrets, but this gives me hope that a true Ryzen ultrabook might exist next year, now that the industry have to take AMD seriously. I will sell my MacBook in a heartbeat if that happens.

You’re undervolting the CPU and overclocking your RAM in a benchmark...<p>Why?

This is pretty wild.<p>The M1 beats my Xeon E-2176M @2.7GHz with 64GB of memory in every test but Jython. (I&#x27;m on OpenJDK 15, which probably doesn&#x27;t matter). Later tomorrow I&#x27;ll try it on my 2700x based system.<p>45W vs 10W... Running these tests may have changed my mind on this little CPU!

I have a little doubt about the results of the Java benchmarks.<p>I think the JVM tests should have been executed with the same amount of heap allocated for each platform in order to get the internal dynamics&#x2F;heuristics of the JVM to be comparable. IMHO all JVM tests should have been executed with -Xmx 7G (8 Gigs maximum as per the M1 MacBook Air minus a little something for the OS and the system buffers)<p>Still, I&#x27;m impressed with the Apple silicone.

Can anyone explain the Redis numbers, specifically the 3900X versus 5800X [1]? The 5800X is showing numbers easily more than 2x the 3900X. I understand this is a single-threaded test, so the additional cores of the 3900X (12C&#x2F;24T versus 8C&#x2F;16T for the 5800X) do it no advantage. But I wouldn&#x27;t expect the Zen 3 architecture to be <i>that</i> dramatically superior to Zen 2.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;tuhdo&#x2F;tuhdo.github.io&#x2F;master&#x2F;emacs-tutor&#x2F;static&#x2F;5800x_m1_charts&#x2F;Redis.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;tuhdo&#x2F;tuhdo.github.io&#x2F;mast...</a>

A very important reason this CPU benchmarks well in these tests has to do with the fast SSD and SSD controller. One cannot ignore the I&#x2F;O factors in these tests, which often involve reading and writing to lots of little files.

An additional observation that I haven&#x27;t read here, is that all of these languages (except Python) are JITted, and the ARM backend may be less mature than the x86 equivalent

Realistically, what do people think the iMacs and Mac Pros of the M1 era will look like?

&gt; RAM: 64 GB DDR4 overclocked to 3733 MHz, stress testing 24 hours stable<p>OP, it may be worth downclocking the RAM to 3600MHz (while tightening timings) unless you have a golden chip with &gt;1800MHz Infinity Fabric. Decoupling IF and memory speed can cause huge latency (90ns on my 3950x).<p>Obviously you want a baseline and benchmark from there, but you clearly know what you are doing.

M1: Four high‑performance cores + Four high‑efficiency cores<p>vs<p>5800X : Eight high‑performance cores

This guy really doesn&#x27;t get the point - he&#x27;s testing an embedded part with 16GB RAM against an overclocked desktop part with 64GB RAM (and a load of the benchmarks are garbage collected so the extra RAM is significant). Its also the case that none of these benchmarks are Apple specific - users buying a Mac Mini for development are likely to be developing in Swift for which the M1 has special optimizations. Need to wait for Apple to release a part for an iMac or MacBook Pro to inform his conclusion that x86_64 is going to be able to outperform Apple&#x27;s ARM chips going forward.

Ryzen and M1 both had design wins this year I feel because of broader and faster access to memory. In the next few years L1 &amp; L2 caches might be getting bigger.

I think a lot of commenters ar forgetting another fact about the M1: It also offers low power cores, neural engine, a GPU and RAM all on a single die. Therefore die sizing comparisons to most desktop class cpus make little sense and money comparisons too. (Of course the article was about something different, I’m referring to the comments)

It really doesn&#x27;t matter what kind of stat you bring out against the M1. People have made up their mind and either the marketing worked or it didn&#x27;t. The minority will be swayed by facts and will cling to whatever preconception they have or been told to have. That&#x27;s just how the world is (now?).<p>Nice benchmarks though.

Many of these tests are Java, but to my knowledge only Azul has a JVM for the M1. Which JVM was used?

In other words, Apple needs to just add 4 more cores to M1 to absolutely mop the floor with the Ryzen?

The major difference between Ryzen 5000-series and Apple M1 is the former is sold out worldwide and the latter is on the shelf at every Apple Store in the world. Comparing the M1 to something that nobody can buy is dumb.

There is a key aspect to take into consideration, price of the cpus and energy. With the price of 2 or 3 ryzen we can buy a complete pc. Anyway really useful info

Benchmarking Ryzen on ClearLinux is problematic, Fedora 33, Arch or Gentoo would be much better. Intel explicitly didn&#x27;t set AMD-specific optimizations to favor Intel.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clearlinux-pkgs&#x2F;linux&#x2F;blob&#x2F;26bf1495e7aac067651c33e199b6ae70c6627bd6&#x2F;config#L377" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clearlinux-pkgs&#x2F;linux&#x2F;blob&#x2F;26bf1495e7aac0...</a>

i feel like this is missing the point..

This is all splitting hairs. Major manufacturers are in active competition and bar temporary hick-ups they will all be leap frogging each other while offering more or less the same deal over time in regards to performance &#x2F; power. In the end it&#x27;ll be just personal preference whether go with Apple, AMD or Intel.<p>Well I suspect due to loyalty factor Apple as usually may be able to extract more money from the customers.

Some ppl say that Apple is only a marketing company.<p>TBH with results like those its clear the company in case of tech is years ahead of competition.<p>This is a comparison of current beast desktop CPU which requires water cooling to maintain low temps vs air cooled CPU.<p>Those results are amazing.

&gt; While M1 is indeed very powerful for its size, when comparing it to the high-end x86 desktop, it is still slower<p>I too am astonished that a high-end x86 desktop could possibly be faster than a Mac mini or a laptop without a fan. Now I will have to burn my Apple card (if I had one) in protest.<p>I call on Apple to immediately retract all of its marketing that says that the M1 is the fastest CPU in the universe.<p>&gt; obscene power draw<p>Who cares about power in a desktop (or laptop for that matter)? These things aren&#x27;t solar powered - just <i>plug it in</i> like a normal person! Duh.<p>I also note that a single Ryzen 5800X processor is actually <i>cheaper</i> than the Mac mini, and is readily available from many helpful and enterprising resellers on ebay at special holiday pricing.<p>;-)

This is how-to-make-a-click-bait article-101.<p>Show me an x86 laptop in the same power envelope that can match the fanless MacBook Air with the m1. I’ll wait. Oh and do so at roughly 1k.<p>On the desktop the Mac mini is 699 USD in its base spec. The 5800X is 500 euros on its own before motherboard, case, ram etc etc.<p>Apples to apples benchmarks either controlling for power or price would make for a more relevant article.