Thread

Apple M6 Pro achieves the highest single-core CPU score in Geekbench 7

118 points · 145 comments · gainsurier

khoirul · 1789817915 · focus · HN ↗
I will never understand how an intelligent, opinionated crowd like HN can be so obsessed over Apple's CPU offerings. Buying into the Mac ecosystem is without a doubt subjecting oneself to vendor lock-in. Linux won't even run on these machines until in 2-3 years, if you're lucky.
1. brabel · 1789818655 · focus · HN ↗
  What kind of vendor lock in are you talking about?? I use Mac and Linux and don’t feel at all locked in by Apple.
  1. crossroadsguy · 1789821076 · focus · HN ↗
    Running an OS of your choice? Easily? That kind?
    brabel · 1789834445 · focus · HN ↗
    The OS is mostly invisible to me. Except for the desktop manager but both Mac and Linux have options for that, I just don’t even feel the need to change the defaults. If I really need Linux for whatever reason, Docker makes that extremely easy on my Mac. I really can’t understand what Linux gives you that you would feel a need to change your OS on Mac.
    bigyabai · 1789836844 · focus · HN ↗
    > I really can’t understand what Linux gives you that you would feel a need to change your OS on Mac.
    - Native Docker support in-kernel
    - High-performance Vulkan drivers
    - CUDA support (macOS doesn't sign CUDA drivers for some reason)
    - Support for NTFS, FAT32 and other common filesystems without using FUSE
    - Better package management with versioned rollback
    - System updates that don't force breaking changes
    Those are just the ones that stop me from returning to macOS (I left after Catalina).
    brabel · 1789845238 · focus · HN ↗
    Interesting how people find reasons even when they make no sense. When did you experience problems with Docker on Mac?? I couldn’t care less it’s not native, it just works. About CUDA, mac has great GPUs , so much so that it’s a fad now to buy mini Macs to run LLMs. I don’t know about why you would use those file systems, am I missing something so great about them? Package management is awesome on Mac with brew, people are even using Brew on Linux lately since it’s one of the best. About system updates, I don’t remember being forced to do it, quite the opposite, my old Macs stopped being able to update after 8 years I believe. Which is fine with me, they get pretty obsolete after so long , and I believe Linux Wasabi works on old Macs if I need it ( but I don’t , I have a Dell with Linux that I could use if I wanted Linux, but I never need it and that laptop was just headache for me, which is why I choose to only use my Macs now ). But to each its own though.
    bigyabai · 1789847405 · focus · HN ↗
    > When did you experience problems with Docker on Mac??
    On my 16gb Macbook Pro, compiling a monorepo for my job. Between the APFS slowdowns and the virtualization overhead, it was faster to build everything in a VPS and download the artifacts onto my Mac.
    > About CUDA, mac has great GPUs , so much so that it’s a fad now to buy mini Macs to run LLMs.
    Mac GPUs are close to the worst on the market. There's a reason why AMD and Nvidia are being put in datacenters while Apple Silicon isn't. Apple's GPU designs are a waste of electricity for LLM inference. My RTX 3070 Ti cost $500, is fabbed on Samsung's 8nm node and beats the 5nm M2 Ultra's GPU in power efficiency. That's how bad Apple Silicon GPUs are for compute.
    > I don’t know about why you would use those file system
    NTFS and ExFAT are the two most-common filesystems of all time. Almost all flash drives and external drives are formatted like this, not HFS or APFS.
    > Package management is awesome on Mac with brew
    Brew is a dependency graph nightmare. You should be using Nix on macOS if you're a developer, it handles things like side-by-side package versioning and environment isolation much nicer than Homebrew does. Brew works okay for simple app installation, but is basically a torture device if you use it professionally.
    brabel · 1789908195 · focus · HN ↗
    You seem to be in a completely different universe than me.
    Mac GPU, for consumer products, is absolutely the best when you need LLMs which require a lot of memory and consumes much less power (it's funny that you seem to believe otherwise when that's literally that biggest advantage of Mac silicon which absolutely no one who knows anything about computers doubts).
    Real world, proper comparison here: <a href="https://www.thinkdifferent.blog/blog/the-truth-about-mac-vs-nvidia-for-ai-i-tested-both/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thinkdifferent.blog/blog/the-truth-about-mac-vs-...
    If you think Nix is great but Brew is not, I really don't know what to tell you. One is a UX nightmare, the other just works. Nix is cool, I admit, but for day to day usage, it really is not ready for real world usage.
    Your comments are like a parody of a professional, I highly doubt you're a professional, you're a teen, aren't you? I should've guessed it when you mentioned "High-performance Vulkan drivers" :(.
    crossroadsguy · 1789836897 · focus · HN ↗
    > The OS is mostly invisible to me
    I always thought I was missing something on the Macs. That must be it. Cheers.

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