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TechCrunch give figures for compiling WebKit on the 13" Pro in their review: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro... - the gains are not as drastic, but it is still faster than the 16" and as fast as a Mac Pro, while using hardly any battery.

Very impressive stuff. I only got a new 16" last year but a lot of my time is spent compiling, I might find it hard to resist upgrading next yera when they announce more Pro models.



This feels fishy somehow; we need a more thorough in-depth look at exactly what is being compiled in both instances (I've seen projects that build half the object files on different architectures). It's likely not a 1:1 comparison on actual amount of code being compiled and linked.

It will be awesome if accurate, but I think we need more data.


The results check out - code compilation is very sensitive to cache and the M1 has about 4 times more L1 cache per core than Intel CPUs.

The i7 9750H has 32kb data- and 32kb instruction cache plus 256kb L2 cache per core.

The M1 has 192kb instruction cache and 64kb data cache per core as well as 12MB L2 cache (shared) for the high performance cores.

This alone is enough to explain significantly better code compilation performance.




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