Performance & Processors
Performance & Processors
There is a lot of misleading information about laptop performance online, so as I start to discuss hardware differences that make the linux migration a challenge, I feel that processors is a good topic to discuss first.
A very succinct comparison of desktop processors:
The fundamental difference of modern Macs is that they use an Arm based system on a chip called an M series processor. The M series is not just a CPU but a "System on a chip", meaning more hardware components are included of a total system on the cpu die. GPU and HBM memory are included with the M processor on die.
The historical leader in destkop processors is the x86 processor. The x86 processor has used 64 bits as a standard for several years, ergo you see it referred to as x86_64 or amd64. This is what all other competitors (AMD, Intel) use and what Apple was using until they made the switch. These processors will include just CPU or sometimes CPU & GPU on one die.
The difference between ARM and x86 is that ARM is a licensable hardware standard that companies can modify to meet their own needs, whereas x86_64 is closed and proprietary. Thus we have all variants of Apple processors: the A series for phones and M series for computers as well as coprocessors like the T for security. In enterprise compute and android phones (ie Qualcomm Snapdragon) Arm is leveraged heavily but they have different modifications than the M series.
In addition, on the horizon is a new open standard processor type called RISC-V. This isn't ready for the desktop/laptop arena yet but when it matures in the next 5-10 years it will have a huge impact on the current market, particularly in Asia and particularly in AI computing.
The fundamental trade off between using ARM vs x86_64 is TDP (total drawn power) vs special instructions. ARM includes few special instructions comparitively and runs at much lower power and heat whereas x86_64 is higher heat and power but has many special instructions that speed up common cpu requests. Ableton Live has performance improvements based on, for instance, AVX2 that don't exist for Mac, though not enough performance improvement to use one or another platform; 5-10% improvement in certain cases. After that AVX512 helps with FFT processing (like in convolution reverbs) but not in a capacity that would sway you to buy either cpu.
Fundamentally most DAWs suffer from a physical issue that audio is serial in terms of signal flow. That is to say the output of one unit goes into the next and so on until it is mixed. This flow is traditionally modeled on a single core. Ableton Live suffers a lot from this bottleneck and you can see the issue if you put a lot of devices on one track. One of the only ways to better distribute load in Live is to create FX only tracks that audio sources in a separate track, and route through them before going to master. However, nothing really stops an angry plugin from pegging your CPU. For instance: in the video I posted at https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWwtvc3EmNf/ the cpu is at 28% usage on an M3 Ultra because of one of the plugins. And thus nothing saves us from occassionally needing to bounce tracks to audio to stop CPU misbehavior no matter how powerful your system is.
Bitwig Studio has gone beyond this core performance issue with their plugin sandboxing, that allows load to distribute properly across cores, and is in my opinion one of several reasons why it is the best DAW available today: https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=237189
Also, while linux has always strived to run everywhere as a desktop distribution much more software is available to you on x86_64. To run solely on ARM you should expect to need to compile a fair amount of software yourself . Also, Bitwig for linux is only built for x86_64. That will improve with time but if you are not up for the challenge, I can't recommend running linux on ARM right now.
So with that background, what's the best performance choice?
Performance isn't easily measured or compared in the current hardware market. Apple has the performance crown right now for performance solely because of it's memory architecture. Because HBM memory for the M system on a chip is on die, the CPU can access the memory orders of magnitude faster than any other processor. This not only makes up for the gap in slower instructions but it causes certain operations to become much much faster. And whatever percentage gains Apple claims in marketing really have no value, just know that certain types of tasks will be faster that would have previously been constrained by memory.
Core count matters in terms of DAW performance. Most modern systems have at least 4 cores and some DAWs cannot take advantage of larger core count values than 8. So when the marketing is telling you need this 12 core chip vs this 10 core chip it is often splitting hairs in terms of any real world performance you might expect. However, know that the peak frequency of your performance cores matters. There is a huge difference in my setup between Core Ultra 9 285H (6 peformance cores 2.9-5.4Ghz) vs Core Ultra 7 165U (2 performance cores 1.7-4.9Ghz).
Because the processors are often on par with each other, the better way to evaluate performance today is relating it to how you use your machine. So for instance if you are looking for a single laptop to run everything you want
I would look for:
- battery life - macs always win here but several modern pc laptops have good battery life, think greater than 4 hours
- weight - if it's much more than 3 lbs it's too heavy
- max clock speed on performance cores
- not less than 16GB ram but prefer 32-64
- Max storage size (I always run out of storage and I always push 4T)
- External monitor connectivity
At this point in time some features to me are just gimmicks:
- Thunderbolt 5 – great on paper, absolutely no real world use cases
- SSD Speeds - NVMe at PCIe4 is fast enough for all audio work. Apple keeps trying to tell us their native Samsung stuff is faster except it just doesn't make much difference
- OLED & XDR ProMotion – both of these are brighter and sharper but suck battery and really aren't necessary for audio work. You will get better battery life with MiniLED or older IPS. I will say 120Hz is much easier on the eyes if available.
- WiFi 7 vs 6E – great on paper, not practically different in the real world
- Discrete GPUs in the laptop space. – if you buy a laptop you do not want the headache of having to deal with a discrete nvidia GPU, especially in linux. Not to mention the dramatic increase in heat and weight.
Therefore, right now for laptop music producers that are going to use one of the 2 big operating systems, the macbook pro is your best choice. It is a choice that comes at a cost, of course, but if you are using only one computer you will likely have the best performance and reliability with a single macbook pro.
For those of us looking for a linux route there are several vendors you can consider:
The Lenovo X Carbon series has traditionally always supported linux in business, primarily for developers. I have one of these and can confirm it is a solid choice. It is light, strong and has decent battery life assuming you have software to support the proper sleep states. The one drawback of this is the use of the Ultrabook series processor from Intel which has a low turbo clock speed. So whenever you push the processor expect the fans to be on full bore and that it's top clock isn't as good as other systems.
I can no longer recommend Dell XPS13 for linux work at all. There are too many drawbacks and the newest design really abandons better support.
I have recently acquired a Starlabs Starfighter Ultra (https://us.starlabs.systems/) which is a new linux native hardware OEM that uses a Coreboot open source firmware and includes support for encrypted memory. At 3.5 ish pounds it has much higher core clocks.
I also highly recommend System76 (https://system76.com/) for linux native builds.
What about linux on Apple hardware?
As it stands there is a fledgling opensource project called Asahi Linux (https://asahilinux.org/) that is porting linux to M series processors Apple machines. Wherever they are successful their results are limited by the closed nature of Apple hardware. So even if you have one of the supported processors don't expect all parts of the machine to work. The supported processors are years behind the hardware releases. This is why I didn't simply run linux on my Mac.
To me, the single greatest insult that Apple has inflicted on their consumers is failing to fully support Asahi and failing to provide code for their hardware to ther kernel developers at linux.org. When you consider how much of Apple's success has been buoyed by open source it is purely insulting that they have chosen not to give back to the open source community.
Demonstrably, developers who have run Asahi linux flavors have shown that compilation time in linux on an M processor is improved over MacOS on the same machine. This is exciting to me as the only Mac I've kept in my arsenal is an M3 Ultra Mac Studio that might someday be a super powered ARM based linux system. Until then it is my access to all my previous software and musical projects.