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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Hardware Chat Room
Thread: Apple M1 Chip and ARM: Impacts on BOINC and WUs? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 56
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7655 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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1)WCG runs quite sporatically on this machine. At times it runs 4 threads, sometimes 8, other times 7. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why. They probably are throttling way before it gets too hot as a precaution, which would be the smart thing to do in a system with no fans. Only running on half or part of the cores as a thermal constraint somewhat negates the point of having all those cores in the first place. Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 258 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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1)WCG runs quite sporatically on this machine. At times it runs 4 threads, sometimes 8, other times 7. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why. They probably are throttling way before it gets too hot as a precaution, which would be the smart thing to do in a system with no fans. Only running on half or part of the cores as a thermal constraint somewhat negates the point of having all those cores in the first place. Cheers Yes, I sadly agree. Hopefully someone here will post feedback about the Macbook Pro and Mini. It would be interesting to see what kind of throttling Apple is doing on those machines.  |
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Seth Karlinsey
Cruncher Joined: Apr 19, 2020 Post Count: 15 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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So far so good on my M1 MBP. Tasks are all getting done in ~3.5 hours so far under rosetta.
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JohnTee
Cruncher Joined: Jun 26, 2011 Post Count: 2 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi, i've just started my Apple Mini M1.
I will update on progress when its configured. |
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DrMason
Senior Cruncher Joined: Mar 16, 2007 Post Count: 153 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I wonder if the sporadic behavior is because of the chip’s big.little design?
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Seth Karlinsey
Cruncher Joined: Apr 19, 2020 Post Count: 15 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Im going to guess its being aggressive on the thermals on the air. My MBP is the same CPU design and is keeping all 8 pinned at 100%.
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 258 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Im going to guess its being aggressive on the thermals on the air. My MBP is the same CPU design and is keeping all 8 pinned at 100%. So is it still running all 8 cores 24x7? My Air is only returning about 30 WUs a day (since it is only running 4 cores) which is pretty low compared to some basically-4-years-old i7-7700 chips on some desktops I have that are easily returning 70+ a day. If all 8 cores on my Air were running, that would be about 60 WUs a day which is still a tad lower than what the i7-7700 machines are doing. I say this because Apple claims the M1 chip is a huge milestone for performance and I don't really agree. Yes, the M1 makes the Air silent, seems to use far less power and thus it also creates great battery life. The M1 does seem snappy for certain Mac tasks, but even if it does run all 8 cores, it's still behind the 4-year old i7 chips. I don't recall, 4 years ago, if the i7-7700 was a crazy-fast chip for it's time. If I could afford to buy some of the Airs, they would certainly save on the electric bill...10 watts for the M1 vs 65 watts for the i7-7700. But I haven't compared how much total electricity the Air draws vs the i7-7700 desktop. It would be interesting to see if anyone here has the barebones new M1 Mac Mini to see if it can run all 8 cores 24x7. That's only $679. If it were to run at peak performance, I could swap out my desktops and save a ton on the electric bill as well as having a much smaller footprint and likely far less heat generation. |
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I say this because Apple claims the M1 chip is a huge milestone for performance and I don't really agree. That's for software written for the M1. |
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William Albert
Cruncher Joined: Apr 5, 2020 Post Count: 39 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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My Air is only returning about 30 WUs a day (since it is only running 4 cores) which is pretty low compared to some basically-4-years-old i7-7700 chips on some desktops I have that are easily returning 70+ a day.... I say this because Apple claims the M1 chip is a huge milestone for performance and I don't really agree. The M1 is a low-mobile mobile SoC where all components of the package have to share the same thermal budget. You're comparing that to a high-performance desktop processor that is able to draw many times more power for the CPU portion alone. Obviously, the M1 is going to be at a throughput disadvantage. Where the M1 wins is on efficiency (i.e., performance/watt). That being said, 30 WUs per day is a rather disappointing figure. To put that into perspective, I have a five-year-old laptop with a 2C/4T Intel Core i5-5300U (a Broadwell-based core that pre-dates even the 1st gen Skylake) that's in the same product class as M1-powered laptops, and that averages about 27 OPN1 WUs/day. Now granted, this laptop is 100% dedicated crunching, and it has a fan, but still... [Edit 1 times, last edit by William Albert at Nov 27, 2020 7:18:30 PM] |
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mbotmiller
Cruncher Joined: Dec 1, 2005 Post Count: 47 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi all and @ericinboston,
I’ve been testing on the base M1 Mac mini for the last several days so I can give an update on that. World Community Grid has been running 24x7 on all 8 cores and I haven’t had any stability or thermal issues. In terms of memory usage, I’ve observed the OpenPandemic WUs using ~130-170 MB each of memory right when they start and when the WUs are nearing completion, they’re using ~250-290 MB each. Based on the earlier reports in this thread, I did change the memory settings right away to allow BOINC/WCU to use up to 95% of the memory, but I’ve never seen the total M1 Mac mini memory usage over 5-5.5 GB while only running the WCU and I haven’t seen any threads paused with the “waiting for memory” status. In terms of performance, I’m seeing the M1 Mac mini complete OpenPandemic work units in an average time of ~2.9 hours. Thus, with 192 “thread-hours” per day available (8 single-thread cores x 24 hours), it should be able to complete ~66 OPN1 WUs/day and that’s what I’ve been seeing thus far. In terms of total system power draw while crunching, I’m seeing the M1 Mac mini drawing 25 watts while crunching at 100% and thus it is using .6 kWh/day. That translates to ~110 OPN1 WUs/kWh. For comparison, on a late-2018 Mac mini with an Intel Core i7-8700B CPU (6 core / 12 threads) and a 2019 16” MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7-9750H CPU (also 6 cores / 12 threads), I’ve measured them at ~46 OPN1 WUs/kWh. So the new M1 Mac mini does seem to be 2.4 times more efficient than both of those systems. Previously the most efficient computer I have ever measured was a Windows laptop with an Intel Core i7-8650U CPU (4 cores / 8 threads) that draws 29 watts under full load and does ~80 OPN1 WUs/kWh. Compared to that system, the M1 Mac mini is still ~38% more efficient. In terms of general M1 performance, I would echo what @William Albert mentioned that I’m not sure if it is quite fair to compare the M1 performance to desktop-class chips drawing several multiples of power. I think Apple’s marketing emphasis has been on how efficient the M1 is and how powerful it is at an extremely low power draw (i.e. where that is important for mobile devices likes laptops), but not that it was ever going to be challenging desktop-class chips from recent years in raw multi-core performance. This is Apple’s first chip designed for thermal and power constrained devices - when they start putting Apple Silicon chips into devices like the iMac and Mac Pro, then I think it would be more fair to compare the raw performance of those chips to other desktop-class chips from Intel and AMD. The one other thing I think is worth mentioning is that right now, the World Community Grid performance numbers mentioned above for the M1 Mac mini are reflective of all the code being run through Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer. While it may not happen in the near term, if the individual science projects like OpenPandemics, Smash Childhood Cancer, etc. would eventually update their applications to be able to run natively on Apple Silicon / ARM processor architectures, I’m guessing that might produce a ~20-50% performance boost. (I thought https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/googl...pple-m1-native-app-today/ was an interesting example of that with Google Chrome when Google released a universal version of Chrome that can run natively on the M1 chips) If there’s any other World Community Grid related data that anybody is interested in from the M1 Mac mini, please let me know and I’d be happy to see if I can get it. I’ll try and do one more post in a week or so after the system has been running 24x7 for a larger number of days. |
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