I’ve got a new Apple laptop, so I thought I’d do an Emacs build benchmark. Building Emacs is what people do on computers, right? At least if I extrapolate from myself, which is the only natural thing to do.
It’s called proof by induction. Look it up, nerds.
So here’s the benchmarks:
| My Main Build Machine | AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8 Core/16 Threads) | 2m14s | 7m31 |
| My Lenovo Carbon X1 Laptop | Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10610U CPU (4 Core/4 Threads) | 6m22s | 15m22 |
| My Old Apple Laptop | Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7360U CPU (2 Core/4 Threads) | 7m13s | 12m33 |
| My New M1 Apple Laptop | Apple M1 (4-to-8-ish Cores) | 2m44s | 6m37s |
The next-to-last column is with -jTO-THE-MAX, and the last column is with -j1.
I’m impressed! The M1 is able to build Emacs almost as fast as my AMD machine… which is a lot bigger.
Of course, on Debian I’m using gcc and on Macos I’m using clang, so it’s an apples-to-some-different-brand-of-apples comparison.
It’s even more impressive how much faster this laptop is compared to the Apple laptop from… 2019? Yeah. It’s more than twice as fast! And doesn’t have a fan! The old Apple laptop would sound like a VAX in a hurricane while building Emacs!
And it’s also twice as fast as the laptop I use daily here on the couch; last year’s Lenovo Carbon X1, which is just embarrassing. Lenovo! Get on it! Make an ARM laptop that’s fast!
For the first time in my life, I have Apple envy. That is, for the first time ever, they’ve made a laptop that’s clearly superior to what’s available for us Linux peeps. My only comfort is that the Apple keyboard still sucks. Yeah! And it doesn’t have a TrackPoint! Yeah! My laptop is still the best! Yeah! Take that!
Yeah! I’m not the least envious!
*sniff*
Edit some hours later:
But one thing that would be interesting to look at is Emacs performance on M1 vs the other machines. And a way to broadly look at that is to see how long it takes to byte-compile a bunch of Emacs Lisp files: This exercises much of Emacs, except display-related stuff.
So: Benchmarking with
rm `find lisp -name '*.elc'`; time make -jMAX
I get:
| My Main Build Machine | AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8 Core/16 Threads) | 0m57s |
| My Lenovo Carbon X1 Laptop | Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10610U CPU (4 Core/4 Threads) | 4m13s |
| My Old Apple Laptop | Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7360U CPU (2 Core/4 Threads) | 5m33s |
| My New M1 Apple Laptop | Apple M1 (4-to-8-ish Cores) | 1m33s |
Here the AMD clearly wins over the ARM, but per-core performance is in advantage of the ARM. And, of course, the ARM soundly wins over both of the other two laptops.