Thread by @vRallev

At @squareeng we ran our Android benchmarks with the MacBook Pro M1 Max and it performed 65% faster than the MacBook Pro with Intel chip from last year! More details in the thread.

#AndroidDev #MacBookPro #Benchmarks

Many companies shared that they're equipping all their engineers with M1 laptops due to the better performance, but I barely could find any numbers how much better they are.

Last year we decided to buy iMacs for all mobile engineers within Square, because they were 30% faster than the MacBook Pros with Intel chip. You can read more about our benchmarks here: developer.squareup.com/blog/measure-m…

I followed the same approach and compared the following machines:
* MacBook Pro M1 Max, 64 GB of RAM, $3,900
* MacBook Pro Intel chip (model from last year), 64 GB of RAM
* iMac Intel chip, 64 GB of RAM, $3,700
* Mac Pro, 16 cores, 96 GB of RAM, $9,000
* EC2 instances

The M1 is 65% faster than the MacBook Pro with Intel chip. That's huge! An upgrade will quickly pay for itself.

The M1 is 34% faster than the iMac with Intel chip from last year. Even that's a significant boost.

The M1 is 53% faster than the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro configurations costs $5,100 more! You get two faster M1 laptops for that money and even have some left.

The M1 performend 32% better than one of the largest EC2 instances with 48 CPU cores and 192 GB of RAM, which costs $15,000 within two years (assuming 8 hours per week, 48 work weeks per year).

Make sure you install an ARM JDK! We ran the benchmarks with a JDK for Intel as well (likely using Rosetta 2) and it slows down the benchmarks by 2.5x on average.

The M1 performed significantly better than any other machine we tested. Why is the M1 so much faster when it only has 10 cores and should perform worse on paper? It's likely due to the extreme single core performance.

hothardware.com/news/apple-m1-…

We have a very large project and mega repository. Such improvements have a significant impact on developer productivity. For you the numbers might differ and the M1 Pro and less RAM might be good enough.

I hope the numbers help to convince your manager and IT department to buy new machines. It's very likely that you'll save money in the long run.