M1 Apple Silicon for Chess?

[Steve Maughan]

Has anyone come any test attempting to measure how good the new Apple M1 Silicon will be for running chess engines?

Steve

[Peperoni]

From what I understood, the performance are good for single core, for multicore, it looks very average to my eyes.

[Jhoravi]

As far as I have observed chess engine speeds for 2 decades I noticed that it benefits a lot from larger L1 cache size. For the record, our mainstream x86 CPUs have 32kb/32kb L1 cache while this new apple M1 has gigantic 192kb/128kb!

[Peperoni]

Are some benchmarks available?

[Dicaste]

I ordered mac mini but didn't reveived yet. I'll do some testings and give feedback.

[Milos]

As far as I have observed chess engine speeds for 2 decades I noticed that it benefits a lot from larger L1 cache size. For the record, our mainstream x86 CPUs have 32kb/32kb L1 cache while this new apple M1 has gigantic 192kb/128kb!

Zen3 has for example 64kiB per core, but that's irrelevant since M1 doesn't have L3 cache at all, so essentially what is L3 on x86 is L2 on M1 and what is L2 on x86 is L1 on M1. 5950X for example has 8MB of L2 cache and 64MB of L3 (M1 total 16MB of equivalent L2).

To put things into perspective for Apple sheep, I would be surprised if single core performance on SF-NNUE would be more than 1.2Mnps from a starting position. Overall for 8 cores 8Mnps at best, i.e. far cry from a modern 4 core desktop CPU.

[Ras]

I would be surprised if single core performance on SF-NNUE would be more than 1.2Mnps from a starting position. Overall for 8 cores 8Mnps at best

Only four out of the eight M1 cores are for heavy calculations. The remaining four cores are small ones for saving battery in near-idle. The full performance will be rather around four times the single thread performance, not eight times.

Then again, there's no point in comparing a 10W mobile APU to a 65W desktop CPU, let alone to the even bigger ones. It stacks up pretty well however against AMD's 4000U series.

[Milos]

I would be surprised if single core performance on SF-NNUE would be more than 1.2Mnps from a starting position. Overall for 8 cores 8Mnps at best

Only four out of the eight M1 cores are for heavy calculations. The remaining four cores are small ones for saving battery in near-idle. The full performance will be rather around four times the single thread performance, not eight times.

I calculated 4x1.2+4x0.8. Ofc it could be that "energy" cores give only 0.5Mnps, but that would still give a total of about 7Mnps.

Then again, there's no point in comparing a 10W mobile APU to a 65W desktop CPU, let alone to the even bigger ones. It stacks up pretty well however against AMD's 4000U series.

That depends on which 4000U series CPU you take into comparison.
4900U will almost certainly blow M1 out of the water.

[Ras]

That depends on which 4000U series CPU you take into comparison.
4900U will almost certainly blow M1 out of the water.

I don't think so, even if the 4900U were not made of pure unobtanium. Geekbench 5 lists the M1 around 7500 in multicore. The fastest 4800U samples are around 7700 (generally rather in the 5000s or 6000s). It depends a lot on what RAM the machine is using (anything from DDR4-2666 to LPDDR4-4266), and the configured cTDP which can be 25W. The 4900U has only 100MHz more boost clock, 4.3GHz instead of 4.2GHz, but the base clock is the same.

[Raphexon]

That depends on which 4000U series CPU you take into comparison.
4900U will almost certainly blow M1 out of the water.

I don't think so, even if the 4900U were not made of pure unobtanium. Geekbench 5 lists the M1 around 7500 in multicore. The fastest 4800U samples are around 7700 (generally rather in the 5000s or 6000s). It depends a lot on what RAM the machine is using (anything from DDR4-2666 to LPDDR4-4266), and the configured cTDP which can be 25W. The 4900U has only 100MHz more boost clock, 4.3GHz instead of 4.2GHz, but the base clock is the same.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I think ARM chips have always underpeformed their Geekbench score for chess.
And for NNUE engines NEON is a downside compared to AVX2.