And the fans are silent (or nonexistent), and the heat output and energy consumption is minimal.

And it's faster on even the cheapest low-end M1 Mac. This is a very real benchmark that impacts my ability to get work done. I know that cross-compiling Linux on an Intel X86 CPU might not be as fast as compiling on an ARM64-native M1. Yeah, well, it's one of the things that takes the most time and makes an impact on my own workflow. Total time for the test was 9 minutes on the mini (which has a fan to keep the CPU cool under load) and 10 minutes on the Air (which doesn't have a fan, so it starts to throttle after a while).Īnd even if the mini's fan came on during the build (it probably did), I couldn't even hear it over the ambient 32dB environment in my office. I bought both an M1 10 Gbps Mac mini and a M1 MacBook Air to replace the 16' Pro-for the same total price-and I ran the same compile on it, using the exact same configuration. The Intel laptop cost over $3000 when I bought it, and the thing is basically a frying pan on my legs and has two obnoxiously-loud fans running full blast whenever you even look at it sideways. With this Docker-based environment on my 2019 Intel i9 16' MacBook Pro, I can compile the kernel from scratch in about 12 minutes. I recompile the kernel enough I made my own shirt for it!

I've been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pis lately-more specifically, work which often requires recompiling the Pi OS Linux kernel for the aarch64 architecture. It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark-be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building Emacs. (With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.)

Emacs mac m1