M5 MacBook Air compiles much faster than a 2018 Mac mini
Moving from a 2018 to an M5 MacBook Air feels similar for light everyday use, but compilation is much faster. ffmpeg took 57 seconds.
GPU speed was measured with FLOPS and compared against an Ubuntu PC with an RTX 3060 12GB and an RTX 3080 20GB. The test code uses PyTorch and MLX to repeat large matrix multiplications and estimate raw compute speed from the time taken.
The PyTorch example uses MPS to run on Apple graphics hardware, while the MLX example uses bfloat16 numbers. LLM is mentioned in the title, but the provided content does not show clear LLM numbers.
Key points
- Light daily use felt similar between the 2018 and the M5 MacBook Air.
- ffmpeg on the M5 MacBook Air took 57 seconds.
- GPU FLOPS were measured by repeating large matrix multiplications in PyTorch and MLX.
- The comparison hardware included an Ubuntu PC with RTX 3060 12GB and RTX 3080 20GB cards.
- LLM is mentioned, but no clear LLM result numbers are visible in the provided content.