[OS X TeX] benchmark a pdflatexmk run on a Mac Studio?

[Warren Nagourney]

> On May 2, 2022, at 9:59 AM, Murray Eisenberg <murrayeisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 2 May2022, at 11:52 AM, William F. Adams via MacOSX-TeX <macosx-tex at email.esm.psu.edu <mailto:macosx-tex at email.esm.psu.edu>> wrote:
>> 
>> Have you seen:
>> 
>> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/571954/apple-silicon-m1-mac-compatibility-for-mactex-and-performance <https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/571954/apple-silicon-m1-mac-compatibility-for-mactex-and-performance>
>> 
>> William
> 
> Yes, I have seen that. But it doesn’t address performance on the Mac Studio with Max CPU.
> 
> Already when I do a complete pdflatexmk run of my 700-page book on a 13” MacBook Air M1 with 8-core CPU, 16GB RAM, and 1 TB SSD, it takes about 30 seconds less than on my mainstay machine, a2019 iMac 27” with 3.6 GHz 8-core Intel i9, 64 GB RAm, and 2 TB SSD. On the latter, a complete run takes about 5 1/2 minutes. That seems excruciatingly long when I’m waiting to do further writing or editing after looking at what I have so far, complete with all cross-references filled on.
> 
> To have all the needed windows open, that 13” MacBook Air is out of the question, though.
> 
> Hence my interest in the M1 Max chip on a desktop.
> 
> ---
> Murray Eisenberg		murrayeisenberg at gmail.com <mailto:murrayeisenberg at gmail.com>
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Murray,

That seems very long on both devices. I have a 500 page book with about 1500 equations and about 500 figures and typesetting takes about 3 seconds on the M1 and about twice that on the Intel machine. I am guessing that the time limiting task on your machines is not typesetting but something else. 

Knuth acknowledges that TeX will not benefit from more than one core (the famous interview ~2010). I have seen a slew of benchmarks of the M1 Max vs the M1 Pro and the only place where it makes a difference is in tasks which can take advantage of the GPU. Of course, TeX is not in that category, but apps which do video editing and some scientific apps using the Apple replacement for OpenCL are.  

A developer of a popular iOS app (Marco Arment) has tested the Xcode compile time on an M1 Max with 64 GB of Ram and an M1 Pro with 16 GB and it took exactly the same time on both machines (19 sec, vs 30 sec on an M1 in a Mac Mini).  

I doubt very much that there will be any difference in typesetting speed for any of the current M1-based machines. 

Cheers, 

Warren Nagourney


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