One of my development journals mentioned a bench test between these cpu’s. The result was that though the Pro and Max were definitely faster than the original M1, the speed would mostly be noticed in applications that took advantage of Multi-Core. “Normal” apps running on the M1, could be way faster than Intel chips, but the difference fades away between the M1 and its Pro and Max siblings.
What is your experience with PanX’s speed on an M1 machine vs Intel?
I hear the M2 is being held up because I haven’t bought an M1 machine yet. They are waiting; “Paul hasn’t bought the M1, we can’t come out with the M2 until he has owned an M1 longer than any 30 day return policy.” You know, they waited until I bought a LaserWriter with that PostScript Fax card technology before they dropped it six weeks later. It was a great idea - why send a low-res rendition when you can just send the postscript code (printer-to-printer fax) and render it at the resolution of the receiving printer. I recall that Xerox was on board but maybe not HP - and they have something to do with printers.
So I’m sorry for holding up the release of an M2 machine. Maybe a “GoFundMe?”
My belief is that for most applications, you can spend more time benchmarking the speed of your computer than you will ever save from a faster processor!
That said, I am anxiously awaiting a larger-screen iMac. This one will go to my wife, whose iMac is long of tooth, and I will use the new one. But not for speed, just to stay up-to-date longer.
I do have a M1 MacBook Air, which is really cool. Fast, too! And gigabit Internet really helps. I use Panorama with Internet APIs quite a bit. But it is all faster than I need.
I use a suite of Panorama databases to run my small medical office as well as many personal utilities for finance and such. Here are a couple of observations from 25 years of use and development:
Speed is key for our operation where we flip back and forth in the calendar and patient accounts all day long. A couple of seconds makes a difference in the frustration level, as has been known in the computer industry for decades.
I have a 21" M1 iMac and 2013 27" iMac side by side on my desk as I work to port the Pan 6 that we still use at work to the new Pan X version. For everything besides Pan, the speed difference from intel to M1 is striking - email, web, startup, etc - just go for it.
My Pan use is heavily graphics oriented, which is different from data searching and sorting due to changes in MacOS that others might explain better. Below is a section of my calendar that is the main screen of the program. It uses about 1500 lookups from the Calendar DB and Transactions DB to draw the week. Each cell has several possible flags and a name to find and display. There are about 10k calendar records, 5k patient records, and 80k transactions to parse.
On the 8 year old iMac, flipping to a different week takes about 3 seconds. On the new M1 iMac, it might be 2.5 seconds. Almost undetectable difference there. By contrast, the Pan 6 version takes about 0.5 seconds. Searching for and displaying the patient financial account is on the same level of speed differences. BTW I have spent many hours tweaking the display graphics and lookups for speed and tested a couple dozen to optimize to this arrangement.
Hope this helps. I’m hoping the native version that Jim is working on speeds things up.
