Yes, the m1 isn’t a graviton 2. But then again the mobile i7 in my current MBP isn’t the same as the Xeon processors my code runs on in production. This isn’t about serious optimization, but rather the ability for a developer to reasonably estimate how well their code will work in prod (e.g. “will it deadlock”). The closer your laptop gets to prod, the narrower the error bars get, but they’ll never go to zero.

And keep in mind this is about reducing the incentive to switch to a chip that’s cheaper per compute unit in the cloud. If Graviton 2 was more expensive or just equal in price to x86, I doubt that M1 laptops alone would be enough to incentivize a switch.

We have MBPs on our desks but our cloud are Centos Xeon machines. The problems I run into are not squeezing every last ms of performance, since it's vastly cheaper to just add more instances. The problems I care about is that some script I wrote suddenly doesn't work in production because of BSDisms, or Python incompatibilities, or old packages in brew, etc. Would be nice if Apple waved a magic wand and replaced its BSD subsystem with Centos* but I won't be holding my breath :)

* yes I know Centos is done, substitute as needed.

I think this is a slightly different point from the other responses, but this not true: if I am seriously optimizing something I need ssh access to the same chip.

I don't run my production profiles on my laptop - why would I expect to compare how my i5 or i7 chip on a thermally limited MBP to how my 64 core server performs?

It's convenient for debugging to have the same instruction set (for some people, who run locally), but for profiling it doesn't matter at all.

This is typical Hacker News. Yes, some people "seriously optimize" but the vast majority of software written is not heavily optimized nor is it written at companies with good engineering culture.

Most code is worked on until it'll pass QA then thrown over the wall. For that majority of people, an M1 is definitely close enough to a graviton.

Instruments exposes a fair number of counters, though–what's wrong with using it?