GoKawiilIn an interesting test, DuckDB’s Gábor Szárnyas compared the 512GB MacBook Neo with a range of cloud servers to see how Apple’s new entry-level laptop performs on heavy database workloads. Here’s how it did.
MacBook Neo goes up against cloud servers with up to 4× more memory
In a blog post titled Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook (via Boing Boing), Szárnyas describes how he benchmarked the MacBook Neo using two benchmarks: ClickBench and TPC-DS:
ClickBench has 43 queries that focus on aggregation and filtering operations. The operations run on a single wide table with 100M rows, which uses about 14 GB when serialized to Parquet and 75 GB when stored in CSV format. TPC-DS has 24 tables and 99 queries, many of which are more complex and include features such as window functions. And while TPC-H has been optimized to death, there is still some semblance of value in TPC-DS results.
In all tests, the MacBook Neo was up against two cloud instances:
c6a.4xlarge with 16 AMD EPYC vCPU cores and 32 GB RAM.
c8g.metal-48xl with a whopping 192 Graviton4 vCPU cores and 384 GB RAM.
For the ClickBench benchmark, they ran two tests: a cold run, which measures performance when caches are empty, and a hot run, which measures performance once the system can take advantage of caching.
For the cold run, the MacBook Neo beat both cloud instances by quite a lot, completing all queries under a minute, up to 2.8 times faster than its counterparts.
While impressive, DuckDB explains that:
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