M1 Macbook Air for Android Studio Developers

hey everybody so alexander cys kind has been the number one go-to guy for m1 mac and development and recently he did this video where he released the m1 macbook air versus the macbook pro 14-inch i think the base model like a core m1 max and he did an android build and in the android build there was inconsistencies mostly because the 14-inch macbook pro even though it has more powerful cores it was coming behind the macbook air well interestingly enough the benchmark that he was using for android studio was um this repo right here by josh hick and if you notice the last time the gradle was updated on this benchmark project was two years ago so by the time we recorded this it had an outdated gradle now when i went to try it out for myself the gradle was upgraded five days ago and i believe that alexander probably just recorded this video before this was applied because the gradle is for i'm not an android expert but from what i understand the gradle is one of the build tools for building everything so i assume that upgrading the gradle will actually make it substantially more optimized now i don't have an m1 macbook pro i just have the m1 macbook air with 16 gigabytes so what i'm going to do is i'm going to run this benchmark now and compare them to the numbers that alexander was getting now if you notice here the gradle that was being used for the last two years was 3.5 and now it's been updated to 7.0 which is a substantial version jump also for the plugins android junit oh okay so the um the creator of the benchmark obviously updated the gradle in addition to that i'll be using the zulu jdk which is optimized for arm and this is this is basically going to allow the m1 mac to be fully optimized for compiling android studio projects or jdk projects so what i've done so far is that i downloaded the project and i also have the cpu usage history window i have tg pro's uh temperature monitor so that we can see how hot the cpu gets right now it's ridiculous like it's under 30c uh it's just not something you see every day on pcs so um this is the current temperature at idle it was recently rebooted i also have the activity monitor down here just showing memory usage and on top of that i'm going to have android studio open with the project for the benchmark with the updated gradle now something that i also did was if you go into android studio preferences you can increase the heap memory settings i can do this because i have 16 gigabytes the default that it comes with is 1200 megabytes i upgraded it to you know 2048 or 2 gigabytes it's not that much of a leap i think i could do three or four gigabytes without having any system performance issues but i'm gonna leave it at 2 because it was the recommended settings when i open android studio so we're going to open up by terminal now before we actually type the command to run the project let's just pull from the repo to make sure that we're up to date with the current one awesome now i'm going to run the command now do note that because i'm recording it might use resources as well and the score might not be as high but it's still substantially higher than other x86 laptops and desktops even that i saw on the spreadsheet that he had so i am going to run it and i'm going to fast forward but i'm not going to cut i think the first run is going to be super slow and then the subsequent runs are going to be much faster all right so the benchmark finished and we got one minute and 35 seconds which is outstanding um however the lowest i've seen this number on my personal machine is one minute one second i and this was the first run so let's do another run and see how low it goes all right so this seems pretty awesome the second run i got one minute and 10 seconds which is a substantial difference from the previous result of one minute 35 seconds and just to put that in perspective if we open up if we open up the benchmark he does supply an excel sheet with a lot of people submissions from their systems and if we if we go by build time on the second run let's sort this so on the second run a minute 10 is comparable to an amd 5950x 16 cord 32 thread which is a beast of a cpu and a desktop cpu on the second run let's see if we can get that faster so what i'm going to do i'm going to close my browser i'm going to quit it i'm going to quit this antivirus i guess i can't quit it well i can quit the vpn let's i'm sure that i'm losing performance because of everything i have open and the fact that i'm recording but let's go to preferences and increase the heap size from two gigabytes to three gigabytes we're going to apply it it's going to tell us we have to relaunch android studio now this is something i really like android studio is notoriously known for setting pcs on fires just booting it and the fact that optimization have have been improved for arm architecture is amazing hopefully moving forward we can all realize that it's more important to have something optimized than to have something with raw performance on synthetic benchmarks now what we're going to do is we're going to run this command this is going to be the first run the heap size is a little bit bigger so maybe we can get that down to 105 or one minute one second like i saw one time however because i'm recording i really doubt it alright so this one is complete and it did it in one minute and six seconds which is ridiculously fast and also much faster than alex original video for the macbook air i think the macbook air only got down to like a minute 30 but that's all because of the gradle being outdated now if you use the zulu jdk which is the armed version which runs great on apple silicon if you're running android studio the latest updates that are m1 optimize you can get substantial performance and if we look here you can see that as soon as i started a benchmark the cpu all the cores even the efficiency ones were maxed out and the highest temperature we achieved was which was the highest temperature all right ah there it is so the highest temperature on the one core was 75 c which means the cpu never cracked 80 degrees now disclaimer i did do the silicon pad modification to the m1 air and i think it's a great modification that everybody should do now i know that the body the bottom of the body may get warm but the way i counter this is by having a shell around the laptop now i was going to do that regardless of whether or not i did the silicon pad modification because aluminum is a malleable metal that can easily get nicked and chipped and i would just want it to protect my laptop so if you're an android developer seriously consider the m1 air as opposed to the new ones now i'm sure that the new ones are going to be faster than the m1 air i think there was an optimization issue with the older gradle but now that it's up to date i would really like to see this test ran again with an m1 pro or an m1 max just because the gradle was really really outdated all right bonus content so just for shits and giggles let's max out the heap size it's going to relaunch android studio i stopped recording i closed out all the temperature tg pro program and the activity monitor and now that everything's been closed let's try the benchmark again with four gigabytes of heap memory just for just some giggles usually after two gigabytes the diminishing returns at that point all right it completed in one minute and two seconds let's rerun it just one last time to see if we can get under a minute all right a minute and one second we couldn't crack under a minute well it's still relatively quick compared to other machines so once again consider the macbook air as your android development machine

Channel: Code Fallacy

Views: 642

Keywords: M1, apple silicon, m1 max, m1 pro, macbook pro, macbook air, android studio, android studio artic fox, artic fox, zulu, openjdk, arm optimized, android development on m1, android benchmark, alexander ziskind

Id: z11wA78Y_6s

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021