Benchmark Windows vs Apple Silicon with M1 pro chip

[Andrea Ciaccio]

Hi all,
after almost 6 years of using a standard version of a MacBook Air, I need to change laptop, and I am really struggling whether to upgrade to a MacBook Pro 14 with M1 pro chip (16 gb of ram and either 8 or 10 CPU cores) or a windows 11 with similar characteristics (such as a Dell or a Lenovo). I was wondering whether there exists any benchmark comparing these platforms when using STATA MP 17 8core version, but I did not manage to find anything relevant. Most of the benchmarks available on internet are for video rendering or photoshop users. So, do you know anything about it? Did any of you have the chance to run Stata MP on both two platforms and can tell me which performs "better"?
I know macOS does not allow to work on two different datasets, but I usually use Stata with one dataset at time, and I am currently working heavily with bootstrap and monte-carlo (and all of these are process-demanding tasks).
Thank you all in advance.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

I'm not sure there is a perfect answer here. StataCorp has benchmarks available but these pertain to the speedup from using more cores (and licensing from BE to MP), so that's not relevant. Stata on any platform can only work with one dataset at a time, but this is no longer strictly true with the use of frames. Frames let you change between multiple datasets arbitrarily.

On a broader note, you appear to weight two quite different operating systems. In this case, I would also take a step back and consider what else you want to use the computer for, and which of these environments works most easily for those other tasks.

These days I only use Stata on Windows, but there are some active Mac users here. They may have some perspective for performance on modern architectures.

[Andrea Ciaccio]

Thank you very much Leonardo! Yes, I know StataCorp provides these benchmarks. In principle, I would like to know (at least) if anyone here has used the MacBook Pro 14" with chip M1 pro and if they have any insight on it. In particular, if it is worth it for processor-intensive tasks such as bootstrap and Monte Carlo simulations!

[Joro Kolev]

I think people before have reported problems running parallel Statas on Mac systems. (This is related to you wanting to do computationally intensive work.)

I am a Windows user, but I cannot say I am much happy with the recent developments of Dell. Back in the days I had reliable Dell Latitude laptops. More recently I had one Dell XPS 15 on which I spent a lot of money. a bit more than 1500 pounds, and it crashed one year after I started using it, and it started to show blue screen, and right now I cannot even start it, I just see black screen. I lost data, big drama basically.

I am currently on the most modern Dell Latitude with 32gb of RAM, and this laptop has problems as well. It does not go to sleep well, it freezes often, and the controls are extremely weird. It is touch screen and understands complicated gestures, but to me this is all a pain as I am accustomed to the old Windows.

Overall I would say if you are devoted Stata user and this is why you are buying the laptop, just buy the cheapest that has the most RAM and some decent processor. It seems to me that both Macs and expensive Dells are a scam.

[Andrea Ciaccio]

Thank You very much Joro! I will then take this into consideration. Anyway, is there any Mac users who is currently using an M1 pro 14"? If so, how many cores?