In a recent test, DuckDB’s Gábor Szárnyas pitted the 512GB MacBook Neo against several powerful cloud servers. He wanted to see how the MacBook performed under heavy database tasks.
In his blog post, “Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook,” Szárnyas described how he conducted benchmarks using two tests: ClickBench and TPC-DS.
ClickBench focuses on 43 queries that involve data aggregation and filtering on a massive table. TPC-DS is more complex, involving 24 tables and 99 queries, making it a tougher challenge.
The MacBook Neo faced two cloud instances:
- c6a.4xlarge with 16 AMD EPYC vCPU cores and 32 GB RAM.
- c8g.metal-48xl with 192 Graviton4 vCPU cores and 384 GB RAM.
In the cold run test, where caches are empty, the MacBook Neo outperformed both cloud servers, finishing all queries in under a minute and being up to 2.8 times faster. This impressive result stemmed from the MacBook’s local NVMe SSD, which offers quicker access than the network-attached disks used by cloud servers.
However, during the hot run, things changed. The c8g.metal-48xl completed the test in just 4.35 seconds, while the MacBook Neo took 54.27 seconds. Despite this, the median query times showed that the MacBook could still outperform the smaller c6a.4xlarge instance.
For the TPC-DS benchmark, the MacBook Neo held its ground as well. At SF100, it effortlessly managed most queries, with a median query time of 1.63 seconds. But at SF300, things got tight. The MacBook sometimes needed to spill data to disk, with one query taking a staggering 51 minutes. Still, all queries were completed in 79 minutes.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time DuckDB has tested Apple’s hardware. The A19 Pro chip in the iPhone 16 Pro was also benchmarked under extreme conditions, completing a challenge in just over seven minutes.
For more details on DuckDB’s findings with the MacBook Neo, check out their full report.
Insights
Experts point out that while the MacBook Neo offers impressive performance for its price, users with heavy database needs might still find cloud servers essential. The ability to scale resources in the cloud is unbeatable for large enterprises.
Recent surveys show a trend towards personal computing devices that can handle more intensive workloads, making tests like these increasingly relevant.
Overall, these benchmarks highlight the MacBook Neo’s capabilities, especially for users who may not need the extensive resources of cloud computing but still want reliable performance.
