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Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#131

Post by gaul »

throwaway888abc wrote: post #87

Dell Inc. XPS 15 9575 vs MacBookAir10,1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4654605?baselin... Opinion: Pretty and impressive story

Note that this laptop uses Kaby Lake based on the older Skylake design. Newer laptops use Sunny Cove based on Ice Lake and have improved single-core performance.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#132

Post by anonfunction »

uniclaude wrote: post #119

In this day and age of Electron apps, I would say that RAM matters as much or more than CPU performance but seeing these results competes the story. M1 is good and has the potential to power pro laptops.

I agree, I would have probably bought the pro if it had a 32GB option.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#133

Post by mdorazio »

Really impressive. I was skeptical from just the Apple-released info, but it seems like ditching x86 for ARM really does mean that much performance increase per watt. I'm excited to see how this plays out in both the processor and OS space over the next few years.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#134

Post by plorkyeran »

harshitaneja wrote: post #63

All those thinking of buying the new MBA, are you not concerned about availability of applications? Not all x86 applications will have an ARM alternative, yet.

I haven't encountered any problems running x86 programs on the DTK. Performance is fine (with a slower CPU than the MBA) and everything I tried running worked. I'm sure someone will hit problems once a few orders of magnitude more people are using it, but most people won't.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#135

Post by kube-system »

nostromo wrote: post #127

So... I'd be feeling pretty silly right now if I bought the Mac Pro in 2019 for like $7,000. (Which I almost did!) https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/457 M1 is comparable to baseline Mac Pro on multicore performance and better on single core performance. And several thousand dollars cheaper (and smaller).

There's still a lot to be said for software support, IO, RAM, etc.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#136

Post by YetAnotherNick »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #88
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #53

And this test is very likely not the native test, but ran with translation from Rosetta. Kudos to Apple. This has the highest single core performance of all processors including highest end desktop processors from Intel and AMD: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

These are native. The ARM/Fat Binary release was today on the App Store.

Ah, I stand corrected. This was native test.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#137

Post by jaas »

throwaway888abc wrote: post #87

Dell Inc. XPS 15 9575 vs MacBookAir10,1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4654605?baselin... Opinion: Pretty and impressive story

The Intel chip in that comparison was released in Q1 2018, almost three years ago now. How is this a helpful comparison?

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/130411/...

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#138

Post by kondro »

uniclaude wrote: post #119

In this day and age of Electron apps, I would say that RAM matters as much or more than CPU performance but seeing these results competes the story. M1 is good and has the potential to power pro laptops.

With the storage IO right on the SoC I can imagine swapping to feel especially snappy as well.

Although it's worth remembering the m1 is just Apple's CPU for their low-end machines. They haven't announced their high-end 13" & 16" MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac Pros.

Also, I know Electron has a history of high-memory, but right now my Slack client is currently running at 500MB and my VS Code windows (3 projects) at And even though my current MBP16 is spec'd at 64GB RAM, I don't think 16GB would probably feel all that slow these days.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#139

Post by bpye »

uniclaude wrote: post #119

In this day and age of Electron apps, I would say that RAM matters as much or more than CPU performance but seeing these results competes the story. M1 is good and has the potential to power pro laptops.

I have seen an interesting point raised elsewhere. macOS on ARM will be able to run iOS apps (assuming the author doesn’t opt out). That means that a lot of the uses of electron or similar may no longer be needed. Slack, Spotify, etc. Some of course will still be electron, there’s no native version of VS Code for instance. But it could work out better than expected...

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#140

Post by YetAnotherNick »

LIV2 wrote: post #5

Is geekbench accurate at comparing across different architectures?

If anything, I feel like many tests are based on x86 special instructions like AES, which does not directly translate to other tasks. But for most of the tasks I think it wouldn't be possible that the processor are only better at those and performance of most program should correlate with geekbench score.
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