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

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

#191
post #118

MacBook Air with M1 vs. XPS 13 with Tiger Lake i7-1165G7: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4306696?baselin... Single core similar and multicore 50% better for MacBook.

The XPS's CPU only has 4 cores to the Air's 8. Dell would be wise to ditch Intel for AMD so that they're competing with the same TSMC 7nm silicone as Apple. Intel is in trouble.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few reasons to buy the Mac Pro with the lowest CPU option. This here is the comparison to make and it crushes the M1's multithreaded score of 7,000 with a score of almost 19,000: https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/mac-pro-late-2019-intel-x...

I suspect an Apple Silicon equivalent to Ampere’s Altra (which can go to 80-core today per socket and 128-core soon) would absolutely devastate these Geekbench scores on a tricked out Mac Pro. If you want to make an apples to oranges comparison that’ll really be the one to make.

Great point. It also makes me wonder about how long the NVidia deep learning advantage will last.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still has a lot of limitations that matter to many pros - max 16 GB of RAM, max 2 displays (only 1 external for laptops), only enough PCIe lanes to support 2 thunderbolt ports. eGPUs aren't supported either, but hopefully that is a software thing that will be fixed. It will be very interesting to see what the performance will be of the more "pro" chip that overcomes those limitations that they'd put in the 16" and…

why would it be only 1 external display? Can you not plug into a thunderbolt dock and use multiple external displays? I do exactly that with my 2012 MacBook Pro.

You can use sidecar with an ipad for a second external display.

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

#194
post #118

MacBook Air with M1 vs. XPS 13 with Tiger Lake i7-1165G7: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4306696?baselin... Single core similar and multicore 50% better for MacBook.

And the Dell is $500 more

To think I lived to see the day when you buy a macbook for value

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

#195

ARM is the future, at least in laptops. Apple lead the fray again, it's incredible.

I have a burning question: Can I use gcc, python, etc. on the new M1-based Macbooks? I am thinking about getting one but not sure if I can use it as a development machine. How does rosetta translation layer work with brew apps and other binaries?

Yes you can.

For GCC targeting arm64 macOS, the dev branch is at https://github.com/iains/gcc-darwin-arm64/ currently.

For Rosetta, everything runs except virtualisation apps.

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

#196

I really really hope that in real life scenarios this will be much faster than Intel CPUs, in case a wake up slap from AMD will not do. Maybe Intel will swallow its pride and design a new CPU for TSMC.

If they haven’t woken up by now, when will they?

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

#197

Kind of remarkable for a laptop without a fan. (Infamous fan-hater Steve Jobs would be proud.) Power/thermal management looks very good - low heat and long battery life without sacrificing performance. Presumably the Air will have to throttle performance for some workloads, but not in this benchmark apparently.

Was Steve Jobs an infamous fan-hater? What did he do/say?

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

#198

I wonder what Linus thinks of Geekbench's accuracy now: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost... https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=185109&curpost... Personally I'm not convinced, until I see something like SPECint/SPECfp results.

[deleted]

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

#199
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing my 16" MBP (8 core i9 2.3ghz / 32GB RAM) with the new Air as well. All of that power (yes I know, it's not sustained) without a fan is incredible.

Yeah I had almost the same configuration (2tb/32gb/2.4 ghz). I’m literally getting the new Air for half of what I’m selling it for.

You guys must have some generic or Apple specific workflows since you are confident that the software is already supported.

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

#200
Man. Obligatory old person remark, but seeing this kind of a quantum leap in performance per watt makes me feel young and tingly all over again. If M1 makes SIMD suck less, there are downstream effects. It's true if that were /entirely/ the case, Radeon would have stolen the crown from NVidia years ago.

But this is different. There's the convenience factor here. How far does M1 have to go before commodity DL training is feasible on commodity compute, not just GPU?

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