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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

#201

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy m…

It's just a name, if you need long battery life, bigger screen, dedicated gpu, etc. then you choose appropriately. Who cares what the Pro means.

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

#202

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...

If the Geekbench scores are to be believed, the M1 in the MacBook Air scores 7,500 multithreaded. So yeah, the 28-core Mac Pro is quite a bit faster (and can sustain that performance), but the performance of the Air looks extremely good.

It does look very promising. One can only imagine what future Mac Pros will be capable of. And thanks for the correction.

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

#203
post #179

What's actually more interesting to me than Intel vs ARM is how much further ahead Apple is vs the competition. The snapdragon 8cx is about 1/3rd the speed in both Single and Multicore performance of the M1. How is Apple so far ahead even with the same instruction set?

ARM laptops have been trapped in a vicious cycle of low performance -> low sales -> low R&D -> low performance. The A78C and X1 cores should help a lot but they still won't match Apple Silicon. Apple is ahead because they have more money than Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc. combined.

How big one's pocket isn't usually the driving factor on who does best.

This feels like once again Apple is 5 years ahead of competition just like when iPhone came out.

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

#204
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just outperforming the MacBook Pro. It's also blowing away the current 2020 top-end iMac, which has a 10-core Intel i9. And it's doing this while using more than an order of magnitude less power (10W vs. a TDP of 125W for that Intel part). That's stunning.

It’s also outperforming the 5950X in single core. Incredible!

Yeah, and doing this without a fan. It's almost like Apple is rubbing Intel's face in it for sport. It's not even fair.

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

#206

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?

Yes, Apple IIs and early Macs had no fans because Jobs wanted them to be silent.

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

#207
post #113

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

Not sure if this is in any way a useful comparison, but it's what I currently use and am looking to replace: Mid-2015 15" MacBook Pro vs MacBookAir10,1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4643216?baselin...

This is definitely compelling. I’m still going to try holding out until the Apple Silicon 16”, but my computer is more and more reminding me how long ago 2015 was.

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

#209

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.

> We've seen this before: cellphones tend to have simpler libraries that are statically linked, and at least iOS uses a page size that would not be relevant or realistic on a general purpose desktop setup.

This is an interesting thing to say considering that 1. most apps on iOS use large dynamic libraries and 2. Apple silicon Macs run on 16K pages, just like iOS.

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

#210
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptop Macs of late are known for heavy throttling due to inadequate cooling, which cannot have been unnoticed in simulations

But not anymore. That era is over.

So it’s natural that devices from that era and devices after that era behave differently
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