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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

#291
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought the new Air, but I’m keeping my 16” as it may be the last laptop of that quality that can run programs without telling some stranger over the network that you’ve run a specific program. Current (and presumably future) macOS does this and you can’t turn it off, except with Little Snitch. New APIs in macOS 11 means that Little Snitch will no longer be able to block OS processes, so it will require external net…

This is where I’m at too. Compromising Little Snitch and VPNs is just a bridge too far. It’s cool that they got this level of performance in a lightweight form factor, less so when it enables the worse of surveillance practices.

Ugh, I didn’t realize that the system apps would bypass VPNs, too. That’s terrible. :(

https://appleterm.com/2020/10/20/macos-big-sur-firewalls-and...

Looks like it will be impossible to use Apple Silicon (without external network hardware) without revealing your track log to the CIA. How cool is that?!

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

#292

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.

It’s one run and it runs for a couple of minutes, so it’s not going to tell you much about thermal management.

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

#294

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…

My friends brother runs a landscaping business, purely off his iphone. He asked me for advice on how to get his iphone onto a laptop, like with an emulator or something. This was about a year ago, so the ARM mac stuff was just rumors at that stage, and I mentioned that it wasnt possible. Now, I can say hey if you get one of the new macbooks / mac minis, you can run your iphone apps natively. He probably will be one o…

Interesting. Just out of curiosity, can you let us know which apps he uses? I am guessing a CRM id one of those

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely a version that can beat a 8 core Xeon is made for 'actual professionals'?

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…

It’s a first generation chip in a thin-and-light laptop. I suspect all those problems will be fixed as they scale it up. Not to mention their unique position of leverage dedicated acceleration silicon in their software now.

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

#296
post #274

AMD's Zen 3 (Ryzen 5xxx series) are beating the Apple M1 in single core score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore As another datapoint Ian (of Anandtech) estimated that the M1 would need to be clocked at 3.25Ghz to match Zen 3, and these systems are showing a 3.2Ghz clock: https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1326516048309460992

The M1 is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an MVP desktop arm chip.

M2, M3... that is when I think we will see stellar performance against things like Ryzen.

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

#297

Can somebody explain how is M1 going to work on larger GPU tasks (rendering, encoding etc) with it's memory bandwidth M1 total memory bandwidth is 68.2 GB/s (128 bit LPDDR4x-4267) AMD Radeon Pro 5600m memory bandwidth is 394.2 GB/s (2048 bit HBM2) https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-5600m.c3612

It's not clear, but here's some knowledgeable speculation:

- All M1 models only have 1 Thunderbolt Controller, thus can only handle 2 Thunderbolt ports on all announced models so far.

- All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K.

- No M1 model supports >16GB of RAM or 10GB Ethernet.

All of the above seem like bandwidth limitations to save cost that a future "M1X" or "M2" or "X1" would be extremely likely to fix, and that's where you'll see the bandwidth increase.

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

#298

This really flips the argument that Mac hardware is overpriced and underpowered on its head. Now Apple computers are a premium product from a performance perspective, as well.

So performant premium that I’m thinking of calling Apple about my MBP preorder and switching it to the Air. Last thing I need is a MacBook Air equivalent with an unnecessarily loud and annoying fan.

Hang on, you're swapping a AS MBP for an AS MBA because you think the fan noise will be an issue with the MBP?

If anything, it's a bonus to have the fan so your can have prolonged boost performance while the MBA chip will throttle under continuous load.

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

#299

This really flips the argument that Mac hardware is overpriced and underpowered on its head. Now Apple computers are a premium product from a performance perspective, as well.

So performant premium that I’m thinking of calling Apple about my MBP preorder and switching it to the Air. Last thing I need is a MacBook Air equivalent with an unnecessarily loud and annoying fan.

Yeah, they only put the fan in MBP to annoy people, of course. It has zero use. Go order the Macbook Air and have fun. Maybe you can fry your breakfast eggs on it too.

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

#300
post #274

AMD's Zen 3 (Ryzen 5xxx series) are beating the Apple M1 in single core score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore As another datapoint Ian (of Anandtech) estimated that the M1 would need to be clocked at 3.25Ghz to match Zen 3, and these systems are showing a 3.2Ghz clock: https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1326516048309460992

The M1 is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an MVP desktop arm chip. M2, M3... that is when I think we will see stellar performance against things like Ryzen.

It'll be sooner than that. Just wait for "M1X" or "X1" or whatever Apple calls the increased-bandwidth variant that goes into their 16-inch model and desktops.
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