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

The 5950X cores are actually reasonably power efficient. Anandtech has nice charts here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

TL;DR is that 5950X cores draw about 6W each with all cores loaded at around 3.8GHz per core. They scale up to 20W in the edge case where a single core is loaded at a full 5GHz.

> And the M1 is running at a lower clock.

Comparing a power-optimized laptop chip to an all-out, top of the line desktop chip isn't a great way to compare efficiency because power scaling is very nonlinear. The AMD could be made more efficient on a performance-per-watt basis by turning down the clock speed and reducing the operating voltage, but it's a desktop chip so there's no reason to do that.

Look at the power consumption versus frequency scaling in the Anandtech chart for the 5950X: Going from 3.8GHz to 5.0GHz takes the power from about 6W to 20W. That's 230% more power for 30% more clockspeed. Apple is going to run into similar nonlinear power scaling when they move up to workstation class chips.

If you really wanted to compare power efficiency, you'd have to downclock and undervolt the AMD part until it performs similarly to the Apple part. But there's no reason to do that, because no one buying a top of the line 5950X cares about performance per watt, they just want the fastest possible performance.

Comparing to an upcoming Zen3 laptop chip would be a more relevant comparison. The Apple part is still going to win on power efficiency, though.

EDIT:// sorry, i misread/skip the "chip" part.

I would say that generally, a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity.

A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete.

In all these cases, it's the quality and innovation in the tool, that's holding these professionals back from being even better at their job than they already are.

Also, take special note of the case of the stenographer: professionals often require special professional variants of their tools, which trade off a longer learning curve for a higher productivity ceiling once learned. A stenographic keyboard takes years to learn, but all non-stenographic keyboards cap out at 150WPM, while stenographic keyboards allow those trained in their use to achieve 300+WPM.

And to make one more point: a professional car driver isn't a race-car driver. A professional car driver is a chauffeur. Rolls-Royce's cars aren't famous for how luxurious they are to drive; they're famous for having all the amenities needed by professional drivers — chauffeurs — to allow them to efficiently cater to their clients' needs. Limousines are the same kind of "professional tools" that stenographic keyboards are: they increase chauffeuring productivity.

> How did [video editing] become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

Because all tech vloggers and most tech pundits — the people who review tech — edit videos as part of their jobs, of course ;)

Apple, it's been good knowing you, time to move on.