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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

#491

> The M1 chip, which belongs to a MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency. > The Mac mini with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067. > Update: There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core…

the latest ipad pro is still on the A12Z bionic. the air just got refreshed with the A14 bionic

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

#492

> The M1 chip, which belongs to a MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency. > The Mac mini with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067. > Update: There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core…

The A14 Air just came out and has a brand new CPU. The Pros have much fancier displays, lower pen latency, etc. Subjectively, in most typical use, the Pros already feel like they have more available cycles than iOS apps have got around to soaking up.

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

#493
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have incubated this chip arch in their iPhones for five years!

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

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very impressive. It seems like the open computing platforms where you have control of your hardware/ os are in real trouble. I use Mac at work, but Linux at home, if the hardware isn’t competitive....

- Mac has ~10% of the global market for end user machines. It doesn't now, never has, and never will own the market nor does it desire to sell cheap enough machines to do so. - Given that you can't add ram after the fact and 256GB is anemic the cheapest laptop that is a reasonable choice is $1400. - The cheapest desktop option is $6000 with an 8 core cpu or 8000 with a 16 core. - The average end user spends $700 on a…

Completely nailed it. I need something with more grunt than the base prices here and apple don’t have a hold on that market because of expense. And they don’t hold the lower end market.

This is still a niche.

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

#495
post #48

This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years. For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out 16 inch MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600m and even with that I'm regularly hitting 100% usage of the card, and…

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

I’d go so far as to say “laptops of late”, thermal throttling isn’t unique to MacBooks.

My XPS15 regularly throttles and sounds like it’s about to take off.

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

#496

Looking at Geekbench charts, I see that my Samsung phone has a faster processor than my $3000 gaming rig, and it sure as hell draws less power ... so why aren't datacenters just use phones instead of Xeon and Epyc servers, what am I missing?

Nuvia is a startup that is planning to do just that https://nuviainc.com/blog You need to be competitive on single thread performance to have a chance at datacenter. Amdahl's law is still very relevant. Up until very very recently, the CPUs were not up to par.

Nice charts ... so performance per watt is indeed 10x better for S865 vs the Ryzen.

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

#497

> The M1 chip, which belongs to a MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency. > The Mac mini with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067. > Update: There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core…

It may be possible the variations are due to differences in the thermal environment when the tests were conducted. I would expect the pro and mini to beat the air as they should have better thermals, but that may only show up over longer term tests and environmental factors could win out in shorter tests. Just a theory.

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

#498

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…

eGPU support will depend on if they have a way to work around the need for a PCIe I/O BAR. Many GPUs require that to initialize and as far as I know no ARM cpus support it since it's a legacy-ish x86 thing. It'll be the same problem that prevents gpu use on raspberry pi 4s still. I bet you can make a controller that'll provide a mapping for that to allow it but that'll mean needing a new enclosure (probably not a hug…

I don't quite get how Apple could claim to be Thunderbolt-compatible with this sort of limitation in hardware, though.

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

#499

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

They were waving their hands around a bit saying that in addition to on-package RAM with high bandwidth, they have done optimizations inside driver, OS and APIs to eliminate 1 or even 2 or more RAM to RAM copies for common tasks. So maybe there is a higher effective bandwidth when comparing to Wintel machines. It was very vague. Would love to read a detailed article comparing the systems.

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they aren't. All of the top results have crazy overclocking and liquid cooling. You need to look the numbers here: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks . Top end Zen 3 is slightly lower than M1.

Not exactly. You can check the clock speeds: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4620493.gb5 Up to 5050MHz is stock behavior for the 5950X and it's using standard DDR4 3200 memory.

Even if the Ryzen wins out, that would still be comparing a desktop CPU to a mobile one, using 105W vs 10W. It is incredible that we are making these comparisons. Apple outdid themselves.
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