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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

#591

Post by dutchmartin »

throwaway4good wrote: post #568
martin_bech wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to add you cant do Android development on these, as you need Android Studio, but that seems to be on the way — Support for Apple Silicon is in progress

I assume they have the OpenJDK JVM ported at this point so all of JetBrains' products should be working or close to working.

They have to make the claim ‘millions of devices run Java true’. But anyway. A lot of programming languages are going to have to support Arm now. Interpreters for like php and js must be cross-compiled and then most things can work. Like Rust just brought their arm support to the tier 1 support level, see https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2959

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

#592

Post by Tepix »

throwaway4good wrote: post #554
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #479

> 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 results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

The Macbook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB isn't really priced competitively here in Germany. It's almost 1600€.

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

#593

Post by mpweiher »

dharma1 wrote: post #506
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #479

> 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's probably iPad pro - the current 2020 gen iPad pro has A12Z (essentially the same chip as 2018 A12X with extra GPU cores) - significantly older chip than A14. I think there will be an A14 iPad Pro refresh with mini led display in early 2021.

> thermals ... reduce clock speed.

I see that statement a lot, and yes, at some point that is going to happen.

But the analysis seems to fail to take into account what utterly amazingly low power devices these chips are. So while it will happen, it might take a long time.

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

#594

Post by m_mueller »

spockz wrote: post #449
m_mueller wrote: post #444

Couple one of these with a good USB-C hub and a cloud based Windows 10 VPS, and you have the future of professional workstations. Though, how good are these hubs yet nowadays? I'd want 1x USB-C power, 1x thunderbolt USB-C passthrough, 2x USB-A, 1x HDMI and 1x gbit ethernet in a portable format. maybe throw in SD card and a sound card with separated microphone port, and you'd have pretty much the universal I/O hub.

Maybe one of these hyper hubs are for you: https://www.hypershop.com/collections/usb-c-hubs

Thanks! Looks promising.

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

#595

Post by Tepix »

adrian_b wrote: post #590
throwaway4good wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

As expected, the Apple M1 is a little faster than Inter Tiger Lake in single-thread applications, but it is a little slower than AMD Renoir in multi-threaded applications. So for things like software development where you compile frequently your projects, the new Apple computers are a little slower than similar computers with AMD CPUs. So even when taking only CPU performance into consideration, there are reasons to…

> Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance.

That's exactly the reason why you would chose Apple Silicon right now where you can choose between Intel and Apple SoC. There are of course other reasons such as battery life and price.

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

#596

Post by Tepix »

kmlx wrote: post #579
throwaway4good wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? as a power user I will not be touching anything apple ARM until all my hundreds of software apps are certified to work exactly the same as on x86_64. i will not rely on rosetta to take care of this. i need actual testing. besides this, 8GB of RAM is how much a single instance of chrome uses. i…

> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

Apple is at day 1 of their two year migration to Apple Silicon. Your judgement seems not just a little premature.

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

#597

Post by vbezhenar »

throwaway4good wrote: post #554
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #479

> 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 results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

They are not priced competitive. Cheapest macbook air starts from $999. Cheapest Dell Inspiron starts from $319.

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

#598

Post by Tepix »

One interested little side aspect of Apple Silicon and Apple's war against Epic Games is going to be Unreal Engine.

I can see Unreal Engine not being available for Apple Silicon for quite a while. During the presentation of the new notebooks, Apple showed quite a bit of gaming. If there are no Unreal Engine titles for Apple Silicon, this could hurt them.

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

#599

Post by adrian_b »

Bud wrote: post #172
maz1b wrote: 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…

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.

Without doubt, the Apple M1 has the highest single-threaded performance of any non-overclocked CPU, being a little faster than AMD Zen 3 and Intel Tiger Lake.

Nevertheless, because Apple has chosen to not increase their manufacturing costs by including more big cores, the multi-threaded performance is not at all impressive, being lower than that of many much cheaper laptops using AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPUs.

So for any professional applications, like software development, these new Apple computers will certainly not blow away their competition performance-wise, and that before taking into account their severe limitations in memory capacity and peripheral ports.

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

#600

Post by ojosilva »

What are current viable alternatives to the M1 MacBook (Air and Pro) laptops in the PC world?

I'm looking for those 2% computers "in the same class" (from the apple keynote 2 days ago) that are faster than these M1 laptops. From the looks of it they surpass their Apple store siblings, but how about x86 PC laptops? I'm currently shopping for my next dev machine, in the lighter side of the form-factor.

I've seen some name-dropping here and in other threads, like HP Zbook and Lenovo, but I'm completely out of the loop since I moved to a fully specced i7 2014 Macbook Air back in the day and.

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