Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 1001 posts

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

#641

Post by pjmlp »

ascar wrote: post #581
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? There are enough people who do not want to deal with MacOS and Darwin regardless the hardware specs. Also the way of least friction is usually to use whatever the rest of your team uses. There are even relevant differences in Docker for MacOS vs Docker for Linux that make cross platform diffic…

> Working with C/C++ is another pain point for cross platform, which already starts with Apples own Clang and different lib naming conventions.

A walk in the part to anyone that had to deal with coding with C or C++ across UNIX flavours.

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

#642

Post by GeekyBear »

rbanffy wrote: post #542
bigdict wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if M1 dominates an i9-9980HK at multithreaded workloads that make full use of available SIMD? Does an M1 dominate at peak theoretical flops?

M1 is not magic and can't break the laws of physics. SMT makes better use of silicon and will probably push speeds closer. OTOH, M1 has a fast memory that the i9 can't match. I still bet on the i9, but it'd be interesting to run a test.

>M1 is not magic and can't break the laws of physics.

Anandtech's deep dive provides several examples of advances in Apple's core design that didn't involve magic or breaking the laws of physics. For example...

Instruction Decode:

>What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry. Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs

Instruction Re-order Buffer Size:

>A +-630 deep ROB is an immensely huge out-of-order window for Apple’s new core, as it vastly outclasses any other design in the industry. Intel’s Sunny Cove and Willow Cove cores are the second-most “deep” OOO designs out there with a 352 ROB structure, while AMD’s newest Zen3 core makes due with 256 entries, and recent Arm designs such as the Cortex-X1 feature a 224 structure.

Number of Execution Units:

>On the Integer side, we find at least 7 execution ports for actual arithmetic operations. These include 4 simple ALUs capable of ADD instructions, 2 complex units which feature also MUL (multiply) capabilities, and what appears to be a dedicated integer division unit.

On the floating point and vector execution side of things, the new Firestorm cores are actually more impressive as they a 33% increase in capabilities, enabled by Apple’s addition of a fourth execution pipeline.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

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

#643

Post by dnh44 »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #149

Reposting from other thread: So can anyone comment on how we should interpret these benchmarks: a) Across the various Mac models (i.e. why buy a pro vs the air vs the mini). If they all benchmark the same, what am I paying the difference for? b) The M1 chip vs a ryzen desktop (naively interpreting this its punching up near a 5950X, which seems TGTBT?). How do these chips compare against the larger TDP competitors if…

I think those number are peak performance and not necessarily sustained performance, but I don’t know enough about geekbench to be 100% sure.

The pro and the mini have fans so they should be able to maintain these speeds for longer than the air which will presumably have to throttle down as it heats up.

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

#644

Post by arrrg »

miskin wrote: post #611
gregoriol wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One has to remember that Apple is still selling an Intel mac mini at the top of the range: it likely means something about the performance to expect from M1 vs Intel.

They probably have a lot of customers still demanding Intel CPUs. Mac minis are often used in server farms as build servers and there are many companies that would require Intel CPU there for some time.

All of that is true, however it is notable that the models they replaced (are not selling anymore) are all the lower end models. The two port MacBook Pro, the Air, only the lower end mini.

Seems pretty obvious to me that there will be another more higher end variant of the M1, though maybe the only difference will be the amount of RAM, the number of GPU cores, the number of supported USB4 ports or something like that, not raw CPU performance.

Either way, it seems obvious to me that the M1 is their low end Mac chip.

That will be interesting to watch.

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

#645

Post by timpattinson »

jeswin wrote: post #272
Bud wrote: 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.

> 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 the wrong conclusion to make. For instance, the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s (with a Ryzen 4800u) with a 15W TDP posts the same Geekbench multicore scores [1] as the M1 Macbook. But the ThinkBook isn't in any way faster than the top-end iMac for real world compute intensive tasks. The M1 certainly…

Maybe Geekbench is kinda useless as a benchmark suite then? I only see it used by Mac fans.

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

#646

Post by Fnoord »

baybal2 wrote: post #430
trynumber9 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet it still makes it very clear: a properly implemented ARM core can easily bury an X86 of equivalent size because of inherent advantage of not having to pay interest on 40 years of technical debt in the ISA.

AMD64 (x86-64) runs x86-32 at near-native speed, but it isn't x86-32. As someone who was an early adopter of Linux/AMD64 I know first-hand backwards compatibility is very important. Apple knows, hence Rosetta. Every time they switch architecture, they invest into backwards compatibility. As a counter-example, Itanium wasn't good with backwards compatibility.

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

#647

Post by Liquid_Fire »

dutchmartin wrote: post #591
throwaway4good wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most popular languages have supported Arm for many years already, on Linux (and more recently, some of them on Android and iOS).

> Rust just brought their arm support to the tier 1 support level

(for Linux)

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

#649

Post by guax »

stu2b50 wrote: post #194
johnsolo1701 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Dell is $500 more

To think I lived to see the day when you buy a macbook for value

Wait for real world reviews, the indications here are that apple will catch up and be a good price/performance if not better but the jury is still out.

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

#650

Post by kalleboo »

reaperducer wrote: post #248
kalleboo wrote: post #100

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…

max 2 displays (only 1 external for laptops) I wonder if that includes AirPlay screens, or just wired.

I would imagine just wired - it's probably a lack of DisplayPort/HDMI encoders rather than rendering resources.
Post reply on HN