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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

#651

Post by sirn »

kccqzy wrote: post #475
michaelmrose wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't we wait for non synthetic benchmarks to be performed by third parties running real applications? We could even compare some cross platform apps across both OS and cpu and see how the total package performs.

I've personally found Geekbench results representative of real time workloads. So do more traditional benchmarks like SPECint.

Anandtech has done SPECint on A14 and result is consistent with what we've seen from M1 on Geekbench. It's not the same CPU, but they share the same Firestorm/Icestorm cores.

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

#652

Post by GeekyBear »

timpattinson wrote: post #645
jeswin wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.

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

#653

Post by BillinghamJ »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #604
pvg wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, that makes sense - I didn't realise there was no Pro line on the newest chips yet. It'll be interesting to see how the next iPad Pros compare to these M1 Macbooks.

The iPad Pros never even used the A13 series - they're still back on A12 (though with some variants & binning), so understandable that it could be a fairly big jump

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

#654

Post by SXX »

simcop2387 wrote: post #326
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…

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…

AMD GPUs work just fine with POWER8 hardware so this is certainly solved.

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

#655

Post by randmsie »

acomjean wrote: post #382
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK... but let's say it's 95% there, even. How much power does an M1 draw compared to a 5950X? It's not even funny. And the M1 is running at a lower clock.

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....

With the prices these machines are going at (1600 for a basic mac air with 500gb and 26 gb ram), i dont see how these macs will be able to push an increase in apples market share.

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

#656

Post by ben-schaaf »

amelius wrote: post #648

Why do they call it Apple Silicon, when the core of the chip was designed by ARM and it was fabbed by TSMC? Can't any other customer of ARM do the same thing, in principle?

Apple aren't using ARM's core designs, they're just licensing the architecture.

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

#657

Post by andy_threos_io »

baybal2 wrote: post #315
andy_threos_io wrote: post #281

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

68.2GB/s is a ton of bandwidth. Actually, very, very few tasks on a desktop can stress a CPU enough to saturate the bandwidth on a single task. Proper HPC programs written to have absolutely zero cache misses can. A javascript eating 1GB of RAM to show some text, and pictures, cannot.

I asked about GPU workloads the bandwidths are 394.2 GB/s > 68.2 GB/s (5.78 times)

And even the raw GPU processing power AMD Radeon Pro 5600M is 5.274 TFLOPS vs M1 as Apple rated 2.6 TFLOPS

It's a downgrade in GPU processing power for the user.

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

#658

Post by marcyb5st »

Betelgeuse90 wrote: post #640
kmlx wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They also doubled (!!!) the SSD speeds, at least according to their slides. Presumably swapping will be much more seamless, so I'm not sure low RAM would be a huge issue for most day to day tasks.

It will still be a problem. The difference in access time between RAM and SSDs is still order of magnitude faster for RAM (10s of micro-seconds vs 10s of nano-seconds). So even if they doubles speeds random access of small data chunks will still choke your performance.

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

#659

Post by GeekyBear »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #339
whalesalad wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dunno. I find it hard to believe that their next chips will be more powerful. You must have an inside with Apple to know this

> I find it hard to believe that their next chips will be more powerful.

>Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.

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

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