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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

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was Surface that started the trend, then MacBook followed and became a feature. By the way, “throttling” refers to CPU _slowing down_ despite cooling working at full capacity, so loud fans in itself isn’t one. e: Another way to explain thermal throttling would be “thermal fading”, like brake fading on a car. Whether brake fading is considered a design fault or a feature that allow bursts of stronger brakes is sema…

If we're doing analogies, let's do them right :) Therefore I'd argue it is more like supercharger overheating on a car. As a supercharger gets hotter from prolonged load it gets hot and warms the air entering the engine which reduces cold-air intake thus reducing horse power compared to a cooler supercharger. There is a way to solve this: by fitting a chargecooler - which is basically a cooling system for the supercharger.

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

#682

> 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?

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows

- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines

- only 2 thunderbolt ports

- limited to 16GB RAM

- no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards

- no AAA gaming

- can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static

- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

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

#683
post #585
post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also funny that Johny Srouji and probably others in his team come from the team at Intel in Israel that "saved" Intel in the early 2000s by designing the Intel Core architecture which is still used by Intel today. cf. Anandtech article from 2003: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1083/2

Some people are priceless. One of the designers of Ryzen, Jim Keller [1], for example. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12689/cpu-design-guru-jim-kel...

Jim also lead the team behind the Apple A4 and A5 SOCs - Apple's first venture into designing their own Silicon.

Edit: hadn't clicked through to your article. my comment is redundant

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

#685

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? - locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows - virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines - only 2 thunderbolt ports - limited to 16GB RAM - no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards - no AAA gamin…

- Starts at $999 for the base laptop version. You can get much cheaper still good Windows laptops.

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

#686

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.

That's interesting take on it. I guess with 5G around the corner we will see MacBooks with 5G integrated and Remote Desktop won't be a pain in the ass. May be that's another reason Apple made this move.

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

#687
post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

€1665 in Czechia, and we have much lower purchasing power.

To be honest, you'd expect widely traded good to trade at the same prices, regardless of local purchasing power.

The price seems to be the same except for tax. Germany has a 16% rate (July-Dec 2020) and Czechia 21% for sales tax/VAT.

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

#688

> 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…

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.

The available RAM and eGPU support could explain that rather than raw performance.

I also imagine not all customers are ready to jump on ARM day 1. Some will want to wait until the software ecosystem has had time to make the transition.

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

#689
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.

It's not measuring sustained performance. The fanless MacBook Air is going to throttle much sooner than a desktop iMac with proper cooling and unlimited power.

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

#690

> 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?

No Linux support is a deal breaker. (current versions with Intel included)
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