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

macrumors.com

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

#711

Post by zwily »

moondev wrote: post #682
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? - 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…

Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

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

#712

Post by amelius »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #656
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.

Are you sure about that? I didn't see this mentioned anywhere in the news, or on the M1 Wikipedia page.

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

#714

Post by gsich »

zwily wrote: post #711
moondev wrote: post #682

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? - 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…

Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

Maybe the gaming part.

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

#715

Post by m12k »

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…

AFAIK it's pretty common for new macs to spend a while creating an index of its hard drive. For that reason, if you want to run benchmarks, you should generally wait until it's done with that (e.g. an hour or probably less with these speedybois). It might be that the people running the Pro benchmarks didn't wait for that, in their rush to publish the first benchmark. This would be consistent with what we're seeing - the Pro has faster single core performance, but slightly lower multicore, because some of its "background" cores were busy creating the index, while the Air was done with that task.

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

#716

Post by leadingthenet »

46Bit wrote: post #710
leadingthenet wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wouldn't be awesome. This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push, and because other parts of the business were able to massively subsidise the R&D costs necessary to come up with a competitive SOC in an established market that's otherwise a duopoly. If their CPU/IC design segment were its own company, the M1 would never have seen the light of day. Period. Fu…

> This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push This seems pretty grounded. > The whole reason why they're able to beat Intel/AMD is because they don't have to cater to the exact same generic market that the established players do, but instead massively optimise for their exact needs. I'm less convinced of this. Their exact needs seem to be making laptops... and so t…

But they're not just making generic laptops. They're making Macs.

Everything from the memory model, to the secure enclave for TouchID/FaceID, to countless other custom features, are parts that other SOCs do not need to have present on the die, and cannot optimise for.

For good or bad, this is truly a piece of engineering that could only have come out of Apple.

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

#717

Post by my123 »

josteink wrote: post #415
acomjean wrote: post #382

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....

> It’s very impressive. It seems like the open computing platforms where you have control of your hardware/ os are in real trouble. Not really. The M1 may objectively and factually be a very good CPU, but it comes bundled with the cost of being locked into a machine with a locked bootloader and not being able to boot any other OS than MacOS. And many people will find such a cost unacceptable.

The bootloader is not locked.

However, good luck writing the full set of drivers for your OS of choice.

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

#718

Post by Aaargh20318 »

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.

Their focus is not on power users ? They just completed the first, small, step of the migration to ARM. They only updated the very low-end models, those who were never targeted at power users anyway, and we're seeing that their cheapest, lowest-end models are whooping the i9 MBPro's ass.

Sure, the features and RAM may not be there yet, but again, these are the low-end models. If we're seeing this level of performance out of an MBAir or Mini. I can't wait to see what the Mac Pro is going to be capable of.

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

#719

Post by ojosilva »

Tepix wrote: post #612
ojosilva wrote: post #600

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 n…

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 GA502IV-AZ115 is likely to be faster. It is cheaper than the Macbook Air M1 with 16GB/512GB, too (in Germany: 1465€ vs 1588€). It has an AMD Ryzen 7 4800HS CPU and a RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU.

But that's a gaming laptop. Macbook Air is a "notebook" laptop, aka "ultraportable". Also the G15 Geekbench 5 is 1100 for single core, which is like 35% slower than the single core performance of the M1. Obviously for gaming benchmarks, then that's a different story...

I'm starting to wonder if Apple's "faster than 98% of PC laptops" is an understatement, at least within its class.

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

#720

Post by manmal »

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…

> it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus

Depends on the definition of "power user". Music producers, video editors, and iOS developers will be served quite well.

> lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.

When making that calculation, one should also take power consumption into account. $ per cycle is very low now with the new CPU.

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