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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

#721

Post by rswail »

nmlnn wrote: post #254
cactus2093 wrote: post #128

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy m…

> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers? They get outsized influence because they're the ones that make the shiny youtube reviews (using their video editing skills).

In my experience, every teacher I know for the last 6-8 months.

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

#722

Post by m12k »

kar1181 wrote: post #553
hbbio wrote: 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

Did not know that, and indeed the pentium m / core / core 2 series microarches have done incredibly well. I've become something of CPU collector in recent years, and I have a nice line of p6 cpus from thePentium Pro -> Pentium 2 -> Pentium 3 -> Pentium M -> Core 2 that conveniently sidesteps those awful Netburst p4 CPUs. It feels like this (p6+) microarch has finally run out of road and needs a rethink. What 'saved'…

It's fascinating to see history repeated - the architecture and design with the most power efficiency generally also turns out to be the one that can be pushed furthest for performance when you want to go that route.

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

#723

Post by soneil »

fludlight wrote: post #320
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear, but here's some knowledgeable speculation: - All M1 models only have 1 Thunderbolt Controller, thus can only handle 2 Thunderbolt ports on all announced models so far. - All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K. - No M1 model supports >16GB of RAM or 10GB Ethernet. All of the above seem like bandwidth limitations to save cost that a future "M1X" or "M2" or "X1" would be extremely likely to f…

Is there a legitimate laptop purpose that requires 10GB internet? If so, how niche is that purpose?

It makes a huge difference for networked storage. For some rough equivalency (ignoring seek times, but also ignoring tcp overheads etc, total spherical cow territory)

- An 8x cdrom narrowly beats 10meg ethernet.

- 1x dvdrom narrowly beats 100meg ethernet.

- ATA133 narrowly beats 1gbit ethernet.

Original SATA is 1.5gbit, so 1Gbit ether bottlenecks us to 1999 storage speeds.

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

#724

Post by [deleted] »

GeekyBear wrote: post #652
timpattinson wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

[deleted]

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

#725

Post by AshamedCaptain »

GeekyBear wrote: post #652
timpattinson wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

And yet here we have the M1 MacBook Air apparently beating the M1 MacBook pro, by a large margin.

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

#727

Post by m12k »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #582
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.

While it sounds promising, I'm going to wait for some additional benchmarks and real world usage scenarios; factors like cooling, multi-process work, and of course suboptimal applications (browsers, Electron apps, stuff compiled for Intel) will be a big factor as well. That said, it's promising and I'm really curious to see where this development will lead to in a few years' time.

Me too - let's see what the sustained performance is like. That said, with this much headroom, I'm cautiously optimistic that even with some throttling going on, it'll still be plenty fast for anything I'm likely to throw at it.

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

#728

Post by marcan_42 »

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 do not require I/O BARs, and highly doubt Nvidia ones do either. The VBIOS will probably assume it can use it, but most modern cards can be initialized without actually running the VBIOS (because people use them on headless servers, for virtualization, and things like that). The I/O BAR is only required for legacy VGA compatibility, you can ignore it.

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

#729

Post by pjmlp »

sliken wrote: post #668
pjmlp wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently I am not a professional, since I don't use docker and leave VMs for servers.

How about using a second monitor?

I am always on the go, it is a bit hard to carry a second monitor with me.

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

#730

Post by imtringued »

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?

Why would anyone who is not forced to buy a Mac get one of these?
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