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

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731–740 of 1001 posts

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

#731
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'…

> I've become something of CPU collector in recent years, and I have a nice line of p6 cpus from thePentium Pro

I bought i486DX for $20 month ago, as a memo of my first CPU.

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

#732

Their line from the video about being the highest performance chip in single core appears to be true. This is of course a synthetic benchmark but the single core result is very promising. Note that the single core and multi core scores exceed the top-of-the-line 16” MacBook Pro (9th generation 8-core i9 2.4 ghz). I actually made the call to sell my 16” for the new Air yesterday. It’s looking like a good call. Glad I’…

That Air will sell so well.

Many don't even want to pay for the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar and many will probably see an Air's fanless design as an advantage over Pro, even if its CPU is throttled a little more often in sustained high CPU workloads. Complete silence is just that good. And it's going to be so much cheaper.

I think the star of the show yesterday was definitely the MacBook Air.

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

#733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an important one to keep in mind. I'm sure most native Mac apps will be compiled to ARM, but a lot of existing apps won't. Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps. I for one really wouldn't mind if Apple would build a native app to replace Electron apps, e.g. a chat app that works as a good client for (what I have open right now in Rambox) Discord, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and multiple Slack chann…

Electron seems to have support in recent beta releases.

You still have to rebuild your software and explicitly support a bunch of different architectures.

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

#734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "laptop"/"desktop"-grade chip distinction is pretty arbitrary here. This is the first of their CPUs. The iMac will almost certainly be running a higher end CPU which at the very least supports more RAM. It's likely the 16" MacBook Pro and the higher end 13" MacBook Pro will share a CPU with the iMac the same way the Mac mini and the MacBook Air share a CPU.

I think the holdup for the iMac is not the CPU, but rather Apple's discrete GPU which is not ready yet. For replacing the Xeon-W in the Mac Pro and iMac Pro, they will also need a higher performing CPU, sure.

I hope they offer an option for integrated-only for all their product lines going forward.

The 16" MacBook Pro is only available with a discrete GPU, which I don't need but causes me tons of issues with heat and fan noise. The dGPU has to be enabled to run external monitors, and due to an implementation detail, the memory clocks always run at full tilt when the resolution of driven monitors doesn't match, resulting at a constant 20W power draw even while idle.

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

#735

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…

I think the Surface was late to the party, the original Macbook Air had huge problems when it launched in 2008.

https://www.theage.com.au/technology/apple-fans-burned-by-ho...

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

#736
post #714
post #711

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

Maybe the gaming part.

If porting IOS games is easy then gaming for most people shouldn't be an issue.

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

#737

> 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…

I checked this geekbenchmark with our several different computers on hand, and I can confirm that it's total useless measurements for real world applications or performance.

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

#738
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…

> 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 featur…

They also updated the MacBook Pro so that is exactly the performance you are going to get for this generation.

The big screen model might give you more cores and RAM but IPC is going to be exactly the same.

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

#739
post #581

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…

I'm primarily a Mac user but laptops are cheap. If I were working on a team doing Linux development for x86 I'd certainly have a Linux laptop for that even if I preferred a MacBook for other purposes.

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

#740

A matter of time until Apple releases a ChromeBook competitor - a cheap plastic laptop for schools/students, similar in spirit to the iPhone SE, perhaps running on A14 instead of M1, and a 12" screen. This would be great for marketshare gains and to get more young people into the Apple ecosystem. Perhaps something that looks like the polycarbonate MacBook introduced in 2006?

Maybe reintroduce the iBook? Ha!
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