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A future MacBook with an M2 chip will be an even better buy, and software availability will be even better.
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Many apps optimized for the x64 platform won't run as well as the benchmarks.
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…
What's actually more interesting to me than Intel vs ARM is how much further ahead Apple is vs the competition. The snapdragon 8cx is about 1/3rd the speed in both Single and Multicore performance of the M1. How is Apple so far ahead even with the same instruction set?
Probably has something to do with the 5nm process.
I'm not a fan of Apple's domineering business strategies, but this SoC is impressive. I have to imagine AMD and Intel will follow up with something similar (a tightly integrated SoC aimed at higher performance applications).
Unless you happen to need a new MacBook right now, I think the right move for most people is to hang on to their existing MacBook another year or two (get a battery replacement if necessary). A future MacBook with an M2 chip will be an even better buy, and software availability will be even better.
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I assume they have the OpenJDK JVM ported at this point so all of JetBrains' products should be working or close to working.
They have to make the claim ‘millions of devices run Java true’. But anyway. A lot of programming languages are going to have to support Arm now. Interpreters for like php and js must be cross-compiled and then most things can work. Like Rust just brought their arm support to the tier 1 support level, see https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2959
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if I recall correctly, the geekbench score does run on small bursts and it's designed to find the peak performance without taking the thermal limitations in account.
Hence why Cinebench is often used these days when evaluating real-world performance with sustained workloads.
GB deliberately avoids running up the heat because it is focused on testing the chip, not the machine's cooling ability.
Cinebench, as you say, tests "real-world" conditions, meaning the entire machine, not just the chip.
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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.
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It may be possible the variations are due to differences in the thermal environment when the tests were conducted. I would expect the pro and mini to beat the air as they should have better thermals, but that may only show up over longer term tests and environmental factors could win out in shorter tests. Just a theory.
if I recall correctly, the geekbench score does run on small bursts and it's designed to find the peak performance without taking the thermal limitations in account.
Of course the iPhone chip isn't as beefy as the M1, but the results still speak for themselves.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
> 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…
Has an interesting comparison of an iPhone 12 mini doing similar work to an i9 iMac
Now I haven't dug into the details to verify both produced the same results. I believe most of the difference is from software encoding versus hardware encoding. the follow up tweets suggest similar output.
it does show how workloads can cause people to jump to conclusions on simply one test and not having all the details to support the conclusion they desire to arrive at
Jonathan Morrison posted a video [0] comparing a 10-core Intel i9 2020 5K iMac with 64GB RAM against an iPhone 12 Mini for 10-bit H.265 HDR video exporting and the iPhone destroyed the iMac exporting the same video, to allegedly the same quality, in ~14 seconds on the iPhone vs 2 minutes on the iMac! And the phone was at ~20% battery without an external power source. Like that is some voodoo and I want to see a lot of real world data but it is pretty damn exciting.
Now whether these extreme speed ups are limited to very specific tasks (such as H.265 acceleration) or are truly general purpose remains to be seen.
If they can be general purpose with some platform specific optimisations that is still freakin' amazing and could easily be a game changer for many types of work providing there is investment into optimising the tools to best utilise Apple Silicon.
Imagine an Apple Silicon specific version of Apple's LLVM/Clang that has 5x or 10x C++ compilation speed up over Intel if there is a way to optimise to similar gains they have been able to get for H.265.
Some very interesting things come to mind and that is before we even get to the supposed battery life benefits as well. Having a laptop that runs faster than my 200+W desktop while getting 15+ hours on battery sounds insane, and perhaps it is, but this is the most excited I have been for general purpose computer performance gains in about a decade.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUkDku_Qt5c
Edit:
A lot of people seem to just be picking up on my H.265 example which is fine but that was just an example for one type of work.
As this article shows the overall single-core and multi-core speeds are the real story, not just H.265 video encoding. If these numbers hold true in the real world and not just a screenshot of some benchmark numbers that is something special imho.