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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

#821

[flagged]

What a horrible comment, and a largely false one.

There's no record of Jobs being anti-vax (your comment is already the fifth Google search result for "Steve Jobs anti-vax", and the top four are nothing to do with him being anti-vax.

As for "eschewed almost all forms of modern medicine": completely false. He delayed surgery for his cancer - which was of a form that was known to be slow-growing and not especially lethal - for just 9 months, then decided to have conventional surgery. This is not "eschew[ing] almost all forms of modern medicine". It's just delaying for a relatively short period.

He later spoke of his regret about this delay to his biographer, so others would be warned against doing the same thing [1].

Even still, he lived for another 8 years after the diagnosis and was in good health for most of it.

Some experts dispute that his approach likely caused his death, and even suggest it might have extended his life [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

[2] https://www.livescience.com/16551-steve-jobs-alternative-med...

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

#822

> 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 think more results are needed to smooth out the curves. If you check all the results by model so far,

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Macmini9%2C1

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=MacBookPro17%2...

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q...

it looks like they're all in the same ballpark (i.e. the Air is not leading others, just comparable).

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

#823
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always used 15” MBPs without external displays as my only computer for years. I like being mobile and don’t particularly like having a desktop + laptop. Since COVID I’ve been stuck at home so I decided to finally get an external monitor. The problem is that you can’t use the 16” with an external display and the lid open without the fans spinning at full speed. Some people don’t mind it but it drives me crazy. No…

> The problem is that you can’t use the 16” with an external display and the lid open without the fans spinning at full speed Say what? I have a LG 5K and two 27” Apple Thunderbolt displays (four screens total including laptop display) hooked up to my 16” MBP and fans definitely are no where near full speed, unless I’m compiling or in a Google Hangout that is...

I have two identical top-specced MBP16", bought them as soon as they were released. They BOTH do that with my LG 5K Ultrafine display, whether they're closed or open, without doing anything particularly heavy. Sent them both to Apple, they passed all checks with flying colours. And that's the end of more than a decade of giving Apple tons of money. I built a Ryzen desktop this year and, despite missing macOS terribly, I couldn't be happier with the speed and ergonomics.

edit: I've tried both sides of the laptop, I have iStat Menus and keep an eye on temps, etc.

edit2: they "only" spin to 3.5k-4k at idle, but go up as soon as I do anything with Chrome or am on a video call, which is most of my job

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

#824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Torvalds ripped it apart nearly a decade ago. It's a useless benchmark, what I want to see is things like time to compile a bunch of different software, things that take long enough for the processor/cooling to reach thermal equilibrium etc. I.e. stuff that more closely matches the real world

He ripped apart a very different benchmark for what it was worth, that was GB3 at the time I believe. 5 was a rewrite to make it cross platform-equal. In real world use it actually is far more relevant than thermally limited benchmarks. It just measures max peak burst performance...which is important because 90% of all users use their computer to do only bursty tasks rather than long term processing. See exporting a 10 second clip on an iPhone or loading a heavy SPA webpage on a Mac. These are 5 second burst tasks where real world use would not be thermally limited but would see real change consistent with Geekbench.

It's really only intended to be one of many benchmarks to tell the whole story; of course Linus would attack that because it doesn't make any real sense in his use and isn't the full story for him. If Geekbench was not tested, it would not cover the majority of computing uses and it would weigh cpus that had poor turbo or burst performance unfairly high for most uses.

Geekbench is kinda like 0-60MPH times and other tests (like SPEC2006) are like top speed I guess? The whole story is between them.

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

#825
post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many apps optimized for the x64 platform won't run as well as the benchmarks.

They did mention in a presentation some applications ran even quicker in Rosetta 2 than native. Though Wine isn't an emulator, I've seen the same in Wine numerous times. How many, which, etc, who knows? Interesting to figure out regardless.

This is often because it's translating syscalls rather than emulating them, so for applications that are only asking the OS to do the real work, in those cases it's running native code. And then it's running it on a current day CPU instead of one from two years ago.

Unfortunately, although applications like that exist, they're not the common case.

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

#826

I'm looking forward to seeing what the top end of this chip can do. 64 cores ought to be nice! 32 cores at least.

Interesting question is whether they go with 2x/4x M1 or have a specially designed M2.

I think M2 would be next year, no? So maybe M1X or M1S or M1P or something like that.

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

#827
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also outperforming the 5950X in single core. Incredible!

Yeah, and doing this without a fan . It's almost like Apple is rubbing Intel's face in it for sport. It's not even fair.

The 5950X in a single core load only uses around 18w. Drop 200mhz off of the top end boost frequency and it drops to 11w.

Short duration single core workloads workout a fan is trivial even for CPUs that aren't trying to do so.

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

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the electron apps out there already have native iOS versions which will run natively on AS macs too, that should go a long way to smooth the transition (and will be interesting to see how much extra RAM you gain from not needing slack/spotify/notion etc to run on Electron).

I guess there will still be issues for people who need to run VMs or media apps like Adobe CC etc, and also it will take a while for some dev environments to be fully supported (https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 for example shows it will take some time to get to feature parity).

Overall though a lot of the hard work has already been done, and I'm sure in 2 years time or whenever the transition is 'complete', mac owners will be getting much more value for money with few drawbacks (the main one being higher walls around the garden)

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

#829

This is very interesting and in line with Apple's claims. I am looking forward to some real world numbers for different tasks in the next few weeks and months as native apps become available. 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…

Your h265 example is due to the iPhone having a dedicated HW encoder while the iMac was rendering using the CPU. A hardware video encoder is almost always going to be faster and more power efficient than a CPU-based one by definition. However, a CPU encoder offers more flexibility and the possibility of being continually improved to offer better compression ratios. Generally, HW encoders offer worse quality at smalle…

You see the same order of magnitude differences between encoding 8-bit H265 on the 2020 imac vs 2019 imac. The T2 in the 2020 imac has hardware encoding ability for 8-bit H265.

Now, the thing is: intel's AVX512 instructions are supposed to accelerate this sort of work, but in practice they are getting lapped by the T2 chip. That signals that apple's ability to tune hardware designs to the needs of content creators is greater than intel's.

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

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there Rosetta that they talked about?

It's an emulator, not a panacea. "Rosetta is meant to ease the transition to Apple silicon, giving you time to create a universal binary for your app. It is not a substitute for creating a native version of your app.” https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

It's a stop gap yes, but I am replying to someone that said their apps will not run on these new machines.

And check my reply to a sibling comment where people are finding cases where Rosetta is faster than native.

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