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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

#881
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The new R23 release even does multiple runs by default. Excitedly waiting for results for the M1 to start popping up now that its released and has support.

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

#882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

68.2GB/s is a ton of bandwidth. Actually, very, very few tasks on a desktop can stress a CPU enough to saturate the bandwidth on a single task. Proper HPC programs written to have absolutely zero cache misses can. A javascript eating 1GB of RAM to show some text, and pictures, cannot.

I asked about GPU workloads the bandwidths are 394.2 GB/s > 68.2 GB/s (5.78 times) And even the raw GPU processing power AMD Radeon Pro 5600M is 5.274 TFLOPS vs M1 as Apple rated 2.6 TFLOPS It's a downgrade in GPU processing power for the user.

Yes, but for computational, non gaming tasks, it barely is.

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

#883
post #875

If you still own any Intel stock it is probably good time to dump it. Not only can't they compete with AMD, Apple now started running circles around them all. I wonder what the world is going to be like when companies own entire stack including all hardware (even things like cameras and displays) and applications (including app stores). There is going to be no competition as any new player would have to first join an…

Outside HN like bubble circles, very few companies actually bother to buy AMD, and ARM is no match for servers, neither is Apple going to sell their chips to third parties. Intel can still do as many mistakes as they feel like it, and AMD better hold on to their game console deals.

This simply isn't true. I just spun up a new instance on Oracle cloud, and it came with AMD CPUs. If AMD is selling to cloud providers Intel is fucked.

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

#884

Go ahead, buy into that and before long Apple will lock the OS down so tight you will only be able to install software from the app store. Apple, it's been good knowing you, time to move on.

I don’t see Apple going further on this front than what they’ve already done. They don’t want to discourage developers from using their machines because guess who works on MacOS? Developers using Macs.

Been inside an apple store lately? They no longer need to care about developers.

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

#885

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…

whatsapp support in native apps is not something that isnt happening because there is no will in teams or companies to do that. its just not possible, there are no APIs. everything you see is a workaround or mashup of the whatsapp web feature

Not just the lack of will - hostile action and threats from whatsapp against even just community projects trying to build a client for a platform not supported by the official ones. This might no longer be the case but a couple years ago they still used to do that, so no wonder so little native clients exist.

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

#886

Go ahead, buy into that and before long Apple will lock the OS down so tight you will only be able to install software from the app store. Apple, it's been good knowing you, time to move on.

That will eventually happen and they will claim 'security'. They'll make it harder to install 3rd party software. Indie devs are going to suffer because of this tight control.

Exactly. Their revenue model going forward is to have the millions who have passed, and will pass, through the apple stores downloading all apps from the app store. Kaching!

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

#887

> 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…

Geekbench is a series of extremely short and bursty benchmarks. Because of this, it doesn't really test the steady state speed a system is capable of, it's more testing the peak performance for short periods.

In this view, it's entirely possible that the Air simply did not have time to throttle before the benchmark ran out.

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

#888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not priced competitive. Cheapest macbook air starts from $999. Cheapest Dell Inspiron starts from $319.

Answer straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAo8gnUCWzE

The recent keyboard fiasco would say otherwise.

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

#889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "no AAA gaming" This is, arguably, a disadvantage of any Mac. But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.

> But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase. Not really. The business models for desktop gaming are completely different to mobile devices, and there is no meaningful common market. I think people will actually be surprised at how few games from iO…

> "the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac"

Exactly. So it was never really the hardware that held back gaming on Mac, but the fact that from a game-development perspective it's an esoteric platform that has limited or no support for the main industry standard APIs (DirectX, Vulkan, etc).

It was never worth the effort for most game developers to bother porting games to the Mac because writing a custom port for Metal was way too expensive to justify for such a niche market.

But now with Apple Silicon, that all changes. If you're going to port your game to iOS (and that's surely tempting - it's a huge platform/market with powerful GPUs and a "spendy" customer base) then you basically get Mac for free with close to zero additional effort.

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

#890

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…

For top performance you're looking at high end intel H series laptops (https://www.ultrabookreview.com/20056-core-i9-portable-lapto...) or Ryzen 4000 H series laptops (https://www.ultrabookreview.com/36004-amd-ryzen-7-4800h-lapt...). They seem to basically match the M1's benchmarks though, not exceed it. You will not find anything as thin and light as a macbook air with that performance in the x86 line-up, as those CPU's are power-hungry beasts that necessitate big battery and cooling setups.
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