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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

#921

Post by valuearb »

miskin wrote: post #611
gregoriol wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One has to remember that Apple is still selling an Intel mac mini at the top of the range: it likely means something about the performance to expect from M1 vs Intel.

They probably have a lot of customers still demanding Intel CPUs. Mac minis are often used in server farms as build servers and there are many companies that would require Intel CPU there for some time.

The M1 Mini is far better than Intel Mini on cost/power, power/watt, power/heat measures.

Server farms are going to switch rapidly, one leading Mini server farm just announced a 600 unit starter order, and the CEO noted that Big Sur also made significant changes to licensing to make its use in server farms easier.

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

#922

Post by GeekyBear »

rbanffy wrote: post #905
GeekyBear wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>M1 is not magic and can't break the laws of physics. Anandtech's deep dive provides several examples of advances in Apple's core design that didn't involve magic or breaking the laws of physics. For example... Instruction Decode: >What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is b…

> advances in Apple's core design that didn't involve magic or breaking the laws of physics. That's exactly what I said. It's faster, but not an order of magnitude faster and different workloads will perform differently depending on a multitude of factors (even if benchmarks don't). Do not expect it to outperform a not-too-old top-of-the-line mobile CPU by a large margin.

The current gen iPhone chip using the same cores literally outperforms anything Intel makes on a per core basis.

Zen 3 slightly outperforms the iPhone chip, but it runs it's clocks slower to stay inside a 5 watt power draw.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

So, yes. Expect it to outperform Tiger Lake and Zen 3, at least on a per core basis.

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

#923

Post by ogre_codes »

mrweasel wrote: post #451
ogre_codes wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't compile your code? Obviously it depends greatly on what kind of software you are writing, but at all my dev jobs, I eventually end up waiting for some amount of time while the CPU heats the room up. Notably, VIM is inevitably more gentle on my CPU than VSCode and similar.

You could comfortable develop say a large e-commerce site on a 7 year old Macbook Pro, so I’d assume an M1 based Air would be equally fine.

That's fair. I think a lot depends on your stack and the specific project. Right now I spend a good chunk of time waiting for builds (usually 10-20 seconds) and my previous job was worse. Prior to that, not so much.

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

#924

Post by derefr »

bawolff wrote: post #410
derefr wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What in the world is an actual professional? I would say that generally , a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity. A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete. In all these cas…

I'm a professional programmer... hardware constraints aren't exactly the limiting factor when i use vim all day.

A professional user of a given tool. It's a qualified phrase.

You can be a professional, without being a professional user of all your tools. In fact, for any such tool, there's probably only one or two professions that are professional users of that tool specifically (i.e. where that is the tool that constrains their productivity.)

Many professions aren't constrained by any tools, but rather are constrained by human thinking speed, or human mental capacity for conceptual complexity. These people aren't "professional users" of any tools. They're just regular users of those tools.

So, to sum up — when a tool is described as being "for professionals", what that means is that the tool serves the needs of people who are members of a profession whose productivity is constrained by the quality of that tool. It doesn't mean that it's for anyone who has a profession. Just people who have those professions. They know who they are. They're the people who were frustrated by the tool they have now, and for whom seeing the new tool elicits a joy of the release of that frustration. An "ah, finally, I can get on with my work without [tool] getting in my way so much."

-----

Programming is a profession that is most of the time constrained by thinking speed. (Although, some of the time, we're constrained by grokking speed, which is affected by the quality of the tools known as programming languages, and sometimes the tools known as IDE code-navigation.)

Very little time in a programmer's life is spent waiting for a build to happen, with literally no other productive tasks that they could be doing while they wait.

(Someone whose role comes down solely to QA testing, on the other hand, tends to be a professional user of CI build servers. Faster CI server? More productive QA.)

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

#925

Post by valuearb »

olnluis wrote: post #369
valuearb wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Ryzen 4800u actually uses up to 25W TDP, depending upon implementation. And it’s 45% slower in single core. Most importantly, the M1 is estimated to cost Apple $65, the 4800u is a $300+ part.

Unlikely OEM's are paying 300+ for a 4800u. Certainly more than $65, though.

Certainly more than $200, so what’s your point?

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

#926

Post by dylan604 »

noir_lord wrote: post #798
moondev wrote: post #682

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? - locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows - virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines - only 2 thunderbolt ports - limited to 16GB RAM - no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards - no AAA gamin…

IIRC, binaries on arm on osx have to be signed. I.e. "We raised the walls on our garden further" Balls to that, if I buy hardware I want to be able to run what I want on it or it's not a general purpose computer, it's something else.

The Macintosh, by design, was never a general purpose computer. It was a computer that Steve Jobs allowed you to use. The Apple II was the general purpose computer that Woz championed.

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

#927

Post by simonh »

kzrdude wrote: post #902
Joeri wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite likely what happened, a second geekbench score has shown up for the pro and it matches the air: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=&q=MacBookP... My guess: in geekbench air and pro score the same, because geekbench is shortlived and not thermally constrained. In cinebench you'll see the pro pulling ahead.

Who uploads these results, are they unverified?

The geekbench software uploads them automatically.

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

#928

Post by Skunkleton »

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'…

That's an interesting observation. It holds true in other areas as well. For example, we have lots of high horsepower cars as the result of R&D effort into high efficiency engines.

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

#930

Post by vlunkr »

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?

I think price comparisons depend on what you're looking for. You cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$. That's pretty steep, especially considering other laptops will let you upgrade the RAM yourself. And along with that you get the touch bar and the garbage keyboard. I'm just one person, but that's why I would never buy one of these.
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