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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

#581

Post by ascar »

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?

> 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 difficult (in particular thinking about host.docker.internal, but there are certainly more). Working with C/C++ is another pain point for cross platform, which already starts with Apples own Clang and different lib naming conventions.

Going away from x86 makes this situation certainly not better.

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

#582

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Bud wrote: post #172
maz1b wrote: post #48

This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years. For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out 16 inch MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600m and even with that I'm regularly hitting 100% usage of the card, and…

It's not just outperforming the MacBook Pro. It's also blowing away the current 2020 top-end iMac, which has a 10-core Intel i9. And it's doing this while using more than an order of magnitude less power (10W vs. a TDP of 125W for that Intel part). That's stunning.

While it sounds promising, I'm going to wait for some additional benchmarks and real world usage scenarios; factors like cooling, multi-process work, and of course suboptimal applications (browsers, Electron apps, stuff compiled for Intel) will be a big factor as well.

That said, it's promising and I'm really curious to see where this development will lead to in a few years' time.

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

#583

Post by djxfade »

dwaite wrote: post #498
simcop2387 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eGPU support will depend on if they have a way to work around the need for a PCIe I/O BAR. Many GPUs require that to initialize and as far as I know no ARM cpus support it since it's a legacy-ish x86 thing. It'll be the same problem that prevents gpu use on raspberry pi 4s still. I bet you can make a controller that'll provide a mapping for that to allow it but that'll mean needing a new enclosure (probably not a hug…

I don't quite get how Apple could claim to be Thunderbolt-compatible with this sort of limitation in hardware, though.

It's not a limitation in hardware. It's a legacy feature of the x86 that isn't supported on ARM.

This could be solved by the GPU engineers by removing the legacy compatibility. "Nobody" boots a modern PC from BIOS anymore

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

#584

Post by gregoriol »

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…

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.

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

#585

Post by Fnoord »

hbbio wrote: post #519
maz1b wrote: post #48

This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years. For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out 16 inch MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600m and even with that I'm regularly hitting 100% usage of the card, and…

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

Some people are priceless. One of the designers of Ryzen, Jim Keller [1], for example.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12689/cpu-design-guru-jim-kel...

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

#586

Post by JosephRedfern »

numpad0 wrote: post #550
JosephRedfern wrote: post #495

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…

Sorry, yes, I realise that’s what throttling is but wasn’t clear. I meant to say in the original comment the fans normally come on followed by throttling.

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

#587

Post by sliken »

rayiner wrote: post #227
numpad0 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptop Macs of late are known for heavy throttling due to inadequate cooling, which cannot have been unnoticed in simulations

I have the 16” MacBook Pro. It doesn’t throttle and will happily run at max boost for tens of minutes.

Which one? I have the i9 flavor and it sounds like it's taking off if I run a video conf with zoom or Microsoft teams.

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

#588

Post by feanaro »

brailsafe wrote: post #443
josteink wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s very impressive. It seems like the open computing platforms where you have control of your hardware/ os are in real trouble. Not really. The M1 may objectively and factually be a very good CPU, but it comes bundled with the cost of being locked into a machine with a locked bootloader and not being able to boot any other OS than MacOS. And many people will find such a cost unacceptable.

I have a hard time believing that the amount of people that care so deeply about loading other OSs as to switch their computing platform of choice is significant. Perhaps more significant for those who are already doing that with either a mac or something else and choose not to switch, likewise for virtualization, but I sure as hell wouldn't switch away from mac for the ostensible benefit of multibooting Windows or L…

There are gargantuan unseen costs for giving up computing freedom that will not readily apparent at the moment you abandon it. The benefit will be shown as much more than "ostensible". I do hope for both of our sakes that most people are not so fickle to abandon it at first opportunity just because it is not an immediate cost.

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

#589

Post by gigatexal »

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…

> This seems a bit odd too - the A14 iPad Air outperforms all iPad Pro devices?

Well yeah, every year for the last bunch or years the A series of chips have had sizeable IPC improvements such that the A12 based iPad Pros are slower than the new Air. Apple's chip division is just industry leading here.

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

#590

Post by adrian_b »

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?

As expected, the Apple M1 is a little faster than Inter Tiger Lake in single-thread applications, but it is a little slower than AMD Renoir in multi-threaded applications.

So for things like software development where you compile frequently your projects, the new Apple computers are a little slower than similar computers with AMD CPUs.

So even when taking only CPU performance into consideration, there are reasons to choose other computers than those with Apple Silicon, depending on what you want to do.

Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance.

Those who want to use Apple software will buy Apple products, those who do not want to use Apple software will not buy Apple products, like until now, regardless which have better performance.

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