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

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/

by antipaul • 6 years ago

1080 1126 6 years ago

saagarjha9• 6 years ago

It's interesting that the Mac Mini is clocked slightly lower than the laptops.

vondur• 6 years ago

Yeah, that's odd. I figured it would be clocked higher as it can probably have the best cooling of all of the M1 devices.

thesandlord• 6 years ago

It might be a lower-binned part that can't run as fast. Assuming the best chips will go to the Pro.

thoughtsimple2• 6 years ago

There seems to be only one public test of the Macmini9,1. Sometimes GeekBench is not accurate on the clock speeds. Take the clock speed with a little skepticism until more results are posted. I can't see why the system with the best cooling would be 3.04 GHz instead of 3.2 like both the MacBook Pro and Air.

LIV2• 6 years ago

Is geekbench accurate at comparing across different architectures?

wizee• 6 years ago

Generally, yes. The benchmarks are calculating/computing the same things on both architectures, and the various sub-benchmarks are based on real-world non-trivial computational problems rather than microbenchmarks that are easily manipulated by instruction set differences.

userbinator2• 6 years ago

Unless they are written in optimised Asm I would not compare across architectures, because there is considerable leeway in compilers and my experience has shown that a good human can often beat a compiler solidly --- at least on x86.

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=185109&curpost...

ytch3• 6 years ago

Geekbench tests daily tasks like AES, PDF, HTML5. If the score is higher, then daily tasks are faster too.

IMHO it is reliable across different Arch/CPU/OS.

YetAnotherNick6• 6 years ago

If anything, I feel like many tests are based on x86 special instructions like AES, which does not directly translate to other tasks. But for most of the tasks I think it wouldn't be possible that the processor are only better at those and performance of most program should correlate with geekbench score.

johncolanduoni• 6 years ago

ARM has AES instruction extensions, and IIRC iPhones have had them for some time.

LeoPanthera3• 6 years ago

Has Geekbench for Mac been ported to ARM or is it running in Intel emulation mode?

berelig• 6 years ago

Looks like it has (as of 6 hours ago) https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2020/11/geekbench-53/

ytch3• 6 years ago

The text under score shows "macOS AArch64", I guess it runs on ARM natively?

mettamage• 6 years ago

I wonder what the Macbook Pro 16 inch late 2019 is on the single core score. Not having the same devices in both single core and multi core makes me sceptical.

grecy6• 6 years ago

No need to wonder [1], it's right around 1070

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=MacBook+pro+16

varispeed• 6 years ago

I really really hope that in real life scenarios this will be much faster than Intel CPUs, in case a wake up slap from AMD will not do. Maybe Intel will swallow its pride and design a new CPU for TSMC.

woah• 6 years ago

If they haven’t woken up by now, when will they?

waterhouse• 6 years ago

How long does Geekbench take to run? Long enough to reach thermal equilibrium?

threeseed8• 6 years ago

Only a few minutes. And likely not.

On my 10980xe it will cause the CPU to reach peak temperatures for 30s or so but only during specific workloads. Typically those utilising AVX-512.

jb19916• 6 years ago

Geekbench is designed to measure CPU burst speeds, not to measure cooling systems. By design it does not run long enough to test the thermal situation.

WoodenChair4• 6 years ago

Their line from the video about being the highest performance chip in single core appears to be true. This is of course a synthetic benchmark but the single core result is very promising. Note that the single core and multi core scores exceed the top-of-the-line 16” MacBook Pro (9th generation 8-core i9 2.4 ghz). I actually made the call to sell my 16” for the new Air yesterday. It’s looking like a good call. Glad I’m selling my 16” while it still has some value.

You can see all Air results so far here: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=MacBookAir10%2...

imwally3• 6 years ago

Replacing my 16" MBP (8 core i9 2.3ghz / 32GB RAM) with the new Air as well. All of that power (yes I know, it's not sustained) without a fan is incredible.

WoodenChair4• 6 years ago

Yeah I had almost the same configuration (2tb/32gb/2.4 ghz). I’m literally getting the new Air for half of what I’m selling it for.

srtjstjsj• 6 years ago

Why did you pay a fortune for 32GB RAM, a larger screen, and a dGPU if you don't need it? You could have bought a 13" MBP and saved enough cash to get the new Air and now have 2 laptops.

pgt• 6 years ago

Note that the M1 does not support eGPUs, in case you need it.

fastball3• 6 years ago

I want to do the same, but I like being able to do some gaming on my Windows partition (I opted for the 8GB dGPU as well).

minxomat9• 6 years ago

Direct comparison between best MBP Intel 16" vs M1 Air: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4651916?baselin...

1.5x single-core perf.

M1 MacBook Pro vs Intel MBP (top specs) show same performance: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4652718?baselin...

Likely because GB5 doesn't run long enough to trigger thermal throttling on the M1 MBA.

M1 is beating all CPUs on the market in single-core scores: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks (M1 at 1719, vs AMD Ryzen 9 5950X at 1628).

Anandtech on the memory-affinity of GeekBench vs SPEC:

There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.

cmer• 6 years ago

The new MBA is a total beast. The comparison is almost unbelievable. Can't wait to see what they do with the iMac, Mac Pro and MBP 16". Just phenomenal!

S_A_P2• 6 years ago

Damnit I have to decide the same thing. I’m really happy with my 16” mbp for once and I’m not sure if I want to get a smaller screen and give up windows support (for now) I feel like Ms could be convinced to make a version for Apple silicone if it keeps its performance advantage.

minxomat9• 6 years ago

Good news is Parallels announced a closer colab with Apple to bring x86 virt to M1, too. They demo'd Parallels running a linux VM at WWDC, but the upcoming release will also support seamless Windows virt again.

Scarbutt• 6 years ago

They need to put out a 16" MBA.

sneak3• 6 years ago

I bought the new Air, but I’m keeping my 16” as it may be the last laptop of that quality that can run programs without telling some stranger over the network that you’ve run a specific program.

Current (and presumably future) macOS does this and you can’t turn it off, except with Little Snitch. New APIs in macOS 11 means that Little Snitch will no longer be able to block OS processes, so it will require external network filtering hardware.

I’ll likely end up with Linux on the 16”, and use the new one for things that are not secret/private.

claudeganon• 6 years ago

This is where I’m at too. Compromising Little Snitch and VPNs is just a bridge too far. It’s cool that they got this level of performance in a lightweight form factor, less so when it enables the worse of surveillance practices.

brundolf3• 6 years ago

I'm seriously considering doing the same thing. My only hesitation is the screen size. But right now the laptop I bought in January is being outclassed by one that costs 1/3 the price...

wishysgb4• 6 years ago

I think you should wait because I have a feeling all of this sounds too good to be true. wait for real world reviews.

jug• 6 years ago

That Air will sell so well.

Many don't even want to pay for the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar and many will probably see an Air's fanless design as an advantage over Pro, even if its CPU is throttled a little more often in sustained high CPU workloads. Complete silence is just that good. And it's going to be so much cheaper.

I think the star of the show yesterday was definitely the MacBook Air.

rdw• 6 years ago

What's up with these iMacPro results with AMD Ryzen processors? https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4644694 Thought Apple was an Intel-only shop until Apple Silicon.

asniper• 6 years ago

Probably hackintosh builds

ArchOversight• 6 years ago

Hackintosh build. Look up Acidanthera Mac.

pwinnski2• 6 years ago

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.

grecy6• 6 years ago

And I think it's safe to assume that is in the works for the iMac Pro and Mac Pro, it's just a question of when it will see the light of day.

SubjectToChange3• 6 years ago

The Mac Pro isn't a high volume unit. So it's unlikely that Apple will spend the money developing huge, workstation class CPUs.

threeseed8• 6 years ago

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

kllrnohj7• 6 years ago

It'll definitely be a different chip either way. To have a 2x or 4x M1s would require interconnects between the CPUs for sharing RAM and general communication, which isn't there on the M1 currently. So at a minimum you're talking a rev of M1 to add such interconnects. But that all seems very unlikely. If they do go that route it'd almost certainly be something like AMD's chiplets instead of just straight "multi-socket"

pwinnski2• 6 years ago

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

bichiliad2• 6 years ago

I've been holding onto my late 2013 15" MacBook Pro for almost 7 years now and it's wild to see it get absolutely out-spec'd by the MacBook Air. It's been a long time, but I've always convinced myself that I'm not missing out on that big of a processor improvement. I do a lot of audio work with it, but even then it doesn't always feel like a slow experience.

mixmastamyk• 6 years ago

My favorite model, the keyboard is heavenly.

bichiliad2• 6 years ago

I really do love it. I'm gonna miss it when I eventually have to retire it. It's been rock solid this entire time.

bluedino3• 6 years ago

Your 2013 would be at a huge performance disadvantage to the 2020 Intel Air and Pro.

Those are supposed at just as much of a disadvantage compared to the new Apple Silicon Air and Pro.

That's where shock comes in.

colmvp• 6 years ago

That MacBook has to be one of the best computers Apple has ever created. Mine has lasted this long with non-stop daily usage for years and travel around different countries.

jackschultz• 6 years ago

Throwing in a comment in this thread to say same. Incredible how I've used mine for 7 years and it seems new still. Only issue is 8 gigs of ram makes things like docker or ides difficult, but I get hesitant to buy a replacement because of the year to year changes. I mean, why buy a new one if you have a machine that's been going strong for so long?

mxxx2• 6 years ago

Yeah I’ve had two new models since but my 2013 keeps on ticking. Never had any issues and still running just fine. Night and day compared to the piece of garbage 2017 model I got.

bsaul2• 6 years ago

same here. My friends don't believe it when we work together at a cafe and my battery lasts about as long as their brand new mbp.

my only pb are the smears on the screen, otherwise i think i'll keep it for another 7 years.

rhys91• 6 years ago

Can also vouch for this. I've been working with a late 2012 Retina MacBook Pro and it's been an indestructible workhorse for me.

protoman3000• 6 years ago

If Apple can create this magic with ARM, I wonder what they can achieve using RISC-V.

saagarjha9• 6 years ago

Probably much worse.

Avi-D-coder2• 6 years ago

Air vs Pro, is the benchmark to look for.

I'll be interested to know how much active cooling and binning real do for Rustc or LLVM compilation times.

diehunde• 6 years ago

I mean the only relevant difference I see is that the Pro comes with a fan. Would like to see that benchmark too.

Avi-D-coder2• 6 years ago

That is what I mean by active cooling.

wmf7• 6 years ago

Air vs. Tiger Lake 1165: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4306696?baselin...

And the GPGPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/1800719?bas...

WoodenChair4• 6 years ago

Is this arguably comparing a 28 watt part to a 10 watt part?

kllrnohj7• 6 years ago

We don't know the boosting behavior of the M1, so we have no idea how much power it's pulling during Geekbench's short burst.

Also the i7-1165G7 is a 12-28w part, configurable by the OEM. I'd assume the XPS 13 is running it at top spec, but that'd also need validation.

notfried• 6 years ago

The Dell XPS with a i7-1165G7 processor has a base price $1,499. This includes a 512GB SSD so compares to the Macbook Air's $1,199 price with the same SSD. With that Macbook Air configuration, you also get a higher resolution screen.

knolan2• 6 years ago

Apple’s SSDs tend to be faster too, but also soldered in along with everything else.

YetAnotherNick6• 6 years ago

The one you shared looked crazy overclocked or something(it says 4.7 ghz). Almost all other tests of 1165 is in the range of single core performance of 1500. This is more representative of the chip of the same laptop: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4648891?baselin...

justinator5• 6 years ago

The 16GB max ram still seems a head scratcher. Not what would suppose I want for video editing.

threeseed8• 6 years ago

The three models Apple chose are all the consumer, low-end ones.

You will see much higher specs on the Mac Mini Pro, MacBook Pro 14/16 and Mac Pro planned for next year.

justinator5• 6 years ago

I guess for those who desire more RAM the call is hold off on M1 based MacBooks until this ceiling is raised. I’m guessing an intel based MacBook is a better call, except resale price will suffer.

spideymans2• 6 years ago

To think... this is the performance we’re seeing from their low-end model

Existenceblinks4• 6 years ago

Timing is important here, M1 is not going to give you 32GB+, 1 year gap doesn't sound to me. M1 to M2 (whatevername) gap should be 2 years+

grecy6• 6 years ago

I've got 16GB in my 2015 MBP and editing 1080p in FCPX it never slows down at all.

justinator5• 6 years ago

I currently have the same MacBook but everything seems to be breaking (keyboard, battery, screen, major OS upgrades fail, etc) and it needs to be replaced. But 16gigs seems not very future proof. I’m already having issues with some video codecs I can’t work with, example .360 GoPro files. (I bought an iPhone SE to handle that!)

alwillis5• 6 years ago

With the unified memory, 8 CPU and GPU cores and super fast I/O and native FinalCut Pro, video editing will be just fine.

crazygringo• 6 years ago

What do you need more memory for with video editing?

Video editing's all done on disk isn't it? It's not like editing programs are loading a 20 GB file into memory?

Even just 8 GB has never given me any problems with video editing.

What am I missing here?

Beached2• 6 years ago

editing programs are loading a ton into memory though. edits are done in memory before their final output is saved to disk. if your viewing it on the screen, it is almost certainly in memory, and if your working with high res video you very well could exceed 16gb. more memory means larger (longer clips or higher res) video files loaded to memory means faster and more efficient working

john_minsk2• 6 years ago

The question is which professional software for video editing is available for this new platform? Probably not much at the moment. So these machines will be perfect for those who do their work with browser, email and not much more.

I'm using Tableau Desktop in my daily work and until it is available on this new platform - these Macs are not an option for me even if they are 10x more performant. I guess there are a lot of professionals that are constrained in a similar manner. So we will see if M1 is adopted in such scenarios at all.

justinator5• 6 years ago

The question is which professional software for video editing is available for this new platform?

Final Cut Pro is one of the options for the new Macbook, on the item's page.

kube-system12• 6 years ago

Anyone have thoughts on where are these benchmarks might be coming from? Part of me wants to put in my order today, and part of me wants to wait until after the YouTube reviews.

threeseed8• 6 years ago

At this point you would expect key developers like Microsoft, Adobe, OmniGroup etc to have retail hardware for testing.

And whilst they are under NDA you do often see them running anonymous benchmarks like Geekbench.

kube-system12• 6 years ago

Ah, I didn't realize devs got anything other than the developer kit up until the release.

arn2• 6 years ago

There are also review units certainly out there

terramex3• 6 years ago

Geekbench is designed to test CPU's in short bursts to not get them into thermal throttling (this is by design, it is supposed to be CPU test, not cooling test), so I would be wary of Air's results - at least until other benchmarks results are available. MacBook Pro's results on the other hand should be more representative as it has active cooling and can sustain heavy load for longer.

minxomat9• 6 years ago

GB5 scores for the M1 Mini and M1 MBP are linked in TFA.

terramex3• 6 years ago

I know, and they show the same numbers as Air's CPU.

I'm just making sure everyone understands that it does not mean Air will have the same real life performance as Pro or Mini. If you compare top MacBook Air 2020 (Intel)[1] with lowest MacBook Pro 2020 (Intel)[2] their results are almost identical, but their real life performance was not even close - Air starts to throttle after just few minutes of work. At the moment there is no reason to believe that Apple's CPU will behave differently (after all, the fan is in Pro and Mini for a reason).

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4652268 [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4653210

altmind3• 6 years ago

GB5 scores are not comparable across different CPU arch. The scale is different.

bredren4• 6 years ago

My maxed out 2018 air did 760/1596 on geekbench 5.0.3.

New MBA has a 1719/6967 on gb 5.3.0

nichch• 6 years ago

How am I supposed to interpret this? A MacBook Air surpasses my i7-8700k in single and (almost) multi core performance?

minxomat9• 6 years ago

Yes, in fact, the A14 (iPhone 12) already surpassed most Intel chips: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory_575p...

Intel is now #3

FartyMcFarter• 6 years ago

A modern mobile CPU with a TDP of 6 watts is beating a modern desktop CPU with a TDP of 125 watts? Is it just me or this seems too good to be true?

maz1b• 6 years ago

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 not to mention the fan noise.

Looking forward to a version from Apple that is made for actual professionals, but I imagine these introductory M1 based devices are going to be great for the vast majority of people.

martinald2• 6 years ago

Surely a version that can beat a 8 core Xeon is made for 'actual professionals'?

kalleboo3• 6 years ago

It still has a lot of limitations that matter to many pros - max 16 GB of RAM, max 2 displays (only 1 external for laptops), only enough PCIe lanes to support 2 thunderbolt ports. eGPUs aren't supported either, but hopefully that is a software thing that will be fixed.

It will be very interesting to see what the performance will be of the more "pro" chip that overcomes those limitations that they'd put in the 16" and iMacs

sliken4• 6 years ago

Dunno, seems like most professionals would want to use docker, virtual machines, or enough video/data to want more than 16GB ram. Or maybe even plug in more than a charging cable and one more device. Or run more than one external monitor.

Doesn't seem very "pro" to me. The MBP16" intel has 4 x USB-c ports, can drive two monitors, and can have >= 32GB ram.

numpad06• 6 years ago

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

Bud3• 6 years ago

But not anymore. That era is over.

rayiner• 6 years ago

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

JosephRedfern2• 6 years ago

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.

akmarinov• 6 years ago

*Intel Laptop Macs of late are known for heavy throttling

We have no idea what the M1 would look like. Though it's likely. I imagine they wouldn't have taken the fan out of the Air if that was a big concern.

Bud3• 6 years ago

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.

xvector2• 6 years ago

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

ttul• 6 years ago

TSMC’s 5nm node is exceeding everyone’s expectations.

jeswin2• 6 years ago

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 the wrong conclusion to make. For instance, the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s (with a Ryzen 4800u) with a 15W TDP posts the same Geekbench multicore scores [1] as the M1 Macbook. But the ThinkBook isn't in any way faster than the top-end iMac for real world compute intensive tasks.

The M1 certainly looks efficient, but there's little you can conclude from a single benchmark running for a very short period of time.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4642736

floatingatoll• 6 years ago

The data we don’t have is for sustained use over time. An Intel iMac Pro can sustain max performance far longer than an Intel laptop, as it has a far higher thermal exhaust capacity.

Does the M1 performance have to be ramped down during sustained use due to exceeding thermal envelope of the fanless MBA? Of the fan’d MBP?

We’ll know soon enough!

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

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.

adrian_b2• 6 years ago

Without doubt, the Apple M1 has the highest single-threaded performance of any non-overclocked CPU, being a little faster than AMD Zen 3 and Intel Tiger Lake.

Nevertheless, because Apple has chosen to not increase their manufacturing costs by including more big cores, the multi-threaded performance is not at all impressive, being lower than that of many much cheaper laptops using AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPUs.

So for any professional applications, like software development, these new Apple computers will certainly not blow away their competition performance-wise, and that before taking into account their severe limitations in memory capacity and peripheral ports.

bigdict• 6 years ago

I wonder if M1 dominates an i9-9980HK at multithreaded workloads that make full use of available SIMD? Does an M1 dominate at peak theoretical flops?

rbanffy5• 6 years ago

M1 is not magic and can't break the laws of physics. SMT makes better use of silicon and will probably push speeds closer. OTOH, M1 has a fast memory that the i9 can't match.

I still bet on the i9, but it'd be interesting to run a test.

hbbio• 6 years ago

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

kar11812• 6 years ago

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' intel was a change in philosophy rather than chasing MHz they chased power savings. And with Apple's new chips that history is repeating itself (and appears to be with a similar outcome).

It's an exciting time for hardware again because Intel and AMD are going to have to react to this and I think there's still legs to x86, it's survived everything thats been thrown at it so far...

Fnoord7• 6 years ago

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...

fiftyfifty• 6 years ago

It's also worth pointing out that Apple is also benefitting from TSMC's latest and best fab processes. Intel is not only behind architecturally but in manufacturing too:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3572624/tsmc-details-its-fu...

jimbokun4• 6 years ago

Agreed that the vast majority of Hacker News comments about the M1 Macbook Air are very glass half empty.

This seems like a really cool piece of technology, and I'm kind of bummed that everyone is so cynical and pessimistic about everything these days (albeit understandably so).

cercatrova• 6 years ago

That's true, but some people need the larger screen and discrete GPU. I personally run bootcamp Windows all the time (for development as well as gaming with an eGPU) and I just run macOS for compiling my iOS apps. ARM Macs won't be able to use an eGPU it seems.

my1234• 6 years ago

Hardware is able to use an eGPU, but Apple decided to not compile the Radeon drivers for arm64 macOS at least for now.

Hopefully they'll reverse that decision. (or their GPUs in the higher end machines will have to be really good)

sitharus• 6 years ago

I'm assuming (for now) that discrete GPUs will still be featured in higher-end machines, so the Radeon drivers will appear over the next couple of years.

YetAnotherNick6• 6 years ago

And this test is very likely not the native test, but ran with translation from Rosetta. Kudos to Apple. This has the highest single core performance of all processors including highest end desktop processors from Intel and AMD: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

thoughtsimple2• 6 years ago

These are native. The ARM/Fat Binary release was today on the App Store.

YetAnotherNick6• 6 years ago

Ah, I stand corrected. This was native test.

Aperocky4• 6 years ago

ARM is the future, at least in laptops.

Apple lead the fray again, it's incredible.

systemvoltage• 6 years ago

I have a burning question: Can I use gcc, python, etc. on the new M1-based Macbooks? I am thinking about getting one but not sure if I can use it as a development machine. How does rosetta translation layer work with brew apps and other binaries?

knolan2• 6 years ago

They showed this during the previous transition announcement. They flashed up a screen of various open source tools that they’ve tested. It even included Blender.

Here is the image: http://www.cgchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/200623_A...

lawnchair_larry• 6 years ago

Brew would just compile the ARM version and it should work the same for the most part. Same as running Linux on ARM (like raspberry pi).

I’m not sure if it supports it immediately, but this isn’t a difficult change, so it will certainly come soon.

jsjohnst3• 6 years ago

I don’t have an M1 yet, but the things you mentioned work perfectly fine on my Developer Preview hardware, so I don’t see any reason they wouldn’t on the production hardware.

my1234• 6 years ago

Yes you can.

For GCC targeting arm64 macOS, the dev branch is at https://github.com/iains/gcc-darwin-arm64/ currently.

For Rosetta, everything runs except virtualisation apps.

onedr0p• 6 years ago

Apple is hardly the first laptop manufacturer that built a arm based laptop. Microsoft did it before them with the Surface back in 2012. However it's not going to be as popular as Apple's laptop.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT

jb19916• 6 years ago

Apple is rarely "first" with anything (they were nowhere near the first with mp3 players, for example). But they are often first-in-class once they commit to an idea. And then we got the iPod after many other companies tried to also do that in the preceding years. ARM is not new, but Apple committing to this is going to be very disruptive, and ultimately a more impressive implementation, in ways the Surface never was.

Aperocky4• 6 years ago

But it seems that everyone else had the idea that ARM is cheap material and only Apple put in enough effort to make the full potential of both the instruction set and the chip design.

Beached2• 6 years ago

people have been saying that for over a decade.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 6 years ago

I am really looking forward to where this goes.

That said, I am definitely waiting for at least one generation to pass before I jump on the train.

I’ve been through this before. It will be great, but Apple is a master at smoke & mirrors. Things will not go as smoothly as the sizzle reels make it seem.

Aperocky4• 6 years ago

I'm hoping that at least the basics will be here (posix shell, vim, browser, etc), I won't need anything else for a long long time.

rvz2• 6 years ago

Like the grandparent comment, I would avoid this M1 Macbook since the developer ecosystem is still unsupported by it. Take this for example: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/4733

Docker still doesn't run on Apple Silicon Macs, so the migration path is already disrupted here.

saagarjha9• 6 years ago

All of those are there.

tambourine_man3• 6 years ago

I think this will be their smoothest transition by far. Everything is compiled by the same tool chain with much higher level frameworks.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 6 years ago

I think you’re probably right, but it’s still a massive change. Basically, repaving the highway, while there’s cars driving on it. Apple has done this a few times before (but we don’t talk about Copland in polite company), so I know it will end well.

I think their new architecture will be awesome. Personally, I look forward to being able to debug iOS Bluetooth apps in the simulator, and I think some of the new form factors will be pretty cool.

But I can’t help but notice the current dearth of AAA apps that are already universal.

A transition like this is a big deal; especially if you have an app with thousands of function points, as it requires a complete, top-to-bottom re-test of every one.

In the unlikely case that you won’t find issues, it will still take a long time. Also, most companies won’t bet the farm on prerelease hardware; instead, using it to solve issues. They will still need to test against the release hardware before signing off for general distribution.

Also, I have a couple of eGPUs that I use. I don’t think the new architecture plays well with them.

I’m hoping that the next gen will obviate the need for them. They are a pain.

harshitaneja• 6 years ago

All those thinking of buying the new MBA, are you not concerned about availability of applications? Not all x86 applications will have an ARM alternative, yet.

jackvalentine• 6 years ago

There are a few exceptions but...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

minxomat9• 6 years ago

Had access to a DTK, and know even more devs who have one. Even that machine could run essentially all x86 software just fine with Rosetta (including things like dynamically loaded plugins). Only thing missing is virtualization, but that's coming soon (Docker & Parallels are working with Apple).

tambourine_man3• 6 years ago

Nope. This transition will be fast. Not like PPC -> Intel at all.

Everyone is on Xcode these days and using much higher level frameworks. Adobe and Microsoft already announced early 2021 availability of native binaries.

Besides, Rosetta 2 is even more impressive than the original was. I’m betting it will be a breeze. 6 months in and almost everything will be native.

sharkjacobs• 6 years ago

Rosetta 2 sounds pretty good

fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1
…and ~14 nanoseconds on an M1 emulating an Intel

https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262384342355...

I won't be replacing my workstation this weekend but then, I won't be updating it to Big Sur just yet either. I am getting a new personal machine sometime in the next year though I don't imagine I'll be buying an Intel Mac.

plorkyeran• 6 years ago

I haven't encountered any problems running x86 programs on the DTK. Performance is fine (with a slower CPU than the MBA) and everything I tried running worked. I'm sure someone will hit problems once a few orders of magnitude more people are using it, but most people won't.

jb19916• 6 years ago

Several benchmarks have shown that popular x86 apps running in Rosetta on the M1 still run faster than running on native x86 on other machines, so it's probably not going to be an issue.

AnthonyMouse8• 6 years ago

This is a pretty good single thread number. It's essentially the same as Zen 3. On the other hand, it's using 5nm rather than 7nm to get there, so 5nm Ryzen is likely to pull ahead in the not too distant future.

The more interesting thing is the power efficiency, which doesn't have that much impact on single thread performance because higher power CPUs don't actually use their entire power budget for a single thread. But that's an impressive multi-threaded score for that TDP. It gets stomped by actual desktop CPUs for the obvious reason, but it has better multi-threaded performance than anything with the same TDP. Though that's also partially because the low-TDP Zen 3 CPUs aren't out yet.

What I'd really like to see is some benchmarks that aren't geekbench.

sys_64738• 6 years ago

Are these benchmarks run for long enough to allow throttling the CPU to be considered?

throwaway888abc• 6 years ago

Dell Inc. XPS 15 9575 vs MacBookAir10,1

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4654605?baselin...

Opinion: Pretty and impressive story

adamnemecek• 6 years ago

The MacBook has 8 cores vs 4 (hyperthreaded) in the Dell.

nkirsch• 6 years ago

M1 doubled it on single core performance.

abc_lisper• 6 years ago

Single core scores are indicative too

raverbashing3• 6 years ago

Not really. It's 8 big/small cores, so only 4 are "fast" ones

Which makes it even more impressive.

prawn3• 6 years ago

Not sure if this is in any way a useful comparison, but it's what I currently use and am looking to replace:

Mid-2015 15" MacBook Pro vs MacBookAir10,1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4643216?baselin...

bocklund• 6 years ago

This is definitely compelling. I’m still going to try holding out until the Apple Silicon 16”, but my computer is more and more reminding me how long ago 2015 was.

auslegung• 6 years ago

This seems more relevant to me, 2019 16" MBP vs 2020 13" MBA https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4651583?baselin.... It is quite close! Not sure how significant it is that these tests were done on different versions of geekbench, so maybe caveat?

akhilcacharya• 6 years ago

The cache comparison is especially striking. Wow.

I’d love to see one of these go head to head compiling a large project etc.

gaul2• 6 years ago

Note that this laptop uses Kaby Lake based on the older Skylake design. Newer laptops use Sunny Cove based on Ice Lake and have improved single-core performance.

jaas• 6 years ago

The Intel chip in that comparison was released in Q1 2018, almost three years ago now. How is this a helpful comparison?

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/130411/...

noahtallen• 6 years ago

The 2019 16” MBP (the one many pros will spring for) is still running the 9th gen intel. So a lot of people will either still have these chips, or will still be considering them in an upgrade.

bosswipe2• 6 years ago

A better comparison would be the new XPS 13 which beats it at single core but only has 4 cores to MacBookAir10's 8 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4309589?baselin...

kllrnohj7• 6 years ago

The M1 is a 4+4 big.little core configuration. It only has 4 fast cores, not 8. In a multi-threaded workload those little cores will still help, sure, but not nearly as much.

Hence why in that multi-core result the 4c Intel is way closer to the 8c M1 than it "should" be.

ip26• 6 years ago

If the M1 mops the floor with everything else, why didn't they put it in the high-end 16-inch MBP too?

grecy6• 6 years ago

I think we have to assume something else is coming. Certainly something that supports >16GB of RAM, and something that has more I/O.

While we're there we may as well a bunch more cores...

bredren4• 6 years ago

It also needs a proper application for marketing.

Something “previously not possible on a portable” specific to Apple’s other strengths.

redisman• 6 years ago

That must be it. They’re building a few bigger SoC’s

mholm2• 6 years ago

It does by performance, but RAM and IO are still very constrained (1 external display on laptops, max 16GB RAM) We'll see. If they replaced all products with an M1 version, they're diluting their pro brand, then un-diluting it when they figure out the pro features?

ab-dm• 6 years ago

My 15" MBP (2019, 2.4 Ghz, 32 Gb, 560x 4 Gb) is probably the most disappointing machine I've ever owned. The keyboard is meh, the battery isn't great and it's no where near as performant or efficient as it should be for the price. My 5.7k AUD laptop shouldn't sound like it's taking off to Mars because Firefox with a few tabs has been open too long. Heaven forbid I try and compile or transpile anything.

These types of results make me hopeful for the future of Apple hardware. I've always been a huge fan of OSX, but I was pretty sure this MBP would be the last Apple laptop I would buy. Looking forward to being wrong.

gaul2• 6 years ago

MacBook Air with M1 vs. XPS 13 with Tiger Lake i7-1165G7:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4306696?baselin...

Single core similar and multicore 50% better for MacBook.

johnsolo1701• 6 years ago

And the Dell is $500 more

stu2b504• 6 years ago

To think I lived to see the day when you buy a macbook for value

bosswipe2• 6 years ago

The XPS's CPU only has 4 cores to the Air's 8. Dell would be wise to ditch Intel for AMD so that they're competing with the same TSMC 7nm silicone as Apple. Intel is in trouble.

mholm2• 6 years ago

Careful comparing core count, half of the Air's cores are power efficiency cores rather than performance.

uniclaude• 6 years ago

In this day and age of Electron apps, I would say that RAM matters as much or more than CPU performance but seeing these results competes the story. M1 is good and has the potential to power pro laptops.

anonfunction• 6 years ago

I agree, I would have probably bought the pro if it had a 32GB option.

kondro• 6 years ago

With the storage IO right on the SoC I can imagine swapping to feel especially snappy as well.

Although it's worth remembering the m1 is just Apple's CPU for their low-end machines. They haven't announced their high-end 13" & 16" MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac Pros.

Also, I know Electron has a history of high-memory, but right now my Slack client is currently running at 500MB and my VS Code windows (3 projects) at < 1.5GB.

And even though my current MBP16 is spec'd at 64GB RAM, I don't think 16GB would probably feel all that slow these days.

bpye• 6 years ago

I have seen an interesting point raised elsewhere. macOS on ARM will be able to run iOS apps (assuming the author doesn’t opt out). That means that a lot of the uses of electron or similar may no longer be needed. Slack, Spotify, etc. Some of course will still be electron, there’s no native version of VS Code for instance. But it could work out better than expected...

musicale2• 6 years ago

Kind of remarkable for a laptop without a fan. (Infamous fan-hater Steve Jobs would be proud.)

Power/thermal management looks very good - low heat and long battery life without sacrificing performance.

Presumably the Air will have to throttle performance for some workloads, but not in this benchmark apparently.

Wowfunhappy2• 6 years ago

Was Steve Jobs an infamous fan-hater? What did he do/say?

wmf7• 6 years ago

Yes, Apple IIs and early Macs had no fans because Jobs wanted them to be silent.

taejavu• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws

kristofferR2• 6 years ago

Yeah, he wasn't a fan.

foobarbazetc• 6 years ago

It’s one run and it runs for a couple of minutes, so it’s not going to tell you much about thermal management.

darkhorse13• 6 years ago

It is honestly crazy how many times Jobs was able to force his personal choices into the designs of Apple products, and then force the entire industry to follow suite thanks to the influence of Apple. And I am not even mad, he was correct (in hindsight) multiple times - styluses, Flash, and so on. Even in death, he may be proven right about his dislike of fans.

nostromo• 6 years ago

So... I'd be feeling pretty silly right now if I bought the Mac Pro in 2019 for like $7,000. (Which I almost did!)

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/457

M1 is comparable to baseline Mac Pro on multicore performance and better on single core performance. And several thousand dollars cheaper (and smaller).

kube-system12• 6 years ago

There's still a lot to be said for software support, IO, RAM, etc.

musicale2• 6 years ago

Yeah, the Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of DRAM (vs. 16GB), it's got a bunch of slots and discrete GPUs, and it can run Windows and Windows VMs. I hope it doesn't end up as an orphan system like the 2013 "trash can" Mac Pro, which was an interesting system that got zero upgrades. Perhaps Apple will offer Apple Silicon upgrades to Mac Pro buyers.

Assuming they can build it (and they have implied that they can scale their silicon designs up in terms of cores, power, and clock rate), an Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be a pretty interesting machine.

If they wanted to, Apple could even bring back an Apple Silicon powered Xserve, or the legendary, mythical, modular desktop Mac (I know, now we're in the realm of pure fantasy, but one can dream.)

andreasley2• 6 years ago

Also GPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/1799092?bas...

The Vega II is even faster (but quite a bit more expensive).

sthnblllII2• 6 years ago

There are very few reasons to buy the Mac Pro with the lowest CPU option. This here is the comparison to make and it crushes the M1's multithreaded score of 7,000 with a score of almost 19,000:

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/mac-pro-late-2019-intel-x...

andreasley2• 6 years ago

If the Geekbench scores are to be believed, the M1 in the MacBook Air scores 7,500 multithreaded. So yeah, the 28-core Mac Pro is quite a bit faster (and can sustain that performance), but the performance of the Air looks extremely good.

nixgeek• 6 years ago

I suspect an Apple Silicon equivalent to Ampere’s Altra (which can go to 80-core today per socket and 128-core soon) would absolutely devastate these Geekbench scores on a tricked out Mac Pro.

If you want to make an apples to oranges comparison that’ll really be the one to make.

cactus20932• 6 years ago

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end.

Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy machine, and there are professional programmers that just need a dumb terminal to ssh into a dev machine in the cloud.

And then of course what the largest subset of people seem to mean is professional video editors or content creators. What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

And then a lot of things that people also complain about like how replacing the wider variety of ports with usb c or thunderbolt is contradictory on a “professional” machine also don’t really make sense. Professionals can use dongles like anyone else. In fact many professionals will have more specific needs that require a single a way, for instance having a builtin sd card reader doesn’t help a professional photographer using cfexpress cards.

alasdair_• 6 years ago

I’ll take a stab at the problem: an “actual professional” in this context is someone who makes their money by using the computer.

stu2b504• 6 years ago

That does include practically every white collar occupation at this point.

cactus20932• 6 years ago

See, I think that is very far from the definition a lot of others have in mind. By your definition, probably 95% of professionals don't need any more power than a macbook air.

Iwan-Zotow• 6 years ago

What in the world is an actual professional?

Well, that is an easy question - actual professionals are people involved in making, marketing and distributing porno

radley• 6 years ago

Pretty sure content creators are the core of the Pro series. It's not uncommon to have multiple design apps open at the same time, along with team apps, multiple browsers each running multiple apps, and multiple monitors.

And that's just web design.

Now open your eyes and look around your room. Everything you see was designed by someone, most likely on a Pro.

murderfs• 6 years ago

Unlikely. Most CAD users are on Windows.

buryat• 6 years ago

It's just a name, if you need long battery life, bigger screen, dedicated gpu, etc. then you choose appropriately. Who cares what the Pro means.

usaphp• 6 years ago

What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

I think it’s because youtubers like linustech etc are the type of people who review these laptops, they live in their bubble that only “real” professionals are those who edit videos.

xenihn• 6 years ago

i spend 1/3 of my workday waiting for xcode to build

vmlinuz• 6 years ago

Of course there are specific niches, but it's pretty easy to answer in general: 'actual professionals' need some combination of two criteria - capacity and reliability/durability/usability. A device which can handle 'large' loads - be it CPU-bound, memory/storage-bound, or even screen size bound, and can be worked hard for 6-8-10-12 hours per day, 5-6-7 days per week without either the machine or the user breaking.

The point is not a professional using a computer, it's a professional computer user - someone who doesn't just use a computer to do their work, but someone for whom the limits of the computer are the limits of the work they can do.

Jetrel• 6 years ago

To be fair, it's pretty outdated terminology.

It comes from an era when computers were so genuinely slow that doing almost anything - even using page layout like Pagemaker, or setting up just a single track song in a DAW, had tons of render lag. Even spreadsheets would take significant amounts of crunch time to run their calcs, in the very early days. This meant that most work done on computers, with anything larger than a "toy/hello-world" dataset, was going to be painfully slow. That's why they called it "professional" - because you were actually using datasets large enough to burden the beast. Actually balancing a whole company's finances with a spreadsheet, rather than tallying up a little 10-item list.

I want to emphasize that "majoritarian" aspect of it - it wasn't just a few specific kinds, it was a majority of ALL kinds of work.

And that's changed.

We're now at a point where only a tiny minority of tasks done on computers actually have throughput limits based on the computer rather than the operator.

greenknight• 6 years ago

My friends brother runs a landscaping business, purely off his iphone. He asked me for advice on how to get his iphone onto a laptop, like with an emulator or something. This was about a year ago, so the ARM mac stuff was just rumors at that stage, and I mentioned that it wasnt possible.

Now, I can say hey if you get one of the new macbooks / mac minis, you can run your iphone apps natively. He probably will be one of their first customers.

I wouldnt be surprised if there was a huge 'professional' market that is untapped. not the traditional professional market but the ones which want something as simple & familiar as a iphone, on a desktop.

eloisius• 6 years ago

Why bother with all that? Isn’t it easy enough to pair a keyboard and mouse to an iPad?

connectsnk• 6 years ago

Interesting. Just out of curiosity, can you let us know which apps he uses? I am guessing a CRM id one of those

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

Here is my definition:

In this context, a professional is someone whose productivity is limited by the power of the computer. A developer compiling large code base on their computer. A person doing video editing. These are examples. And maybe “professional” is the wrong term, but I think that is what people are aiming for when they use that word in this context.

atoav• 6 years ago

In my experience in IT support there are very few people where this is actually the case.

For most people their ability to use the computer is the blocker. This also involves the ability yo make sane file format/compression decisions if they work with graphics or video.

washadjeffmad2• 6 years ago

We say the 'pro' in MacBook Pro hasn't stood for professional grade equipment in at least a decade, but for equipment for someone who considers themself to be a professional.

People also regularly misplace their importance and prevalence in industry. For instance, you see more Linux than Mac in the big color and VFX houses.

It's important to trust and value your tools, which is how prosumers generally feel about their Macs, and they do make nice frontends for the computers that perform the actual work.

nmlnn• 6 years ago

What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

They get outsized influence because they're the ones that make the shiny youtube reviews (using their video editing skills).

rswail• 6 years ago

In my experience, every teacher I know for the last 6-8 months.

mqrs• 6 years ago

"Pro" is really just a marketing misnomer for "premium".

jrobn2• 6 years ago

YouTube has grown by triple digits. Those video “content creators”, from those just messing around to the professional film makers, are a huge opportunity for Apple to secure mind share in. Billions of views on YouTube. Billions of videos too.

I suspect the M1 powered Macs will be hugely successful and very useful for multiple types of users.

p1necone6• 6 years ago

I don't see these being very useful for video editing with RAM maxing out at 16gb. Maybe 1080p, but not 4k.

(And the small storage, but that can be remedied with a NAS or other external storage, and then fast local scratch space only needs to be big enough for a couple of projects at a time)

nocubicles• 6 years ago

I for example use the computer to develop ERP systems. I have always around 10 Docker containers running with different versions of the ERP's. I also need to run SQL server natively on my machine. Also need to run VScode, Chrome, have few Excel's open, use Teams all day long, open Visual Studio from time to time and work with it etc.

derefr4• 6 years ago

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 cases, it's the quality and innovation in the tool, that's holding these professionals back from being even better at their job than they already are.

Also, take special note of the case of the stenographer: professionals often require special professional variants of their tools, which trade off a longer learning curve for a higher productivity ceiling once learned. A stenographic keyboard takes years to learn, but all non-stenographic keyboards cap out at 150WPM, while stenographic keyboards allow those trained in their use to achieve 300+WPM.

And to make one more point: a professional car driver isn't a race-car driver. A professional car driver is a chauffeur. Rolls-Royce's cars aren't famous for how luxurious they are to drive; they're famous for having all the amenities needed by professional drivers — chauffeurs — to allow them to efficiently cater to their clients' needs. Limousines are the same kind of "professional tools" that stenographic keyboards are: they increase chauffeuring productivity.

How did [video editing] become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

Because all tech vloggers and most tech pundits — the people who review tech — edit videos as part of their jobs, of course ;)

bawolff2• 6 years ago

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

blt• 6 years ago

What are those Rolls Royce features needed by chauffeurs?

alwillis5• 6 years ago

Gruber addresses this in his latest post [1]. Short answer: Pro usually means nicer, not necessarily for professionals only.

Think about it: the M1-based MacBook Air has better CPU and graphics performance than Intel-based laptops—including Apple’s—that are targeted at professionals.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_mac...

p1necone6• 6 years ago

What percent of the working population are video editors?

Most of the working population could get away with using basically any computer - if you're marketing a computer as 'Pro' you're talking to a specific subset of that. (Or you're just banking on it working as aspirational marketing and don't actually care about professionals)

EugeneOZ3• 6 years ago

”Pro” doesn't implicitly mean ”Pro Video Editor”.

greggman3• 6 years ago

Regardless of the "Pro" meaning, my 2014 MBP is significantly faster than my top end 2018 Macbook Air. The MacBook Air was frustratingly slow. The most noticeable place was switching apps (like Cmd-Tab) and having it not keep up but there were plenty of other places.

Pro to me = Provides more power. That's it.

Looking forward to the next MBP

dang4• 6 years ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065664.)

jamil72• 6 years ago

I share an office with quite a few “professional users” I guess you’d call them. There are directors and 3D graphics people using mac pro towers and I’m sure they’d fit the definition, in that performance is a significant bottleneck for them and their output is tied to their hardware.

mdorazio• 6 years ago

Really impressive. I was skeptical from just the Apple-released info, but it seems like ditching x86 for ARM really does mean that much performance increase per watt. I'm excited to see how this plays out in both the processor and OS space over the next few years.

maxpert• 6 years ago

Would love to see it compared against surface books

lostlogin4• 6 years ago

Assuming I’m reading it right, it isn’t in the ballpark.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=&q=Surface

kube-system12• 6 years ago

This must have been enough to convince people to buy out the first shipment. Apple.com was showing me an 11/17 estimated arrival at checkout. Now it's showing 11/27-12/4.

ACow_Adonis• 6 years ago

Reposting from other thread:

So can anyone comment on how we should interpret these benchmarks:

a) Across the various Mac models (i.e. why buy a pro vs the air vs the mini). If they all benchmark the same, what am I paying the difference for?

b) The M1 chip vs a ryzen desktop (naively interpreting this its punching up near a 5950X, which seems TGTBT?). How do these chips compare against the larger TDP competitors if portability and batteries aren't an issue?

b2) Compared to the AMD mobile chips? (i don't have much insight into these)

c) someone else on here posted a Tiger-lake intel chip benchmark beating the M1. Now that makes even less sense to me now, because now there's an intel mobile chip beating the top of the line Ryzen desktop?

Help out an honestly confused individual.

dnh44• 6 years ago

I think those number are peak performance and not necessarily sustained performance, but I don’t know enough about geekbench to be 100% sure.

The pro and the mini have fans so they should be able to maintain these speeds for longer than the air which will presumably have to throttle down as it heats up.

martinald2• 6 years ago

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?

blurbleblurble2• 6 years ago

Probably has something to do with the 5nm process.

wmf7• 6 years ago

Qualcomm and Samsung have access to 5nm.

blurbleblurble2• 6 years ago

I did some more research after commenting and found that while surely the 5nm transistors help this processor to run cool and stable, it's the packaging that really brings the speed. Everything being integrated right there means less latency, which likely means less need for caching, less stuff stuck waiting in RAM, etc.

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).

PopePompus• 6 years ago

How certain can one be that the M1 uses nothing but the ARM instruction set? They certainly aren't advertising it as ARM. They aren't selling it to other OEMs. One way to really put the kabash on Hackintoshes would be to make Mac OS use nonstandard instructions. What's to keep them from adding instructions?

saagarjha9• 6 years ago

Nothing, and the chip does have a handful of proprietary instructions. But for the most part it's just standard ARMv8.5, which you can see because it runs ARM binaries generated using a standard compiler toolchain.

LASR• 6 years ago

It’s what happens when a trillion dollar company does vertical integration the right way instead of dicking around.

Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft - all have to build products that work for the lowest common denominator. Loss of focus is a major problem.

Apple has a handful of products. One OS. One developer platform.

This kind of agility is extremely powerful. They can switch fabs whenever it makes sense. They can switch ISAs whenever it makes sense.

Contrast with Microsoft, that has to support so many hardware platforms. They’re not helping themselves with so many software frameworks - Win32, WinRT, .NET, MFC, WinJs? I’ve lost count.

Intel is handicapped stuck to their process nodes.

Qualcomm, while they’ve effectively captured the mobile SOC market, they too have the same problem. They can’t control what handset makers do. So they can only go so far.

Apple can make a single CPU core and mix and match that with variations. Things get a lot easier if you just have to deal with yourself e2e - even as far as retail sales.

wmf7• 6 years ago

ARM laptops have been trapped in a vicious cycle of low performance -> low sales -> low R&D -> low performance. The A78C and X1 cores should help a lot but they still won't match Apple Silicon.

Apple is ahead because they have more money than Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc. combined.

mekster2• 6 years ago

How big one's pocket isn't usually the driving factor on who does best.

This feels like once again Apple is 5 years ahead of competition just like when iPhone came out.

bsder• 6 years ago

How is Apple so far ahead even with the same instruction set?

Single customer. Apple can optimize directly for iOS workload and consider nothing else.

Intel sells into the general market and has to hit sometimes conflicting goals so that Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. will all buy their chip.

anonuser123456• 6 years ago

QCom focuses their capital on handsets. They could likely compete with Apple design, but they wouldn’t have a market for years. Also, they’d be competing as a commodity against Intel, AMD and AMLogic. In the semi industry, it’s not a good bet to invest only to become a 2nd source that eats into everyone’s margin.

Apple is a vertical. They own their market, so the investment has more predictable returns.

userbinator2• 6 years ago

I wonder what Linus thinks of Geekbench's accuracy now:

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=185109&curpost...

Personally I'm not convinced, until I see something like SPECint/SPECfp results.

theluketaylor• 6 years ago

anandtech has specint numbers for the A14, which should serve as the floor for M1 performance. M1 will (likely) clock higher, has more cores and sustain thermals longer.

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

I’m also interested in seeing what M1 can do once people get their hands on real hardware running on Mac OS where so many more details can’t be hidden like in iOS, but all signs point to it being an absolute monster.

saagarjha9• 6 years ago

We've seen this before: cellphones tend to have simpler libraries that are statically linked, and at least iOS uses a page size that would not be relevant or realistic on a general purpose desktop setup.

This is an interesting thing to say considering that 1. most apps on iOS use large dynamic libraries and 2. Apple silicon Macs run on 16K pages, just like iOS.

justincormack• 6 years ago

The M1 runs with 4k pages, unlike the iPhone chips.

Shivetya2• 6 years ago

we don't know Big Sur's optimizations, it is possible they used a number of iOS techniques within it.

jeffbee• 6 years ago

He'd probably say it's garbage, since all the reasons it is garbage remain true. Getting yet another garbage result hardly changes the argument.

aphroz• 6 years ago

Here is a video of what the other Linus thinks: https://youtu.be/ljApzn9YWmk

jp0d• 6 years ago

I wonder how they compare the machine learning performance of the integrated GPU. Does anyone know if any of the ML libraries support the new architecture? AFAIK most libraries don't support anything other than nVidia. Any tests on training models? Or is it mostly inference?

fouc• 6 years ago

Update: There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 6802.

It doesn't make much sense for the Macbook Pro to have a lower score than the Macbook Air.

JumpCrisscross2• 6 years ago

I noticed that too. But it’s one score for the Pro versus four for the Air.

Assuming it is sampling error?

brundolf3• 6 years ago

It's also possible that the fan comes into play more with a sustained load. I believe their clocks are the same, but I'm sure the Air has to start throttling at a certain point once it gets hot.

randmsie2• 6 years ago

Isnt the chip the exact sane in these devices? The air scores are probably going to tank massively when thenal throttling kicks in. There should be a decent performance gap between these machines then

crudbug• 6 years ago

How much that on-die memory impact these scores ?

yowlingcat2• 6 years ago

Man. Obligatory old person remark, but seeing this kind of a quantum leap in performance per watt makes me feel young and tingly all over again. If M1 makes SIMD suck less, there are downstream effects. It's true if that were /entirely/ the case, Radeon would have stolen the crown from NVidia years ago.

But this is different. There's the convenience factor here. How far does M1 have to go before commodity DL training is feasible on commodity compute, not just GPU?

etaioinshrdlu• 6 years ago

I wonder if this is good enough that nobody will complain about x86 emulation performance. Although Apple will likely remove x86 emulation support in the OS in about 5 years.

DisjointedHunt• 6 years ago

So on a cutting edge process, Apple Silicon is ~5-10% faster than the AMD offering.

Interesting times.

werber• 6 years ago

Should I sell my 2020 intel air and upgrade?

samatman2• 6 years ago

Air to Air seems like a no-brainer from where I'm sitting. Maybe give it a couple months to see if some obvious issue surfaces.

mekster2• 6 years ago

The bigger question is, will Windows also shift to ARM now that raw machine performance is miles behind Mac on similar pricing/weight/battery/loudness.

Last time I read, Windows ARM version isn't ready for everyone yet not to mention there's no transition kit at all for everyone to move.

Why would anyone use Windows anymore unless your infra site needs IE?

stu2b504• 6 years ago

Well, yes. Microsoft has already announced they're working on an x86-64 to ARM emulator (i.e Rosetta 2 equivalent)[1] and they have partnered with Qualcomm to make ARM CPUs for their surface line up[2]

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315733-64-bit-x86-emul...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-pro...

markus_zhang• 6 years ago

Windows has tons of stuffs Macs don't have. Unless you are speaking about development machines.

watersb• 6 years ago

I am probably going to get one.

How much thermal paste are they planning to use on these things?

lofties• 6 years ago

The thermal paste is there only to improve heat transfer between two imperfect surfaces. The real question is what the heatsink on these puppies will look like.

lowbloodsugar• 6 years ago

Despite my grumbling at the lack of ram on the MBP, I might just have to buy the Air in honour of my 1988 Archimedes.

thombles• 6 years ago

Are there any manufacturers working on similar high-performance-per-watt CPUs for PC, i.e. Win10 on ARM? I know that ARM servers are a thing but it all seems very quiet on the laptop/desktop front.

kube-system12• 6 years ago

Yes.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-pro...

But Apple absolutely dominates:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4648107?baselin...

faitswulff2• 6 years ago

This really flips the argument that Mac hardware is overpriced and underpowered on its head. Now Apple computers are a premium product from a performance perspective, as well.

silly-silly2• 6 years ago

Its not though, The 16 inch has known performance bottlenecks on both thermal and power draw.

Diesel555• 6 years ago

Source please? Honestly curious, on one now.

gjsman-10008• 6 years ago

That's disputed. But when they get around to updating that 16-inch next year, holy smokes.

arthurcolle• 6 years ago

Tell me more, I'm dying to go to the Apple Store and get this replaced.

gazelleeatslion3• 6 years ago

So performant premium that I’m thinking of calling Apple about my MBP preorder and switching it to the Air.

Last thing I need is a MacBook Air equivalent with an unnecessarily loud and annoying fan.

whalesalad5• 6 years ago

I would. It’s the same chip in every device. Plus, having owned one of each, the chassis of the Air cannot be beat.

tedk-42• 6 years ago

Hang on, you're swapping a AS MBP for an AS MBA because you think the fan noise will be an issue with the MBP?

If anything, it's a bonus to have the fan so your can have prolonged boost performance while the MBA chip will throttle under continuous load.

marta_morena_28• 6 years ago

Yeah, they only put the fan in MBP to annoy people, of course. It has zero use. Go order the Macbook Air and have fun. Maybe you can fry your breakfast eggs on it too.

chrysoprace• 6 years ago

Does it? The article is comparing Apple products, instead of comparing an Apple product to an equivalent performer from a competitor.

It's not really Apples to Apples (even if it is in name), so to speak.

jaykru• 6 years ago

It's comparing Apple Silicon to Intel silicon (in an Apple product), which is apples to oranges to me.

ProAm2• 6 years ago

This really flips the argument that Mac hardware is overpriced and underpowered on its head.

This doesn't excuse years behavior not respecting their customers on (price + performance) divided by bugs.

willio582• 6 years ago

Customers seem to be pretty happy with Apple in general so I can’t imagine they feel disrespected by the price and performance.

michaelmrose5• 6 years ago

Shouldn't we wait for non synthetic benchmarks to be performed by third parties running real applications?

We could even compare some cross platform apps across both OS and cpu and see how the total package performs.

kccqzy2• 6 years ago

I've personally found Geekbench results representative of real time workloads. So do more traditional benchmarks like SPECint.

faitswulff2• 6 years ago

Judging by upward trajectory of their processors’ performance (https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png) and their dominance in mobile, it seems like only a matter of time.

ekianjo2• 6 years ago

So we trust Geekbench over actual user testing now?

soneil3• 6 years ago

I think it's more that we want information today and we don't have actual user testing today. And we're all guilty of this - why else did we click when the machines are still pre-order.

Existenceblinks4• 6 years ago

In my perspective, the underpowered part has always been graphic card though.

torbital• 6 years ago

But now they are locking down their software hard. So there is really no free lunch.

the_lucifer2• 6 years ago

Someone here posted when the M1 powered Macs launched that they're essentially ASICs now and that made me do a double take. Since you cannot change the operating systems anymore, aren't these essentially ASICs?

avalys• 6 years ago

In what respect is Apple “locking down their software hard” with respect to these new Macs?

jariel• 6 years ago

This is salient, and almost upsetting frankly as I (and others?) have been looking for a 'way off' the platform after years of grievance. This is might just be good enough to keep their core platform value in place. It's a shrewd move in their part, it's been a while since we've seen this level of core innovation on their non-iOS offers.

acomjean3• 6 years ago

It’s a huge problem for open computing to be sure.

This isn’t risk free, issues having to do with supply and process and frankly geopolitics can cause problems. But it looks like they’re off to a good start.

hackerfromthefu• 6 years ago

I'd expect their performance features, such as the wide execution and L2 etc, to be copied by amd/intel within a couple of years.

bsaul2• 6 years ago

same feeling here. It seems that we'll soon have to choose between freedom on one side vs performance ( inaddition to good UX, which is today's tradeoff).

i was hoping for a good ios opensource replacement, i guess now i'll soon have to wait for a good laptop competitor as well.

I feel like i'm stuck in a jail made out of gold.

totalZero4• 6 years ago

Not quite. You can't synthetically compare one chip to another and draw organic conclusions. Apple computers with M1 don't support the software that I use. That's why I bought a fully spec'd Intel MBP13 today. All this talk about battery life and benchmarks gets flipped on its head when I can't use the product in the real world.

manojlds3• 6 years ago

Isn't there Rosetta that they talked about?

AntiImperialist• 6 years ago

They have 5nm chips because they essentially outbid everyone else from doing so at this time and bought all of the production capacity from TSMC for themselves.

They could do that because they've been selling overpriced products.

patrec• 6 years ago

Now Apple computers [...]

Apple no longer sells computers. You can rent some shiny gizmo from them to run software of their choosing provided by people they deign to allow on their platform and in a manner they approve of¹. It's not really yours anymore.

¹ "But you can still do X". Well, and last year you could still do W, and the year before that V.

wishysgb4• 6 years ago

wait for it. this all sounds too good to be true. I would love it if it was and I will be the first to get a Mac but it doesn't sound true.

mraza007• 6 years ago

Looks like I’m getting a new Macbook air instead of MacBook Pro

boromi2• 6 years ago

I'm curious for Windows users what can we hope for from Arm/AMD? It's kind of depressing seeing how well Apple and their ecosystem is coming along. Being able to run apps natively on your laptop sounds amazing. Android and Windows are far away from that level of cohesion. There's Phone Link, but running apps using that is clunky and slow.

gjsman-10008• 6 years ago

I think there is also a moral angle that disturbs Windows fans to this as well: This is validation that Apple's heavy-handed walled-garden approach can, in fact, work and even sometimes beat an open ecosystem. That's freaky.

mirthflat83• 6 years ago

Not really. Apple is one of the few companies that invests in this kind of cohesive experience. It didn’t come out of the blue. Doubt Windows does much in this regard given their atrocious UX

whalesalad5• 6 years ago

You’re kidding me. Are you seriously happy with the level of innovation coming out of x86? It’s a decades old pile of glue and skeletons. Intel has all but given up. AMD is out innovating Intel but at the end of the day the platform as a whole is aging and comes with a lot of baggage, spectre/meltdown, etc...

You can certainly choose to view this as a step towards bolstering the walled garden... but my money is on Apple wanting to innovate and knowing that they can. Vertical integration does a lot for efficiency, cost, etc... as well and not just keeping people in your walled garden.

People forget: Apple has been shipping their own silicon for years. If you had stellar cpus you could make in house, wouldn’t you rather use them instead?

zdw• 6 years ago

AMD's Zen 3 (Ryzen 5xxx series) are beating the Apple M1 in single core score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore

As another datapoint Ian (of Anandtech) estimated that the M1 would need to be clocked at 3.25Ghz to match Zen 3, and these systems are showing a 3.2Ghz clock: https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1326516048309460992

gjsman-10008• 6 years ago

OK... but let's say it's 95% there, even. How much power does an M1 draw compared to a 5950X? It's not even funny. And the M1 is running at a lower clock.

trynewideas• 6 years ago

We don't know what the M1 draws at load because Apple won't say.

It's almost certainly better per watt, which I'd expect because the 5950X (and the 6-core 65W TDP 5600X, which also tops the MBA multi-core Geekbench result) are still desktop processors.

martinesko36• 6 years ago

Plus, 5950X costs 799$ for the chip alone. (cooler no included)

PragmaticPulp2• 6 years ago

How much power does an M1 draw compared to a 5950X?

The 5950X cores are actually reasonably power efficient. Anandtech has nice charts here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

TL;DR is that 5950X cores draw about 6W each with all cores loaded at around 3.8GHz per core. They scale up to 20W in the edge case where a single core is loaded at a full 5GHz.

And the M1 is running at a lower clock.

Comparing a power-optimized laptop chip to an all-out, top of the line desktop chip isn't a great way to compare efficiency because power scaling is very nonlinear. The AMD could be made more efficient on a performance-per-watt basis by turning down the clock speed and reducing the operating voltage, but it's a desktop chip so there's no reason to do that.

Look at the power consumption versus frequency scaling in the Anandtech chart for the 5950X: Going from 3.8GHz to 5.0GHz takes the power from about 6W to 20W. That's 230% more power for 30% more clockspeed. Apple is going to run into similar nonlinear power scaling when they move up to workstation class chips.

If you really wanted to compare power efficiency, you'd have to downclock and undervolt the AMD part until it performs similarly to the Apple part. But there's no reason to do that, because no one buying a top of the line 5950X cares about performance per watt, they just want the fastest possible performance.

Comparing to an upcoming Zen3 laptop chip would be a more relevant comparison. The Apple part is still going to win on power efficiency, though.

p1esk• 6 years ago

M1 can't run all existing x86 code natively. Ryzen can.

acomjean3• 6 years ago

It’s very impressive. It seems like the open computing platforms where you have control of your hardware/ os are in real trouble.

I use Mac at work, but Linux at home, if the hardware isn’t competitive....

whalesalad5• 6 years ago

The M1 is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an MVP desktop arm chip.

M2, M3... that is when I think we will see stellar performance against things like Ryzen.

gjsman-10008• 6 years ago

It'll be sooner than that. Just wait for "M1X" or "X1" or whatever Apple calls the increased-bandwidth variant that goes into their 16-inch model and desktops.

nathanvanfleet• 6 years ago

I dunno. I find it hard to believe that their next chips will be more powerful. You must have an inside with Apple to know this

jasonv• 6 years ago

That’s my guess. I’m a Mac house but I have two gaming machines arriving Friday for some rendering projects. I really wanted to wait to see what Apple released, but I figure two things: I’m not traveling much in the next year, so I’ll have a desktop year, 2) not a good idea to get v1 of new Apple things. I hope they’ll have new 2nd gen things in the market next year and I’ll come back.

Apple often has 2-3 future generations in development. This was just the first complete design they turned into a product.

That RAM design, tho...

ksec• 6 years ago

Yes. I thought I was dismissive [1] with the new MacBook especially with regards to pricing. ( Mostly because of BOM Cost and Margins are price gouging, even by Apple's standards )

Now things are settled a bit I thought may be it isn't as bad as I thought . Had the MacBook Air Priced any lower, it would have seriously hurt their sales of 16" MBP. Once MacBook Pro transition to ARM, with a rumoured of Mini-LED Screen refreshed as 14" and 16". ( MingChiKuo has been extremely accurate with regards to Display Technology used on iPad and Mac ) So MBP wont be lower in price but offer more features ( Mini-LED is quite costly ). And possibly an M2 with HBE? I am not sure how Apple is going to coupe with the bandwidth requirement. It would need to be LPDDR5 Quad Channel at 200GB/s or HBM2 if we assume M2 will double the GPU core again.

May be only then Apple could afford to offer a MacBook 12" at $799. And educational price at $699. Although I am not sure if that is enough, Chrome Book in many classes are going at $299. Apple doesn't have to compete dollar to dollar in pricing, but 2X difference is going to be a hard battle to fight. But at least it would allow Apple to win key areas in Education market where TCO and Cost are not as stringent.

May be Apple will do just one more Final update for some Intel Mac like Mac Pro ( At least I hope they do for those who really need an x86 Mac )

Oh M3 in 2022, Still within the 2 years transitional period, I think we are going to see a 3nm monster Chip for Mac Pro. When Intel is Still on their 10nm. And I think 2022 is when we will see an Apple console. Cause I dont think the Mac Pro Monster SoC volume is enough for its own investment. Some other product will need to use that, and Game Console seems like a perfect fit. ( At least that is how I could put some sense to the Apple Console rumours )

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049927

xbar• 6 years ago

This seems right to me, in performance.

In the market, I think M1 systems will not alienate Apple-app-only users (Logic, Final Cut, Xcode-for-iPhone development) and may attract some purely single-page-application users.

Mostly, Zoom call efficiency will drive its broader adoption this year among the general population. If the Air is fast, quiet, and long lasting for Zoom calls, it will crush.

I won't buy one. I have a 32GB 6-core MBP that will satisfy my iOS dev needs until M2 (and a clearer picture of the transition has developed). But I might start recommend Airs to the folks sitting around our virtual yule log this year.

tintor• 6 years ago

5950X is 105W desktop CPU. Apple M1 is for laptops and Mac Mini.

gjsman-10008• 6 years ago

You can buy it in a Mac Mini, and an iMac eventually no doubt. The "laptop"/"desktop"-grade chip distinction is pretty arbitrary here.

kcb• 6 years ago

Single core performance usually isn't much different between laptop and desktop CPUs.

YetAnotherNick6• 6 years ago

No, they aren't. All of the top results have crazy overclocking and liquid cooling. You need to look the numbers here: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks. Top end Zen 3 is slightly lower than M1.

trynumber93• 6 years ago

Not exactly.

You can check the clock speeds: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4620493.gb5

Up to 5050MHz is stock behavior for the 5950X and it's using standard DDR4 3200 memory.

akuma733• 6 years ago

Fake news. These are not Macs and are very overclocked PCs (Hackintosh).

akuma733• 6 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted? The top score shows a 6.472GHz clock speed - clearly not stock.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4644694.gb5

marmaduke• 6 years ago

Zen 3 is sold out it seems for now

klelatti• 6 years ago

*The 5900 is a desktop chip that costs $500+ with a 100W TDP and we're comparing with the cpu in a $1000 laptop with no fan.

_the_inflator• 6 years ago

I don't think that scoring high in the single core area is Apple's primary goal.

Doing it while not burning lots of Watts and being energy efficient is what Apple aims for.

And I doubt that AMD and especially Intel will offer an alternative here soon. Desktop yes, but not on mobile.

jccalhoun• 6 years ago

Agreed. People are acting like this is some kind of record breaking performance when it isn't. It is impressive that the m1 chips can do it without a fan which shows that they do have a lot of headroom which is a sign of where things may go in the future.

andy_threos_io3• 6 years ago

Can somebody explain how is M1 going to work on larger GPU tasks (rendering, encoding etc) with it's memory bandwidth M1 total memory bandwidth is 68.2 GB/s (128 bit LPDDR4x-4267)

AMD Radeon Pro 5600m memory bandwidth is 394.2 GB/s (2048 bit HBM2)

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-5600m.c3612

gjsman-10008• 6 years ago

It's not clear, but here's some knowledgeable speculation:

- All M1 models only have 1 Thunderbolt Controller, thus can only handle 2 Thunderbolt ports on all announced models so far.

- All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K.

- No M1 model supports >16GB of RAM or 10GB Ethernet.

All of the above seem like bandwidth limitations to save cost that a future "M1X" or "M2" or "X1" would be extremely likely to fix, and that's where you'll see the bandwidth increase.

Steko• 6 years ago

The Mac Mini supports two monitors one 6K and one 4K.

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

fludlight• 6 years ago

Is there a legitimate laptop purpose that requires 10GB internet? If so, how niche is that purpose?

desmap2• 6 years ago

- All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K.

Where did you find this? In the Macbook Pro 13 landing page I find the specs per Thunderbolt port which states the display capabilities for each while not restricting anywhere to just one monitor.

So I'd would expect 1x monitor per Thunderbolt port leading to total 3 displays for the Pro ARM model: one internal and two external displays. I assume the restriction you refer to just applies to the Air model.

PragmaticPulp2• 6 years ago

You can buy an entire M1-based Mac Mini for the price of the 5600M upgrade cost over a base MacBook Pro (5600M is a $700 upgrade over base configuration).

It's an apples and oranges comparison. The M1 GPU is an integrated solution targeted at the cheapest Macs. The 5600M is external GPU targeted at $4000+ top of the line Macs.

There's no reason that higher end Apple silicon machines can't also use external GPUs like the 5600M (after development, of course).

baybal26• 6 years ago

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.

andy_threos_io3• 6 years ago

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.

wmf7• 6 years ago

The M1 will work as well as Tiger Lake or Renoir which have the same bandwidth and acceptable (not great) GPU performance.

tedd4u• 6 years ago

They were waving their hands around a bit saying that in addition to on-package RAM with high bandwidth, they have done optimizations inside driver, OS and APIs to eliminate 1 or even 2 or more RAM to RAM copies for common tasks. So maybe there is a higher effective bandwidth when comparing to Wintel machines. It was very vague. Would love to read a detailed article comparing the systems.

wmf7• 6 years ago

Intel and AMD theoretically also support zero-copy but I wonder if it gets used in reality since most apps are probably optimized for discrete GPUs.

cybwraith• 6 years ago

Anyone know if linux can be installed on these or has apple gone full lockdown? I'm guessing custom graphics drivers will need to be made...

ekianjo2• 6 years ago

Are Geekbench implementations in X86 and ARM identical to be compared?

happyweasel• 6 years ago

Nobody ever saved a dime by switching to the apple ecosystem. Whatever real innovation lies within this silicon will be available to the normal PC ecosystem in no time.

valuearb20• 6 years ago

Said Android developers about the iPhone 4s...

jb19916• 6 years ago

My Mac products (MBP and iPhone) usually well outlast devices I've owned that were Windows or Android by a factor of 2x. So I'd say I definitely saved more than a dime by using them.

valzam• 6 years ago

Cries in 6core Ryzen 5 3600... https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4656718

The air is basically 50% faster... incredible.

zanethomas3• 6 years ago

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.

willio582• 6 years ago

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.

zanethomas3• 6 years ago

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

brundolf3• 6 years ago

What about this new hardware has anything to do with the App Store?

vijaybritto• 6 years ago

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.

zanethomas3• 6 years ago

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!

_ozde• 6 years ago

How much trouble would I get into if use the new Macbook Pro for software development(i.e. Python, Java, ReactJS)?

spullara• 6 years ago

I think the thing you have to look at is the velocity of Apple's improvements to see the real story.

rurban• 6 years ago

whow! fanless with 3.2Ghz base is really good.

so now they only have to fix their OS and their keyboard or just revert to the versions from 8 years ago.

Synaesthesia• 6 years ago

They said it was faster than 98% of laptops. I think the only thing faster right now is AMD's Zen mobile chips.

aledalgrande• 6 years ago

There's still a lot of work to do on these chips, but these benchmarks give hope and I'm curious to see how much more speed Apple can actually squeeze out of the M1 now that they can do full vertical integration with the OS.

russler232• 6 years ago

Impressive, but pretty unsurprising given the A series. 100 points higher than the A14 is a less than 10% improvement.

From Apple’s somewhat uninformative slides, we should expect peak power draw around 15W? The A series draws half that for > 90% monocore performance, so scaling seems on target.

jwmoz• 6 years ago

Can someone ELI5 why this new M1 chip would be better than decades of Intel's experience?

username90• 6 years ago

Apple pays a lot better and can therefore get the best engineers. Having experience isn't very helpful when the competition can just poach it by paying salaries your organization can't afford.

jb19916• 6 years ago

Well the M1 is not some "new" and "overnight" phenomenon. Apple has been designing its own ARM chips for iOS for a decade now, and with great success. The iPad Pro's ARM is still faster than at least 90% of all laptops made by any company. Moving that into their desktop/laptop line made a lot of sense and leverages many years of research and production experience.

rStar• 6 years ago

as a raspberry pi enthusiast what * most* excites me about all of this is, all software has to run on arm going forward.

aprdm• 6 years ago

I am confused on the new macbook pro vs macbook air, they have tme same specs, are we simply choosing the form?

pi-rat• 6 years ago

We don’t know yet, there could be some binning involved.

They could be identical, and the choice is just different thermal envelopes. Active vs passive cooling can make a huge difference for some work loads.

m_mueller2• 6 years ago

Couple one of these with a good USB-C hub and a cloud based Windows 10 VPS, and you have the future of professional workstations. Though, how good are these hubs yet nowadays? I'd want 1x USB-C power, 1x thunderbolt USB-C passthrough, 2x USB-A, 1x HDMI and 1x gbit ethernet in a portable format. maybe throw in SD card and a sound card with separated microphone port, and you'd have pretty much the universal I/O hub.

spockz2• 6 years ago

Maybe one of these hyper hubs are for you: https://www.hypershop.com/collections/usb-c-hubs

m_mueller2• 6 years ago

Thanks! Looks promising.

john_minsk2• 6 years ago

That's interesting take on it. I guess with 5G around the corner we will see MacBooks with 5G integrated and Remote Desktop won't be a pain in the ass. May be that's another reason Apple made this move.

p1necone6• 6 years ago

These benchmarks are impressive. The non upgradable ram capping out at 16gb is very disappointing though.

I'm hoping the rest of the PC market benefits from this increased market for ARM compatible desktop software. ARM has less of an issue with patent encumbrance and more competition. Desktop CPUs could get a lot cheaper in the future if ARM Windows and ARM Linux get more use as well as Mac.

(In case you didn't know, you can run ARM Windows now (sort of unofficially, you'll need to google)! App support is a bit spotty, but it can also run 32 bit x86 apps through a translation layer (why it's limited to 32 bit I don't know, I guess it's easier to do?))

Edit: The Switch is ARM too, so there's a reason for some AAA games to come to the otherwise small market too.(for traditionally Console/PC games, I'm aware mobile gaming is a huge market, it's just not one I find to produce much quality output)

BMSmnqXAE4yfe14• 6 years ago

Looking at Geekbench charts, I see that my Samsung phone has a faster processor than my $3000 gaming rig, and it sure as hell draws less power ... so why aren't datacenters just use phones instead of Xeon and Epyc servers, what am I missing?

gre• 6 years ago

Cell phone plans cost an arm and a leg!

akuma733• 6 years ago

Nuvia is a startup that is planning to do just that https://nuviainc.com/blog

You need to be competitive on single thread performance to have a chance at datacenter. Amdahl's law is still very relevant. Up until very very recently, the CPUs were not up to par.

BMSmnqXAE4yfe14• 6 years ago

Nice charts ... so performance per watt is indeed 10x better for S865 vs the Ryzen.

Tiberium• 6 years ago

Are you sure that you compared results from the same major Geekbench version? (v4 and v5 have quite different results).

BMSmnqXAE4yfe14• 6 years ago

I'm just looking at the charts, v5

dt3ft• 6 years ago

Probably due to overheating. Your phone can do bursts of processing every now and then, but if you let it execute heavy compute operations, the phone would probably overheat and shut itself off.

regularfry• 6 years ago

So would a Xeon if you pulled the heatsink off.

crb002• 6 years ago

Apple shit when they saw M1 benchmarks and delayed their data center for years to fill it with their own server chips. https://businessrecord.com/Content/Default/All-Latest-News/A...

altmind3• 6 years ago

Because geekbench results are not comparable across the platforms/OS. The scale is not consistent.

willvarfar• 6 years ago

Any thoughts and experience around using the current (slow) Mac Mini as a web and java dev box?

And any thoughts and expectations around using the (fast?) M1 Mac Mini for web and java dev?

I'm right now getting frustrated with my company's lead times ordering a new HP Zbook laptop. (Its not like I particularly want the Zbook, its just that's what devs get here.)

But I'm a remote home worker, and I'm thinking "M1 Mac Mini available next week. Its like 1/3rd cost of a high end laptop and probably outperforms it, and is silent...?"

jmnicolas2• 6 years ago

I don't know what you do with Java, but here Windows 10 + Android studio + an Android emulator consumes around 11GB of ram.

So add dozens of tabs open in a couple browsers, maybe a VM or 2 and 16GB or ram is going to be insufficient.

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

Been thinking about this:

- openjdk is being ported to the new hardware but it's not there yet. I'm not sure if it works with the emulator; or how well.

- if you use anything by Jetbrains, like I do, you'll likely have to wait for them to use that and package up a new release. It's a resource hog as it is and emulation is not going to improve things probably; assuming that works at all.

- things like android studio that rely on virtualization for running simulated phones will likely need upgrades too; but since the emulated hardware is arm that should be doable.

- things like docker which most server side developers like me won't work until Docker releases an arm version. Then the next problem is going to be that the vast majority of docker images out there are x86.

- If you are a web developer and want to test on something else than safari, you'll have to wait or accept worse performance of chrome, firefox, edge, etc. in emulated mode.

- pro hardware with >64GB; 16 GB is a non starter for me. I upgraded to that in 2014. I'd frankly want that dedicated to GPU memory in a modern setup. If you are a pro video or graphics user; I imagine those are not strange requirements. If your workflow involves third party tools and plugins that are x86; I'd wait a couple of years before even considering. Long term, this could be great; short term it's going to be rough depending on what you use.

- Also nice would be for things like opencl (Darktable) and games to work. I have a few steam games and X-plane. I expect that Steam Mac is going to be once more decimated. With the last release 32 bit games stopped working. Essentially all of the remaining games are x86 only. I look forward to seeing some benchmarks of how these are running under rosetta 2; but I don't get my hopes up. I'm guessing, Apple is looking to unify the IOS and Mac gaming ecosystem instead and is actively working to kill off the PC gaming ecosystem on mac. This will be an app store only kind of deal. Likewise, if they finally make moves in VR, it will be ARM and app store only.

So in short, for me it doesn't make sense to upgrade until most of that stuff is covered. None of it is impossible but it's going to take some time. I would be in the market for a 16" x86 mac pro but of course with this transition, long term support for that is very much going to be an afterthought. I might have to finally pull the trigger on a move to Linux.

mcintyre19943• 6 years ago

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 score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 6802. Like the MacBook Air , it has a 3.2GHz base frequency.

So single core we have: Air 1687, Mini 1682, Pro 1714

And multi core we have: Air 7433, Mini 7067, Pro 6802

I’m not sure what to make of these scores, but it seems wrong that the Mini and Pro significantly underperform the Air in multi core. I find it hard to imagine this benchmark is going to be representative of actual usage given the way the products are positioned, which makes it hard to know how seriously to take the comparisons to other products too.

When compared to existing devices, the M1 chip in the MacBook Air outperforms all iOS devices. For comparison's sake, the iPhone 12 Pro earned a single-core score of 1584 and a multi-core score of 3898, while the highest ranked iOS device on Geekbench's charts, the A14 iPad Air, earned a single-core score of 1585 and a multi-core score of 4647.

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

chandler5555• 6 years ago

the latest ipad pro is still on the A12Z bionic. the air just got refreshed with the A14 bionic

pvg• 6 years ago

The A14 Air just came out and has a brand new CPU. The Pros have much fancier displays, lower pen latency, etc. Subjectively, in most typical use, the Pros already feel like they have more available cycles than iOS apps have got around to soaking up.

mzl• 6 years ago

This is about the new line of Macs and the M1 chip in them, not iPads

mcintyre19943• 6 years ago

Thanks, that makes sense - I didn't realise there was no Pro line on the newest chips yet. It'll be interesting to see how the next iPad Pros compare to these M1 Macbooks.

simonh2• 6 years ago

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.

joking• 6 years ago

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.

dharma1• 6 years ago

it's probably <20s short tasks, if you run the CPU/GPU at full load for extended periods the thermals kick in and the M1 Macbook Air without fan will reduce clock speed.

iPad pro - the current 2020 gen iPad pro has A12Z (essentially the same chip as 2018 A12X with extra GPU cores) - significantly older chip than A14. I think there will be an A14 iPad Pro refresh with mini led display in early 2021.

mpweiher• 6 years ago

thermals ... reduce clock speed.

I see that statement a lot, and yes, at some point that is going to happen.

But the analysis seems to fail to take into account what utterly amazingly low power devices these chips are. So while it will happen, it might take a long time.

throwaway4good3• 6 years ago

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?

seunosewa• 6 years ago

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

martin_bech2• 6 years ago

You cant run bootcamp on these..

For me atm thats a dealbreaker.. but I still want one

martin_bech2• 6 years ago

I was going to add you cant do Android development on these, as you need Android Studio, but that seems to be on the way — Support for Apple Silicon is in progress

raxxorrax• 6 years ago

Far more pluralistic software environments would be a huge factor.

kmlx2• 6 years ago

Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

as a power user I will not be touching anything apple ARM until all my hundreds of software apps are certified to work exactly the same as on x86_64. i will not rely on rosetta to take care of this. i need actual testing.

besides this, 8GB of RAM is how much a single instance of chrome uses. i run 3 chrome instances, 2 firefox and 2 safari. and this is just for web.

this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

as such i was looking into a lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.

ascar• 6 years ago

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.

adrian_b2• 6 years ago

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.

Tepix6• 6 years ago

The Macbook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB isn't really priced competitively here in Germany. It's almost 1600€.

vbezhenar3• 6 years ago

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

yodelshady• 6 years ago

Asking myself that very same question. I've been booting linux, quite happily I might add, off mid/high-end Dells and HPs for a while. The last time I looked Airs were still dual-core, and much more expensive for 16 GB.

I'm not an Apple fan, but the change in value is stunning. I don't need a new laptop currently...

pjmlp14• 6 years ago

Basically anyone not lucky to live in countries with comparable economy to US, aka 80% of world IT.

moondev2• 6 years ago

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 gaming

- can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static

- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

adriancr2• 6 years ago

No Linux support is a deal breaker. (current versions with Intel included)

marcan_428• 6 years ago

Until all software is ported to ARM, it will run in emulation, which is going to be slower in most cases. People invested in plug-in ecosystems, like DAWs or video editing, will likely have an endless long tail of plug-ins that aren't getting ported, or that require a re-purchase to get an ARM version. And due to Rosetta's architecture, you can't mix ARM and x86 plug-ins (in-process, like VSTs - Apple wants you to use AUv3 which is out of process but nobody does that), so you will be running your entire workflow under emulation until you can make the switch hard and all at once. And some of your software will never make it.

Mark my words, this is going to be a massive shit show for people using those ecosystems, for 5 years if not 10. It already happened with the PPC transition.

imtringued6• 6 years ago

Why would anyone who is not forced to buy a Mac get one of these?

dbspin3• 6 years ago

Professional use in creative industry - film, TV, videography, audio production, and a million other things. 16GB ram and a souped up integrated GPU won't cut it for many 'Pro' applications Mac has traditionally excelled at.

vlunkr2• 6 years ago

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.

jimnotgym2• 6 years ago

Maybe they have to run enterprise software which does not get updated every year so they can't use MacOS. Or perhaps they want a fully featured copy of Office? Maybe they want to run an Active Directory network? Maybe they like having ports on their laptop

gregoriol• 6 years ago

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.

miskin• 6 years ago

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.

wffurr3• 6 years ago

The available RAM and eGPU support could explain that rather than raw performance.

I also imagine not all customers are ready to jump on ARM day 1. Some will want to wait until the software ecosystem has had time to make the transition.

valuearb20• 6 years ago

I remember when Intel simultaneously released the first x86, 286, and 386 CPUs all on the same day. What exciting times it was!

Apple released a killer low end SOC in the M1. It contains the highest performance single core processor in the world along with high end multi core performance. But it’s limited to 16Gb and two USB4/Thunderbolt ports, so it’s targeted at the low end.

When the M2 is released mid next year, it will be even faster, support four USB4/Thunderbolt ports and will also come in 32Gb and 64Gb versions.

Greatness takes a small wait sometimes.

gigatexal• 6 years ago

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.

agloeregrets• 6 years ago

A14 Air outperforms all iPad Pros in single core, multicore is still faster on the A12X. Keep in mind the fastest iPad Pro is using a two generation old cpu.

blunte8• 6 years ago

I have watched a number of reviews comparing the new Air to the Pro. The CPU performance increase isn't noticeable in most cases, and the Pro still offers better pencil latency and display refresh rate (plus camera/lidar, but probably most don't care).

I wouldn't buy a Pro now because I would wait for the next version, but I wouldn't trade a current Pro for a new Air just for the CPU bump...

Reason0775• 6 years ago

“the A14 iPad Air outperforms all iPad Pro devices?”

iPad Pro is still on an older generation of SoC (A12Z), while the iPad Air just got the new A14.

m12k3• 6 years ago

AFAIK it's pretty common for new macs to spend a while creating an index of its hard drive. For that reason, if you want to run benchmarks, you should generally wait until it's done with that (e.g. an hour or probably less with these speedybois). It might be that the people running the Pro benchmarks didn't wait for that, in their rush to publish the first benchmark. This would be consistent with what we're seeing - the Pro has faster single core performance, but slightly lower multicore, because some of its "background" cores were busy creating the index, while the Air was done with that task.

Joeri5• 6 years ago

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.

andy_threos_io3• 6 years ago

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.

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

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

Shivetya2• 6 years ago

https://twitter.com/tldtoday/status/1326610187529023488

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

Cabal• 6 years ago

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).

Tuna-Fish• 6 years ago

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.

millzlane• 6 years ago

Yep, try doing that test back to back 25 times and see who comes out on top.

GrayShade• 6 years ago

Is Geekbench that trustworthy? I always see them saying that new iPad CPUs are faster that the latest x86 desktop ones, but they are different architectures so I'm not sure the scores are comparable.

MrBuddyCasino4• 6 years ago

2019: "I'll build a Hackintosh, its cheaper & faster"

2020: "I'll build a Hackintosh, its slightly cheaper"

throwaway4good3• 6 years ago

They are going to sell these things like cup cakes ... why buy a pc laptop when these are around?

Jonnax• 6 years ago

Because they're expensive and the best selling laptops are half the price?

gabereiser2• 6 years ago

You’re right... these M1 MacBooks ARE half the price of a high end pc laptop AND are 4x-12x the performance. :D

gabereiser2• 6 years ago

Benchmarks came in and I stared at an older 2013 MBP 15” and decided, “Yup! Time to upgrade”. Tons of others at my work are looking at these with drool coming from their mouths. 2020+ is going to be the decade of extreme-computing on ARM I guess.

HugThem• 6 years ago

Because pc laptops can run Linux.

carlsborg• 6 years ago

The Jim Keller effect. He was involved in architecting both Ryzen and this.

arvinsim4• 6 years ago

Are we moving into a world where OS venders will try to do vertical software and hardware integrations? Because it seems that only Apple is doing it and it is paying off.

0x0082• 6 years ago

*back into a world

altmind3• 6 years ago

There're questions about both QB4 and QB5 results not being comparable across different architectures and operating systems. This should be discussed more.

codecamper• 6 years ago

Isn't max 16GB ram a downer?

jb19916• 6 years ago

For the target audience of the Air and the 13" MBP, no, it is not a downer. These are not flagship machines (despite that they are performing well against existing flagships).

saos• 6 years ago

Oh wow

ceronman• 6 years ago

I'm super impressed by those M1 CPUs. But it's so sad that the only way to get them is buying one of the few Apple options. I wish that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm et al catch up quickly. We really want competition in this field.

marvel_boy• 6 years ago

RIP Intel/AMD.

cyrksoft2• 6 years ago

I think nobody commented this, but Apple has just made the Mac lineup unrepairable. They will need to have a really high, almost perfect quality control.

M4v3R• 6 years ago

Nothing they did this week made it more unrepairable that it already was. Newest Macbooks already had CPUs and memory soldered in to the motherboard for quite some time. And this doesn't make them unrepairable because most of the motherboard issues don't come from a faulty CPU or memory, but from corrosion/other kind of damage on the smaller discrete elements like resistors, capacitors or smaller chips, which can easily be replaced if you know what you're doing. It's not something that you can do at home without equipment, but there are a lot of repair shops that can repair even the newest Macbooks with high success rate.

cyrksoft2• 6 years ago

but there are a lot of repair shops that can repair even the newest Macbooks with high success rate.

That is my point. Now EVERYTHIN is in the M1 chip. Nobody will be able to fix it, not even Apple.

andy_ppp3• 6 years ago

Does anyone know how fast the unified memory is? Is on package is likely to mitigate some of the lack of cache?

cfstras• 6 years ago

Since the 10,1 is not selling yet, where are these numbers coming from? Are Apple employees publishing benchmarks? Or are randos on the internet just uploading fake numbers?

arn2• 6 years ago

Review units

nathan_f77• 6 years ago

This is amazing! My wife just got a new MacBook Air delivered a few days. The courier is coming to pick it up tomorrow morning and we'll be getting a full refund, and looking forward to ordering the M1 version.

HacklesRaised• 6 years ago

I think I'll wait until some real world testing can provide definitive results. I would be very happy if these results translate, I just don't believe they Intel and AMD engineers are so inferior to Apples that Apple could pull this off with a known CPU architecture without some smoke and mirrors.

Tepix6• 6 years ago

One interested little side aspect of Apple Silicon and Apple's war against Epic Games is going to be Unreal Engine.

I can see Unreal Engine not being available for Apple Silicon for quite a while. During the presentation of the new notebooks, Apple showed quite a bit of gaming. If there are no Unreal Engine titles for Apple Silicon, this could hurt them.

propelol• 6 years ago

The case between Apple and Epic Games is about the app store on iOS. Epic can sell games without having to give Apple 30% on Mac OS. I doubt the investors is on board boycotting Apple as a whole.

ojosilva2• 6 years ago

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 name-dropping here and in other threads, like HP Zbook and Lenovo, but I'm completely out of the loop since I moved to a fully specced i7 2014 Macbook Air back in the day and.

Tepix6• 6 years ago

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 GA502IV-AZ115 is likely to be faster. It is cheaper than the Macbook Air M1 with 16GB/512GB, too (in Germany: 1465€ vs 1588€). It has an AMD Ryzen 7 4800HS CPU and a RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU.

ojosilva2• 6 years ago

But that's a gaming laptop. Macbook Air is a "notebook" laptop, aka "ultraportable". Also the G15 Geekbench 5 is 1100 for single core, which is like 35% slower than the single core performance of the M1. Obviously for gaming benchmarks, then that's a different story...

I'm starting to wonder if Apple's "faster than 98% of PC laptops" is an understatement, at least within its class.

Joeri5• 6 years ago

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.

timvisee• 6 years ago

Now show some non-synthetic benchmarks

amelius2• 6 years ago

Why do they call it Apple Silicon, when the core of the chip was designed by ARM and it was fabbed by TSMC?

Can't any other customer of ARM do the same thing, in principle?

ben-schaaf2• 6 years ago

Apple aren't using ARM's core designs, they're just licensing the architecture.

amelius2• 6 years ago

Are you sure about that? I didn't see this mentioned anywhere in the news, or on the M1 Wikipedia page.

cutler• 6 years ago

So we should be seeing some serious discounts on 13" Intel Macbook Pros soon. Any estimates on the May 2020 models once the market responds?

kar11812• 6 years ago

But can it run Crysis?!

akrymski2• 6 years ago

A matter of time until Apple releases a ChromeBook competitor - a cheap plastic laptop for schools/students, similar in spirit to the iPhone SE, perhaps running on A14 instead of M1, and a 12" screen. This would be great for marketshare gains and to get more young people into the Apple ecosystem. Perhaps something that looks like the polycarbonate MacBook introduced in 2006?

prawn3• 6 years ago

Maybe reintroduce the iBook? Ha!

akrymski2• 6 years ago

Yes, that's the name I couldn't recall!

ekr• 6 years ago

There were talks of splitting Google and other huge companies due to their size (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/house-amazon-fac...).

Wouldn't it be awesome if Apple's CPU/IC design segment became a separate company and sold these CPUs and maybe SoC by themselves?

I think that would make a big dent into AMD/Intel market shares. Since Apple's part/die should be quite a bit smaller than most of the x86 dies, the fab costs should also be smaller and so should the final price.

leadingthenet2• 6 years ago

No, it wouldn't be awesome.

This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push, and because other parts of the business were able to massively subsidise the R&D costs necessary to come up with a competitive SOC in an established market that's otherwise a duopoly. If their CPU/IC design segment were its own company, the M1 would never have seen the light of day. Period.

Furthermore, this chip is not meant to be a retail product. It's optimised for the exact requirements that Apple's products have. The whole reason why they're able to beat Intel/AMD is because they don't have to cater to the exact same generic market that the established players do, but instead massively optimise for their exact needs.

I genuinely don't understand how can anyone who wishes to break up Apple not see that these things?

46Bit• 6 years ago

This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push

This seems pretty grounded.

The whole reason why they're able to beat Intel/AMD is because they don't have to cater to the exact same generic market that the established players do, but instead massively optimise for their exact needs.

I'm less convinced of this. Their exact needs seem to be making laptops... and so these chips would make interesting candidates for other laptops, if split off from Apple.

It's never going to happen, and an independent company might struggle for R&D money, but if these prove to be better laptop CPUs there is a market there.

delfinom2• 6 years ago

This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push, and because other parts of the business were able to massively subsidise the R&D costs necessary to come up with a competitive SOC in an established market that's otherwise a duopoly. If their CPU/IC design segment were its own company, the M1 would never have seen the light of day. Period.

Eh, that's some very biased thinking.

In the real hardware world of both mechanical and electrical. I can approach a company and say "we want something with these specs, we'll buy 10 million pieces per month, what can you do you us?" and that kicks off R&D efforts after some ground contractual agreements to commit both parties.

You know, exactly what Microsoft did with AMD when they commissioned unique SOC designs for their consoles with a host of never before implemented features such as direct gpio <-> ssd io.

beefcake• 6 years ago

In browsing the web wirelessly! What about running docker, kubernetes, brew install?

Dahoon• 6 years ago

I can't believe HNers believe sales pitch benchmarks.

diebeforei4852• 6 years ago

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.

rem1313• 6 years ago

There will be always something better next year. The general advice I give is - wait as long as you can before you buy and then buy the best version you can afford.

diebeforei4852• 6 years ago

Not all annual improvements are equal. The current M1 laptops have some real disadvantages- old industrial design, only two Thunderbolt ports, limited RAM, and limited software support for many apps. There are real compromises to switching to an M1 device as your main machine right now (unless you also have a separate x86 device).

MacBooks are due for a new industrial design, so it makes sense to wait. If you absolutely need a new computer, that's a tricky place to be right now.

satysin4• 6 years ago

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 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.

joefourier4• 6 years ago

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 smaller fie sizes and are used for real-time streaming, while CPU-based ones are used in offline compression in order to achieve the best possible compression ratios.

gjsman-10008• 6 years ago

OK... but let's say I'm a professional. That's a big sell. Having dedicated HW to do something faster than CPU is a bonus, not cheating.

satysin4• 6 years ago

Yes but that is kind of the point. Going forward all Apple Silicon machines will have this kind of hardware baked into the SoC at no extra cost whereas no Intel system (be it PC or Mac) will.

That is a big deal as it means Adobe, Sony, BlackMagic, etc. will be able to optimise to levels impossible to do elsewhere. If that 8x speed up scales linearly to large video projects you would have to have a Mount Everest sized reason to stick to PC.

Joeri5• 6 years ago

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.

Aeolun• 6 years ago

This is the most excited I have been for general purpose computer performance gains in about a decade.

I think I would be excited if it were not built by Apple. That functionally means it’s only going to be in Apple products at a 300% markup.

Dirlewanger• 6 years ago

No one's stopping any other company from doing it. But as usual, Apple has been the only company (for better or worse) that has been innovating on the desktop for the past decade. Every other manufacturer is content with producing the same milquetoast laptops.

woko• 6 years ago

I still feel that neural networks and genetic algorithms are far underused methods of solving problems. (Especially the latter, which don’t require training.)

Funny how he is more ambitious about genetic algorithms.

burlesona• 6 years ago

I see a lot of people debating the finer details of benchmarks and trying to argue whether or not Intel or AMD are still ahead.

But consider:

1. Apple just introduced their “starter” chip for everyday consumers. They would not WANT that chip to smoke their top-end Intel Macs, as it would cannibalize margins until the more powerful chips are ready.

2. This is a “two year transition,” with a team that has been shipping a meaningfully better chip every 12 months for about a decade.

From those two observations, I would expect that we’ll see an M1x or M2 chip in the next 12 months which nudges the 16”MBP to 20% or so better than what we’re seeing today, and 12 months after that the transition is completed with the introduction of the M3 series, where there’s an M3, M3x, and M3z for the low, mid, and max performance machines.

And when that happens, I expect the max-performance M3z is going to smoke anything else on the market.

This is not the first time Apple has had a “five-year lead” on the industry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes Intel and AMD some time to catch up.

And frankly we should all be thrilled about that, because more competition and innovation is just going to accelerate our entire field. I can’t wait to see all the new stuff this will power over the next decade :)

offtop5• 6 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, but is it possible that the various decades of legacy code which hold up the x64 instruction set were simply bogging it down.

I just ordered the new silicon MacBook Pro and I fully expect to record a full album on it using Logic X. As presumably Apple rewrote it from the ground up for the silicone, I expect to be absolutely blown away.

lmilcin2• 6 years ago

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 existing stack that keeps tight grip and ensures competition is killed off before gaining momentum.

So, basically, dystopian future with whole world divided into company territories.

sz4kerto2• 6 years ago

The industry is not moving _this fast_. Intel still has many-many opportunities (and years) to catch up.

If you still own any Intel stock it is probably good time to dump it.

The market already has the information you have, so it is unlikely that your evaluation of Intel's expected future profits is significantly better/more insightful that others'.

typon• 6 years ago

The market already has the information you have, so it is unlikely that your evaluation of Intel's expected future profits is significantly better/more insightful that others'

This is religion

selectodude3• 6 years ago

If you still own any Intel stock it is probably good time to dump it.

Until Intel stops making huge amounts of money, I'm not sure, as a company, they're in huge trouble. Apple isn't going to be selling the M1 to other companies and other companies have proven they don't have the mettle to spend what Apple is spending to make chips like this. Really, AMD should be a little worried since they have some counterparty risk getting all of their chips made by TSMC. At least Intel controls their own production.

Mindwipe6• 6 years ago

Really, AMD should be a little worried since they have some counterparty risk getting all of their chips made by TSMC. At least Intel controls their own production.

Chip fab is probably a short term risk but not a medium long term one, as the situation with Huawei has made it very clear to world governments that having competitive chip fab capabilities is incredibly important from a geopolitical power point of view. I would expect to see significant investment by various governments in the next ten years into addressing it.

(If you have a proven skillset in that area and no particular ties to the country you live in I would look into buying a yacht.)

lmilcin2• 6 years ago

Stock value is a view on future, not current financial situation of the company, with relation to what existing market thinks it is going to be.

By buying stock you say: I believe the company is going to be better than the market thinks it is going to be.

samtheprogram• 6 years ago

Intel may or may not be controlling their production in the future; although it’s claimed to be for the short term, they’ve also started using TSMC.

source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-now-ordering-chips-tsmc...

hans1729• 6 years ago

'There is going to be no competition'

this is what some of the intricate systems related to technological progress and markets we're dealing with converge on, yes.

In these terms, I'd rather look at this with a different perspective: the platforms are becoming more mature.

Think of it as an organism; there is nothing natural about outsourcing the control flow of your own components. My intuition for natural design would be something along the lines of microservices (like our biological organs), organically defining the greater entity they themselves form (the company).

Apple is just one illustration of systems getting out of control. Think of international politics, or edgecases in financial markets. Our systems didn't escape us, because they were never truly under control.

Therefore, this isn't dystopian. It is dystopian from a reference frame within wich you claim to have control, but you don't, and you never had. To exercize any control over technological and economic progress is _way_ beyond our individual scope, by a margin of at least one level of abstraction.

Instead, this is a transition from one system (one with decentralized and autonomous components (subcontractors et al)) to the next (one with organic components).

Within our current game, that feels dystopian, but that won't matter, because it won't be the same game anymore. Iteratively, that is.

pjmlp14• 6 years ago

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.

wu_187• 6 years ago

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.

dcchambers2• 6 years ago

It's funny - x86 has been the king of computing for basically my entire life, and we're finally seeing that change. This is kind of like a throwback to the early days of innovation in the CPU space, before everything ran on the same ISA. I'm both nervous and excited.

Excited because x86 has been stagnant for years. I'm not an EE but my understanding is that its a pretty messy architecture with lots of "glue and duct-tape" fixes.

Nervous because, although x86 had flaws, since pretty much everything ran on it allowed for more open environments and development practices & fewer walled gardens.

SubjectToChange3• 6 years ago

x86 is an extremely messy ISA, but what about it has been stagnant? New instructions are pretty much every year.

dcchambers2• 6 years ago

I guess I shouldn't say that development on it has been stagnant - certainly engineers at Intel and AMD must be doing something - but performance improvements have stagnated, especially compared to the rapid improvements we're seeing from Apple in the ARM space.

I am not at all an expert in this field so my remarks are based on my own observations and performance benchmarks from experts in the industry. For example, this graph from Anandtech shows the stagnation (or at least slow improvements) in x86 performance gains while performance gains from Apple have been massive.

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png

xwdv• 6 years ago

I'm still in denial. I feel like there's just no way it's possible without huge compromises.

slayerjain• 6 years ago

If the graphics performance also get good boosts, mac minis could become a more versatile playstation/xbox alternative! Assuming the games are there of-course.

madenine• 6 years ago

Is there a common linear algebra benchmark?

Would love to see a non-Intel chip + OpenBLAS beating out Intel + MKL

kccqzy2• 6 years ago

Why would you use OpenBLAS rather than Apple's Accelerate.framework? Since you're already using the Intel MKL, the only fair comparison is Accelerate.framework.

moelf• 6 years ago

https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/release/upcom...

togs• 6 years ago

Confirmed. Apple chips are the future of gaming!

dang4• 6 years ago

All: there are multiple pages of comments; if you're curious to read them, click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065026&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065026&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065026&p=4

herf• 6 years ago

I am wondering if M1 is winning many of these due to main memory latency?

I think Geekbench 4 reported memory latency, but it's not in v5. Does anyone know of a benchmark of this directly?

S_A_P2• 6 years ago

Ive an iMac Pro from 2018, and thought it would be interesting to compare my Geekbench scores.

Single thread: 1015 Multi thread: 7508

M1 is far ahead of the 3.2Ghz Xeon in my machine single threaded and I suppose having double the cores(vs M1 Hi-po cores) helped me in that respect. The fact that I paid 5 grand vs a ~1500 dollar portable is not lost on me here...

soheil• 6 years ago

Could it be that a batch of CPUs that should have had subpar performance ended up having good performance due to luck?

mkaic• 6 years ago

I think the really cool thing is that this would theoretically rank the M1 as #1 on the Geekbench Single Core leaderboard, above both AMD and Intel's latest offerings!

randycupertino• 6 years ago

Dang, you do a very nice job of moderating here. Light touch approach, helpful guidance and enforcement when needed. Just wanted to let you know it's appreciated!

seehafer• 6 years ago

Mr. Gackle is in large part what has kept HN from degrading into just another Internet forum.

AshamedCaptain3• 6 years ago

To be honest, I think that these comments evidence a failure of the HN website UI.

Wouldn't it be easier to just create standard pagination links at the top of the comments page, rather than manually forcing a mod to post this "list of pages" comment on each and every article?

als0• 6 years ago

Hmm I wonder if dang's message might already be automated rather than manual?

mrgordon2• 6 years ago

Yes similarly I’ve started to notice that other users never notice I’ve replied to their comments since there are no notifications. A bit sad since sometimes quite a bit of effort is put into the replies.

kgermino• 6 years ago

I think dang would agree.

1) there is a more link at the bottom of the page, Dan started making these comments because the UI is too subtle and a lot of people miss the link

2) I believe that he’s said they are working on performance improvements so that all the comments can be shown on a single page to solve the problem completely.

dang4• 6 years ago

Oh yes but there are two failures: (1) the UI doesn't display pages clearly; (2) the software is too slow to render entire threads. #2 is the real problem, and I don't want a temporary workaround to become too easy.

The real prize is getting the software fast enough to just render entire pages again, which is what it did for most of HN's existence.

dang4• 6 years ago

Thank you! and sorry to proceed by detaching your comment, but it's best for this subthread not to be at the top. (I could collapse it, but think of the non-JS users...)

bnolsen• 6 years ago

considering the intel macs spend their whole lives thermally throttled, i'm not suprised by the numbers.

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

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