Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel

https://unum.cloud/post/2021-12-21-macbook/

by signa11 • 5 years ago

243 214 5 years ago

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

What really impressed me in this was not the expected M1 to older x86 performance gap (that poor i9 must have been throttling for the whole benchmark while the fans were preparing the laptop for takeoff) but the fact you can get a much faster laptop with 4x as much memory for about the same price from Apple just a couple years later…

grumpyprole• 5 years ago

The Intel chipsets were limited for a long time in that they could only support a maximum of 16GB of LPDDR ram. Yet another reason Apple must have been frustrated with Intel.

bnt• 5 years ago

Is there a reason Intel put that limitation in place?

tcmb• 5 years ago

The price given in the article is not correct though, the 16" M1 Max 64GB is actually 3.900 USD (and I presume this is before sales tax, I'm from a country where advertised prices include VAT).

ChuckNorris89• 5 years ago

Did I miss it or did the author fail to mention the most important variable of this comparison, specifically, the frequency at which the memory of the AMD server CPU was operating at.

If you're doing memory benchmarks, why omit such essential details like memory frequency, as this can have a bigger impact here than the CPU itself?

masklinn2• 5 years ago

The entire thing seems incredibly half-assed e.g. they're testing a 64 cores CPU on single-threaded workload (literally the only mentions of threads is that they "disable multithreading"), they repeatedly harp on the server being "over 50k" but the CPU is 5 so I can only assume most of the 50k are in the

1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory

which you apparently need to... bench hashmap lookups?

The mac's pricing seems pretty bullshit as well as the lowest price to get 64GB is $3500 (Max with 24 GPU cores, and a measly 512GB SSD), which does not qualify as "around $3000" in my books.

jhgb• 5 years ago

Setting aside the fact that Threadripper is not really a server CPU, it tops at DDR4-3200 when it comes to memory support. Considering the custom build, it seems the most likely option. (As in, why would it use anything slower for no good reason?)

glandium• 5 years ago

The Threadripper Pro has 1TB memory, which means it's likely ECC registered, which is slower at the same frequency, and it might not even be DDR4-3200 in the first place because it's rather new in ECC, and server hardware manufacturers like to use old stuff.

ashvardanian4• 5 years ago

Its configured with the fastest memory possible on the Threadripper. The exact specs and RAM stick models match the ones mentioned in the preceding article, I have linked below. We didnt include those, as we don’t know the exact specs of RAM modules in MacBooks.

https://unum.cloud/post/2021-11-25-ycsb/#our-toys

Daniel_sk2• 5 years ago

I "downgraded" from a top spec Macbook Pro 2019 16" i9 9980HK with 64GB RAM to the new 14" M1 Pro with 32GB. Fans are at 0 RPM all the time, I haven't heard them yet. It compiles the same Android project without a sweat and with 0 RPM fan speed. The i9 was hitting 100C and maximum RPM in the same use case and took maybe three times longer. And the new macbook was about 25% cheaper than the 16" I bought in 2020. It's a completely different league - worth all the money I spent.

tluyben2• 5 years ago

I did the same but to an Air 16gb. Much cheaper, mostly faster and doesn't have the quirks I had with the 16". I had it replaced 3x and it's was still shit; overheated and 3x just completely died... It was the most expensive computer I bought in since the 90s (Sun or SGI were more expensive) and it was a total horror show. Apple did give me new ones no problems but they never worked well for me; fans always on and burning so hot that it was uncomfortable to work on. This new air is really fabulous; always snappy and it does not heat up at all. It's actually a bit too cold.

Daniel_sk2• 5 years ago

A colleague is working on the same project with an Air 16GB and doesn't complain. It's crazy that it doesn't even have active cooling and can be used for serious CPU intensive work. The 16" model was a big Apple failure. I had to use it in clamshell mode with an external monitor because having the macbook open with an external monitor would make the macbook run a lot hotter and the fans would spin much louder all the time. That was a pretty well known problem with the GPU and they never fixed it (probably some HW issue).

marsouin• 5 years ago

Exact same issues, I just changed my MB Pro Intel core i9 16" for a M1 Max 16", it's the biggest technological jump I have ever seen and the M1 Max is even cheaper.

Joeri2• 5 years ago

The m1 air is the star of the show for me, because it is a machine that overdelivers to such a degree. I got one to replace my laptop, and to my surprise discovered that it outperforms my i5 9600K desktop, by a noticeable margin, without even getting warm. Also, it’s really nice to finally have actual all day battery life. For the brief window that our offices reopened I would leave my charger at home and still have 20% to 30% left by the end of the day.

beebeepka• 5 years ago

Yeah,we know. But consider the this: your baseline is a shit laptop. Apple knew they were releasing a turd. Maybe even did so semi-intentionally because that would make new chips seem even better.

My personal Ryzen 5800H powered Lenovo doesn't overheat and I haven't heard the fan I over a month despite doing all kinds of lightweight development and browsing on it.

Meanwhile, my fairly expensive work issued 6 core Intel Xeon Lenovo from 2019 sounds like it's about to take off throughout most of the day.

addicted2• 5 years ago

This thread is really interesting to read because if the same thread had been made a couple of years ago, before Apple released its M1 laptops, it would have been filled with Apple fans who would be saying that the Intel MBPs were the best thing since sliced bread and that the users were doing something wrong.

I think the only time Apple fans actually accepted that an Apple product was actually bad was the trashcan Mac Pro, and that was only because they went half a decade without upgrading it and they replaced a beloved design with one that was branded as a trash can.

kitsunesoba2• 5 years ago

YMMV though, I briefly owned a 5900HS/3080 Zephyrus G15 and though it was indeed a powerhouse, it absolutely got more hot and way WAY more noisy than my 16” M1 Pro does now doing the same things, while overall not being as nice of a laptop (far worse screen, somewhat chintzy build, meh speakers, barrel power connector, huge power brick, bad battery life, etc).

That G15 was better at some things than my M1 Pro is now but not by enough that I’d want it over the M1 Pro, even considering the price difference.

Gigachad2• 5 years ago

I met with a coworker recently who has the intel macbook and I was shocked to hear the amount of noise coming out of the thing while just running the basic programs we need to run. It was even discharging while plugged in until they closed enough stuff and turned docker off. Meanwhile I haven't had any issues with the M1.

kzrdude• 5 years ago

That sounds like a laptop full of lint though

sixothree• 5 years ago

Honestly, the thermals in intel macbooks were completely laughable.

bouke• 5 years ago

I’m using TurboBoost Switcher Pro to battle this issue. It keeps the machine cool(er) and thus quiet(er). Combined with the VRM cooling mod, it is doable with heavy workloads. Battery life is still bad though and now the bottom gets very hot.

JyB2• 5 years ago

Same experience with a M1 16GB. I have never felt such a jump in experience from a laptop to another. The M1 stays cold and silent and the battery lasts much longer, it's simply incredible. Even when I tried to throw games at it. It exceed my expectations.

l5870uoo9y• 5 years ago

I skipped the fan entirely and went from Macbook Pro Intel I9 to Macbook Air M1. Plenty of performance, much better battery time and size is more comfortable than the 14"/16".

agency• 5 years ago

The battery life is wild. Watched a full length movie on a 14” M1 the other day and checked the battery… 95%

dragonelite• 5 years ago

Its such a nice experience to not hear fans or burn your lap with couch programming.

tomp• 5 years ago

Exactly. Same for me (except 16GB). I am programming all day (multiple IDEA projects open) and have probably 200+ tabs open in Chrome and Safari. Not a sweat.

I keep saying, the best Apple advertisement are all other computers (and Windows/Android operating systems). It's like they're not even trying!

cf100clunk2• 5 years ago

These are good real world examples, and the other comments here in confirmation of the performance and energy benefits are pushing me towards Asahi Linux when it is good enough/close enough to be roadworthy. At that moment, Apple can have my money for an M1 Pro.

grishka6• 5 years ago

I went from a 2012 retina macbook pro to a maxed out (except storage) 14" M1 Max. The performance difference keeps blowing my mind on a daily basis. One Android project I sometimes work on took ~45 minutes for a release build on the old one but only 11 on the new one — and as it turns out I had spotlight indexing stuff in the background the whole time, and the SDK is still x86 so it runs through emulation. Fans do spin up sometimes but you have to try really hard to make it happen. On the old macbook the fans were spinning literally all the time and the CPU temperature has never fallen below around 60° on idle. That part of the case above the keyboard was always hot to the touch, on the M1 it's barely warm.

xcambar• 5 years ago

I assume 2021 and not 2012, right?

teaearlgraycold4• 5 years ago

I'd be curious to hear how your old laptop could improve after getting cleaned of dust and with fresh thermal paste.

charwalker• 5 years ago

Part of that is Intel cannot get to low enough wattage on their mobile chips to sustain anything more than a quad core for very long. AMD is beating them but ARM is in a league of its own after decade+ of mobile focused development.

I'm excited to see how this changes x86 systems, mobile and desktop.

vmchale• 5 years ago

I'm on an M1 (8GB RAM) and it completes my Q/data science stuff faster than my desktop (through rosetta). I use it for fun mainly but wow!!

malshe• 5 years ago

I have a 2018 MBP with i9. The fans drive me crazy. I remember once I was in a meeting with my PhD student who was sitting across from me. The MBP was on my desk in clamshell mode placed in between us. Suddenly its fans started and my student jumped from the chair because the fan noise was so intense. It's been more than 3 years and the fans are still noisy. Just to be sure, there is no lint inside it. I cleaned it just the last week.

phyalow• 5 years ago

I have a 16" M1 Max, fully loaded. The thermal profile on this thing is insane, here is a screenshot of the internals after being on for a couple of hours with a bunch of chrome tabs open https://imgur.com/a/yjXxdvJ its barely warmer than body temperature.

CSSer• 5 years ago

Wow, thanks for the share! I had no idea there were that many temperature sensors throughout the board.

secondcoming2• 5 years ago

Doing something like code compilation would be a better test of thermals than opening a bunch of chrome tabs

sersi• 5 years ago

I tend to be around 55-60 degrees... Still great though, my previous mbp from 2019 was around 90

FpUser• 5 years ago

Bunch of tabs idling should consume no CPU. Why would you expect it to be warm?

vmception2• 5 years ago

Also note for anyone on the fence about being 1-inch larger,

the 16 inch model is the same physical size as the 15-inch models and they removed a lot of bezel. the screen has the same camera/sensor notch as an iphone does, which allows them to extend the screen farther.

full screen videos are letterboxed 99% of the time so the notch blends into. I don't play full screen games so can't tell if thats an issue. and it is in the OS top bar the other rest of the time.

sprite3• 5 years ago

I went from a maxed out late 2019 to a maxed out M1 max (except ssd). The M1 is so much better it’s almost crazy and I can finally use my 2 LG 5k monitors again without the machine coming to a crawl. In a lot of ways the 2019 was worse than my previous one which I believe was the 2017 model. Glad Apple finally listened to what people wanted and made a laptop that works, added some ports back in and got rid of the terrible Touch Bar.

Ginden• 5 years ago

Though, i9 Macs were notoriously bad due to heat management, slower than i7 Macs in many applications.

chrischen• 5 years ago

I also downgraded from the top 16” intel mac but to the 13 inch pro. I’m thinking I might keep it as it’s almost as powerful as the new M1 with much much longer battery (new 14 inch battery is comparable with older intel macbooks).

thecompilr• 5 years ago

There is now doubt the M1 is very much cooler, but they also made the laptop much thicker to allow sufficient airflow without hitting the fans. I am pretty confident that this is the main reason to make it so much thicker than the Intel one

ranguna• 5 years ago

In summary, apple made a better product than a two your old mac. 64 GB DDR5 M1 vs 16 GB DDR4 overheating i9 mac from 2019.

This is indeed Apple to Apple, but not apples to apples.

kevingadd• 5 years ago

I'd really love to find out how much of the m1's performance is due to the advantage of having a custom architecture designed to make Apple's refcounting mania actually perform well. I.e. somehow run all their arm code in a way that emulates the M1 instructions on a regular ARM chip with similar clocks, cache etc... probably very hard to do. Maybe you could patch a binary that came out of Apple's compiler to not use the new instructions? The atomics they use to do refcounting definitely have a measurable performance impact on x86.

saagarjha2• 5 years ago

There are no "special" M1 refcounting instructions, they're just ARMv8.1 LSE atomics made to go really fast. (You can confirm this pretty easily: objc_retain uses cas.)

pja• 5 years ago

I think that’s the OP’s point? Apple optimised the snot out of their chip for the code they run.

Vertical integration works, in other words?

cwizou• 5 years ago

Yep, I think it's interesting to note how slow x86 was in general with refcounting even compared to the PowerPC era.

It's something that showed early on quite a lot when you compared what was considered light usage at that point in time (say open Word and a couple of Safari tabs), a G4 wasn't ridiculous in those scenarios compared to the first Core 2 machines.

While I'm sure the designers paid particular attention to those instructions, it's really x86 being a terrible instruction set than the other way around that create that particular refcounting gap I think.

izacus4• 5 years ago

Nah, most of the performance comes from:

- Massive caches

- Really really good power efficiency due to good manufacturing node

- Massive RAM bandwidth

- Very fast I/O performance of the builtin SSD

It's a big, expensive chip to manufacture and it pays off with overall performance.

ksec4• 5 years ago

Nitpicks:

How a DDR5-powered MacBook.....

LPDDR5, which was correctly labeled later in the article. LPDDR5 is not a variant of DDR5. Hence the title DDR5 powered is inaccurate.

Cores have massive L2 blocks for a total of 28 MB of L2.

24MB + 4MB. Only 24MB is shared between HP Cores. There is also an additional 48MB of System Level Cache on Max ( 24MB on Pro ). So in reality the cache difference on Mac system is the reason for most ( but not all ) of the performance difference.

Printing was done via the 5N TSMC lithography standard.

N5.

Memory bus was upgraded to LPDDR5 and claims up to 400 GB/s of bandwidth.

On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with both M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking.

masklinn2• 5 years ago

On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking.

That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop, probably more relevant is that CPUs are not able to come anywhere near saturating memory bandwidths on the Max: Anandtech tested the memory subsystem[0] and it caps out at around 110 per performance cluster (which you only need 4 cores to reach, with 2 cores already coming close: individual cores reached 102GB/s each), plus around 20 for the efficiency cluster.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

ksec4• 5 years ago

Yes they are only really needed for the GPU. But then I dont want people to think M1 Pro has the same 400GB/s memory bandwidth as M1 Max just from reading the article. Again, nitpicking.

ben-schaaf• 5 years ago

That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop

It's about on-par with modern-ish dedicated laptop GPUs. The mid-range GTX 1060 mobile from 2016 does 200GB/s, a RTX 3070 mobile from this year does ~450GB/s.

jeroenhd2• 5 years ago

While the M1 is definitely impressive, Apple has been known for their lacking cooling designs and weird performance curves back in the Intel days.

This comparison maybe Apples to Apples, but it's not really apples to apples. Modern Intel and even older Intel can bring a lot more to the table than the Mac Pro from a few years back could deliver because of Apple's design decisions. You could make the argument that you're just benchmarking Apple Macbooks to choose a platform to run macOS on, but then the datacenter CPU doesn't really add anything.

If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU into the comparison, at least grab a modern Intel chip for your benchmarks. The 9980HK is from two years ago, back when Intel was already losing ground to AMD. The 10th, 11th and 12th gen processors made significant performance improvements since then (12900HK performing twice as well in some benchmarks compared to the 9980HK), at the cost of thermals and power usage.

The M1 will probably still beat a modern Intel chip, but by a significantly smaller margin in terms of performance (battery usage, though, is a whole different story).

starfallg2• 5 years ago

The funny thing is that the Threadripper isn't even a DC/Server CPU, it's a workstation CPU. The whole comparison is undermined by the design choices.

KarlKemp• 5 years ago

It’s undermined by comparing a laptop to a $50,000 workstation? In that it is unfair to the workstation?

throw8932894• 5 years ago

On some intel CPUs charger included with Macbook does not not satisfy CPUs power consumption. So if you ran CPU on 100%, it will use battery to get extra power, and macbook will eventually die, after battery reaches 0%.

This is not how you design "workstation". Macbooks are just toys.

plantain• 5 years ago

[citation needed]

I've only ever seen this happen if you use the lower wattage charger from a 12" Macbook Air with a higher spec'd Macbook Pro.

richardw• 5 years ago

A non-zero percentage of the world GDP originates from work done on MacBooks, to differentiate it from most “toys”. I don’t have one so I’m not talking my (mac)book here.

klelatti7• 5 years ago

At the cost of thermals and power usage

Isn’t this the whole point? Sure if you give Intel a bigger thermal envelope it will do better than the M1 but that really is Apples to oranges.

i_am_proteus3• 5 years ago

Horse is a lot faster than a motorcycle if all you've got for fuel is oats, hay, and water.

Adding in some gasoline would be apples-to-oranges.

sys_647382• 5 years ago

It’s down to brute force raw power and performance per watt nowadays. Apple mostly wins the latter but the former is inevitably going to kill demand for those climate unfriendly servers due to cooling and powering problems. We await the high end Mac systems with much interest.

Redoubts• 5 years ago

Depends if you feel the thermal constraints are inherent to the form factor, or simply sloppy engineering.

zamalek2• 5 years ago

If your machine is perpetually sitting on your desk then that doesn't really matter. For personal use, power and thermals are only a serious concern away from your desk.

My 3950x runs circles around the M1 work has me use. I use both for the same task. Apples to apples.

sschueller• 5 years ago

I found the i9 in macbook pro so severally throttled most likely because of heat that it underperforms compared to a 10 year old high end i7. The i9 in that from factor is pointless IMO.

afr0ck• 5 years ago

I have an Intel I9 workstation machine, I use it mainly for developement. Let me tell you something: it's the most horrible machine I've ever had in terms of performance (based on compiling a very large C code base).

jb1991• 5 years ago

If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU

Do you mean CPU?

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

Apple has been known for their lacking cooling designs and weird performance curves back in the Intel days.

Isn't that at least partly because Intel over promissed and under delivered.

qeternity• 5 years ago

My desktop rig went from a recent overclocked i5 32gb ram hackintosh to an 8gb ram m1 mini when they first came out, and the performance was mind blowing. I also grabbed an m1 mbp at the same time, which demolished my previous intel mbp but the hackintosh comparison is the one that sealed the debate for me. I had a massive cooler installed and yet the m1 mini was easily twice as fast.

I couldn't get my hands on the 16gb versions at launch, and for the first year they were still so much faster even when swapping 6-10gb but I am feeling the ram crunch a bit these days. I recently upgraded the rest of my team to the new 14 inch pros with 32gb ram and I'll be grabbing one for myself when I have the time next year to do a time machine transfer.

carlycue• 5 years ago

Tim Cook grabbed the infinity gauntlet and said “Fine, I’ll do it myself”.

oq_pmg• 5 years ago

Anyone cares to share how M1s performs with virtualization tasks? Say Windows desktop or Linux cli?

Gigachad2• 5 years ago

Docker runs a linux VM and it destroys intel macbooks. I hardly notice it running on the M1. Flawless experience with minimal power drain.

paulryanrogers2• 5 years ago

A coworker of mine is seeing their M1 performing about 2-4x slower than my Intel MacBook Pro where Docker is invoked. So YMMV

JyB2• 5 years ago

Flawlessly.

kissiel• 5 years ago

I'm using vmware fusion to run ubuntu vms for my daily work. The virtualized 20.04 aarch64 is on par with my x64 desktop (5900x from amd). Surprisingly in both, ST and MT loads. The laptop never runs out of juice at the end of the day when I'm on battery. Also there's no perf. penalty for disconnecting the charger.

izacus4• 5 years ago

Note that while people here are gushing over performance, it's worth mentioning that you need to run ARM64 virtualized OSes (both Windows and Linux) for it to work.

Getting Intel x64/x86 VMs to work is... fun and they don't perform nearly as well as you'd expect from the gushing praise.

So double check if your virtualization use-case actually is fine with running ARM guests.

raarts• 5 years ago

Pretty good but note the M1 chip does not support nested virtualization. So you can run Windows/ARM but you can't run Docker, VMWARE or VirtualBox inside that.

nottorp• 5 years ago

Funny that everyone does benchmarks and goes ooh and aah at the bigger numbers. Or complains about apples to hazelnuts.

How about this: I do NOT want a space heater on my desk or under my desk. I have a separate heating system thank you. Looks like the MxBlaBla chips can deliver good performance and stay cool.

Now if Apple would hurry with the MxBlaBla desktops... I don't need a new laptop atm.

forrestthewoods2• 5 years ago

I have the opposite complaint. I couldn’t care less about heat or battery life. I want the fastest possible machine, period. And too many articles about M1 discuss heat and efficiency which I just don’t care about.

mekster2• 5 years ago

So, just build a desktop or buy a huge laptop.

killjoywashere• 5 years ago

Am I the only one not seeing legends in the bar charts?

Terretta• 5 years ago

Tiny, on top of the bars.

traceroute662• 5 years ago

Might also be worth pointing out that there is no mention of "battery" in that blog post.

The M1 Max is already a beast of a chip, and lots has been written on HN and elsewhere about how it knocks the socks off the competition. I'm not going to repeat all of the stuff that has already been written all over the internet.

But the most impressive party piece of the new M1s is surely that they can knock the socks off the competition whilst running on battery and can do so for a decently sustained period of time.

All of the remotely viable competition I am aware of needs to be plugged into the mains at all times otherwise you get a very throttled experience.

brailsafe• 5 years ago

Apparently the Asus Zephyrus beats it on a number of benchmarks by a large margin, but I'm not sure if those were just GPU benchmarks, and I'm not sure if those were on battery tests. Linus Tech Tips did a recent comparison.

izacus4• 5 years ago

It's always telling that these benchmarks are done vs. old Intel chips inside the Mac and not the current competitors like latest AMD Ryzen series.

Apple chips still win, but nowhere near with the same margin as those breathless marketing posts are trying to advertise.

traceroute662• 5 years ago

The Asus probably also runs hotter and requires more use of fans. And I doubt the battery will last as long on intensive tasks.

A big part of the M1 performance per watt efficiency is the SoC integrated design. I'm no motherboard designer but I think it would be nigh on impossible to replicate it using discrete component systems (which I assume is what the Asus is).

Will caveat my comment here with a note that I haven't looked at comparisons for a while, only around the time the M1 was launched.

howolduis• 5 years ago

"$50K" is so vague and not useful for comparison.....

moondev• 5 years ago

AMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX with 1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory

rc_mob• 5 years ago

Anyone else having their M1 freeze sometimes?

eternalban• 5 years ago

I have an Air M1 and it definitely hiccups once in a while. It is noticeable. I am guessing it is Rosetta related.

sgarman• 5 years ago

Yea. This article is about the hardware which is great. The freezes, memory leaks and bugs are from the software and the latest mac os software really needs more time in the oven. I can't use firefox any more because WindowServer will eat up over 100% cpu and start allocating ram and and never releasing it until a crash or restart.

tiffanyh• 5 years ago

I’ve always wondered, how much of the M1 gains comes from ALL components (not just the CPU but more importantly also the GPU, controllers, etc) on its SoC being fab’ed on the smallest industry node size that competitors can’t use yet.

It’s not uncommon on x86 platforms for GPUs, memory controllers, etc to run on 1-2 generation old nodes while the CPU uses the latest tech.

xyzzy21• 5 years ago

This is a key difference. The amount of power required to drive bond pad loads can be substantial and there's a major speed hit because you have to drive the larger capacitance of the load which only can be juiced with more power. Keeping it all on-chip is definitely a major factor because you have none of this sucking up power and speed (at the trade of power).

Tagbert• 5 years ago

Sure, the fab size is part of the story, but we have also seen a general tendency for efficiency from Arm chips and the reason that they are used in mobile devices. Apple has also been willing to spend money on larger caches and wider buses in their SOCs to remove bottlenecks. Finally, Apple tunes the processor performance to optimize for processes that Mac OS uses a lot. That is possible because of their tight vertical integration and I have not seen on the more heterogenous Windows/Linux + Intel environment.

MobileVet4• 5 years ago

Ditto all the comments about swapping from 2019 MBP to 2021 MBP and being silent and powerful again.

The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the line 2019 i9 would chew through battery on Zoom. I could barely get 1.5 hours… which makes the term ‘laptop’ a little silly.

The 2021 can run long enough I don’t pay any attention to the battery, which is the point of a laptop - mobile computing.

General computing is even better, people didn’t even bother bringing their power supplies to work anymore with the M1. They could go all day doing development and the occasional meeting.

Power consumption and MagSafe are the hidden gems of the M1 models imho.

beeboop• 5 years ago

I never understood why zoom destroyed my work macbook pro's battery either. It was a max of about 90 min like you said. Seems ridiculous.

MobileVet4• 5 years ago

Right? How is video decoding not an optimized chip level operation on modern systems? It’s network traffic and video decoding… it shouldn’t required an i9 going full bore.

mekster2• 5 years ago

It's hard to imagine how laptops always lasted half a day from 20 years ago, despite plenty of technology innovations.

It must be the desire of users and developer laziness that chews all the batteries.

wellthisisgreat• 5 years ago

Is it worth getting the 14” MBP M1 Max or do you absolutely need 16” because of the wattage?

The 16” seems really too big and heavy for me and I use 3090 for the GPU stuff.

bitigchi• 5 years ago

Watch the latest Linus Tech Tips video about this.

ben7799• 5 years ago

I haven't seen an M1Max yet.. but I've had a ton of 15", 17", and 16" MBP models over the last 10 years at work. All have generally been maxed out i7 models up to the latest one which is an i9 I got about 3-4 months ago right before the ARM ones came out.

I'm totally on board with the narrative that the MacBook Pro has been going downhill for a long time and going to ARM is the ray of hope. At least in the case of my i9 16" they finally fixed the keyboard but it's a ridiculous space heater and it's only about 2x as fast as the 2018 i7 it replaced on a lot of tasks, and that's probably only because I was RAM limited on the 2018 one and am not on the 2021 one. The fan drives me bonkers as it pretty much runs full blast all day while I'm working. Lots of us on our team have seen the battery draining while it's plugged into the wall.

Some of these benchmark games miss the point, the user experience for a "mobile workstation" user has just been going downhill for a long time and these new machines are finally starting to turn that around.

I've had as 13" M1 MBP since launch last year FWIW and have never heard the fan come on, other than the fact it has a Touch Bar it's just about perfect for a personal machine. It feels much faster than the i9 for most real world tasks and the battery life resembles a kindle more than a laptop.

e43gg34gg2• 5 years ago

The new 12900HK from Intel beats M1 Pro in both single core performance and multicore performance:

https://news.in-24.com/technology/414335.html

TDP: 35 - 45 watt

but of course, it's better to compare with 3 years old CPU, so the results will be much more impressive.

teaearlgraycold4• 5 years ago

The Lenovo notebook with a Core i9-12900HK achieved 1878 points in the single-threading run of Geekbench 5.4.3, and 12,058 points in the multi-threading test.
A 14-inch MacBook Pro manages around 1750 (single threading) or 12,600 points (multithreading)

Higher in single-threaded only.

e43gg34gg2• 5 years ago

Yes, on this laptop, only single core is faster, but on some other laptops the overall performance of the intel CPU is higher:

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/82364/intel-core-i9-12900hk-m...

On this laptop it achieves > 13000 points in Geekbench Multicore.

lispm• 5 years ago

that just means that it's getting faster, while still drawing a lot more power.

My older i9-based Mac was additionally having thermal problems when the AMD graphics chip was used, which added another 20+ watts to the power consumption: use of external screens, video conferencing, ...

The new MacBook Pro happens to vastly improve the power consumption of the CPU, the powerful GPU and the Thunderbolt interface.

whalesalad• 5 years ago

I’ve been wanting to build a threadripper workstation for a while - or at least a top-tier Ryzen. My experience jumping from my loaded 2018 MBP (Core i7, Radeon, 32GB memory) to an M1 mini w/ 1/2 the RAM has caused a paradigm shift in the way I think about computing.

I abuse my machines too. I’m a freelance polyglot so on any given hour of the day I am working on Python, JS, design work, Clojure, Elixir, Ruby, scripting indesign, etc. One of the systems I operate runs millions of domain analysis operations a day and I tend to run a scaled-down version of the real system when developing. I do that for all clients, really.

The MacBook Pro must essentially be viewed as a desktop. The fans are always on full blast. The disk access is slower so Docker container file system sync tends to suffer. It’s not a terrible machine in and of itself, but once I “upgraded” the difference was night and day.

My M1 Mini has 16gb of ram but is otherwise stock. Assuming native ARM execution for a container, Docker is significantly faster at most things. Everything is faster. Running an Intel build of VSCode is the only thing that has ever stressed it, but I’ve never heard the fan. Disk performance is very impressive for such a commodity-grade machine.

We just deployed one in a client site to perform Adobe InDesign imposition “as a service” for an on-demand print factory. It’s handling the work like a champ!

As much as I’d love a new ARM MacBook Pro, the chassis is too big for me. Sounds petty, but the OG MacBook Air chassis is the ultimate mobile computer for me.

So I think I’ll hold off and wait until Apple unveils their Mac Pro replacement. If we extrapolate things out even just a little - it should be a monster.

vaxman• 5 years ago

Suggest learning about Unified Memory Architecture (history, features and limitations) --not so much benchmarks of "$50K Server" from Armenia.

TL;DR: If you're okay with the non-Windows world, there are few reasons (other than GPU performance) to buy new Intel or Chinese processors for consumer apps or professional bit-banging (image/video/audio/machine-learning).

Likewise, there is NO reason to buy Apple SoC processors for mission critical IT (boxes that run backups, your CFO's workstation that still crunches the Board's spreadsheets or other client-side databases including QuickBooks) --those will all need to be on Intel Xeon processors with ECC memory and a battery/UPS until migrated to the Cloud.

More than a year from now, I expect major Chinese manufacturers will release cheaper (RISC V based) UMA designs (which Apple is rumored to be exploring too) and more than two years from now, I expect Intel to release more expensive (Core based) UMA designs (for anyone wanting Windows). I think it is a foregone conclusion Microsoft will get into chip manufacturing (to diversify from Intel and Qualcomm and compete with Amazon and Google) too.

cloudengineer94• 5 years ago

Coming from an Intel Macbook user to migrated to the M1 Air and then eventually to the M1 Pro I have to say the current Apple Silicon Macs are excellent for productivity and casual use.

But for anyone interested in gaming you either get a console or need another gaming rig.

marricks• 5 years ago

Casual gaming is fine on them for me at least. Magic Arena or Civ5, performs well and totally quiet.

I know this isn't most or even many gamers, but it's the gaming I did on my intel MacBook and it's way better on M1.

dainiusse• 5 years ago

I an very happy with Apple doing that, but also keeping my fingers crossed for Intel. This company slept for too long, but I still think it is critical to have. And with these butkicks I hope they are going to show what they have. Of course... it will take some time. But we need competition, tsmc shouldn't have it all

st3fan• 5 years ago

For the "Copying Memory" test - isn't the page size on M1 something non-standard? It may be worth it to also try 8KB and 16kB block sizes.

diebeforei485• 5 years ago

This is just the beginning and there is still overlap with new Intel chips (though not at the same power consumption).

I'm very excited for what future products (M2/M3 - Pro / Max) can do in terms of efficiency and performance.

bfrog• 5 years ago

Maybe I'm naive, but I really haven't seen a reason to jump off my core i7 6600 lenovo laptop or 4770k desktop, neither of which spin fans or kill batteries. I can run xilinx vivado, kicad, and gcc just as fine as a newer 18 core i9 I have for work. Having used a mac air with an intel chip which is incredibly slow in comparison I have to wonder if the issue isn't mac os x itself rather than the hardware involved.

Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel

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