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

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.

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

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.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/11/how-apple-silicon...

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.

Again, what definition of "pro" are you using, and how is that relevant to professionals with other occupations?

I wonder if that includes AirPlay screens, or just wired.

But regardless of professional requirements, "Pro" in Apple's product line just means "the more expensive slightly better version." Nobody's arguing that AirPods Pro are the wireless earbuds of choice for people who make money by listening to wireless earbuds.

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

The fanless Intel Core-M CPUs could post excellent benchmark scores (for its time). But if you give it a lengthy compile task, it'll slow down dramatically.

I'm a Sofwware Engineer / pro photographer / videographer.

I sling code from time to time, edit thousands of RAW files from my cameras and edit together 1080p footage day in and day out.

I did that for years on a 2013 MBA with 8GB of RAM. Now I have a 2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM. It's perfectly adequate.

Or are you saying that the test needs to run for way longer to be fair?

And it’s 45% slower in single core.

Most importantly, the M1 is estimated to cost Apple $65, the 4800u is a $300+ part.

Yes, the main computing constraint of mobile devices is heat management (This doesn't really reflect the CPU but the complete device. Putting the CPU in a more ideal setup like a traditional desktop or water cooling will improve the CPU's performance in longer tasks)

Two and a half times higher cost to build a slower, more power hungry CPU is not actually very similar.

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!

My XPS15 regularly throttles and sounds like it’s about to take off.

cf. Anandtech article from 2003:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1083/2

Thin and light is great for short bursts of activity, but, when you need sustainable heavy usage, you'll need a bigger computer, even if it's just to have a bigger heatsink.

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

By the way, “throttling” refers to CPU _slowing down_ despite cooling working at full capacity, so loud fans in itself isn’t one.

e: Another way to explain thermal throttling would be “thermal fading”, like brake fading on a car. Whether brake fading is considered a design fault or a feature that allow bursts of stronger brakes is semantic.

I ordered a 16GB Pro the other day to be my personal dev machine. I’m sure it’ll be more than fine. I’m upgrading from a 2013 8GB Pro which was only just starting to slow me down.

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...

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

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

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

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/gs6bal/2019_mbp...

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.

The two limit seems to be for 6016x3384 which I assume is 5k.

Anandtech's deep dive provides several examples of advances in Apple's core design that didn't involve magic or breaking the laws of physics. For example...

Instruction Decode:

>What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry. Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs

Instruction Re-order Buffer Size:

>A +-630 deep ROB is an immensely huge out-of-order window for Apple’s new core, as it vastly outclasses any other design in the industry. Intel’s Sunny Cove and Willow Cove cores are the second-most “deep” OOO designs out there with a 352 ROB structure, while AMD’s newest Zen3 core makes due with 256 entries, and recent Arm designs such as the Cortex-X1 feature a 224 structure.

Number of Execution Units:

>On the Integer side, we find at least 7 execution ports for actual arithmetic operations. These include 4 simple ALUs capable of ADD instructions, 2 complex units which feature also MUL (multiply) capabilities, and what appears to be a dedicated integer division unit.

On the floating point and vector execution side of things, the new Firestorm cores are actually more impressive as they a 33% increase in capabilities, enabled by Apple’s addition of a fourth execution pipeline.

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

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

My resource hogs are slack, mainly the browser, and Zoom calls are apparently the most computationally intensive thing in the world, especially if you screen share while you have an external plugged in.

Memory wise the reason I had to go from 8Gb to 16GB on my personal laptop was literally just for TravisCI.

Honestly, adding external monitors cripples MacBooks pretty quick, even unscaled 2 2k monitors will slow a 2015 15 down significantly (don't try and leave YouTube on either), and it gets worse from there once you start upgrading to 4k monitors. a 2017 15 is good for a 4k and a 2k, and gets a bit slow if you try and go dual 4k.

I planned on looking into eGPU solutions until IT offered me a new Macbook, and I convinced them I needed a 16" Pro.

tldr: External monitors or badly optimized applications (Zoom, YouTube, or browser based CI) will make most MacBooks feel sluggish pretty quick.

This comparison looks at different segments of the fab<>manufacturer<>OEM relationship. Add the user in there and you might say that you can buy an AMD CPU for $100 but an Apple CPU will cost you $1000. Not very meaningful as a comparison.

Edit: hadn't clicked through to your article. my comment is redundant

I bought i486DX for $20 month ago, as a memo of my first CPU.

https://www.theage.com.au/technology/apple-fans-burned-by-ho...

I imagine they will eventually have enough chips to start binning for different performance levels like AMD and Intel do.

iOS/iPhones/iPads already smoke every other device in running javascript. Apple Silicon may end up being the best thing to ever happen for Electron apps.

This is one place where the 64-bit ARM ISA design shines: since all instructions are exactly 4 bytes wide and always aligned to 4 bytes, it's easy to make a very wide decoder, since there's no need to compute the instruction length and align the instruction stream before decoding.

Short duration single core workloads workout a fan is trivial even for CPUs that aren't trying to do so.

The benchmark is just ... that accurate.

They are not binning for how high the cores will clock, which is just how business is done with Intel and AMD.

Also, some one, some day, had to disrupt it. Maybe this is it, maybe not.

When I said there is no magic, I was warning that we shouldn't expect huge speedups or a crushing advantage, at least not for long. The edge M1 has is due to a simpler ISA (which is less demanding to run efficiently, freeing more resources for optimization and execution) and a faster memory interface (which makes an L3 miss less of a punishment). This fast memory interface also limits it to, for now, 16GB of memory. If the dataset has 17GB, it'll suffer. Another difference is that all of the i9 cores are designed to be fast, whereas only 4 cores of the M1 are. This added flexibility can be put to good use by moving CPU-bound processes to the big cores and IO-bound and low-priority ones to the little ones.

In the end, they are very different chips (in design and TDP). It'd be interesting to compare them with actual measurements, as well as newer Intel ones.

That's exactly what I said. It's faster, but not an order of magnitude faster and different workloads will perform differently depending on a multitude of factors (even if benchmarks don't). Do not expect it to outperform a not-too-old top-of-the-line mobile CPU by a large margin.

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

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

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

You can argue that this particular Ryzen has a higher gross margin, say 50%, and lower ASP than $300, but that only gets your cost down to what, $140? And with RAM costing extra.

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

Apple chips with more cores will come in time as well.

It's the per core performance, especially at a given power draw, that matters going forward.

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).

But the truth is comparing to future offerings is bullshit, and we have to stick to what's available today. Impressive power/performance and all that, I have to say. We will see how sustained load looks like and how it runs non-optimized software. But to put in perspective 1 CCX of zen 3 performs better on 7nm (but draws up to 65W). With approximately the same die size (although w/o GPU and other things, the M1 has).