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

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).

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

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.)

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...

> Apple could even bring back an Apple Silicon powered Xserve

Given their performance/watt, this sounds like it could be potentially game changing.

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.

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.

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

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

Great point. It also makes me wonder about how long the NVidia deep learning advantage will last.

It does look very promising. One can only imagine what future Mac Pros will be capable of. And thanks for the correction.

I don’t know if the wider audiences would invest heavily enough in servers given Apple’s graveyard of products in that space.

Amazon AWS is already doing this with their own ARM cpus.

Yes, but Apple's ARM implementations seem to be better than ARM's.

The Gravitons are based on Cortex-A76 aren't they? Don't phones with that architecture benchmark similar to an Apple A10?

It's clear to me that they will.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft each have a cloud offering.

The M1 is just what Apple needed to compete there.