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

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 8 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source | bottom
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nostromo ◴[12 Nov 20 03:07 UTC] No.25065960[source]▶
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).

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1. kube-system ◴[12 Nov 20 03:09 UTC] No.25065976[source]▶
There's still a lot to be said for software support, IO, RAM, etc.
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2. musicale ◴[12 Nov 20 03:16 UTC] No.25066014[source]▶
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.)

replies(1): >>25066093 #
3. kube-system ◴[12 Nov 20 03:30 UTC] No.25066093[source]▶
> Apple could even bring back an Apple Silicon powered Xserve

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

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4. andreasley ◴[12 Nov 20 03:43 UTC] No.25066178[source]▶
Also GPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/1799092?bas...

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

5. joshspankit ◴[12 Nov 20 03:58 UTC] No.25066277{3}[source]▶
I don’t know if the wider audiences would invest heavily enough in servers given Apple’s graveyard of products in that space.
6. p0rkbelly ◴[12 Nov 20 04:44 UTC] No.25066533{3}[source]▶
Amazon AWS is already doing this with their own ARM cpus.
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7. kube-system ◴[12 Nov 20 04:56 UTC] No.25066594{4}[source]▶
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?

8. 1996 ◴[12 Nov 20 05:43 UTC] No.25066843{3}[source]▶
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.