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

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 2 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source
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martinald ◴[12 Nov 20 03:28 UTC] No.25066078[source]▶
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?

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1. PopePompus ◴[12 Nov 20 03:40 UTC] No.25066157[source]▶
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?
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2. saagarjha ◴[12 Nov 20 04:07 UTC] No.25066329[source]▶
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.