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

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 5 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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maz1b ◴[12 Nov 20 02:16 UTC] No.25065664[source]▶
This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years.

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.

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Bud ◴[12 Nov 20 03:40 UTC] No.25066161[source]▶
It's not just outperforming the MacBook Pro. It's also blowing away the current 2020 top-end iMac, which has a 10-core Intel i9.

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.

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1. ttul ◴[12 Nov 20 04:21 UTC] No.25066399[source]▶
TSMC’s 5nm node is exceeding everyone’s expectations.
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2. arvinsim ◴[12 Nov 20 07:41 UTC] No.25067455[source]▶
On the non-Apple side, it will be interesting what AMD does with the 5nm node.
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3. andy_ppp ◴[12 Nov 20 08:24 UTC] No.25067695[source]▶
Yes I’m guessing we can expect a die shrink of Zen 3 at least next year meaning 10-15% additional performance with no architectural changes. Crazy.
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4. 0-_-0 ◴[12 Nov 20 09:40 UTC] No.25068151{3}[source]▶
5nm is not design compatible with 7nm, but 6nm is, so there might be a die shrink to that.
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5. andy_ppp ◴[13 Nov 20 19:13 UTC] No.25086172{4}[source]▶
Interesting! What makes the design incompatible I don’t know enough about it to know...