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

> 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 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

A Ryzen 4800u actually uses up to 25W TDP, depending upon implementation.

And it’s 45% slower in single core.

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

Unlikely OEM's are paying 300+ for a 4800u. Certainly more than $65, though.

That price is a meaningless comparison, you can't buy the Apple processor in retail. What's the cost to procedure the AMD part? Something similar I'd guess.

AMD on it’s current hot steak has gotten its gross profit margins to 43%, which would make the cost to manufacture a $300 part around $171.

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

Yeah using the gross margin of the whole company and applying it to a single product is going to provide a reliable figure...

how much of the $300 goes to the retailer? how much goes to the distributor?

Not to mention I believe the RAM is included on the M1 SOC.

How much goes to R&D?

Maybe Geekbench is kinda useless as a benchmark suite then? I only see it used by Mac fans.

>There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.

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

That makes sense, AMD is selling to OEMs for a profit (over cost) while Apple is its own OEM, if any charging is done it's purely internal and for accounting purposes.

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.

It's not measuring sustained performance. The fanless MacBook Air is going to throttle much sooner than a desktop iMac with proper cooling and unlimited power.

And yet here we have the M1 MacBook Air apparently beating the M1 MacBook pro, by a large margin.

The silicon lottery is still a thing.

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

They are already binning. The air is supposed to be less powerful, with cheaper variants even having one core less.

The benchmark is just ... that accurate.

They are binning for functional GPU cores and allow chips with only 7 functional GPU cores instead of 8 to go into the lower priced Air.

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

Based on a sample size of 1 or 2, most likely. It could be due to something as stupid as Spotlight running in the background on the MBP but not the Air.

It's thought that the MBP score is due to it being ran possibly during indexing on setup. The score difference is too big, it's a single sample, and the pro still fries it at single core.

It’s how companies price their products. Is it perfect? No, but that’s why I used the word “around”.

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.

Certainly more than $200, so what’s your point?