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

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 9 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 1.025s | source | bottom
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zdw ◴[12 Nov 20 04:30 UTC] No.25066465[source]▶
AMD's Zen 3 (Ryzen 5xxx series) are beating the Apple M1 in single core score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore

As another datapoint Ian (of Anandtech) estimated that the M1 would need to be clocked at 3.25Ghz to match Zen 3, and these systems are showing a 3.2Ghz clock: https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1326516048309460992

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whalesalad ◴[12 Nov 20 04:41 UTC] No.25066520[source]▶
The M1 is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an MVP desktop arm chip.

M2, M3... that is when I think we will see stellar performance against things like Ryzen.

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gjsman-1000 ◴[12 Nov 20 04:43 UTC] No.25066527[source]▶
It'll be sooner than that. Just wait for "M1X" or "X1" or whatever Apple calls the increased-bandwidth variant that goes into their 16-inch model and desktops.
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1. whalesalad ◴[12 Nov 20 04:51 UTC] No.25066568[source]▶
Sure, call it what you want. This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy. It won’t be full throttle.

I’m excited for whatever is next.

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2. alwillis ◴[12 Nov 20 05:37 UTC] No.25066810[source]▶
This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy.

Doubtful. You know they've been using ARM-based Macs with the requisite version of macOS for at least a year inside of Apple.

They've done a processor transition two other times; unlike the last two times, this time Apple controls the entire stack, which wasn't the case going from 68K to PowerPC or from PowerPC to Intel.

Apple has been designing their own processors for a decade now. There's nothing in the smartphone/tablet market that even comes close to the performance of the A series in the iPhone and iPad; there's no reason to believe this will be any different.

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3. nomel ◴[12 Nov 20 05:45 UTC] No.25066857[source]▶
Rosetta 2 hasn't had much mileage yet, though.
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4. ogre_codes ◴[12 Nov 20 05:58 UTC] No.25066930[source]▶
> This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy. It won’t be full throttle.

Apple has been running a version of OS X on these CPUs for 10 years now. The only thing which is "beta" here is Rosetta.

5. viraptor ◴[12 Nov 20 07:42 UTC] No.25067464[source]▶
Even if it's used internally it doesn't mean it's not beta/buggy. Intel releases regular microcode patches and has issues with all their existing experience. This is apple's v1 which was in the pipeline for over a year. The designers are likely months into working on v2 already - that cycle is very long.

"Don't upgrade MacOS to x.0 version" is already a common idea. Why would it be any different for their hardware?

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6. alwillis ◴[12 Nov 20 08:09 UTC] No.25067614{3}[source]▶
"Don't upgrade MacOS to x.0 version" is already a common idea. Why would it be any different for their hardware?

Because hardware and software are very different. The M1 is the next stage of Apple’s A series of SoCs—and they've shipped over 1.5 billion of those. I’d like to think all of the R & D and real world experience Apple has learned since the A4 in 2010 has lead to where we are today with the M1.

If anything, this simplifies things quite a bit compared to using an Intel processor, a Radeon GPU (on recent Macs with discrete graphics), Intel’s EFI, etc. This transition has been in the works for several years and Apple knows they only get one shot a making a first impression; I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be shipping if they weren't ready. I’m not concerned in the least about buggy hardware. They just reported the best Mac quarter in the history of the company; it's not there's pressure to ship the new hotness because the current models aren't selling [1].

The release version of Big Sur for Intel Macs is 11.0.1 and I've been running it for 2 days now. It's been the smoothest macOS upgrade I've done in a long time—and I've done all of them, going back to Mac OS X Public Beta 20 years ago.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/29/21540815/apple-q4-2020-e...

7. alwillis ◴[12 Nov 20 09:00 UTC] No.25067885{3}[source]▶
I’d be surprised if hundreds of apps haven’t already been tested already.
8. deergomoo ◴[12 Nov 20 12:36 UTC] No.25069150{3}[source]▶
They've been making ARM CPUs for 10 years. They're not new to the game, this is just the first time they're in non-mobile devices.
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9. viraptor ◴[12 Nov 20 20:39 UTC] No.25074649{4}[source]▶
And I expect it's a big enough change. (I may be wrong. We'll see)