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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.