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

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

as a power user I will not be touching anything apple ARM until all my hundreds of software apps are certified to work exactly the same as on x86_64. i will not rely on rosetta to take care of this. i need actual testing.

besides this, 8GB of RAM is how much a single instance of chrome uses. i run 3 chrome instances, 2 firefox and 2 safari. and this is just for web.

this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

as such i was looking into a lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.

> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

Apple is at day 1 of their two year migration to Apple Silicon. Your judgement seems not just a little premature.

it depends how you consider it.

“two year migration” sounds just about right for a transition to something non apple.

we can then re-visit apple in 3 years time.

They also doubled (!!!) the SSD speeds, at least according to their slides. Presumably swapping will be much more seamless, so I'm not sure low RAM would be a huge issue for most day to day tasks.

It will still be a problem. The difference in access time between RAM and SSDs is still order of magnitude faster for RAM (10s of micro-seconds vs 10s of nano-seconds). So even if they doubles speeds random access of small data chunks will still choke your performance.

I jumped ship back to Linux (still sucks). This is the first new computer I’ve bought in almost a decade.

I think many professionals who need new hardware will use this as the catalyst to make them move back to PC hardware. The M1 looks amazing, but I need more than just Apple software to do my work. It’ll be a while before all the things I use get migrated.

> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

Their focus is not on power users ? They just completed the first, small, step of the migration to ARM. They only updated the very low-end models, those who were never targeted at power users anyway, and we're seeing that their cheapest, lowest-end models are whooping the i9 MBPro's ass.

Sure, the features and RAM may not be there yet, but again, these are the low-end models. If we're seeing this level of performance out of an MBAir or Mini. I can't wait to see what the Mac Pro is going to be capable of.

> it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus

Depends on the definition of "power user". Music producers, video editors, and iOS developers will be served quite well.

> lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.

When making that calculation, one should also take power consumption into account. $ per cycle is very low now with the new CPU.

They also updated the MacBook Pro so that is exactly the performance you are going to get for this generation.

The big screen model might give you more cores and RAM but IPC is going to be exactly the same.

Taking power consumption into account makes sense when the machine is running on battery power, but all modern processors are power efficient enough for the cost of electricity to be negligible for a tiny desktop computer.

The 13" MBP was never a pro "pro" model. I bet the big screen models next year will have more RAM and maybe an M2 chip.

> but IPC is going to be exactly the same.

I am not sure what you mean with this?

> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus.

Let's back up a second: Tim Cook said this transition would take place over two years. This is just the first batch of computers running Apple Silicon.

I certainly hope and think that Apple can come out with a beefy 16 inch MacBook Pro with 32 gigs of ram within the next two years. Also, in that time I imagine everything in Homebrew would be ported over natively.

They updated the lesser 13" Pro, but not the high-end 13" Pro (since 2016, it's been separated into two lines, with the high end one distinguished by higher TDP, four thunderbolt ports, and more fans) or the 16". IPC will be the same, sure, but I'd expect the higher end 13" and the 16" will have more cores or higher clock speed or both, to soak up the extra TDP headroom.

Its the same chip so single core performance is going to be the same, unless they raise the clock.

I don't replace laptops that frequently, currently.

I agree for the most part; the exception would be if I were running the small machine as a server. I know this is outside of most use cases, but if I were buying a machine to have on all the time (Plex, email, whatever), I'd want to at least feel like it's not driving up my electric bill.

This is where idle power matters. I recently replaced a pretty low power atom in my nas with a i3-9100F. The peak power usage is probably a good 2x higher, but the idle power is just a couple watts, so I expect my average power draw to be much less since the power draw under plex/etc is about the same and the machine sits idle most of the time.

Why don’t you think the M2 will increase clock speed?

And the problem with the M1 isn’t performance, single core is already off the charts. The M2 is going to provide 32Gb and 64Gb systems with up to four thunderbolt/USB4 ports and support for dual 6K monitors.

My tiny desktop is on all the time (but idle most of the time) and that was the frame in which I wrote my comment.

Hypothetical scenario: You save 50W (maybe too high, maybe not), use the machine for 10h every day, and a kWh costs you €0.40 (eg in Germany). You save €0.20 per day, €73 per year, and €365 in 5 years. Definitely a factor in areas with high electricity prices.

I think for most power users, they probably generate significantly more than €73 in value from the computer every day (or maybe every hour), so they are probably not thinking too much about that savings.

(Of course, power savings are important in their own right for mobile / battery-operated use cases.)

I doubt that the M1 or M2 is going to have superior single core performance to the upcoming Zen4/5nm laptop chips.

Let alone multicore performance. Apple's core are also far behind in IO, 64GB of RAM and 4x Thunderbolt is less than what current gen laptop chips can do.

Yes, Apple SSDs are back on the leading edge, they were about half the speed of the fastest Gen4 SSDs.

Low RAM is still an issue with such fast SSDs, as someone who ran RAID0 Gen3 NVMe SSDs (so equivalent to what's in there).

I agree that Zen4 should be comparable, but it also will cost 4X to make, and more to implement since it doesn’t include RAM.

The M1 is a system on a chip, with all the benefits and drawbacks of that including RAM and port limits.

The next releases will likely be A) a tweaked M1 for higher end PowerBooks with more RAM and ports and B) a desktop version with plenty of ports, significantly higher clock speeds, and off chip RAM.

I think there will always be faster CPUs out there, but not remotely near the M series in power per watt, and cost per power.

Zen is also an SoC, but with off-chip memory, this brings other advantages.

Most importantly, Zen 4 is a chiplet design, so for the same amount of cores it will be cheaper to make than the M1 chip.

As for performance per watt, Renoir in low power configurations matches the A12. I would really doubt that a laptop Zen 4 on 5nm LPP wouldn't pass the M1/M2 in both performance and performance per watt, because Renoir is on 7nm with an older uArch and gets close.

"Video editors" are going to buy a machine with 8GB RAM? (Which, I assume, will be soldered to the motherboard, like all recent Apple products.) Good luck to them, I guess.