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

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 3 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.715s | 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. adrian_b ◴[12 Nov 20 09:17 UTC] No.25067990[source]▶
Without doubt, the Apple M1 has the highest single-threaded performance of any non-overclocked CPU, being a little faster than AMD Zen 3 and Intel Tiger Lake.

Nevertheless, because Apple has chosen to not increase their manufacturing costs by including more big cores, the multi-threaded performance is not at all impressive, being lower than that of many much cheaper laptops using AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPUs.

So for any professional applications, like software development, these new Apple computers will certainly not blow away their competition performance-wise, and that before taking into account their severe limitations in memory capacity and peripheral ports.

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2. sjwright ◴[12 Nov 20 20:49 UTC] No.25074803[source]▶
But given that M1 is clearly the basic CPU for low cost, thin-and-light devices, we can strongly infer that Apple’s next M chip will be significantly more capable. Chips with eight or more performance cores would be a certainty for the upper tier of laptops and iMacs.
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3. misterdabb ◴[15 Nov 20 14:20 UTC] No.25101367[source]▶
Given that the M1 is a full node ahead of Zen 3 and two nodes ahead of whatever Intel has to offer, one would think that when on same node, Intel and AMD will be just as capable.

But the truth is comparing to future offerings is bullshit, and we have to stick to what's available today. Impressive power/performance and all that, I have to say. We will see how sustained load looks like and how it runs non-optimized software. But to put in perspective 1 CCX of zen 3 performs better on 7nm (but draws up to 65W). With approximately the same die size (although w/o GPU and other things, the M1 has).