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

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1080 points antipaul | 3 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mcintyre1994 ◴[12 Nov 20 07:21 UTC] No.25067338[source]▶
> The M1 chip, which belongs to a MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency.

> The Mac mini with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067.

> Update: There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 6802. Like the MacBook Air , it has a 3.2GHz base frequency.

So single core we have: Air 1687, Mini 1682, Pro 1714

And multi core we have: Air 7433, Mini 7067, Pro 6802

I’m not sure what to make of these scores, but it seems wrong that the Mini and Pro significantly underperform the Air in multi core. I find it hard to imagine this benchmark is going to be representative of actual usage given the way the products are positioned, which makes it hard to know how seriously to take the comparisons to other products too.

> When compared to existing devices, the M1 chip in the MacBook Air outperforms all iOS devices. For comparison's sake, the iPhone 12 Pro earned a single-core score of 1584 and a multi-core score of 3898, while the highest ranked iOS device on Geekbench's charts, the A14 iPad Air, earned a single-core score of 1585 and a multi-core score of 4647.

This seems a bit odd too - the A14 iPad Air outperforms all iPad Pro devices?

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throwaway4good ◴[12 Nov 20 08:30 UTC] No.25067719[source]▶
The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes.

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

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kmlx ◴[12 Nov 20 08:55 UTC] No.25067856[source]▶
> 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.

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1. Betelgeuse90 ◴[12 Nov 20 10:03 UTC] No.25068282[source]▶
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.
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2. marcyb5st ◴[12 Nov 20 10:23 UTC] No.25068396[source]▶
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.
3. sudosysgen ◴[12 Nov 20 21:19 UTC] No.25075205[source]▶
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).