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

(www.macrumors.com)

1080 points antipaul | 1 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source

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martinald ◴[12 Nov 20 03:28 UTC] No.25066078[source]▶

What's actually more interesting to me than Intel vs ARM is how much further ahead Apple is vs the competition. The snapdragon 8cx is about 1/3rd the speed in both Single and Multicore performance of the M1.

How is Apple so far ahead even with the same instruction set?

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macawfish ◴[12 Nov 20 03:37 UTC] No.25066141[source]▶

>>25066078 #

Probably has something to do with the 5nm process.

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1. macawfish ◴[12 Nov 20 12:53 UTC] No.25069288[source]▶

>>25066141 #

I did some more research after commenting and found that while surely the 5nm transistors help this processor to run cool and stable, it's the packaging that really brings the speed. Everything being integrated right there means less latency, which likely means less need for caching, less stuff stuck waiting in RAM, etc.

I'm not a fan of Apple's domineering business strategies, but this SoC is impressive. I have to imagine AMD and Intel will follow up with something similar (a tightly integrated SoC aimed at higher performance applications).

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