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

This is very interesting and in line with Apple's claims. I am looking forward to some real world numbers for different tasks in the next few weeks and months as native apps become available.

Jonathan Morrison posted a video [0] comparing a 10-core Intel i9 2020 5K iMac with 64GB RAM against an iPhone 12 Mini for 10-bit H.265 HDR video exporting and the iPhone destroyed the iMac exporting the same video, to allegedly the same quality, in ~14 seconds on the iPhone vs 2 minutes on the iMac! And the phone was at ~20% battery without an external power source. Like that is some voodoo and I want to see a lot of real world data but it is pretty damn exciting.

Now whether these extreme speed ups are limited to very specific tasks (such as H.265 acceleration) or are truly general purpose remains to be seen.

If they can be general purpose with some platform specific optimisations that is still freakin' amazing and could easily be a game changer for many types of work providing there is investment into optimising the tools to best utilise Apple Silicon.

Imagine an Apple Silicon specific version of Apple's LLVM/Clang that has 5x or 10x C++ compilation speed up over Intel if there is a way to optimise to similar gains they have been able to get for H.265.

Some very interesting things come to mind and that is before we even get to the supposed battery life benefits as well. Having a laptop that runs faster than my 200+W desktop while getting 15+ hours on battery sounds insane, and perhaps it is, but this is the most excited I have been for general purpose computer performance gains in about a decade.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUkDku_Qt5c

Edit:

A lot of people seem to just be picking up on my H.265 example which is fine but that was just an example for one type of work.

As this article shows the overall single-core and multi-core speeds are the real story, not just H.265 video encoding. If these numbers hold true in the real world and not just a screenshot of some benchmark numbers that is something special imho.

Your h265 example is due to the iPhone having a dedicated HW encoder while the iMac was rendering using the CPU. A hardware video encoder is almost always going to be faster and more power efficient than a CPU-based one by definition. However, a CPU encoder offers more flexibility and the possibility of being continually improved to offer better compression ratios.

Generally, HW encoders offer worse quality at smaller fie sizes and are used for real-time streaming, while CPU-based ones are used in offline compression in order to achieve the best possible compression ratios.

Yes but that is kind of the point. Going forward all Apple Silicon machines will have this kind of hardware baked into the SoC at no extra cost whereas no Intel system (be it PC or Mac) will.

That is a big deal as it means Adobe, Sony, BlackMagic, etc. will be able to optimise to levels impossible to do elsewhere. If that 8x speed up scales linearly to large video projects you would have to have a Mount Everest sized reason to stick to PC.

That's not really true. Every modern Intel, AMD, and Nvidia GPU does actually include hardware to accelerate encoding video, it's just that software solutions end up being preferred in a lot of cases because they produce better output and can be continually improved.

A large body of encoding software is however, perfectly capable of taking advantage of them.

The comparison is kind of silly.

> The comparison is kind of silly.

I disagree. Sure we have things like NVENC for accelerated H.265 encoding but that is an additional hardware expense and means only the machines you have that hardware in benefits. This will literally be all Macs from a $699 Mini and up.

I don't know enough about Intel QuickSync to compare but it clearly isn't used on the iMac in that video for some reason (perhaps the software does not support it? I don't know)

That is pretty exciting for video professionals IMHO.

I'm not saying it is world changing but being able to pick up a MacBook Air for $999 and get performance similar (or maybe better?) than a PC that costs two or three times that with dedicated hardware is very cool.

edit:

I appear to be missing why this is a ridiculous thing to say?

Could somebody please explain to me why the comparison is "silly"?

At the risk of going in circles, let me try to explain one last time:

All modern GPUs already have HW-accelerated encoding, including integrated Intel GPUs, and Nvidia and AMD dedicated ones.

Despite that, HW-encoding is not used that much by video professionals because CPU encoders produce better compression given enough time. You only have to do compression once, while the video will be watched who knows many times, therefore there is no real point in making your encoding faster if the file size goes up.

Your HW encoder is absolutely useless for anything else. It does not make your FX rendering faster, and cannot be used for any other codecs.

Even if say, your HW matches CPU-based encoder at first, it is fixed and cannot be updated unless you buy new HW which takes millions to design. Meanwhile any old dev can contribute to x265 and figure out new psychovisual enhancements that will enhance the quality while minimising the file size.

Specialized HW (i.e. ASICs) has been in existence for decades, yet despite that, there are very good reasons as to why we still use general-purpose CPUs (and GPUs) for most computing applications.