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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: 0s | 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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xvector ◴[12 Nov 20 03:48 UTC] No.25066209[source]▶
It’s also outperforming the 5950X in single core. Incredible!
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Bud ◴[12 Nov 20 03:52 UTC] No.25066240{3}[source]▶
Yeah, and doing this without a fan. It's almost like Apple is rubbing Intel's face in it for sport. It's not even fair.
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1. kllrnohj ◴[12 Nov 20 14:35 UTC] No.25070286{4}[source]▶
The 5950X in a single core load only uses around 18w. Drop 200mhz off of the top end boost frequency and it drops to 11w.

Short duration single core workloads workout a fan is trivial even for CPUs that aren't trying to do so.