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1080 points antipaul | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.958s | source
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maz1b ◴[] 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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bigdict ◴[] No.25066381[source]
I wonder if M1 dominates an i9-9980HK at multithreaded workloads that make full use of available SIMD? Does an M1 dominate at peak theoretical flops?
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rbanffy ◴[] No.25067645[source]
M1 is not magic and can't break the laws of physics. SMT makes better use of silicon and will probably push speeds closer. OTOH, M1 has a fast memory that the i9 can't match.

I still bet on the i9, but it'd be interesting to run a test.

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GeekyBear ◴[] No.25068287[source]
>M1 is not magic and can't break the laws of physics.

Anandtech's deep dive provides several examples of advances in Apple's core design that didn't involve magic or breaking the laws of physics. For example...

Instruction Decode:

>What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry. Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs

Instruction Re-order Buffer Size:

>A +-630 deep ROB is an immensely huge out-of-order window for Apple’s new core, as it vastly outclasses any other design in the industry. Intel’s Sunny Cove and Willow Cove cores are the second-most “deep” OOO designs out there with a 352 ROB structure, while AMD’s newest Zen3 core makes due with 256 entries, and recent Arm designs such as the Cortex-X1 feature a 224 structure.

Number of Execution Units:

>On the Integer side, we find at least 7 execution ports for actual arithmetic operations. These include 4 simple ALUs capable of ADD instructions, 2 complex units which feature also MUL (multiply) capabilities, and what appears to be a dedicated integer division unit.

On the floating point and vector execution side of things, the new Firestorm cores are actually more impressive as they a 33% increase in capabilities, enabled by Apple’s addition of a fourth execution pipeline.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

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1. rbanffy ◴[] No.25071733[source]
> advances in Apple's core design that didn't involve magic or breaking the laws of physics.

That's exactly what I said. It's faster, but not an order of magnitude faster and different workloads will perform differently depending on a multitude of factors (even if benchmarks don't). Do not expect it to outperform a not-too-old top-of-the-line mobile CPU by a large margin.

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2. GeekyBear ◴[] No.25072305[source]
The current gen iPhone chip using the same cores literally outperforms anything Intel makes on a per core basis.

Zen 3 slightly outperforms the iPhone chip, but it runs it's clocks slower to stay inside a 5 watt power draw.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

So, yes. Expect it to outperform Tiger Lake and Zen 3, at least on a per core basis.

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3. rbanffy ◴[] No.25073338[source]
Remember the intel part has 8 fast cores while M1 has 4 (and 4 puny ones which really doesn't count). The Intel part also uses SMT to squeeze some extra parallelism that the reordering plumbing can't.
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4. GeekyBear ◴[] No.25074153{3}[source]
Yes, Intel makes parts with more cores, but their entry level chips only have two cores.

Apple chips with more cores will come in time as well.

It's the per core performance, especially at a given power draw, that matters going forward.