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: 0.203s | source

Show context

dcchambers ◴[12 Nov 20 14:57 UTC] No.25070518[source]▶

It's funny - x86 has been the king of computing for basically my entire life, and we're finally seeing that change. This is kind of like a throwback to the early days of innovation in the CPU space, before everything ran on the same ISA. I'm both nervous and excited.

Excited because x86 has been stagnant for years. I'm not an EE but my understanding is that its a pretty messy architecture with lots of "glue and duct-tape" fixes.

Nervous because, although x86 had flaws, since pretty much everything ran on it allowed for more open environments and development practices & fewer walled gardens.

replies(1): >>25080332 #

SubjectToChange ◴[13 Nov 20 08:37 UTC] No.25080332[source]▶

>>25070518 #

x86 is an extremely messy ISA, but what about it has been stagnant? New instructions are pretty much every year.

replies(1): >>25084894 #

1. dcchambers ◴[13 Nov 20 17:32 UTC] No.25084894[source]▶

>>25080332 #

I guess I shouldn't say that development on it has been stagnant - certainly engineers at Intel and AMD must be doing something - but performance improvements have stagnated, especially compared to the rapid improvements we're seeing from Apple in the ARM space.

I am not at all an expert in this field so my remarks are based on my own observations and performance benchmarks from experts in the industry. For example, this graph from Anandtech shows the stagnation (or at least slow improvements) in x86 performance gains while performance gains from Apple have been massive.

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png

↑