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

> The Mac mini with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067.

> Update: There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 6802. Like the MacBook Air , it has a 3.2GHz base frequency.

So single core we have: Air 1687, Mini 1682, Pro 1714

And multi core we have: Air 7433, Mini 7067, Pro 6802

I’m not sure what to make of these scores, but it seems wrong that the Mini and Pro significantly underperform the Air in multi core. I find it hard to imagine this benchmark is going to be representative of actual usage given the way the products are positioned, which makes it hard to know how seriously to take the comparisons to other products too.

> When compared to existing devices, the M1 chip in the MacBook Air outperforms all iOS devices. For comparison's sake, the iPhone 12 Pro earned a single-core score of 1584 and a multi-core score of 3898, while the highest ranked iOS device on Geekbench's charts, the A14 iPad Air, earned a single-core score of 1585 and a multi-core score of 4647.

This seems a bit odd too - the A14 iPad Air outperforms all iPad Pro devices?

Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows

- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines

- only 2 thunderbolt ports

- limited to 16GB RAM

- no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards

- no AAA gaming

- can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static

- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

This is, arguably, a disadvantage of any Mac.

But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.

Not really. The business models for desktop gaming are completely different to mobile devices, and there is no meaningful common market.

I think people will actually be surprised at how few games from iOS will even run on an ARM Mac because developers will block them.

It used to be possible to do some gaming on a Mac - the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac, especially with an eGPU. The end of x86 is the end of that market, forever.

Exactly. So it was never really the hardware that held back gaming on Mac, but the fact that from a game-development perspective it's an esoteric platform that has limited or no support for the main industry standard APIs (DirectX, Vulkan, etc).

It was never worth the effort for most game developers to bother porting games to the Mac because writing a custom port for Metal was way too expensive to justify for such a niche market.

But now with Apple Silicon, that all changes. If you're going to port your game to iOS (and that's surely tempting - it's a huge platform/market with powerful GPUs and a "spendy" customer base) then you basically get Mac for free with close to zero additional effort.