13 ms·

"Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction MacBook Air systems with Apple M1 chip and 8-core GPU, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core In

"Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction MacBook Air systems with Apple M1 chip and 8-core GPU, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 55-second clip with 4K Apple ProRes RAW media, at 4096x2160 resolution and 59.94 frames per second, transcoded to Apple ProRes 422. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Air." This is relevant. This means that the performance increase vs Intel is using the extremely throttled 1.2 GHz i7 as the baseline.

belval 6y ago
Personal opinion, no insider info I think it's a good CPU, but I don't think it'll be a great CPU. Judging by how heavily they leaned on the efficiency, I am pretty sure that it will be just good enough to not be noticeable to most Mac users. Can't wait to see actual benchmarks, these are interesting times.
- therealmarv 6y ago
  You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. But I agree... let's wait for the benchmarks (btw. iPads already overturns nearly all laptop CPUs)
  - oblio 6y ago
    Based on what Apple says. Is there an independent cross platform benchmark which is actually relevant and that says the same?
    - favorited 6y ago
      No, because it hasn't shipped yet.
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    > You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. The important part there is "in their class". I'm sure the Apple silicon will impress in the future, but there's a reason they've only switched their lowest power laptops to M1 at launch. The higher end laptops are still being sold with Intel CPUs.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      The reason is almost certainly that its the lowest power laptops is where the volume is and because it makes absolute sense to go for that part of the market first. I'm really impressed by what they've done in this part of the market - which would have been impossible with Intel CPUs.
    - 013a 6y ago
      That's not what they said during the keynote. They said the Macbook Air (specifically) is "3x faster than the best selling PC laptop in its class" and that its "faster than 98% of PC laptops sold in the last year". There was no "in its class" designation on the 98% figure. If they're taken at their word, its among every PC laptop sold in the past year, period. Frankly, given what we saw today, and the leaked A14x benchmarks a few days ago (which may be this M1 chip or a different, lower power chip for the upcoming iPad Pro, either way); there is almost no chance that the 16" MBPs still being sold with Intel chips will be able to match the 13". They probably could have released a 16" model today with the M1 and it would still be an upgrade. But, they're probably holding back and waiting for a better graphics solution in an upcoming M1x-like chip.
      - harrisonjackson 6y ago
        This probably says more about the volume of low end PCs being sold than about the performance of the air.
        013a 6y ago
        If you believe that, then you've either been accidentally ignoring Apple's chip R&D over the past three years, or intentionally spinning it against them out of some more general dislike of the company. The most powerful Macbook Pro, with a Core i9-9980HK, posts a Geekbench 5 of 1096/6869. The A12z in the iPad Pro posts a 1120/4648. This is a relatively fair comparison because both of these chips were released in ~2018-2019; Apple was winning in single-core performance at least a year ago, at a lower TDP, with no fan. The A14, released this year, posts a 1584/4181 @ 6 watts. This is, frankly, incomprehensible. The most powerful single core mark ever submitted to Geekbench is the brand-spanking-new Ryzen 9 5950X; a 1627/15427 @ 105 watts & $800. Apple is close to matching the best AMD has, on a DESKTOP, at 5% the power draw, and with passive cooling. We need to wait for M1 benchmarks, but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. There is no evidence that they aren't capable of scaling multicore performance when provided a higher power envelope, especially given how freakin low the A14's TDP is already. What of the power envelope of the 16" Macbook Pro? If they can put 8 cores in the MBA, will they do 16 in the MBP16? God forbid, 24? Zen 3 is the only other architecture that approaches A14 performance, and it demands 10x the power to do it.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
    Did they say what they meant when they said faster? I saw some graphs that looked unrealistically smooth with two unlabeled axis
  - StillBored 6y ago
    A number of times when they said that I though, "but, that is a GPU heavy workload". Its not clear if they were comparing to existing mac's or more recent ryzen/intel xe machines. Both of which have very significant GPU uplifts with their integrated GPUs. AKA, I suspect a big part of those perf uplifts evaporate when compared with the laptops that are appearing in stores now. And the ipad benchmarks also remain a wait and see, because the perf uplifts I've seen either are either safari based, or synthetic benchmarks like geekbench. Both of which seem to heavily favor apple/arm cores when compared with more standard benchmarks. Apples perf claims have been dubious for years, particularly back when the mac was ppc. They would optimize or cherry pick some special case which allowed them to make claims like "8x" faster than the fastest PC, which never reflected overall machine perf. I want to see how fast it does with the gcc parts of spec..
    - hajile 6y ago
      They are comparing to the MacBook processors which they kept as ancient 8th gen Intel quad cores.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - arvinsim 6y ago
    Never rely on first party claims. Always wait for 3rd party benchmarks.
  - jug 6y ago
    For how often they repeated "faster", I was surprised to see them announce no benchmarks with some sort of baseline or context. Fast than what at doing what?
JAlexoid 6y ago
The literally benchmarked the slowest 10th Gen i7 CPU on the market. And I got so excited about it...
- akmarinov 6y ago
  They also said it's the fastest laptop CPU?
  - garmaine 6y ago
    "in its class"
    - tcgv 6y ago
      Classic Apple claim
      - sjwright 6y ago
        So you're disappointed that the MacBook Air doesn't beat the CPU and GPU performance of a hulking "desktop replacement" style notebook?
        garmaine 6y ago
        The complaint is that Apple interprets “in its class” to mean literally the slowest mobile processor of the prior generation made by Intel. It’s not even “fastest in the class of low-priced value notebooks for everyday use” which is what a reasonable person might interpret that to mean.
- gburdell3 6y ago
  Which means that, according to Apple, it's better than the CPUs in the other laptops it's competing against. That slow i7 is typical for thin+light 13" machines. I fail to see how this is a bad thing or even sneaky marketing.
  - 6y ago
ffhhj 6y ago
Sorry to ask, what is the "Fabric" module in their architecture? Also, is the "Neural Engine" some neural network specific processor?
- rodgerd 6y ago
  The Neural Engine in iPhones is used for things ranging from photography enhancement to facial recognition for the unlock and Siri.
- gpanders 6y ago
  I wondered this too. In my experience, "fabric" typically refers to the programmable logic region in a FPGA-based SoC (such as the Xilinx Zynq). I'm assuming the M1 does not have this, so I'm not sure what it means in this context.
- grandmczeb 6y ago
  The "Fabric" is the interconnect between different components on the chip. It's what the different units use to communicate and transport data. The "Neural Engine" is a special compute unit specifically for machine learning. The iPhone Camera app uses it for semantic segmentation, for example.
- jzbiciak 6y ago
  Fabric is a common term for describing on-chip interconnects in a system-on-a-chip. It's all the wires and buffers and pipeline registers and arbiters and decoders and muxes that connect the components together. It's dominated by wires, typically, which is probably how it came to be known as a fabric. (Wild speculation on my part.) I've been hearing that term for a long time. Maybe 20 years?
klelatti 6y ago
The Pro is quoted as 2.8x the 1.7 GHz i7. Not Intel's fastest chip but, if these benchmarks are correct, that's a big speed bump and the higher end Pro's are to come. How fast does it have to be in this thermal envelope to get excited about?
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  How many cores does that have, and how many cores does the i7 have though?
  - klelatti 6y ago
    4 + 4 vs 4 hyperthreaded I think. Not sure I follow the point though.
    - tachyonbeam 6y ago
      The new Apple chip has more cores, so faster performance doesn't necessarily mean faster single-core performance. Faster on a parallel benchmark doesn't necessarily translate into faster performance for most real-world scenarios. That is all. That being said, I do believe Apple has very competent chip designers.
      - klelatti 6y ago
        From Anandtech Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim. Thats per core performance.
  - ctvo 6y ago
    Why is this a mystery or rhetorical question? Look on the website? It's public: M1 > Apple M1 chip > 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores > 8-core GPU > 16-core Neural Engine Intel > 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz, with 128MB of eDRAM https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0W42LL/A/refurbished-133-inch-macbook-pro-17ghz-quad-core-intel-core-i7-with-retina-display-space-gray https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0W42LL/A/refurbished-133... Apple's claim: > With an 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU, M1 on MacBook Pro delivers up to 2.8x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 5x faster graphics² than the previous generation. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space-gray-apple-m1-chip-with-8-core-cpu-and-8-core-gpu-512gb# https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space... Fine print: > Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Open source project built with prerelease Xcode 12.2 with Apple Clang 12.0.0, Ninja 1.10.0.git, and CMake 3.16.5. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro. > Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 10‑second project with Apple ProRes 422 video at 3840x2160 resolution and 30 frames per second. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
fudged71 6y ago
Also unclear what they even meant when comparing performance to the “highest selling PC”, I’m not even sure if analysts could tell you what the top PC on the market is
0-_-0 6y ago
According to the Anandtech benchmark the A14 (what's in the latest iPhone) is 8% below the Ryzen 5950X. M1 is likely faster than that. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... Quote: "In the overall SPEC2006 chart, the A14 is performing absolutely fantastic, taking the lead in absolute performance only falling short of AMD’s recent Ryzen 5000 series. The fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including the SoC, DRAM, and regulators, versus +21W (1185G7) and 49W (5950X) package power figures, without DRAM or regulation, is absolutely mind-blowing."
- jfb 6y ago
  This is stupefying to me. Like, when Anand did the A12 or A11 reviews, I wrote: "The craziest thing is how close [to 1/56th of a Xeon 8176] they get at 3W. That's the part that's staggering. What could Apple do with, say, laptop thermals? Desktop thermals? The mind creeps closer to boggling." -- me, 5 October 2018 Guess we're finding out.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
    Would this be good a chip for a data warehouse?
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      I think so, especially with the specialized hardware in there for machine learning (although in a data center you'd probably opt for specialized hardware like discrete GPUs). There are some players on the market for ARM servers as well. That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. They might use variations of it in their own data centers, maybe.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        > That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. I wonder if this could potentially be a good time to bring back Xserve...
jamil7 6y ago
Only for the Air, the M1 Pro is tested against the equivalent i7 Pro so I assume not throttled as much.

belval 6y ago

Personal opinion, no insider info I think it's a good CPU, but I don't think it'll be a great CPU. Judging by how heavily they leaned on the efficiency, I am pretty sure that it will be just good enough to not be noticeable to most Mac users. Can't wait to see actual benchmarks, these are interesting times.

therealmarv 6y ago
You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. But I agree... let's wait for the benchmarks (btw. iPads already overturns nearly all laptop CPUs)
- oblio 6y ago
  Based on what Apple says. Is there an independent cross platform benchmark which is actually relevant and that says the same?
  - favorited 6y ago
    No, because it hasn't shipped yet.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. The important part there is "in their class". I'm sure the Apple silicon will impress in the future, but there's a reason they've only switched their lowest power laptops to M1 at launch. The higher end laptops are still being sold with Intel CPUs.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    The reason is almost certainly that its the lowest power laptops is where the volume is and because it makes absolute sense to go for that part of the market first. I'm really impressed by what they've done in this part of the market - which would have been impossible with Intel CPUs.
  - 013a 6y ago
    That's not what they said during the keynote. They said the Macbook Air (specifically) is "3x faster than the best selling PC laptop in its class" and that its "faster than 98% of PC laptops sold in the last year". There was no "in its class" designation on the 98% figure. If they're taken at their word, its among every PC laptop sold in the past year, period. Frankly, given what we saw today, and the leaked A14x benchmarks a few days ago (which may be this M1 chip or a different, lower power chip for the upcoming iPad Pro, either way); there is almost no chance that the 16" MBPs still being sold with Intel chips will be able to match the 13". They probably could have released a 16" model today with the M1 and it would still be an upgrade. But, they're probably holding back and waiting for a better graphics solution in an upcoming M1x-like chip.
    - harrisonjackson 6y ago
      This probably says more about the volume of low end PCs being sold than about the performance of the air.
      - 013a 6y ago
        If you believe that, then you've either been accidentally ignoring Apple's chip R&D over the past three years, or intentionally spinning it against them out of some more general dislike of the company. The most powerful Macbook Pro, with a Core i9-9980HK, posts a Geekbench 5 of 1096/6869. The A12z in the iPad Pro posts a 1120/4648. This is a relatively fair comparison because both of these chips were released in ~2018-2019; Apple was winning in single-core performance at least a year ago, at a lower TDP, with no fan. The A14, released this year, posts a 1584/4181 @ 6 watts. This is, frankly, incomprehensible. The most powerful single core mark ever submitted to Geekbench is the brand-spanking-new Ryzen 9 5950X; a 1627/15427 @ 105 watts & $800. Apple is close to matching the best AMD has, on a DESKTOP, at 5% the power draw, and with passive cooling. We need to wait for M1 benchmarks, but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. There is no evidence that they aren't capable of scaling multicore performance when provided a higher power envelope, especially given how freakin low the A14's TDP is already. What of the power envelope of the 16" Macbook Pro? If they can put 8 cores in the MBA, will they do 16 in the MBP16? God forbid, 24? Zen 3 is the only other architecture that approaches A14 performance, and it demands 10x the power to do it.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  Did they say what they meant when they said faster? I saw some graphs that looked unrealistically smooth with two unlabeled axis
- StillBored 6y ago
  A number of times when they said that I though, "but, that is a GPU heavy workload". Its not clear if they were comparing to existing mac's or more recent ryzen/intel xe machines. Both of which have very significant GPU uplifts with their integrated GPUs. AKA, I suspect a big part of those perf uplifts evaporate when compared with the laptops that are appearing in stores now. And the ipad benchmarks also remain a wait and see, because the perf uplifts I've seen either are either safari based, or synthetic benchmarks like geekbench. Both of which seem to heavily favor apple/arm cores when compared with more standard benchmarks. Apples perf claims have been dubious for years, particularly back when the mac was ppc. They would optimize or cherry pick some special case which allowed them to make claims like "8x" faster than the fastest PC, which never reflected overall machine perf. I want to see how fast it does with the gcc parts of spec..
  - hajile 6y ago
    They are comparing to the MacBook processors which they kept as ancient 8th gen Intel quad cores.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- arvinsim 6y ago
  Never rely on first party claims. Always wait for 3rd party benchmarks.
- jug 6y ago
  For how often they repeated "faster", I was surprised to see them announce no benchmarks with some sort of baseline or context. Fast than what at doing what?

JAlexoid 6y ago

The literally benchmarked the slowest 10th Gen i7 CPU on the market. And I got so excited about it...

akmarinov 6y ago
They also said it's the fastest laptop CPU?
- garmaine 6y ago
  "in its class"
  - tcgv 6y ago
    Classic Apple claim
    - sjwright 6y ago
      So you're disappointed that the MacBook Air doesn't beat the CPU and GPU performance of a hulking "desktop replacement" style notebook?
      - garmaine 6y ago
        The complaint is that Apple interprets “in its class” to mean literally the slowest mobile processor of the prior generation made by Intel. It’s not even “fastest in the class of low-priced value notebooks for everyday use” which is what a reasonable person might interpret that to mean.
gburdell3 6y ago
Which means that, according to Apple, it's better than the CPUs in the other laptops it's competing against. That slow i7 is typical for thin+light 13" machines. I fail to see how this is a bad thing or even sneaky marketing.
- 6y ago

ffhhj 6y ago

Sorry to ask, what is the "Fabric" module in their architecture? Also, is the "Neural Engine" some neural network specific processor?

rodgerd 6y ago
The Neural Engine in iPhones is used for things ranging from photography enhancement to facial recognition for the unlock and Siri.
gpanders 6y ago
I wondered this too. In my experience, "fabric" typically refers to the programmable logic region in a FPGA-based SoC (such as the Xilinx Zynq). I'm assuming the M1 does not have this, so I'm not sure what it means in this context.
grandmczeb 6y ago
The "Fabric" is the interconnect between different components on the chip. It's what the different units use to communicate and transport data. The "Neural Engine" is a special compute unit specifically for machine learning. The iPhone Camera app uses it for semantic segmentation, for example.
jzbiciak 6y ago
Fabric is a common term for describing on-chip interconnects in a system-on-a-chip. It's all the wires and buffers and pipeline registers and arbiters and decoders and muxes that connect the components together. It's dominated by wires, typically, which is probably how it came to be known as a fabric. (Wild speculation on my part.) I've been hearing that term for a long time. Maybe 20 years?

klelatti 6y ago

The Pro is quoted as 2.8x the 1.7 GHz i7. Not Intel's fastest chip but, if these benchmarks are correct, that's a big speed bump and the higher end Pro's are to come. How fast does it have to be in this thermal envelope to get excited about?

tachyonbeam 6y ago
How many cores does that have, and how many cores does the i7 have though?
- klelatti 6y ago
  4 + 4 vs 4 hyperthreaded I think. Not sure I follow the point though.
  - tachyonbeam 6y ago
    The new Apple chip has more cores, so faster performance doesn't necessarily mean faster single-core performance. Faster on a parallel benchmark doesn't necessarily translate into faster performance for most real-world scenarios. That is all. That being said, I do believe Apple has very competent chip designers.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      From Anandtech Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim. Thats per core performance.
- ctvo 6y ago
  Why is this a mystery or rhetorical question? Look on the website? It's public: M1 > Apple M1 chip > 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores > 8-core GPU > 16-core Neural Engine Intel > 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz, with 128MB of eDRAM https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0W42LL/A/refurbished-133-inch-macbook-pro-17ghz-quad-core-intel-core-i7-with-retina-display-space-gray https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0W42LL/A/refurbished-133... Apple's claim: > With an 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU, M1 on MacBook Pro delivers up to 2.8x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 5x faster graphics² than the previous generation. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space-gray-apple-m1-chip-with-8-core-cpu-and-8-core-gpu-512gb# https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space... Fine print: > Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Open source project built with prerelease Xcode 12.2 with Apple Clang 12.0.0, Ninja 1.10.0.git, and CMake 3.16.5. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro. > Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 10‑second project with Apple ProRes 422 video at 3840x2160 resolution and 30 frames per second. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.

fudged71 6y ago

Also unclear what they even meant when comparing performance to the “highest selling PC”, I’m not even sure if analysts could tell you what the top PC on the market is

0-_-0 6y ago

According to the Anandtech benchmark the A14 (what's in the latest iPhone) is 8% below the Ryzen 5950X. M1 is likely faster than that. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... Quote: "In the overall SPEC2006 chart, the A14 is performing absolutely fantastic, taking the lead in absolute performance only falling short of AMD’s recent Ryzen 5000 series. The fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including the SoC, DRAM, and regulators, versus +21W (1185G7) and 49W (5950X) package power figures, without DRAM or regulation, is absolutely mind-blowing."

jfb 6y ago
This is stupefying to me. Like, when Anand did the A12 or A11 reviews, I wrote: "The craziest thing is how close [to 1/56th of a Xeon 8176] they get at 3W. That's the part that's staggering. What could Apple do with, say, laptop thermals? Desktop thermals? The mind creeps closer to boggling." -- me, 5 October 2018 Guess we're finding out.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  Would this be good a chip for a data warehouse?
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I think so, especially with the specialized hardware in there for machine learning (although in a data center you'd probably opt for specialized hardware like discrete GPUs). There are some players on the market for ARM servers as well. That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. They might use variations of it in their own data centers, maybe.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      > That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. I wonder if this could potentially be a good time to bring back Xserve...

jamil7 6y ago

Only for the Air, the M1 Pro is tested against the equivalent i7 Pro so I assume not throttled as much.