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Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 Is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac
- admiralspoo 6y agoThe fact that it's marginally faster is almost irrelevant. What really matters is that it's using about 1/3 the power of a comparable Intel chip while doing it, and that Intel routinely has a 60%+ quarterly profit margin (probably much higher on PC chips) that Apple now gets to keep.
- vvanders 6y agoAMD has been making similar inroads with Zen on the laptop and desktop space[1]. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cdolan 6y agoSplitting hairs here, but Intel’s 60% profit margin has nothing to do with what Apple “keeps” by making their own chips. It could be dramatically more expensive to make an M1 chip and Apple is making the trade off for performance/walled garden security. Unlikely, but possible
- mehrdada 6y agoYour point is theoretically valid but considering M1 is essentially a rebranded A14Z chip they would have have had to make for the iPad anyway, the marginal R&D spent on M1 should be epsilon.
- mbreese 6y agoIt still might cost Apple more to manufacture an M1 than it costs Intel to make an i5/i7/etc. Just because they are now their own chip supplier doesn’t necessarily mean that it will always be the cheaper option. But Apple didn’t switch chips for the cost. Just like the PPC to Intel switch, they did it for the performance and efficiency. More efficient means smaller, thinner, less battery, etc... more design flexibility. That and the fact that they fully control their release cycle is also a nice bonus.
- mehrdada 6y agoAre you comparing the cost to manufacture M1 to what costs Intel to make chips? I have no claim on that but that’s not what I interpreted from the above post. The relevant point of comparison is what Apple can negotiate with Intel for its chips versus M1 total cost. Please also note that a modern non-M1 Mac included a TSMC silicon (T2) on a similar order of complexity (A10-class) anyway that’s no longer present (albeit at a larger node).
- mbreese 6y ago> Are you comparing the cost to manufacture M1 to what costs Intel to make chips Me personally? I have no way of knowing or estimating those costs either way. But that was how I interpreted the parent comment. If you allow that R&D costs for the M1 are largely aligned with the A* series for iPad that they would have already been paying (from your comment), then you're left with the manufacturing costs. For Intel, they have: 1) chip design R&D, 2) fab method R&D, 3) fab costs, 4) sales/marketing/profit margin By switching to their own chips, Apple has absorbed #1 and #4, and left #2 and #3 to be outsourced to TSMC. If the main costs for #1 are duplicated from the iPad chip, then you're left with fab costs (and fab R&D). But, again, even with the likely cost benefits of making your own chips (and avoiding the Intel profit margin), I doubt that was the deciding factor in switching. The costs probably made the switch possible, but wouldn't have been the primary factor. Apple would gladly pay more per chip if it was more efficient (heat and power) and if they could control the release schedule. Even if their total costs for a single M1 chip are more than for an Intel chip, they probably still would have made the switch.
- ac29 6y agoTSMC, which manufactures Apple's chips, presumably at a profit, has a net margin of ~40%. https://www.tsmc.com/uploadfile/ir/quarterly/2020/3PTwU/E/3Q20ManagementReport.pdf https://www.tsmc.com/uploadfile/ir/quarterly/2020/3PTwU/E/3Q...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- manquer 6y agoIt is lot harder technically and politically for apple to replace TSMC part of the value chain. Apple will loose a lot of brand value if it directly employees cheap Asian labour. They could in theory move the production to U.S. however without the ecosystem of talent, suppliers and partners that Taiwan or china has it will be hard . They already spent 10+ years improving their iPad chips, switching made sense especially given intel lack of reasonable roadmap, the effort to integrate TSMC part of the chain does not have the same value given the risks today.
- creato 6y agoAre you thinking of Foxconn? I don't think anything you said makes sense for TSMC.
- piva00 6y agoTSMC is a foundry, there are very few companies worldwide with capacity to do the fab work that TSMC does and Apple is definitely not one of those. Are you confusing with Foxconn or other parts assemblies that Apple use? Because for Apple to roll out their own fab infrastructure would be a massive undertaking with very little benefit.
- jl2718 6y agoThis seemed obvious to me at first, but less the more I think of it. Samsung, for instance. Apple is already using 100% of 5nm capacity, so they are basically leasing an entire fab. The technology curve for fabs will bend in the direction of lower capital investment, smaller batches, and shorter turnaround, not smaller dimensions.
- Someone 6y agoIntel can distribute its overhead costs over a lot more CPUs than Apple, and Apple pays TSMC for making the chips, so, presumably, a large fraction of the marginal profits go to TSMC (probably not all of it, as I think Apple paid for building production capacity up front)
- ksec 6y ago>Intel can distribute its overhead costs over a lot more CPUs than Apple Purely from a CPU / SoC "Unit" shipped perspective. Apple currently shipped more CPU unit on both leading edge and total volume than Intel.
- Someone 6y agoThanks! Somehow, my mind only was on desktop CPUs. I couldn’t find hard numbers, but it seems that it isn’t a given that, adding all CPU power globally, there is more CPU power in servers than in smartphones.
- stefan_ 6y agoThis is a bit silly, it's like giving Apple credit for not even regularly bumping the CPUs in their lineup or getting locked into Intel.
- wtallis 6y agoThe chart compares M1 against an Ice Lake MacBook Pro and Comet Lake iMac. Comet Lake is current in Intel's desktop product line, and Ice Lake's successor started shipping last month. This isn't comparing against outdated Intel parts.
- acdha 6y agoYou’re close to restating why Apple Silicon exists in the first place: they didn’t want to delay upgrades but Intel couldn’t provide chips with decent specs on a dependable schedule. Back when Intel was shipping on time you’d see regular updates every year but then they stalled and that meant that there wasn’t a better part with the right thermal characteristics or other requirements. Remember when the MBPs had a lengthy delay before the maximum RAM limit went up? That was due to Intel not delivering CPUs using the next generation low-power DDR4 for, IIRC, multiple years. People would point to PCs which used DDR4 but miss that they were substantially larger and had much shorter battery life, massive batteries, or both.
- megablast 6y ago> You’re close to restating why Apple Silicon exists in the first place: they didn’t want to delay upgrades but Maybe. Apple was never very good at updating the chips in their laptops and desktops. Often way behind intels latest. Let’s hope theyve changed , but I doubt it.
- DonaldPShimoda 6y agoAs wtallis said [0]: > The chart compares M1 against an Ice Lake MacBook Pro and Comet Lake iMac. Comet Lake is current in Intel's desktop product line, and Ice Lake's successor started shipping last month. This isn't comparing against outdated Intel parts. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106054
- nottorp 6y agoPromising... but I'd wait for the real world benchmarks first. No one in the real world needs to emulate... geekbench.
- hmottestad 6y agoWould be a lot worse if performance was 1/10th. That’s what this benchmark shows. Essentially that it’s a lot better than people feared. The question for users like myself is, will things like IntelliJ still be decently fast? Still don’t know what kind of performance we will get from the JVM, but this shows some decent hope!
- DonaldPShimoda 6y agoI imagine it won't take long for something as widely used as the JVM to be compiled directly for the M1 instead of relying on Rosetta. :)
- hmottestad 6y agoIronically Microsoft just released a beta arm version of the JVM for Mac.
- WoodenChair 6y ago> Ironically Microsoft just released a beta arm version of the JVM for Mac. I wasn't aware of this. Can you provide a link?
- lolpython 6y agohttps://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/22/microsoft-contributes-to-java-port-for-apple-silicon-macs https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/22/microsoft-contrib...
- saagarjha 6y agoThey have, unfortunately it's a bit crashy in what looks new non-platform specific code.
- mappu 6y agoWhy is it reporting as "2.4 GHz" under emulation?
- boulos 6y agoMost likely they emulated the cpuid corresponding to a previously existing Intel part. cpuid is used to fill in those “GHz” numbers you see in these reports.
- kissiel 6y agoMy guess would be that's the base freq it will go to under full load on a fanless MBA. It's like the "official" 1.1GHz base clock of the i5-1030NG7.
- wmf 6y agoI wonder if this is a hint that Rosetta 2 on the 3.2 GHz M1 is intended to provide equivalent performance to a 2.4 GHz Intel processor.
- simonbarker87 6y agoOne thing I’m unclear on still is the windows VM situation. Is it just that “right now” we can’t run a windows VM but with some work by Apple/Microsoft/Parallels it can happen or is there some fundamental blocker here? I thought there was an ARM version of Windows already?
- minimaxir 6y agoWindows ARM is not available to OEMs. Parallels is trying emulation on M1 but who knows how well that will work. https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-apple-silicon-mac/ https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-apple-sili...
- roseway4 6y agoIn the article, I don’t see mention of Windows x64 running as a guest. They do hint at Windows for ARM, though.
- ACAVJW4H 6y agoI had the impression that, virtualization was not possible on current M1. As I sadly discovered that docker didn’t and won’t run on current silicon. Is it still possible for parallels to move forward without virtualization ?
- thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
- tehjoker 6y agoWhat kind of design choices are they making that can get the power down so low? What's Intel doing that hasn't been optimized away after generations?
- fooker 6y agoTwo things afaik: * Decoding an x86 instruction takes a ridiculous amount of resources. Can't be optimized away because of backwards compatibility. * Limited to small pages without jumping through weird OS hoops.
- PeCaN 6y ago- it takes some die space sure but no x86 processors are actually limited by instruction decoding (except, iirc, the first generation xeon phi in some cases) - huge pages don't exactly require weird OS hoops although i agree the 4kb→2mb→1gb page sizes are inconvenient
- hmottestad 6y agoI saw an interview with the designers of ARM and they explained how their design was ridiculously more efficient than competitors. Don’t have a link. Another good source of info is the article over at anandtech. Apple is doing a lot of stuff they Intel can’t because of x86. And also a bunch of stuff that neither Intel nor AMD want to do. Also don’t forget that Apple is on TSMC 5nm while Intel is for the most part on Intel 14nm which is more or less equivalent to TSMC 10nm.
- tehjoker 6y agoThanks for the tip! I thought power consumption issues increase with decreasing size though due to leakage current though a change in the finFET design can help manage that.
- heisenbit 6y agoYes, so per area there will be more power consumption. But you need less area so if the transistor count stays the same you save.
- ACAVJW4H 6y agoI wonder how this is possible? I imagine its partly due to manufacturing improvements (14nm vs 5nm) I mean how can Intel fall so far behind in only a couple years? I know they were one of the earliest investors in ASML’s EUV. Why couldn’t they push for smaller nodes? Is it because they were milking their current nodes too far? I saw them marketing freaking TEC’s to cool down their 500W Cpu gaming rigs on LTT and derbauer recently. What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy? Or did Intel do something so wrong they tumbled down this far? I know that Intel’s 10nm is closer to 7nm TSMC but still their competition is coming up with interesting and relevant technologies while Intel is like a junkyard of half baked ideas. 5g modems? Arduino competitor? Vaporware GPU’s since Larrabee? Claims of dominance in NN accelerators with nothing solid? Nirvana? Optane 600 series garbage SSDs? Stupid desktop computing form factor ideas? I can go on... I don’t hate Intel or root for any other company. I’m just trying to understand how incompetence like this happens in companies
- Nelson69 6y agoNo idea but I suspect the "unified" on chip memory is very very quick. Some friends and I were BSing about the "pro" level parts, it you can graft 2 or 4 M1s together, use off chip RAM and then treat that onboard 16GB like cache? We're talking about some game changing stuff.
- rbanffy 6y agoThe Xeon Phi had up to 16GB of fast memory in the same package as the main die. IIRC, it could be used as memory or as cache for external memory (which was much slower). If Apple integrates two more memory chips, it'll be able to power a pretty solid desktop or laptop. On the performance, Rosetta is most likely doing JIT so that most of the time it's running native ARM code. It did this with PPC binaries and DEC had it for Alpha.
- 95014_refugee 6y agoAs noted elsewhere, Roesetta doesn't JIT unless the AOT transpilation lets it down. Most apps are statically transpiled at installation time...
- maz1b 6y agoDefinitely impressive, but I just feel deeply disappointed that to get access to this great new promised performance, it comes at the expense of privacy and security with Big Sur. Still, looking forward to real sustained benchmarks. I'm referring to the phoning home issue that was raised on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25095972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25095972 If I'm incorrect in my understanding, would appreciate additional context and or information!
- RandallBrown 6y agoWhat are the privacy and security problems with Big Sur?
- thesuperbigfrog 6y agoI believe they are referring to this: https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/ https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoUnfortunately half of this article is factually incorrect. It’s also not new in Big Sur.
- oddevan 6y agoThere’s further discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25095438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25095438 Essentially: the phoning home is checking hashes of developer certificates to make sure they aren’t revoked.
- 1over137 6y agoNot just the phoning home, but the fact that Big Sur prevents tools like Little Snitch from blocking network traffic from Apple's own apps.
- akmarinov 6y agoSo M1 was the SoC for the lower power Macs - Air, Mini and 2 port 13”. Wonder what they’ll come up with for full port 13”, 16” and iMac.
- KMnO4 6y agoHopefully they keep Mx line as power efficient everyday chips, and create something really ludicrous (P1?) for the high end models. It’s about time that the “Pro” devices started being actually pro. Massive cache, on chip ECC memory, etc. The top of the line’s i9 MacBook really doesn’t cut it for a lot of professional work —- especially when it thermally throttles before the work can even begin.
- alphabettsy 6y agoI thought throttling issues were resolved with current-gen 16” i9?
- presides 6y agoI feel like if they were going to do this right now they would have offered 32gb configurations on the M1 devices... as it stands they're going to have to offer attractive ~$2k devices for creative professionals who don't need bleeding edge cpu performance but would like a 20h battery and native ios apps.
- mlindner 6y agoKeeping with previous naming schemes it'll either be some kind of M1X or an "M2".
- rbanffy 6y ago"Every other Mac" is kind of funny when there is a 28-core monster in the line. In any case, I bet the M3 will be able to run rings around the current MacPro.
- ucha 6y agoThey're comparing single-core perf
- thamer 6y agoIndeed this is the number for single-core performance. A previous benchmark[1] showed a MacBook Air with M1 getting 1687 on the single-core test and 7433 on multi-core. Compared to a 4-month-old kitted out iMac (1251 & 9014)[2] this is 35% faster on single-core and 17% slower on multi-core (8 cores on M1, 20 cores on the i9). Getting a better result via Rosetta 2 on the single-threaded benchmark is very impressive. I assumed that their benchmark included some vector instructions (which as far as I understand Rosetta 2 does not emulate) so this would mean that these higher numbers are for general-purpose instructions vs vector. That said, I can't find any reference to AVX or SSE in the "Geekbench 5 CPU Workloads" document, although the one for Geekbench 4 does mention them. It would be interesting to see numbers for Geekbench 4 on M1, if it runs via Rosetta at all. I would imagine that the tool is able to detect what is supported to run optimized code for each CPU being evaluated. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-be... [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/imac-27-inch-retina-mid-2020 https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/imac-27-inch-retina-mid-2...
- aparashk 6y agoIt is more than likely that Geekbench will use CPUID to establish what it is running on, and then adjust its kernels to suit the host CPU architecture. Rosetta2 would be using a CPUID that excludes the AVX and any other Intel ISA extensions that it does not support, therefore, Geekbench should be running without issues on the fastest vector extension supported, most likely SSE3 or SSE4.x.
- abruzzi 6y agohonestly, my 5 year old laptop is still plenty fast for what I need. If it weren't for dropped support and websites that force me to upgrade to the latest browser, I'd be happy with 10 year old computers. I honestly want to get off the upgrade roller coaster. (I have in the phone world--happy with my 1st gen iPhone SE)
- als0 6y agoMy 1st gen iPhone SE is also still going strong. So responsive. They really built it to last.
- saagarjha 6y agoI just "upgraded" from an iPhone SE to an iPhone 12 mini and realized that the engineers at Slack and Discord must be rocking the latest phones, because their apps fly on the new device in a way that they did not at all on iPhone SE. Other apps see much less of a difference. I have a dream that one day the engineers at those companies will come to work and find their brand new test devices smashed and replaced with iPhone 7s so they can understand exactly how badly their apps perform.
- intricatedetail 6y agoWhy creating native x86 needs a licence, but emulation don't? If a cpu is running microcode, how far away it is from emulation?
- avianlyric 6y agoI wouldn’t assume that there isn’t a licence involved. Intel have clearly indicated in the past that they think licensing is a requirement for emulating x86[0]. I imagine that Apple are only emulating x86-64, since they dropped 32bit support in their last OS. I believe that x86-64 is owned by AMD, so I imagine Apple has a licensing deal with them. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel-threatens-microsoft-and-qualcomm-over-x86-emulation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel...
- saagarjha 6y agoApparently Rosetta emulates 32-bit as well (of course, the kernel will not load these binaries directly). I can only think of CrossOver that needs it, so I'm not quite sure why they went through the effort to add it…
- klelatti 6y agoI think that the legal requirements will depend on the precise instructions - eg your linked article mentions SIMD. Certainly the basic x86-64 extension to x86 originated at AMD who (due to cross license deals) licenses them to Intel but things like AVX are Intel. I suspect that code emitted by Xcode omits these newer instructions. Bear in mind too that a lot of the x86 patents will have expired by now.
- jaimex2 6y agoI guess this means every other Mac was really slow all along.
- ericpauley 6y agoARM already has instructions for improving performance of Javascript [1]. What if Apple added custom ISA extensions to their chips to support efficient x86 emulation? Current evidence seems to suggest that much of the translation is happening statically; a few additional instructions might greatly increase x86 emulation performance if most of the code can be translated instruction-by-instruction. Also curious to see how Rosetta will work with x86 code whose instruction alignments can't be determined statically. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chips-have-an-instruction-with-javascript-in-the-name-fjcvtzs https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chip...
- klelatti 6y agoI think this is very unlikely as 1. Apple is still almost required to follow the ARM ISA as a result of its licensing agreement 2. They will regard x86 emulation as a short term legacy issue (developers will recompile their Apps for ARM soon) and so why design and build in extra hardware you won't need long term and 3. Rosetta 1 worked fine without this sort of help.
- saagarjha 6y agoApple has already shipped custom instructions; they just aren't using them here.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y agoI was all set to abandon macs for my future computers but they sucked me back in. Damn I can't see myself buying x86 shitters after this.
- dannyw 6y agoHave you looked at AMD Ryzen chips?
- mlindner 6y agoThe jury is still out on if these are even faster than the AMD Ryzen chips. The A12 competed favorably against the Ryzen chips.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoSingle thread performance of M1 is 70% faster than top Ryzen U series chip(4800U).
- snvzz 6y agoBut that's Zen2. The latest AMD chips are Zen3, which is some 19% faster IPC.
- bloody-crow 6y agoI really wish this tech was available outside of the Apple ecosystem. If Apple continue like this, x86 machines won't be able to compete. I wonder if other vendors are looking at this and contemplating transitioning to ARM as well.
- Skunkleton 6y ago> I wonder if other vendors are looking at this and contemplating transitioning to ARM as well. Perhaps, but with what hardware? The PC era was defined by mostly open hardware that had a high degree of interoperability. ARM does not bring the same.
- wmf 6y agoARM devices being closed is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The SystemReady program is working towards an open PC-like ecosystem.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoThe ARM ecosystem is way more open that the PC ecosystem. Think about it, instead of having a single (AMD barely counted till recently) CPU manufacturer designing and manufacturing the chips, you now have a company that publishes reference designs and several other companies build an array of interesting implementations. The only reason why ARM seems more closed is that you primarily interact with ARM chips on highly restrictive platforms. The M1 chip will go along way to changing that perception as consumers will now be able to use an ARM based platform as they normally would a regular computer. But, that's not the only way, you can buy a wide array of ARM based devices with recent-generation ARM designs and very flexible IO. e.g. https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
- anuila 6y agoIs there anyone shipping an ARM motherboard and ARM chip? I think the "openness" is also defined by what the market offers. All I see are non-extendable notebooks. Also until you can run non-linux "desktop software" on one, it will always feel like a "tablet"
- mortenjorck 6y agoEveryone here seems to be making this solely about the processor, which it is partially, but the other story is that Rosetta 2 is looking really good. Obviously there’s plenty more to test beyond a GeekBench benchmark, but hitting nearly 80% of native performance shows both the benefits of ahead-of-time transpiling and the sophistication of Apple's implementation. I’ll still be waiting to see what latency-sensitive performance is like (specifically audio plugins) but this is halfway to addressing my biggest concern about buying an M-series Mac while the software market is still finding its footing.
- aparashk 6y agoI am similarly curious about Rosetta2, but there seems to be very little marketing let alone technical information being made available. All I can figure is that it performs user mode emulation, similar to what QEmu can do, and does not cover some of the newer instructions. Off topic, my job has been in virtualisation for the last 12 years, thus I am very familiar with the publicly available body of research on this topic. Ahead of time binary translation has been a niche area at best.
- dwaite 6y agoMy understanding from WWDC is that it does AOT compilation at install time when possible. If an app marks a page executable at runtime (such as a JIT) it will interpret that. Newer instructions are still encumbered by patents.
- aparashk 6y ago"If an app marks a page executable at runtime (such as a JIT) it will interpret that." Was that from a presentation on Rosetta2 that I have missed? It certainly makes sense, but also you'd need to watch for writes to executable pages that have been already AOT translated.
- cormacrelf 6y agoJITs usually mark +x pages -w again after they've written them for sanity, so watching in platform libc mprotect could do it, but you could also force them to be -w anyway and then maybe use the page fault handler. How much integration with the kernel does it have?
- offtop5 6y agoVery very promising. I can imagine even better performance on the pro
- quyleanh 6y agoI just wonder, is there any Cinebench r23 result for M1 chip? How about with other Intel and AMD mobile chip?
- MR4D 6y agoWhat amazes me is that this is their first shot. Can’t wait to see what happens when they have an M chip for the Mac Pro (the tower, not the laptop). This architecture is a beast.
- anuila 6y agoTo be fair, this isn't their first shot at ARM processors, they've been at it for longer than a decade (Apple A4 was launched in early 2010) The AMD64 "emulation" on the other hand is brand new.
- kzrdude 6y agoThat's the cool thing, they've used their iphone/ipad line to gradually grow this.
- chj 6y agoI guess there should be a difference between binary code translation and emulation. Emulation gives you a feeling that you are doing it instruction by instruction, but here from the benchmark, there are tasks heavily relied on system provided API, and behind those API calls are highly optimized native code.
- kunai 6y agoIs this really the end of the road for Intel? If you're a PC gamer who uses Windows or a Linux enthusiast, you're probably running Ryzen which blows Intel out of the water in terms of value and cores (and recently IPC as well), and if you're on Mac obviously it's pointless buying an Intel product unless you really need the nVidia dedicated graphics or are buying a Mac Pro for a specific A/V workflow. It's insane how quickly they fell behind.
- absolutelyrad 6y agoNot yet. Intel fabs have a higher capacity, but if they don't get it right, Intel is going to be in the water.
- kunai 6y agoWith how much they've been struggling with 7nm, doesn't look positive. Zen 3 is already 7nm, a significant leap forward and TSMC and Samsung are already messing around with 3nm. I mean, 2022 for their first 7nm chips to hit market? That's crazy. Zen 3 hit the market two weeks ago.
- LoSboccacc 6y agoyeah transmeta c1 had the same claim. turns out there's a lot more to cpu speed than executing math operations in a straight line.
- gnicholas 6y agoIf the M1's emulated x86 performance is this good, why didn't Apple showcase this sort of comparison at their launch announcement? This seems like something that would have assuaged concerns about the apparent tradeoff of switching silicon. That is, it seems there is very little downside, especially if the M1 is more power/heat efficient. A comparison like this would have demonstrated this point more definitively than the many graphs Apple showed that were conspicuously lacking axis labels.
- HighChaparral 6y agoBecause they want to encourage developers to update their apps for the new architecture as a top priority.
- tobr 6y agoThey would never compare it to a Mac they are still selling.
- Shivetya 6y agoAs another commented, they would prefer native apps. If emulation were so good it may cause may developers to just keep putting development of the native apps off. however the cynical side is, Apple is having difficulty getting developers on board. Apple is notorious for not encouraging game developers to be on OS X to the point the common refrain in the Mac community has been to "buy a different system to game on". Many people don't have that luxury or like me don't want two systems on my desk when one should be sufficient. That M1 debut was notable for one reason too many overlooked, they had very few developers showing off their wares and most of those they did are not well known.
- audunw 6y agoWhenever the transition to ARM came up here before, there were always a lot of people who seemed to think that x86 compatibility would be a huge issue. And if they did emulation, the x86 the performance would certainly be awful! When I claimed that they could probably reach performance parity, or maybe even beat the x86 performance of the Intel chips they were replacing, they didn't believe me. I was thinking that they'd probably add custom instructions for x86 emulation, I haven't heard if that's the case or not. Would be interesting to find out. Given the complexity of a modern x86-64 frontend, it was never that far-fetched to think that a combination of world-class JIT and a bit of custom silicon could have a negligible overhead compared to a pure silicon solution. After that it was mostly a question of how good the CPU core and technology node was. And Anandtech, among others, had already shown they were well on track to beating Intel there.
- jeffbax 6y agoCodeWeavers apparently has WINE running through Rosetta 2, which is wild from a technical standpoint and gives me hope for my older PC games. https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2020/11/10/its-great-to-live-in-interesting-times https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2020/11/10/its-great... The real question is… how long does Rosetta 2 stick around? Rosetta 1 only lasted OSX 10.4 - 10.6.
- sally1620 6y agoConsidering most of heavy lifting in graphical apps like Adobe suite is done on GPU, It seems like these apps would be faster than Intel on M1 even with Rosetta.
- sally1620 6y agoThe title is slightly misleading, a better way to phrase it is: * Faster than any other Mac in single core * Faster than any other Macbook in single-core and multi-core