5 ms·

Interesting that it is not able to outperform the Zen3 CPUs. I had expected it to do somewhat better, especially it being a 5nm processor, and with all the hype

Interesting that it is not able to outperform the Zen3 CPUs. I had expected it to do somewhat better, especially it being a 5nm processor, and with all the hype around ARM processors. I don't know how well it will hold up to its x86 competitors like this, especially once they launch their 5nm CPUs next year.

fxtentacle 6y ago
In multi-threaded mode - which is what Zen3 are optimized for - the M1 barely reaches 30% of the Zen's performance. I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power CPU with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop monster with much more cores. The M1 will likely be an amazing laptop chip, but still unusable for demanding desktop work, e.g. CGI.
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  I've posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the M1 on SPEC reaches Desktop-tier performance, going toe to toe with the 5950X: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
  - Deukhoofd 6y ago
    In single core performance, yes, but as the next page on the article shows, it's more comparable to the 4900HS, AMDs mobile CPU in multithreaded performance. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
    - d3nj4l 6y ago
      Yes, sorry if that came off as misleading. I'll edit this in elsewhere.
    - foldr 6y ago
      The 4900HS has a 35W TDP, though. The M1 in the Mac Mini is estimated at around 20-24W TDP.
      - ip26 6y ago
        We might be able to chalk that level of difference up to process advantage.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        The 4900HS has way more I/O and is on 7nm, as well as has more powerful graphics.
        foldr 6y ago
        I guess we're talking at cross purposes. I was just making the point that the 4900HS isn't really a competitor to the M1 because it's in a different TDP class. It looks like Apple wanted to stick with one chip for their first generation products, but they could presumably at least throw in a few extra cores if they had another 10-15W to play with.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        Well no, but then again there is the 4800S at half the TDP that gets close in single core performance and wins in multicore performance, so there pretty much no way they could've beaten it at another power budget. Indeed, it they were to add a few more cores to their M1, then AMD could have also thrown a few more cores in their 4800, and it would have been a wash.
- gruez 6y ago
  >I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power CPU with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop monster with much more cores. Are we looking at the same charts here? For cinebench multithreaded, the AMD 4xxx series CPUs are zen 2 parts with 15/35W TDP, hardly "unlimited-cooling desktop monster" like you described.
  - foldr 6y ago
    From the article: "While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power." Looking through the benchmarks, the zen 2 parts generally seem to have lower performance than the M1. The cinebench multithreaded benchmark is one exception. It's not that surprising because the 4800U has more cores than the M1 has high performance cores. The M1 wins the single threaded cinebench benchmark.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      The Zen2 4800HS also outperformed the M1 in the Specint2017 multi-threaded results, too. The M1's float results are weirdly good relative to the int results, though. Not sure why Apple seems to have prioritized that so much in this category of CPU.
      - ric2b 6y ago
        Maybe because of javascript, where all numbers are floats?
        hajile 6y ago
        Not strictly true. Taking a loop and adding a bunch of `x|0` can also often boost performance by hinting that integers are fine (in fact, the JIT is free to do this anyway if detects that it can). The most recent spec is also adding BigInt. Additionally, integer typed arrays have existed since the 1.0 release in 2011 (I believe they were even seeing work as early as 2006 or so with canvas3D).
danaris 6y ago
Interesting that your takeaway from all this is "oh, it can't beat some of the top x86 chips in existence—it can only meet them on even footing. Guess it'll be falling behind next year." This is Apple's first non-mobile chip ever. You think this is the best they can do, ever?
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I'd expect NVIDIA to join the ARM CPU race, too. And they have experience with the tooling for lots and lots of cores from CUDA. So I'd expect to have 5x to 10x the M1's performance available for desktops in 1-2 years. In fact, AMD's MI100 accelerator already has roughly 10x the FLOPS on 64bit. That said, it's an amazing notebook CPU.
  - athms 6y ago
    >I'd expect NVIDIA to join the ARM CPU race, too. Nvidia has been making ARM SoCs since 2008. They have been used in cars, tablets, phones, and entertainment systems. What do you think powers the Nintendo Switch?
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      Agree. Yeah I should have thought about the Switch and write things more clearly. I meant that NVIDIA will start producing ARM CPUs optimized for peak data-center performance, similar to how they now have CUDA accelerator cards for data centers, which are starting to diverge from desktop GPUs. In the past, NVIDIA's ARM division mostly focussed on mobile SoCs. Now that Graviton and M1 are here, I'd expect NVIDIA to also produce high-wattage ARM CPUs.
  - danaris 6y ago
    To quote from Ars Technica's review of the M1 by Jim Salter [0]: > Although it's extremely difficult to get accurate Apples-to-non-Apples benchmarks on this new architecture, I feel confident in saying that this truly is a world-leading design—you can get faster raw CPU performance, but only on power-is-no-object desktop or server CPUs. Similarly, you can beat the M1's GPU with high-end Nvidia or Radeon desktop cards—but only at a massive disparity in power, physical size, and heat. ...So, given that, and assuming that Apple will attempt to compete with them, I think it likely that they will, at the very least, be able to match them on even footing, when freed from the constraints of size, heat, and power that are relevant to notebook chips. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-apple-m1-a-seriously-fast-x86-competitor/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-ap...
matsemann 6y ago
Yeah, as someone whose next laptop wont be a Mac again, this was a good ad for what AMD has achieved lately. MyLenovo P1 got a Intel Xeon of some kind, and while I'm otherwise very happy with the Laptop, the CPU is hot, uses way too much power and constantly throttles.
HatchedLake721 6y ago
Have you seen benchmarks post 1st page? M1 at 7-8W power drain beats or just trails behind a desktop class $799 Ryzen 9 5950x at +49W consumption in single threaded performance. What did you expect?
- Slartie 6y ago
  That doesn't say too much. There is a single thread performance ceiling that all CPUs based on current lithography technology available just bump against and can't overcome. The Ryzen probably marks that ceiling for now, and the M1 comes impressively close against it, especially considering its wattage. But you cannot extrapolate these numbers (to multi-core performance or to more cores or to a possible M2 with a larger TDP envelope), nor can you even directly compare them. The Ryzen 9 5950x makes an entirely different trade-off with regard to number of cores per CPU, supported memory, etc., which allows for more cores, more memory, more everything...and that comes at a cost in terms of die space as well as power consumption. If AMD had designed this CPU to be much more constrained in those dimensions and thus much more similar to what the M1 offers, they would surely have been able to considerably drive down power consumption - in fact, their smaller units 4800U and 4900HS which were also benchmarked and which offer really good multithreading performance for their power envelope, even better than the M1, clearly demonstrate this fact. What I read out of these benchmark numbers is: the ISA does matter far less than most people seem to assume. ARM is no magic sauce in terms of performance at all - instead, it's "magic legal sauce", because it allows anyone (here: Apple; over there: Amazon) to construct their own high-end CPUs with industry-leading performance, which the x86 instruction set cannot do due to its licensing constraints. Both ISAs, x86_64 and ARM, apparently allow well-funded companies with the necessary top talent to build CPUs that max out whatever performance you can get out of the currently available lithography processes and out of the current state of the art in CPU design.
  - SJetKaran 6y ago
    > What I read out of these benchmark numbers is: the ISA does matter far less than most people seem to assume. This was my conclusion too. Does this mean, there is not much possibility of desktop pcs moving to ARM anytime soon? Perhaps, laptops might move to ARM processors, but even that seems iffy, if AMD can come up with more efficient processors (and Intel too with its Lakefield hybrid cpu)
acchow 6y ago
I fully expect the 16" MBP to launch with a 12 or 16-core Apple chip.

fxtentacle 6y ago

In multi-threaded mode - which is what Zen3 are optimized for - the M1 barely reaches 30% of the Zen's performance. I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power CPU with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop monster with much more cores. The M1 will likely be an amazing laptop chip, but still unusable for demanding desktop work, e.g. CGI.

d3nj4l 6y ago
I've posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the M1 on SPEC reaches Desktop-tier performance, going toe to toe with the 5950X: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
- Deukhoofd 6y ago
  In single core performance, yes, but as the next page on the article shows, it's more comparable to the 4900HS, AMDs mobile CPU in multithreaded performance. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    Yes, sorry if that came off as misleading. I'll edit this in elsewhere.
  - foldr 6y ago
    The 4900HS has a 35W TDP, though. The M1 in the Mac Mini is estimated at around 20-24W TDP.
    - ip26 6y ago
      We might be able to chalk that level of difference up to process advantage.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      The 4900HS has way more I/O and is on 7nm, as well as has more powerful graphics.
      - foldr 6y ago
        I guess we're talking at cross purposes. I was just making the point that the 4900HS isn't really a competitor to the M1 because it's in a different TDP class. It looks like Apple wanted to stick with one chip for their first generation products, but they could presumably at least throw in a few extra cores if they had another 10-15W to play with.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        Well no, but then again there is the 4800S at half the TDP that gets close in single core performance and wins in multicore performance, so there pretty much no way they could've beaten it at another power budget. Indeed, it they were to add a few more cores to their M1, then AMD could have also thrown a few more cores in their 4800, and it would have been a wash.
gruez 6y ago
>I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power CPU with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop monster with much more cores. Are we looking at the same charts here? For cinebench multithreaded, the AMD 4xxx series CPUs are zen 2 parts with 15/35W TDP, hardly "unlimited-cooling desktop monster" like you described.
- foldr 6y ago
  From the article: "While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power." Looking through the benchmarks, the zen 2 parts generally seem to have lower performance than the M1. The cinebench multithreaded benchmark is one exception. It's not that surprising because the 4800U has more cores than the M1 has high performance cores. The M1 wins the single threaded cinebench benchmark.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    The Zen2 4800HS also outperformed the M1 in the Specint2017 multi-threaded results, too. The M1's float results are weirdly good relative to the int results, though. Not sure why Apple seems to have prioritized that so much in this category of CPU.
    - ric2b 6y ago
      Maybe because of javascript, where all numbers are floats?
      - hajile 6y ago
        Not strictly true. Taking a loop and adding a bunch of `x|0` can also often boost performance by hinting that integers are fine (in fact, the JIT is free to do this anyway if detects that it can). The most recent spec is also adding BigInt. Additionally, integer typed arrays have existed since the 1.0 release in 2011 (I believe they were even seeing work as early as 2006 or so with canvas3D).

danaris 6y ago

Interesting that your takeaway from all this is "oh, it can't beat some of the top x86 chips in existence—it can only meet them on even footing. Guess it'll be falling behind next year." This is Apple's first non-mobile chip ever. You think this is the best they can do, ever?

fxtentacle 6y ago
I'd expect NVIDIA to join the ARM CPU race, too. And they have experience with the tooling for lots and lots of cores from CUDA. So I'd expect to have 5x to 10x the M1's performance available for desktops in 1-2 years. In fact, AMD's MI100 accelerator already has roughly 10x the FLOPS on 64bit. That said, it's an amazing notebook CPU.
- athms 6y ago
  >I'd expect NVIDIA to join the ARM CPU race, too. Nvidia has been making ARM SoCs since 2008. They have been used in cars, tablets, phones, and entertainment systems. What do you think powers the Nintendo Switch?
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    Agree. Yeah I should have thought about the Switch and write things more clearly. I meant that NVIDIA will start producing ARM CPUs optimized for peak data-center performance, similar to how they now have CUDA accelerator cards for data centers, which are starting to diverge from desktop GPUs. In the past, NVIDIA's ARM division mostly focussed on mobile SoCs. Now that Graviton and M1 are here, I'd expect NVIDIA to also produce high-wattage ARM CPUs.
- danaris 6y ago
  To quote from Ars Technica's review of the M1 by Jim Salter [0]: > Although it's extremely difficult to get accurate Apples-to-non-Apples benchmarks on this new architecture, I feel confident in saying that this truly is a world-leading design—you can get faster raw CPU performance, but only on power-is-no-object desktop or server CPUs. Similarly, you can beat the M1's GPU with high-end Nvidia or Radeon desktop cards—but only at a massive disparity in power, physical size, and heat. ...So, given that, and assuming that Apple will attempt to compete with them, I think it likely that they will, at the very least, be able to match them on even footing, when freed from the constraints of size, heat, and power that are relevant to notebook chips. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-apple-m1-a-seriously-fast-x86-competitor/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-ap...

matsemann 6y ago

Yeah, as someone whose next laptop wont be a Mac again, this was a good ad for what AMD has achieved lately. MyLenovo P1 got a Intel Xeon of some kind, and while I'm otherwise very happy with the Laptop, the CPU is hot, uses way too much power and constantly throttles.

HatchedLake721 6y ago

Have you seen benchmarks post 1st page? M1 at 7-8W power drain beats or just trails behind a desktop class $799 Ryzen 9 5950x at +49W consumption in single threaded performance. What did you expect?

Slartie 6y ago
That doesn't say too much. There is a single thread performance ceiling that all CPUs based on current lithography technology available just bump against and can't overcome. The Ryzen probably marks that ceiling for now, and the M1 comes impressively close against it, especially considering its wattage. But you cannot extrapolate these numbers (to multi-core performance or to more cores or to a possible M2 with a larger TDP envelope), nor can you even directly compare them. The Ryzen 9 5950x makes an entirely different trade-off with regard to number of cores per CPU, supported memory, etc., which allows for more cores, more memory, more everything...and that comes at a cost in terms of die space as well as power consumption. If AMD had designed this CPU to be much more constrained in those dimensions and thus much more similar to what the M1 offers, they would surely have been able to considerably drive down power consumption - in fact, their smaller units 4800U and 4900HS which were also benchmarked and which offer really good multithreading performance for their power envelope, even better than the M1, clearly demonstrate this fact. What I read out of these benchmark numbers is: the ISA does matter far less than most people seem to assume. ARM is no magic sauce in terms of performance at all - instead, it's "magic legal sauce", because it allows anyone (here: Apple; over there: Amazon) to construct their own high-end CPUs with industry-leading performance, which the x86 instruction set cannot do due to its licensing constraints. Both ISAs, x86_64 and ARM, apparently allow well-funded companies with the necessary top talent to build CPUs that max out whatever performance you can get out of the currently available lithography processes and out of the current state of the art in CPU design.
- SJetKaran 6y ago
  > What I read out of these benchmark numbers is: the ISA does matter far less than most people seem to assume. This was my conclusion too. Does this mean, there is not much possibility of desktop pcs moving to ARM anytime soon? Perhaps, laptops might move to ARM processors, but even that seems iffy, if AMD can come up with more efficient processors (and Intel too with its Lakefield hybrid cpu)

acchow 6y ago

I fully expect the 16" MBP to launch with a 12 or 16-core Apple chip.