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but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1 The M1 has 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores. It also runs at 10 watts and maxes

but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1 The M1 has 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores. It also runs at 10 watts and maxes out at 24 watts. A Threadripper starts at over 100 watts…

bfgoodrich 6y ago
To be fair, 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). An 8 performance core M1 would be a monster. Not sure if it maxes out at 24 watts. Someone measured wall power of a Mac Mini hitting 21 watts at full load, but that's including power supply inefficiency, all of the supporting circuitry and IO, a fan, flash storage, etc.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.
  - bfgoodrich 6y ago
    Pulling other cores into this discussion does nothing but muddy the waters. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 4.5X faster at SPECfp than the Icestorm cores. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 3.1X faster at SPECint than the Icestorm cores. In my world, the 3.1 - 4.5X faster sibling makes them very low performance, relatively. In a fully working together scenario, the "8" core M1 is equal in performance to a conceptual 4.5 core Firestorm part (see the Geekbench scaling, for instance). This, again, has positively nothing to do with any other core or part. Bizarre that anyone thinks this is somehow negative or dismissive of the M1. It is an extraordinary chip. But they intentionally, purposefully put 4 very low performance -- compared to Firestorm -- cores because it matches the computing model of users average workload.
msla 6y ago
So are we going to have "Core Wars" to replace the "MHz Wars" of previous decades?
- mox1 6y ago
  No probably not. More of a "Benchmark vs. Power Consumption" war I think. Power users understand today that max MHZ doesn't even matter anymore, for various reasons. I think power consumption (even in desktops, servers) will be a large factor / marketing number. I think the big tech sites will continue to hammer home some type of "CPU work / watt" type metric, which is roughly like "time to complete some standardized workload vs. power used to do it"
- rsynnott 6y ago
  No, but we've had performance per watt wars for years now. It's why prior to Zen you only saw AMD chips on the cheapest of laptops, and also now why Intel is panicking.
romanoderoma 6y ago
But honestly, does it matter? People buying a threadripper today don't care about it. What matters to them it's the performance, my gf is a 3d artist, she doesn't care if some cpu consumes more or less power than another (when I say she doesn't care I mean she doesn't even know that CPU have very different power requirements), she needs the fastest gear she can buy on her budget. Apple M1s are not it. There are many other that do not care because the hardware stays at the office, where someone else pays the bills and they too don't care because the electricity bill is the last of their problems, fixing it buying more efficient computing devices would mean spending a lot of money in advance to replace at least half of the stock. How many more months of electricity could that money pay? A lot. People buying Apple for its M1 low power consumption are a niche inside a niche. So I think the reasoning stands: Apple M1s are not a real threat for its competitors because the market that really cares about its strengths is smaller than the one that doesn't and Apple will keep to largely miss the second one.
- matwood 6y ago
  Laptops have outsold desktops every year for the last decade+. The M1, being a mobile friendly chip, is addressing the larger market. People may not care about power usage from the wall, but they do care about battery life. Also, the fact that the M1 is even being mentioned along with a desktop powerhouse like the threadripper says it all. The M1 is the lowest end mobile Apple Silicon. We know higher end mobile chips are coming along with desktop ones. The M1 has put all the chip manufacturers on notice, much the same the way the iPhone did (to the point RIM thought Apple was lying about the iPhone because they thought the device was impossible).
  - romanoderoma 6y ago
    Android has oversold Apple 3 to 1 Now if we look at what people are buying and ask ourselves 'are these the people who care about TDP?' the answer is simply 'no' The majority of laptops sold are sub 700, as the previous post said, low budget, low power and in education, markets that Apple has never even considered (except education, but it's mainly college students in USA) Not saying M1 aren't good, but that they won't shake the market as NVidia buying ARM could P.s. M1 is a Zen 3 competitor, threadripper has been mentioned for the exact opposite reason: because that's the state of the art for people looking at performances in personal computing (while in HPC ARM is prominent)
arvinsim 6y ago
Some people don't care about performance per watt and only care about absolute performance.

bfgoodrich 6y ago

To be fair, 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). An 8 performance core M1 would be a monster. Not sure if it maxes out at 24 watts. Someone measured wall power of a Mac Mini hitting 21 watts at full load, but that's including power supply inefficiency, all of the supporting circuitry and IO, a fan, flash storage, etc.

wtallis 6y ago
> 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things). I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.
- bfgoodrich 6y ago
  Pulling other cores into this discussion does nothing but muddy the waters. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 4.5X faster at SPECfp than the Icestorm cores. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 3.1X faster at SPECint than the Icestorm cores. In my world, the 3.1 - 4.5X faster sibling makes them very low performance, relatively. In a fully working together scenario, the "8" core M1 is equal in performance to a conceptual 4.5 core Firestorm part (see the Geekbench scaling, for instance). This, again, has positively nothing to do with any other core or part. Bizarre that anyone thinks this is somehow negative or dismissive of the M1. It is an extraordinary chip. But they intentionally, purposefully put 4 very low performance -- compared to Firestorm -- cores because it matches the computing model of users average workload.

msla 6y ago

So are we going to have "Core Wars" to replace the "MHz Wars" of previous decades?

mox1 6y ago
No probably not. More of a "Benchmark vs. Power Consumption" war I think. Power users understand today that max MHZ doesn't even matter anymore, for various reasons. I think power consumption (even in desktops, servers) will be a large factor / marketing number. I think the big tech sites will continue to hammer home some type of "CPU work / watt" type metric, which is roughly like "time to complete some standardized workload vs. power used to do it"
rsynnott 6y ago
No, but we've had performance per watt wars for years now. It's why prior to Zen you only saw AMD chips on the cheapest of laptops, and also now why Intel is panicking.

romanoderoma 6y ago

But honestly, does it matter? People buying a threadripper today don't care about it. What matters to them it's the performance, my gf is a 3d artist, she doesn't care if some cpu consumes more or less power than another (when I say she doesn't care I mean she doesn't even know that CPU have very different power requirements), she needs the fastest gear she can buy on her budget. Apple M1s are not it. There are many other that do not care because the hardware stays at the office, where someone else pays the bills and they too don't care because the electricity bill is the last of their problems, fixing it buying more efficient computing devices would mean spending a lot of money in advance to replace at least half of the stock. How many more months of electricity could that money pay? A lot. People buying Apple for its M1 low power consumption are a niche inside a niche. So I think the reasoning stands: Apple M1s are not a real threat for its competitors because the market that really cares about its strengths is smaller than the one that doesn't and Apple will keep to largely miss the second one.

matwood 6y ago
Laptops have outsold desktops every year for the last decade+. The M1, being a mobile friendly chip, is addressing the larger market. People may not care about power usage from the wall, but they do care about battery life. Also, the fact that the M1 is even being mentioned along with a desktop powerhouse like the threadripper says it all. The M1 is the lowest end mobile Apple Silicon. We know higher end mobile chips are coming along with desktop ones. The M1 has put all the chip manufacturers on notice, much the same the way the iPhone did (to the point RIM thought Apple was lying about the iPhone because they thought the device was impossible).
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  Android has oversold Apple 3 to 1 Now if we look at what people are buying and ask ourselves 'are these the people who care about TDP?' the answer is simply 'no' The majority of laptops sold are sub 700, as the previous post said, low budget, low power and in education, markets that Apple has never even considered (except education, but it's mainly college students in USA) Not saying M1 aren't good, but that they won't shake the market as NVidia buying ARM could P.s. M1 is a Zen 3 competitor, threadripper has been mentioned for the exact opposite reason: because that's the state of the art for people looking at performances in personal computing (while in HPC ARM is prominent)

arvinsim 6y ago

Some people don't care about performance per watt and only care about absolute performance.