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Top-end Ryzen chips may be as fast or faster. Are they also as low power? The impressive thing about the M1 isn't just raw performance but performance / watt.
by api 6y ago
Top-end Ryzen chips may be as fast or faster. Are they also as low power?
The impressive thing about the M1 isn't just raw performance but performance / watt. There are obviously faster high-end many-core x86 chips, but the power use difference is wider than the speed difference. The M1 destroys mid-range Intel and AMD offerings at a fraction of the power consumption.
Check out this madness:
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
The MacBook Air trounces the top-end Mac Pro on single core performance. No this is not the top-end Intel you can get, nor is it as fast as AMD, but it's a MacBook Air and consumes a small fraction of the power.
Again... the power efficiency is the thing that really blows me away. 5nm accounts for only some of that.
On multi-core the same MacBook Air is just below recent Mac Pro models on total computational throughput. To beat the MacBook Air you have to go up to newer-generation Xeon chips with 8 full-speed cores. The Xeon is branded as a server chip and uses as much power as probably eight to ten M1s.
It's just insane. If Apple puts, say, 16 full-speed core in one of these chips it's absolutely over for all other vendors. Speculation is that the 16" Pro will end up getting 8 performance cores and 4 low-power cores. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up beating the top-end Intel Mac Pro.
- klelatti 6y agoFeeling a bit sad now as I had to buy a 2020 MacBook Pro to get AVX512!
- api 6y agoI currently use a MacBook Air with the same 10th generation Intel chip in it and it's not bad. The only difference between the Air and the Pro with this chip is that the Pro can sustain high clocks longer and has a Touch Bar. I expected the M1 to be like a much lower power and maybe a bit faster version of this chip, and was really blown away by it being far beyond that.
- klelatti 6y agoI'll probably be in the queue for the M2!
- onli 6y agoJust keep in mind that scaling things will change power efficiency. Like the Vega gpu architecture showed so clearly - which could be quite power efficient, but the Vega graphics card released were ridiculously power hungry, it seems because they missed their performance target and thus got overclocked out of their power efficiency range. I'm not sure that they can easily add more cores to the M1. If they can, that would also raise the TDP. And adding more cores does not increase performance linearly, even if the architecture is made for it. Also keep in mind that comparing it to 14nm Intel processors with an architecture from a decade ago is a fair comparison when comparing M1 vs prior Apple products, but is not a fair comparison when comparing it against what x86 can do in general. You would need a modern x86 processor targeting the same watt usage to have a completely valid comparison. As discussed in the thread above. So yeah, it's a great processor for its target. And it likely will also be a very strong processor when scaled up - it bodes well for the future of ARM. But don't extrapolate the performance too linearly, that is likely to be misleading.
- klelatti 6y agoSigh. I'm typing this on an Apple "prior" product which has a two year old microarchitecture and is built on Intel 10nm (roughly the same as TSMC 7nm) - it's absolutely a modern x86 processor and a valid comparison - and it's left in the dust by the M1.
- onli 6y agoAnd you swapped the SSD and the swapping algorithm/memory usage model so that the IO performance is equal?