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The Mac Pro Mx CPUs illustrate the promise of ARM and Apple Silicon. When the Firestorm core is one of the fastest available but uses less than 5 watts, Apple c
by valuearb 5y ago
The Mac Pro Mx CPUs illustrate the promise of ARM and Apple Silicon. When the Firestorm core is one of the fastest available but uses less than 5 watts, Apple can use a ton of them at once without massive heat and power usage.
The top end Mac Pro with 32 Firestorm on one chip is probably will have a GeekBench Multicore score approaching 60,000, triple the fastest Xeon based Mac Pro.
And it probably uses half the 300 watts of the existing Mac Pro, with correspondingly less heat. Hopefully Apple doesn’t use this as sn opportunity to go back to the whacky packaging of the Trash Can Mac Pro.
- jason0597 5y agoWhy focus on the Geekbench test? I thought the industry standard for CPU testing was Cinebench and AIDA64.
- upbeat_general 5y agoI don’t know about AIDA64, but Geekbench tests a variety of more real world or at least more varied scenarios compared to cinebench which just does CPU rendering. You can see the full description here (https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf) but there’s compression, encryption, compiling, and several other tests.
- jason0597 5y agoTaking for example encryption, isn't it an unfair workload? Encryption is hardware accelerated nowadays, which means you won't get an apples-to-apples (heh) comparison of processors and computers.
- upbeat_general 5y agoYes. I’m not sure exactly how geekbench implements it but that’s certainly a big downside. Perhaps geekbench runs it without any hardware acceleration (to just test a different type of workload) but it might just use whatever hardware available. As an end-user I’m okay with that, because at the end of the day if things run faster I don’t really care how, especially for tasks that are ubiquitous.