13 ms·

Note: 30% faster than a thermally challenged i9 on a MacBook Pro, not a desktop one. Given the comments on similar threads, I feel this needs to be mentioned.

Bancakes 5y ago
Being thermally challenged is part of the design, huh...
- ajross 5y ago
  This was a famously bad CPU/cooling design, actually. LOTS of people complained about it at the time. You can place blame on either party according to your personal affiliation, but similar Coffee Lake chips from other vendors with more robust (and, yes, louder) cooling designs were running rings around this particular MacBook.
Traster 5y ago
It’s a problem of intels own making - marketing vastly different capabilities under the same brand in order to segment the market.
- frozenport 5y ago
  or Apple doing a bad job with the previous generation
  - patmorgan23 5y ago
    Or both
  - tedivm 5y ago
    The 2019 macbook ironically had better heat dissipation than the previous generations, but it's still pretty bad. We can blame Apple for using chips that are too intense for their laptops, and we can blame Intel for making garbage chips that can't really perform in real world cases while spending a decade not bothering to innovate. Apple at least is moving away from Intel as a result of all of this, and I'm really impressed with how well the M1 transition has been going.
    - chippiewill 5y ago
      Ehh. I take the view that Apple has been intentionally sandbagging their laptops for a while to facilitate an ARM transition. Not to say that M1 isn't amazing, but I think Apple has been preparing for this for a while and needed to make sure it would succeed even if their ARM CPUs weren't quite as groundbreaking as they turned out to be.
      - bluejekyll 5y ago
        Are there any benchmarks you can point to that have a similarly spec'd laptop (ideally similar size & weight too) that would show that Apple is sandbagging?
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        Possibility 1: Apple was making do with what Intel gave them, because their profit margins didn't care and they were busy naval gazing into their post-Jobs soul Possibility 2: Apple had a master plan to intentionally torpedo performance in order to make their future first-party chips appear more competitive
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        What Intel supplied was the bigger problem, but Apple was definitely not trying to make the chips perform well. They were hitting thermal limits constantly, and more directly toward "sandbagging" the recent macbook airs have a CPU heat sink that isn't connected to anything and has no direct airflow. They could easily have fit a small array of fins that the fan blows over, but chose not to.
        hedgehog 5y ago
        I've seen the video that makes that claim but it's just plain wrong, if you look at an Intel Air the whole main board complete with heat sinks lives in a duct formed by the rear section of the chassis.
        5y ago
- MikusR 5y ago
  So Macbook Air that came out in 2008 is as fast as the one that came out in 2020?
systemvoltage 5y ago
Why? It’s all the more apples-to-apples as a comparison because the form factor remains the same and thermal limitations are similar between two system. Why would you want to compare a desktop class i9 with a 10 watt M1 chip?
- weatherlight 5y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Because there are a lot of issues with i9s in those form factors that leads to less perf than even an i7 from the same generation. There was a Linus Tech Tips the other day about how even current gen Intel laptops can see better perf on an i7 than an i9. It looks like the i9s simply don't make sense in this thermal form factor and are essentially just overpriced chips for people who want to pay the most to have the biggest number.
- programmdude 5y ago
  The title is implying M1 is always better than every intel, given that I9 is the best intel (consumer) chip. It's been known for years that apple has been limiting the intel chips by providing insufficient cooling. I don't overly care about how fast an M1 chips in a macbook is compared to an intel chip in a macbook. I want to know how fast an M1 is compared to a desktop I9 (given mac minis have M1 chips now), or compared to a properly cooled laptop latest-gen I9. All this experiment shows is that insufficiently cooled processors perform worse than sufficiently cooled ones. It's a classic example of cherrypicking data. Admittedly, my solution would be different to the article's author. Instead of using a badly cooled laptop to compile stuff, I'd setup a build server running linux.
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    If it's only a matter of cooling why does the Intel also produce 4x the power consumption (not highlighted in the article, but still...). If I wanted absolute best compile times I'd go build a threadripper workstation, but I need mobility and can't always rely on an Internet connection.
jayd16 5y ago
Its also a 9th gen i9, a two and a half year old chip.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  You know what's interesting, China and Russia have been struggling for years to get something on the level of intel Westmere. And here comes Apple out of the blue with a proprietary arch and hardware emulator; cinebench showing it to be around a x5650 xeon (Westmere). Easy. M1X and M2X in the making, too?!
  - dathinab 5y ago
    It's not out of the blue and not even surprising. Look at this from this POV: - Apple started on custom ARM many years ago. - Apple isn't really smaller then Amd, and Amd also rewrote and restructured their architecture some years ago. - Apple hired many greatly skilled people with experience (e.g. which worked before with Intel) - Apples uses state of the art TSMC production methods, Intel doesn't and the "slow" custom chips from China and Russia don't use that either as they want to have chips controlled by them produced with methods controlled by them. (TSMC production methods are based on tech not controlled by Taiwan). - Apples had a well controlled "clean" use-case, where they bit by bit added more support. This includes that they could drop hardware 32 bit support and don't have any extensions they don't need for their Apple products, this can make thinks a lot easier. On the other hand x86 has a lot of old "stuff" still needing support and use cases are much less clear cut (wrt. thinks like how many PCI lanes need to be supported, how much RAM, etc.). This btw. is not limited to their CPUs but also (especially!) their GPUs and GPU drivers. So while Apple did a grate job it isn't really that surprising.
    - properdine 5y ago
      > On the other hand x86 has a lot of old "stuff" still needing support and use cases are much less clear cut (wrt. thinks like how many PCI lanes need to be supported, how much RAM, etc.). Good point overall - the performance of Rosetta 2 helped facilitate much of this and - at least from what I've read - does seem to be surprising to folks in the space. So that also helped them out.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
danpalmer 5y ago
To go another layer deeper in analysis though, it is still >20% faster on the thermally throttled M1 MacBook Air. That's a laptop without a fan, and it's still faster than an i9 with a fan.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  This right here. I was so skeptical of getting an Air. And yes, during heavy compile sessions with make -j8, it can hang after a half hour or so. But (a) you can make -j7 instead, and (b) it’s impressive how long it lasts without hitting that point. I’ve been thinking of doing the cooling mod too, where you pop open the back and add a thermal pad to the cpu. It increases conductivity with the back of the case, letting you roast your legs while you work, aka cool the cpu. :)
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Do any of the laptop cooler systems with fans help the M1 Air thermal issues? I used one on an older 2011 MBP, and it definitely helped that laptop. It might have just been a placebo of getting the laptop off of a flat surface to allow air to circulate around it, but the fans could only help in that.
  - ajross 5y ago
    > And yes, during heavy compile sessions with make -j8, it can hang after a half hour or so You bought a computer that crashes reliably when used "heavily"? I mean, if you heard that same statement from an individual PC user in past decades, you'd roll your eyes about the ridiculous overclockers and go back to work on your slightly slower but actually reliable development machine. But this isn't a too-l33t-for-her-own-good overclocker. It's Apple Computer! Jobs is clearly still directing the reality distortion effect from the grave.
    - radicaldreamer 5y ago
      I assume he means step down in clock due to thermal pressure… not literally hang (stop working)
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I will never understand why Intel stuck with the i3, i5, i7, and later i9 branding across so many generations. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people wonder why their 10-year old computer is slow. “But I have an i7”
- lostgame 5y ago
  Thank you for saying this. Honestly - it's not even the i3, i5, i7, i9 thing. It's the fact that two i5s, etc; can be ludicrously different in terms of performance from one another because of the sub-generations within the named generations. Yes - it's ridiculous that I could buy an i7 ten years ago, buy an i7 today, and yet - of course - they are absolutely nothing close to each other in terms of performance. IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.)
  - caspper69 5y ago
    To play devil’s advocate, I can buy a Corvette today that is nothing like the one from ten years ago too. In fact, lots of things are like this.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      How much does the top speed differ?
      - ubercore 5y ago
        More important than top speed, 0-60 went from 4.2 to 2.9 seconds in that time. So the analogy stands
      - neogodless 5y ago
        https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2011/Jun/0609_corvette.html https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content... About 10 years ago. 7:19.63 (ZR1 / i9) https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-sets-strong-nurburgring-lap-time/ https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-s... About a year ago 7:29.90 (base model / i3) Better measure than top speed anyway
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
failwhaleshark 5y ago
Also, many MB(|P)s get thermally-challenged and frequency-challenged because their sensors go tits-up.
Uehreka 5y ago
I blame Intel. For years i9 wasn’t just a “beefed up i7”, it was a high end line of CPUs with 10+ cores costing $1000+, meant for professional workstations that didn’t need Xeon’s ECC RAM support. Then suddenly i9 started to also mean “a beefed up i7”. Maybe they did this in the hope that the i9 HEDT “brand halo” would help them sell more of these consumer CPUs. But if that’s the case, they don’t get to complain when someone posts that an M1 beat an i9 and people accidentally interpret that as “the M1 competes against Intel’s HEDT line”.
KptMarchewa 5y ago
After having to use i9 MBP for 1,5 years, my conspiracy theory is that Apple created those purely to emphasize how their own processors are better.

Bancakes 5y ago

Being thermally challenged is part of the design, huh...

ajross 5y ago
This was a famously bad CPU/cooling design, actually. LOTS of people complained about it at the time. You can place blame on either party according to your personal affiliation, but similar Coffee Lake chips from other vendors with more robust (and, yes, louder) cooling designs were running rings around this particular MacBook.

Traster 5y ago

It’s a problem of intels own making - marketing vastly different capabilities under the same brand in order to segment the market.

frozenport 5y ago
or Apple doing a bad job with the previous generation
- patmorgan23 5y ago
  Or both
- tedivm 5y ago
  The 2019 macbook ironically had better heat dissipation than the previous generations, but it's still pretty bad. We can blame Apple for using chips that are too intense for their laptops, and we can blame Intel for making garbage chips that can't really perform in real world cases while spending a decade not bothering to innovate. Apple at least is moving away from Intel as a result of all of this, and I'm really impressed with how well the M1 transition has been going.
  - chippiewill 5y ago
    Ehh. I take the view that Apple has been intentionally sandbagging their laptops for a while to facilitate an ARM transition. Not to say that M1 isn't amazing, but I think Apple has been preparing for this for a while and needed to make sure it would succeed even if their ARM CPUs weren't quite as groundbreaking as they turned out to be.
    - bluejekyll 5y ago
      Are there any benchmarks you can point to that have a similarly spec'd laptop (ideally similar size & weight too) that would show that Apple is sandbagging?
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Possibility 1: Apple was making do with what Intel gave them, because their profit margins didn't care and they were busy naval gazing into their post-Jobs soul Possibility 2: Apple had a master plan to intentionally torpedo performance in order to make their future first-party chips appear more competitive
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        What Intel supplied was the bigger problem, but Apple was definitely not trying to make the chips perform well. They were hitting thermal limits constantly, and more directly toward "sandbagging" the recent macbook airs have a CPU heat sink that isn't connected to anything and has no direct airflow. They could easily have fit a small array of fins that the fan blows over, but chose not to.
        hedgehog 5y ago
        I've seen the video that makes that claim but it's just plain wrong, if you look at an Intel Air the whole main board complete with heat sinks lives in a duct formed by the rear section of the chassis.
        5y ago
MikusR 5y ago
So Macbook Air that came out in 2008 is as fast as the one that came out in 2020?

systemvoltage 5y ago

Why? It’s all the more apples-to-apples as a comparison because the form factor remains the same and thermal limitations are similar between two system. Why would you want to compare a desktop class i9 with a 10 watt M1 chip?

weatherlight 5y ago
Not sure why you are being downvoted.
monocasa 5y ago
Because there are a lot of issues with i9s in those form factors that leads to less perf than even an i7 from the same generation. There was a Linus Tech Tips the other day about how even current gen Intel laptops can see better perf on an i7 than an i9. It looks like the i9s simply don't make sense in this thermal form factor and are essentially just overpriced chips for people who want to pay the most to have the biggest number.
programmdude 5y ago
The title is implying M1 is always better than every intel, given that I9 is the best intel (consumer) chip. It's been known for years that apple has been limiting the intel chips by providing insufficient cooling. I don't overly care about how fast an M1 chips in a macbook is compared to an intel chip in a macbook. I want to know how fast an M1 is compared to a desktop I9 (given mac minis have M1 chips now), or compared to a properly cooled laptop latest-gen I9. All this experiment shows is that insufficiently cooled processors perform worse than sufficiently cooled ones. It's a classic example of cherrypicking data. Admittedly, my solution would be different to the article's author. Instead of using a badly cooled laptop to compile stuff, I'd setup a build server running linux.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  If it's only a matter of cooling why does the Intel also produce 4x the power consumption (not highlighted in the article, but still...). If I wanted absolute best compile times I'd go build a threadripper workstation, but I need mobility and can't always rely on an Internet connection.

jayd16 5y ago

Its also a 9th gen i9, a two and a half year old chip.

Bancakes 5y ago
You know what's interesting, China and Russia have been struggling for years to get something on the level of intel Westmere. And here comes Apple out of the blue with a proprietary arch and hardware emulator; cinebench showing it to be around a x5650 xeon (Westmere). Easy. M1X and M2X in the making, too?!
- dathinab 5y ago
  It's not out of the blue and not even surprising. Look at this from this POV: - Apple started on custom ARM many years ago. - Apple isn't really smaller then Amd, and Amd also rewrote and restructured their architecture some years ago. - Apple hired many greatly skilled people with experience (e.g. which worked before with Intel) - Apples uses state of the art TSMC production methods, Intel doesn't and the "slow" custom chips from China and Russia don't use that either as they want to have chips controlled by them produced with methods controlled by them. (TSMC production methods are based on tech not controlled by Taiwan). - Apples had a well controlled "clean" use-case, where they bit by bit added more support. This includes that they could drop hardware 32 bit support and don't have any extensions they don't need for their Apple products, this can make thinks a lot easier. On the other hand x86 has a lot of old "stuff" still needing support and use cases are much less clear cut (wrt. thinks like how many PCI lanes need to be supported, how much RAM, etc.). This btw. is not limited to their CPUs but also (especially!) their GPUs and GPU drivers. So while Apple did a grate job it isn't really that surprising.
  - properdine 5y ago
    > On the other hand x86 has a lot of old "stuff" still needing support and use cases are much less clear cut (wrt. thinks like how many PCI lanes need to be supported, how much RAM, etc.). Good point overall - the performance of Rosetta 2 helped facilitate much of this and - at least from what I've read - does seem to be surprising to folks in the space. So that also helped them out.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

danpalmer 5y ago

To go another layer deeper in analysis though, it is still >20% faster on the thermally throttled M1 MacBook Air. That's a laptop without a fan, and it's still faster than an i9 with a fan.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
This right here. I was so skeptical of getting an Air. And yes, during heavy compile sessions with make -j8, it can hang after a half hour or so. But (a) you can make -j7 instead, and (b) it’s impressive how long it lasts without hitting that point. I’ve been thinking of doing the cooling mod too, where you pop open the back and add a thermal pad to the cpu. It increases conductivity with the back of the case, letting you roast your legs while you work, aka cool the cpu. :)
- dylan604 5y ago
  Do any of the laptop cooler systems with fans help the M1 Air thermal issues? I used one on an older 2011 MBP, and it definitely helped that laptop. It might have just been a placebo of getting the laptop off of a flat surface to allow air to circulate around it, but the fans could only help in that.
- ajross 5y ago
  > And yes, during heavy compile sessions with make -j8, it can hang after a half hour or so You bought a computer that crashes reliably when used "heavily"? I mean, if you heard that same statement from an individual PC user in past decades, you'd roll your eyes about the ridiculous overclockers and go back to work on your slightly slower but actually reliable development machine. But this isn't a too-l33t-for-her-own-good overclocker. It's Apple Computer! Jobs is clearly still directing the reality distortion effect from the grave.
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    I assume he means step down in clock due to thermal pressure… not literally hang (stop working)

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I will never understand why Intel stuck with the i3, i5, i7, and later i9 branding across so many generations. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people wonder why their 10-year old computer is slow. “But I have an i7”

lostgame 5y ago
Thank you for saying this. Honestly - it's not even the i3, i5, i7, i9 thing. It's the fact that two i5s, etc; can be ludicrously different in terms of performance from one another because of the sub-generations within the named generations. Yes - it's ridiculous that I could buy an i7 ten years ago, buy an i7 today, and yet - of course - they are absolutely nothing close to each other in terms of performance. IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.)
- caspper69 5y ago
  To play devil’s advocate, I can buy a Corvette today that is nothing like the one from ten years ago too. In fact, lots of things are like this.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    How much does the top speed differ?
    - ubercore 5y ago
      More important than top speed, 0-60 went from 4.2 to 2.9 seconds in that time. So the analogy stands
    - neogodless 5y ago
      https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2011/Jun/0609_corvette.html https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content... About 10 years ago. 7:19.63 (ZR1 / i9) https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-sets-strong-nurburgring-lap-time/ https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-s... About a year ago 7:29.90 (base model / i3) Better measure than top speed anyway

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

failwhaleshark 5y ago

Also, many MB(|P)s get thermally-challenged and frequency-challenged because their sensors go tits-up.

Uehreka 5y ago

I blame Intel. For years i9 wasn’t just a “beefed up i7”, it was a high end line of CPUs with 10+ cores costing $1000+, meant for professional workstations that didn’t need Xeon’s ECC RAM support. Then suddenly i9 started to also mean “a beefed up i7”. Maybe they did this in the hope that the i9 HEDT “brand halo” would help them sell more of these consumer CPUs. But if that’s the case, they don’t get to complain when someone posts that an M1 beat an i9 and people accidentally interpret that as “the M1 competes against Intel’s HEDT line”.

KptMarchewa 5y ago

After having to use i9 MBP for 1,5 years, my conspiracy theory is that Apple created those purely to emphasize how their own processors are better.