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I'm a little bit confused why there are so many comparisons between M1 and older apple hardware. It seems like a weekly occurrence on HN. I think it's great tha

I'm a little bit confused why there are so many comparisons between M1 and older apple hardware. It seems like a weekly occurrence on HN. I think it's great that the M1 performs well. However, posts like these, and in general the comments I read, make me feel a bit uncomfortable. So, take this with a grain of salt, but I feel like there is a strong desire to confirm the idea that the M1 is a beast. This has been reinforced by quite a lot of misleading advertisement. So, personally, I like to work on a desktop computer. I don't care all that much about the power efficiency as I do about performance. So, I was curious, and ran the same test on a regular good top-end desktop hardware, and the same test took 2 minutes and 53 seconds. In other words 4.3x faster, or "78% faster" if using the same metric. Compared to the M1 time it would be 3.1x and 68% respectively. Just to be clear. This isn't a comment that "with my beefy computer I can outperform the M1". My desktop environment is not something I can commute with. My point is nothing more than, maybe to add some interesting data-points that I find are hard to come by. I seem to always see the M1 be compared to older apple hardware. Maybe that's all you wish to know. If MacOS is a must-have, then I suppose it doesn't really matter what else exists. And this is fine, I have no objection to it.

fossuser 5y ago
I think it’s hard to exclude power efficiency since that’s a constraint that matters for a lot of people and is particularly relevant on laptops. The other noticeable thing for me I think is driver related: instant wake, instant resolution change. It’s noticeably nicer to use. Is it faster than a desktop? No, but comparing it to a desktop feels like the weirder comparison to me.
- menomatter 5y ago
  So for development in various ecosystems, would you say the M based is superior to Intel based in terms of efficiency and performance?
- okamiueru 5y ago
  I think I might have been misunderstood here. I sort of feared I would be, as I have some experience in this regard. I don't really have an opinion on what is nicer, and I also don't mind people liking their stuff, if anything it makes my happy to know. I also agree that it is weird to compare it to a desktop. In fact, my larger point is that I feel these benchmarks, and subsequent comment discussions, tend to imply this comparison. And, I don't see the harm in then showing what those numbers would be. If power consumption isn't important, I sure would like to know.
- CoolGuySteve 5y ago
  Even in terms of power efficiency AMD is in the same ballpark with their 4 and 5 U-series mobile parts, particularly when comparing multicore benchmarks on their 8 core/16 thread CPUs. M1 is really most impressive when compared to Intel parts and especially when compared to the underspec’ed Intel parts that Apple used to ship. Yes, the M1 is good but I’m honestly just tired of hearing about it. The story seems to be about the decline of Intel’s fab supremacy more than anything.
  - nullc 5y ago
    It's kind of a joke at this point. Talking about the runtime of something on a dual 7742 and someone pipes up with "Have you tried M1, foocloud has them available, it's so much faster".
- apatheticonion 5y ago
  Single threaded performance is on par with AMD 5xxx series parts. Consider that Apple is using the 5nm process while AMD is using the 7nm process. I'm not sure how it compares in terms of power efficiency though I'd expect the ARM chips to be more efficient both because of the transistor size and the ARM CPU not needing to support instructions from the 60s. I'm very excited to see a new competitor in the CPU game and I'm a big fan of ARM, hopefully we will see further disruption but in the PC space. Imagine a 128 core desktop CPU. It will be interesting to see how software has to evolve in order to maximise utilization of the quantity of threads.
  - eru 5y ago
    > [...] and the ARM CPU not needing to support instructions from the 60s. Apparently, those weird instructions only take up a teeny-tiny amount of space on the CPU and are basically implemented in micro-code. To be backwards compatible those instructions just need to be supported, but they don't need to be fast. So they are implemented such that they don't get in the way much.
  - Leherenn 5y ago
    Is it really a competitor given they don't sell their chips? For Intel maybe, given they lost the Apple market, but it doesn't look like it changed anything for the other players. There's been a lot of comments about how ARM is going to revolutionise everything, but that doesn't seem to be the case for the chips you can actually buy (e.g. Qualcomm Vs AMD). Honestly, I don't see the M1 as a statement about how good ARM compared to x64, but how good Apple is compared to the rest of the field.
  - caeril 5y ago
    > It will be interesting to see how software has to evolve in order to maximise utilization of the quantity of threads. Not only this, but the PHP/Python/Javascript kiddos will need to learn: 1. Languages that get closer to the metal. 2. Utilize those languages to make their applications aware of data locality, temporality, and branching. The bottleneck of the future is memory and pipeline stalls. Spraying objects all over the heap is one of the dumbest things you can do with modern processors, but developers do it all the time. This needs to get fixed.
breakfastduck 5y ago
Understand where you're coming from but there also seems to be a weird section of the audience that, for whatever reason, doesn't like to compare apples to apples. I wouldn't expect large numbers of benchmarks of intels new mobile chip against AMDs fastest desktop chip so I don't know why people find it unusual in this particular circumstance.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  I’m usually already committed to macOS and want to know if the upgrade is “worth it”. But, for this, I’m more interested in perceived performance than real performance and, generally, the non-M1 post-2015 or so MacBooks feel slower than my older MacBooks ever did.
jonplackett 5y ago
I think what people are excited about is not the actual benchmark but the potential of the path we now are clearly on. When you see “M1 beats XXXXX at XXXXX task” I don’t think anyone really cares that much about that task, but it usually makes you think, “crap, imagine what their proper MacBook Pro pro / Mac Pro chip is going to be able to do. Or what it will do in 3 years...? Also, everyone just loves watching Intel suffer.
- ngold 5y ago
  Also 5 or 10 watts versus 125 watt power draw. No matter how you slice it. The BBC acorn has grown up to be a monster.
  - nr2x 5y ago
    Really one of my favorite examples of why public sector investment is a Good Thing.
    - ngold 5y ago
      I still love that movie with the hobbit guy about the BBC acorn. That was great.
      - aaronharder 5y ago
        Micro Men! Great little TV movie, and really interesting story of the rivalry between UK golden-age home computing giants Sinclair and Acorn (Acorn being the company behind the BBC micro, and also originally the "A" in "ARM").
        dopidopHN 5y ago
        Oh thank you, I never heard those name before so I had a hard time following this part of the thread. ( do some more search, adding “micro” ) Ok, so it IS a British Broadcasting Corporation spawn. Ha. Excellent. I had no idea. Thanks for spelling it out, I was about to reject the idea as funny but unlikely.
bradleyjg 5y ago
I remember when the XBOX and PS2 were out. I never got into console gaming, so I was very much on the sidelines. From that perspective it was amazing how passionate people got about a consumer product that realistically should form no part of anyone’s identity. Since then I’ve seen the same pattern over and over again. I don’t really get it. Kudos to modern marketing I guess.
- 0xEFF 5y ago
  I dunno about the marketing, but I for one was excited about the first consumer devices capable of realtime, immersive 3D worlds. I played a lot of 16 player halo in college classrooms on big screen projectors. It was exciting.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    I guess maybe the point I was trying to make wasn’t explicit enough. Getting excited about either one, understandable. Getting into serious and sustained arguments about which one was better like they were political parties or religions, not as understandable.
    - sgerenser 5y ago
      More understandable for anyone who was around for the virtually identical Sega vs Nintendo wars of the 80s and 90s.
- jmkni 5y ago
  I think it’s partly down to money. If you’re on a tight budget and can only afford one, you don’t want to feel as though you’ve made the wrong choice and are missing out. If you can afford to buy both then it’s not as big of a deal.
thedracle 5y ago
What Apple has proven with M1 and Rosetta is you can actually quite elegantly support legacy x86 programs, while leaving little on the table, and make use of all of the advantages of ARM/RISC based architectures. I'm interested if AMD/Intel will respond with their own beefed up desktop profile RISC/ARM processors.
- astrange 5y ago
  I wouldn't call x86-64 all that legacy (it's like, recently legacy) and that's all Rosetta supports. But performance is not that bad even if you stack something like WINE on top to handle i386 programs.
  - jmkni 5y ago
    There’s videos on YouTube of people playing Windows games (like GTAV) through parallels via Rosetta 2. Performance isn’t amazing, but it blows my mind that it works at all!
    - astrange 5y ago
      Is that really Rosetta and not qemu? I didn’t think it supported VMs.
alienalp 5y ago
What did you test was most probably wasnt compiled for m1 or just a rare thing. Until M1 i didnt buy single Apple product. But M1 is clearly superior. You feel the difference clearly just by browsing web. There isnt even need to test anyhting someone who used decent intel/amd laptop and m1 laptop in short period of time will realize the difference.
- serix 5y ago
  Same as for me. I was interested in macos but 2k bucks is something that stoping me all that time :) I bought in 2019 ThinkPad t490 (for nearly 1k $) after my Dell n5110 it's just wow. Speed, touchpad. And then two weeks ago I decided to give it a try to Macbook Air and bought minimal 8/256. And this machine slightly (IMO something 2x in indexing my phpstorm project) faster then my t490 with i5-8265U 24/256 BUT its silent and cold and battery life. After full working 10h day I have 30-40% And I was shocked that 8 gigs is enough for me, on ThinkPad I used at least 10-12 gigs for my work. I just bought minimum to try macos and planned to switch to 16 gig version or go back to ThinkPad, but now I can use it at least next couple of years No regrets from switching
tbrock 5y ago
I don't think you realize how far ahead the M1 actually is... it's about processing power per watt. The desktop you used actually 1) has a fan 2) is probably consuming many more than 15 watts 3) would burn my lap if it was anywhere near it. The implications are huge. Think about the competitive advantage a data center that operated with no cooling requirements and much lower power requirements would be if it got the same (or better!) performance than an equivalent intel based one. It's not just faster, its faster than equivalent parts AND way more efficient.
- okamiueru 5y ago
  The disconnect here is exactly what I'm referring to in my post. I'm at a loss for words, especially considering I've already addressed your main point. Also, what do you mean by "not just faster"? What are "equivalent parts"?
  - tbrock 5y ago
    When they make the desktop pro version its going to slap. This is a 15 watt part! You may not care about efficiency so then wait and see what the desktop part looks like.
    - p1necone 5y ago
      It's generally not that simple - you can't scale a 15w part to 150w and get 10x the performance, there's other factors at play.
      - ssaturn 5y ago
        With the m1 chip you pretty much can, the heat is low enough that you can just add more transistors to the die and give it more juice and it will fly. It seems the days of intel are numbered, not even i9 processors can compete against it now.
franciscop 5y ago
I believe it's often on HN because there hasn't been a major "jump" in computing/processing power like this in over a decade. I do remember when every year's PC was significantly faster and yearn those years, as probably many here, and see this as a very exciting moment. I only use a laptop, like many others, and I believe it's very fair to compare M1 vs last generation Intel. Why? Because both are Apple computers (few differences in screen brightness, colors, etc), same OS (few differences in optimization, stability, support, etc) and similar constrains from being a laptop (thermal, power, etc). Intel's year over year improvements are minimal, so "last year" Intel vs "this year" m1 is a fair comparison. It'll not be so when we get to m3+, but even m2 would be fair-ish game and gain more from comparing an Apple Intel computer vs Apple m2 than comparing it with a totally different windows machine.
- okamiueru 5y ago
  Doesn't that imply you're only limiting yourself to apple hardware? Seems like the logical conclusion if the M1 is this "jump" in computational power, yet being three times slower in the very same test I ran?
  - batty_alex 5y ago
    I’m going to guess your desktop isn’t running on a 15 watt SoC. If it were, then we’d have something to talk about
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      That's a good point. Yet for how long can the M1 sustain maximum performance, even with fans? And at what temperatures? Regardless, it's good to see some innovation--no matter how much hype is involved.
      - Arn_Thor 5y ago
        I'm no expert, but with a 15W power draw the answer to the "how long" question is likely to be "perpetually" with active cooling. Now, Apple tends to let its processors run very hot before throttling (I had an old i5 MacBook which easily hit 98C), but again, a 15W power draw means there isn't all that much energy to push into whatever heat sink or cooling solution they want to use. (In the real world it's rather more complicated, with different load intensity on different parts of the SoC, but still)
AlphaSite 5y ago
There are two important things here: 1. If the smallest laptop chips are this efficient what do you think a full fat desktop chip will look like? 2. I think desktop/workstation is the only category where energy usage isn’t that important, it’s probably less than $100 per year with our usage patterns (don’t quote me on that)P. But for server and laptop it’s very important (for totally different reasons). (Realistically it’s probably a max performance vs efficient trade off, but that may be in part because we’ve not seen any large apple chips, so we don’t know how it scales)s
- makomk 5y ago
  Well, we know that AMD's chips - which use the next largest TSMC node compared to Apple's - have a lot of diminishing returns from increasing the available power envelope above M1-like ultraportable levels, at least in the kinds of core counts you typically find in consumer desktops. So it's possible that even if Apple did ship a full desktop chip in a system with proper cooling, it wouldn't be that much faster. (It's also likely that they just won't bother, Apple being Apple.)
simonh 5y ago
It may be an 'older model' but it's only from 2019. It's only one year behind the current 16" MBP. So I think comparing a 2 year old top of the line, maxed out MBP to a current lowest end entry level MBP, and see the low end model blow away the high end maxed out beast, is a reasonable thing to be impressed with.
WesleyHale 5y ago
the best metric would be power to cost ratio. If you're compiling faster than the M1, how much more or less is your build in comparison?
fsociety 5y ago
These benchmarks don’t threaten other ecosystems and show a strong value proposition for others who own the older, hot and noisy MacBooks. Especially in its form factor. Especially with its battery life. What’s wrong with that?

fossuser 5y ago

I think it’s hard to exclude power efficiency since that’s a constraint that matters for a lot of people and is particularly relevant on laptops. The other noticeable thing for me I think is driver related: instant wake, instant resolution change. It’s noticeably nicer to use. Is it faster than a desktop? No, but comparing it to a desktop feels like the weirder comparison to me.

menomatter 5y ago
So for development in various ecosystems, would you say the M based is superior to Intel based in terms of efficiency and performance?
okamiueru 5y ago
I think I might have been misunderstood here. I sort of feared I would be, as I have some experience in this regard. I don't really have an opinion on what is nicer, and I also don't mind people liking their stuff, if anything it makes my happy to know. I also agree that it is weird to compare it to a desktop. In fact, my larger point is that I feel these benchmarks, and subsequent comment discussions, tend to imply this comparison. And, I don't see the harm in then showing what those numbers would be. If power consumption isn't important, I sure would like to know.
CoolGuySteve 5y ago
Even in terms of power efficiency AMD is in the same ballpark with their 4 and 5 U-series mobile parts, particularly when comparing multicore benchmarks on their 8 core/16 thread CPUs. M1 is really most impressive when compared to Intel parts and especially when compared to the underspec’ed Intel parts that Apple used to ship. Yes, the M1 is good but I’m honestly just tired of hearing about it. The story seems to be about the decline of Intel’s fab supremacy more than anything.
- nullc 5y ago
  It's kind of a joke at this point. Talking about the runtime of something on a dual 7742 and someone pipes up with "Have you tried M1, foocloud has them available, it's so much faster".
apatheticonion 5y ago
Single threaded performance is on par with AMD 5xxx series parts. Consider that Apple is using the 5nm process while AMD is using the 7nm process. I'm not sure how it compares in terms of power efficiency though I'd expect the ARM chips to be more efficient both because of the transistor size and the ARM CPU not needing to support instructions from the 60s. I'm very excited to see a new competitor in the CPU game and I'm a big fan of ARM, hopefully we will see further disruption but in the PC space. Imagine a 128 core desktop CPU. It will be interesting to see how software has to evolve in order to maximise utilization of the quantity of threads.
- eru 5y ago
  > [...] and the ARM CPU not needing to support instructions from the 60s. Apparently, those weird instructions only take up a teeny-tiny amount of space on the CPU and are basically implemented in micro-code. To be backwards compatible those instructions just need to be supported, but they don't need to be fast. So they are implemented such that they don't get in the way much.
- Leherenn 5y ago
  Is it really a competitor given they don't sell their chips? For Intel maybe, given they lost the Apple market, but it doesn't look like it changed anything for the other players. There's been a lot of comments about how ARM is going to revolutionise everything, but that doesn't seem to be the case for the chips you can actually buy (e.g. Qualcomm Vs AMD). Honestly, I don't see the M1 as a statement about how good ARM compared to x64, but how good Apple is compared to the rest of the field.
- caeril 5y ago
  > It will be interesting to see how software has to evolve in order to maximise utilization of the quantity of threads. Not only this, but the PHP/Python/Javascript kiddos will need to learn: 1. Languages that get closer to the metal. 2. Utilize those languages to make their applications aware of data locality, temporality, and branching. The bottleneck of the future is memory and pipeline stalls. Spraying objects all over the heap is one of the dumbest things you can do with modern processors, but developers do it all the time. This needs to get fixed.

breakfastduck 5y ago

Understand where you're coming from but there also seems to be a weird section of the audience that, for whatever reason, doesn't like to compare apples to apples. I wouldn't expect large numbers of benchmarks of intels new mobile chip against AMDs fastest desktop chip so I don't know why people find it unusual in this particular circumstance.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
I’m usually already committed to macOS and want to know if the upgrade is “worth it”. But, for this, I’m more interested in perceived performance than real performance and, generally, the non-M1 post-2015 or so MacBooks feel slower than my older MacBooks ever did.

jonplackett 5y ago

I think what people are excited about is not the actual benchmark but the potential of the path we now are clearly on. When you see “M1 beats XXXXX at XXXXX task” I don’t think anyone really cares that much about that task, but it usually makes you think, “crap, imagine what their proper MacBook Pro pro / Mac Pro chip is going to be able to do. Or what it will do in 3 years...? Also, everyone just loves watching Intel suffer.

ngold 5y ago
Also 5 or 10 watts versus 125 watt power draw. No matter how you slice it. The BBC acorn has grown up to be a monster.
- nr2x 5y ago
  Really one of my favorite examples of why public sector investment is a Good Thing.
  - ngold 5y ago
    I still love that movie with the hobbit guy about the BBC acorn. That was great.
    - aaronharder 5y ago
      Micro Men! Great little TV movie, and really interesting story of the rivalry between UK golden-age home computing giants Sinclair and Acorn (Acorn being the company behind the BBC micro, and also originally the "A" in "ARM").
      - dopidopHN 5y ago
        Oh thank you, I never heard those name before so I had a hard time following this part of the thread. ( do some more search, adding “micro” ) Ok, so it IS a British Broadcasting Corporation spawn. Ha. Excellent. I had no idea. Thanks for spelling it out, I was about to reject the idea as funny but unlikely.

bradleyjg 5y ago

I remember when the XBOX and PS2 were out. I never got into console gaming, so I was very much on the sidelines. From that perspective it was amazing how passionate people got about a consumer product that realistically should form no part of anyone’s identity. Since then I’ve seen the same pattern over and over again. I don’t really get it. Kudos to modern marketing I guess.

0xEFF 5y ago
I dunno about the marketing, but I for one was excited about the first consumer devices capable of realtime, immersive 3D worlds. I played a lot of 16 player halo in college classrooms on big screen projectors. It was exciting.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  I guess maybe the point I was trying to make wasn’t explicit enough. Getting excited about either one, understandable. Getting into serious and sustained arguments about which one was better like they were political parties or religions, not as understandable.
  - sgerenser 5y ago
    More understandable for anyone who was around for the virtually identical Sega vs Nintendo wars of the 80s and 90s.
jmkni 5y ago
I think it’s partly down to money. If you’re on a tight budget and can only afford one, you don’t want to feel as though you’ve made the wrong choice and are missing out. If you can afford to buy both then it’s not as big of a deal.

thedracle 5y ago

What Apple has proven with M1 and Rosetta is you can actually quite elegantly support legacy x86 programs, while leaving little on the table, and make use of all of the advantages of ARM/RISC based architectures. I'm interested if AMD/Intel will respond with their own beefed up desktop profile RISC/ARM processors.

astrange 5y ago
I wouldn't call x86-64 all that legacy (it's like, recently legacy) and that's all Rosetta supports. But performance is not that bad even if you stack something like WINE on top to handle i386 programs.
- jmkni 5y ago
  There’s videos on YouTube of people playing Windows games (like GTAV) through parallels via Rosetta 2. Performance isn’t amazing, but it blows my mind that it works at all!
  - astrange 5y ago
    Is that really Rosetta and not qemu? I didn’t think it supported VMs.

alienalp 5y ago

What did you test was most probably wasnt compiled for m1 or just a rare thing. Until M1 i didnt buy single Apple product. But M1 is clearly superior. You feel the difference clearly just by browsing web. There isnt even need to test anyhting someone who used decent intel/amd laptop and m1 laptop in short period of time will realize the difference.

serix 5y ago
Same as for me. I was interested in macos but 2k bucks is something that stoping me all that time :) I bought in 2019 ThinkPad t490 (for nearly 1k $) after my Dell n5110 it's just wow. Speed, touchpad. And then two weeks ago I decided to give it a try to Macbook Air and bought minimal 8/256. And this machine slightly (IMO something 2x in indexing my phpstorm project) faster then my t490 with i5-8265U 24/256 BUT its silent and cold and battery life. After full working 10h day I have 30-40% And I was shocked that 8 gigs is enough for me, on ThinkPad I used at least 10-12 gigs for my work. I just bought minimum to try macos and planned to switch to 16 gig version or go back to ThinkPad, but now I can use it at least next couple of years No regrets from switching

tbrock 5y ago

I don't think you realize how far ahead the M1 actually is... it's about processing power per watt. The desktop you used actually 1) has a fan 2) is probably consuming many more than 15 watts 3) would burn my lap if it was anywhere near it. The implications are huge. Think about the competitive advantage a data center that operated with no cooling requirements and much lower power requirements would be if it got the same (or better!) performance than an equivalent intel based one. It's not just faster, its faster than equivalent parts AND way more efficient.

okamiueru 5y ago
The disconnect here is exactly what I'm referring to in my post. I'm at a loss for words, especially considering I've already addressed your main point. Also, what do you mean by "not just faster"? What are "equivalent parts"?
- tbrock 5y ago
  When they make the desktop pro version its going to slap. This is a 15 watt part! You may not care about efficiency so then wait and see what the desktop part looks like.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    It's generally not that simple - you can't scale a 15w part to 150w and get 10x the performance, there's other factors at play.
    - ssaturn 5y ago
      With the m1 chip you pretty much can, the heat is low enough that you can just add more transistors to the die and give it more juice and it will fly. It seems the days of intel are numbered, not even i9 processors can compete against it now.

franciscop 5y ago

I believe it's often on HN because there hasn't been a major "jump" in computing/processing power like this in over a decade. I do remember when every year's PC was significantly faster and yearn those years, as probably many here, and see this as a very exciting moment. I only use a laptop, like many others, and I believe it's very fair to compare M1 vs last generation Intel. Why? Because both are Apple computers (few differences in screen brightness, colors, etc), same OS (few differences in optimization, stability, support, etc) and similar constrains from being a laptop (thermal, power, etc). Intel's year over year improvements are minimal, so "last year" Intel vs "this year" m1 is a fair comparison. It'll not be so when we get to m3+, but even m2 would be fair-ish game and gain more from comparing an Apple Intel computer vs Apple m2 than comparing it with a totally different windows machine.

okamiueru 5y ago
Doesn't that imply you're only limiting yourself to apple hardware? Seems like the logical conclusion if the M1 is this "jump" in computational power, yet being three times slower in the very same test I ran?
- batty_alex 5y ago
  I’m going to guess your desktop isn’t running on a 15 watt SoC. If it were, then we’d have something to talk about
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    That's a good point. Yet for how long can the M1 sustain maximum performance, even with fans? And at what temperatures? Regardless, it's good to see some innovation--no matter how much hype is involved.
    - Arn_Thor 5y ago
      I'm no expert, but with a 15W power draw the answer to the "how long" question is likely to be "perpetually" with active cooling. Now, Apple tends to let its processors run very hot before throttling (I had an old i5 MacBook which easily hit 98C), but again, a 15W power draw means there isn't all that much energy to push into whatever heat sink or cooling solution they want to use. (In the real world it's rather more complicated, with different load intensity on different parts of the SoC, but still)

AlphaSite 5y ago

There are two important things here: 1. If the smallest laptop chips are this efficient what do you think a full fat desktop chip will look like? 2. I think desktop/workstation is the only category where energy usage isn’t that important, it’s probably less than $100 per year with our usage patterns (don’t quote me on that)P. But for server and laptop it’s very important (for totally different reasons). (Realistically it’s probably a max performance vs efficient trade off, but that may be in part because we’ve not seen any large apple chips, so we don’t know how it scales)s

makomk 5y ago
Well, we know that AMD's chips - which use the next largest TSMC node compared to Apple's - have a lot of diminishing returns from increasing the available power envelope above M1-like ultraportable levels, at least in the kinds of core counts you typically find in consumer desktops. So it's possible that even if Apple did ship a full desktop chip in a system with proper cooling, it wouldn't be that much faster. (It's also likely that they just won't bother, Apple being Apple.)

simonh 5y ago

It may be an 'older model' but it's only from 2019. It's only one year behind the current 16" MBP. So I think comparing a 2 year old top of the line, maxed out MBP to a current lowest end entry level MBP, and see the low end model blow away the high end maxed out beast, is a reasonable thing to be impressed with.

WesleyHale 5y ago

the best metric would be power to cost ratio. If you're compiling faster than the M1, how much more or less is your build in comparison?

fsociety 5y ago

These benchmarks don’t threaten other ecosystems and show a strong value proposition for others who own the older, hot and noisy MacBooks. Especially in its form factor. Especially with its battery life. What’s wrong with that?