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> I just can't figure out what I'm missing on the "M1 is so fast" side of things. Two reasons: 1. M1 is a super fast laptop chip. It provides mid-range deskto

• nimchimpsky 5y ago
  Its literally the 25th fastest cpu available across all cpu's ? According to the geekbench scores. I'm not sure how you can say its not that fast. Its a laptop cpu, with very very low power draw and its the 25th fastest cpu ACROSS all cpus. Its the biggest generational leap in cpus for 20 years.
• hyperpallium2 5y ago
  > Apple really dragged their feet ... I wonder if this was deliberate theatre for dramatic contrast?
• qudat 5y ago
  For reference, I’m looking to purchase a framework laptop. If I’m lucky I’m going to get 8 hours of battery life. Real number for M1 mbp reach 16+ hours, doubling the laptop of my choice. That is crazy impressive and something that I wish I could get in the ultrabook form factor.
• drewpc 5y ago
  I disagree with this perspective. I think it's important to recognize that the M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC), not simply a CPU. Comparing the Apple M1 to "mid-range 8-core AMD desktop CPUs from 2020" is not comparing apples to apples. The M1 Max in the Geek Bench score has 10 cores whereas the AMD desktop CPUs you mention have 8-cores. That would be more of an apples to apples comparison. Where the M1 architecture really shines is the collaboration between CPU, GPU, memory, SSD, and other components on the SoC. The components all work together within the same 5nm silicon fabric, without ever having to go out to electrical interconnects on a motherboard. Thereby saving power, heat, etc. What you lose in repairability/upgradability, you gain in performance on every front. That tradeoff is no different than what we chose in our mobile devices. If repairability and upgradability are more important to you, then definitely don't buy a device with an Apple M1; absolutely buy a Framework laptop (https://frame.work https://frame.work).
  • lliamander 5y ago
    I really hope Qualcomm/NUVIA (or Nvidia/ARM) release a competitive ARM SoC that will eventually become part of a framework mainboard module.
    • dmitriid 5y ago
      M1 was 10 years in the making. So I wouldn't hold my breath for Qualcomm or anyone else.
    • drewpc 5y ago
      It would be very interesting to see a consumer-oriented ARM SoC from one of the other main manufacturers. I doubt that will happen, however. Their entire business is based on being a component in a chain of components, not being the entire thing. Although, for example, Intel makes some motherboards, some GPUs, etc...their business isn't based on putting it all together in one fabric for their end-clients. They'd have to control/influence more of the OS for that. Apple has it all: full hardware control, full software control, and it's all designed for the mass market consumer.
• lanza 5y ago
  You're missing out on the fact that Apple didn't release a 12980hk or 5980hx competitor. These are 30 watt chips that trounce the competition's 65 watt (e.g. the 12980hk and 5980hx) and beyond chips. Hell, this Geekbench is faster than a desktop 125 watt 11900k. It's faster than a desktop 105 watt 5800x. Apple intentionally played to the competition here. They know AMD/Intel reach some performance level X and released CPUs that perform no greater than X * 1.2. They know they are in the lead since they are paying TSMC for first dibs on 5nm, but they didn't blow their load on their first generation products. Intel will release Alder Lake and catch up, AMD will reach Zen4 and catch up and Apple will just reach into their pocket and pull out a "oh here's a 45 watt 4nm CPU with two years of microarch upgrades" and the 2022 MBP 16 will have Geekbench scores of ~2200 and ~17000. There's a de facto industry leader in process technology today -- TSMC. Apple is the only one willing to pay the premium. They also have a much newer microarch design (circa 2006ish) vs AMD and Intel's early 90s designs. That's a 10-20% advantage (very rough ballpark estimate). The also are on arm which is another 10-20% advantage for the frontend. The big deal here is that this isn't going to change until Intel's process technology catches up. And, hell, I bet at that point Apple will be willing to pay enough to take first dibs there as well. AMD will never catch up since we know they don't care to compete against Apple laptops and thus won't pay the premium for TSMC's latest art. Intel might not even care enough and let Apple have mobile/laptop market first dibs on their latest node if Apple is willing not to touch the server market. Whether or not they'd agree on the workstation MacPro vs 2 slot Xeon workstation market would be interesting. It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop.
  • shaklee3 5y ago
    You are vastly, vastly overestimating how many people like apple laptops. They're expensive, the OS is worse, and there's no speed difference outside of benchmarks. That combined with the fact that most apps are windows-based, and the games are poorly emulated or nonexistent, there's really no reason to buy an apple laptop short of bragging.
    • b9a2cab5 5y ago
      Is that why every tech company uses Macbooks? People who can't afford Apple laptops (and gamers and certain other use cases) buy cheaper laptops. The brand appeal draws all the wealthy people towards Apple devices.
• dehrmann 5y ago
  > But I agree that the M1 hype may be getting a little out of hand. Alder Lake will have big little core and by on 7 nm. I'm really curious if it or its successor will be good enough when compared to the current M1
  • cryptokush 5y ago
    Alder Lake is 10nm
• vegai_ 5y ago
  > 1. M1 is a super fast laptop chip. It provides mid-range desktop performance in a laptop form factor with mostly fanless operation. No matter how you look at it, that's impressive. Get an x86-64 laptop with a recent fastest Ryzen, install Linux on it. You're gonna see better performance for most practical things than your Mac M1, practically fanless. For half the price. Power-per-watt remains Apple's competitive advantage and therefore battery life is 1.5-2x there. I think the question remains, like it had before these new chips: do you want MacOS and the Apple ecosystem? If you do, they're obviously a good choice (even a great choice with these new chips). The less value you get from that ecosystem, the less you will get from these laptops. For nearly everything else, Linux will be the better choice.
  • fastball 5y ago
    If M1 chips have better performance per watt, then they are going to put off less heat. So however "practically fanless" the x86-64 chip you choose is, the M1 is going to be more fanless. And for a laptop chip those are pretty much the two things that matter (not melting your lap and not being crazy loud).
  • mmis1000 5y ago
    Unfortunately laptop price are somehow high up for thin laptop with 32gb+ ram ryzen models recently, probably due to shortage. And about the igpu. AMD haven't release cpu with RDNA2 igpu yet. The first general purpose ryzen with RDNA2 igpu will be probably on steamdeck. But it will be released next year.
  • ideamotor 5y ago
    That's correct. It's about the ecosystem. If you want to run Linux, you don't care about the ecosystem. That person's definition of "most practical things" is going to be very different. For me, using Reminders, Notes, Photos, Messages, and FaceTime across my iPhone and MBP is very practical. I've witnessed amazing gains in the integration just since I got into Apple machines in 2017. My work bought me an iMac in 2011 and I hated it. And yes, it's that portability through incredible battery life that is the other advantage. I've owned many Windows laptops and the Dell M3800 that came pre-loaded with Ubuntu, and none of them came close in this regard. All other laptops I have used needed to be plugged in for most use which does severely limit portability. This does not. It also doesn't get hot. The fans never turn on. It's a game changer.
• PolCPP 5y ago
  From what i see the Clang difference mostly looks like its because it is a 10 core cpu (with 2 efficiency ones at that), vs a 16 core. (I'm seeing 104 klines/sec vs 180.5), the 5800x seems to hit 94-96klines/sec Kinda wish they had a m1 max focused on extra cpu cores rather than gpu cores tbh
• camillomiller 5y ago
  You need to consider the larger target group of professionals. It's really GPU capabilities that blow everything away. If you don't plan to use your MacBook Pro for video/photo editing or 3D modeling, then a M1 Pro with the same 10-core CPU and 16-core Neural Engine has all you need and costs less. Unless I'm missing something I don't think there much added benefit from the added GPU cores in your scenario, unless you want to go with the maximum configurable memory.
  • jjcon 5y ago
    > GPU capabilities that blow everything away Compared to previous macs and igpus - an nvidia gpu will still run circles arounnd this thing
    • jachee 5y ago
      In a quiet laptop?
      • jjcon 5y ago
        If you are trying to do hardcore video editing or modeling then 'quiet laptop' likely comes second to speed
    • mataug 5y ago
      > Compared to previous macs and igpus - an nvidia gpu will still run circles arounnd this thing True, but the point here is that M1 is able to achieve outstanding performance per watt numbers compared to Nvidia or Intel.
      • KptMarchewa 5y ago
        Are you really rendering in a cafe that you need on the go GPU performance?
        • 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
• VortexDream 5y ago
  The fact that this beats AMDs top laptop CPU is actually a huge deal. And that's before considering battery life and thermals. I'll never buy an Apple computer, but I can't help but be impressed with what they've achieved here.
  • gameswithgo 5y ago
    the main reason it does it is because apple bought up all the 5nm capacity though. amd is running at 7nm still. so impressive because they could afford to do that I guess.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Don't get me wrong: It's impressive and I have huge respect for it. I also bought one. However, it would be surprising if Apple's new 5nm chip didn't beat AMD's older 7nm chip at this point. Apple specifically bought out all of TSMC's 5nm capacity for themselves while AMD was stuck on 7nm (for now). It will be interesting to see how AMD's new 6000 series mobile chips perform. According to rumors they might be launched in the next few months.
    • soylentnewsorg 5y ago
      It wouldn't be a surprise that a CPU that can't run most of the software out there (because that software is x86) and has ditched all compatibility and started a design from scratch, can beat last-gen CPUs from competitors. For specific apps and workloads, for which it has accelerators. But here I am, with a pretty thin and very durable laptop that has a 6 core Xeon in it. It gets hot, it has huge fans, and it completely obliterates any M1 laptop. I don't mean it's twice as fast. I mean things run at 5x or faster vs an M1. Now, this is a new version of the M1, but it's an incremental 1-year improvement. It'll be very slightly faster than the old gen. By ditching Intel, what apple did is making sure their pro line - which is about power, not mobility, is no longer a competitor, and never will be. Because when you want a super fast chip, you don't design up from a freaking cell phone CPU. You design down from a server CPU. You know, to get actual work done, professionally. But yeah, I do see their pro battery is 11 hours while mine usually dies at 9. Interesting how I got my computer plugged in most of the time though...
• LDataReady 5y ago
  I think people are missing the fact that it’s performance + energy efficiency where M1 blows regular x86 out of the water.
  • stevespang 5y ago
    > I think people are missing the fact that it’s performance + energy efficiency where M1 blows regular x86 out of the water - - - EXACTLY. You can choose to compute with a sledge hammer - - or you can use an Xacto knife with much longer battery life in a laptop.
• baybal2 5y ago
  > were stuck on relatively outdated x86-64 CPUs. We came to a point when X86 is faster to emulate, than to run on a more modern microarchitecture. One point is clear: per-transistor performance of X86 is dimishing with each new core generation, and it is already losing to M1. X86 makers will not be able to keep up for long. They will have to keep releasing bigger, and hotter chips to keep parity, until they cannot.
  • nly 5y ago
    I think in 10-15 years the majority of the market, laptop or otherwise, will still be x86. For me what the M1 shows is not that x86 is dead and ARM is the future, or even that Intel or AMD are toast, it's that the days of the traditional socketed CPU and modular RAM are numbered. 10 years from now we'll all be using gigantic 32 core x86 SoC's with onboard RAM and GPU, and perhaps people on HN cheering on Apple now won't be when hobbiest PC building is a thing of the past.
  • Slartie 5y ago
    > We came to a point when X86 is faster to emulate, than to run on a more modern microarchitecture. Since you are clearly referring to Rosetta 2: - It is not an emulation. It is a translation. That alone is a 10-100x speed difference. - It is not always faster; it highly depends on the specific code to run. Some code is miraculously faster, some is only at about 50% or lower. - The comparison is "apples vs. oranges" because it's only comparing against Intel Macs, which do not use the fastest x86-64 chips on the market. Most importantly, AMD processors are not included in this comparison at all. Constructing a general superiority of ARM vs. x86 based on this flawed premise is really far-fetched.
  • calaphos 5y ago
    Per transistor performance in M1 isn't any better than the x86 opposition, quite the opposite in fact. The standard M1 has 60% more transistors than a current gen Ryzen mobile chip, while having halve the large cores (and significantly worse multi ore performance).
    • baybal2 5y ago
• NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  >Apple really dragged their feet on updating the old Intel Macs before the transition. People in the Mac world (excluding hackintosh) were stuck on relatively outdated x86-64 CPUs. Maybe my expectations are different; but my 16" MacBook Pro has a Core i9-9880H, which is a 19Q2 released part - it's not exactly ancient.
  • magila 5y ago
    Just because the SKU is fairly recent doesn't mean the tech inside is. That 9880H is using Skylake cores which first hit the market in 2015 and is fabricated using a refined version of the 14 nm process which first used for Broadwell in 2014.
    • ulfw 5y ago
      And the fact intel hasn't updated their CPUs is Apple's fault how again?
    • NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
      But that's Intel's foot dragging, not Apple's, right? The 10th generation i9s didn't come out until 20Q2.
• e40 5y ago
  Really curious to see what chips will go into the Mac Pro line next year (year after?). Will they be faster than the AMD desktop/workstation chips when they come out?
• fnord77 5y ago
  > Compared to those older CPUs, the M1 Max is a huge leap forward. Is it, though? Its single-core score is roughly 2x that of the top CPU Apple put in the mid-2012 macbook pro. 2x after 10 years doesn't seem that great to me. Maybe that's more of an indictment against intel
  • numpad0 5y ago
    Kids these days don't know the days when 2x was within realms of intentional product segmentation and at most 18 months worth of progress.
  • nojito 5y ago
    Single core performance has been stagnant for a decade from all manufacturers.
  • RussianCow 5y ago
    The single-core performance of Intel CPUs has only increased by about 10% per generation, so that checks out.
• traceroute66 5y ago
  > Apple really dragged their feet on updating the old Intel Macs before the transition There was a Twitter post doing the rounds which I cannot locate now as my Twitter-search-foo is not strong enough. :-( To summarise the gist of it: The post was made by someone on the product development team for the newly released MacBook Pro models, they referred to it as multiple years in the making. So it may well be Apple were dragging their feet for good reason. They knew what was coming and did not want to invest further in Intel related R&D and did not want to end up with warehouses full of Intel-based devices and associated service parts.
• rubicon33 5y ago
  What’s the best Apple computer for fastest compile times nowadays?