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You probably wouldn’t have gotten downvoted as much if people hadn’t (ironically?) read the part you said they wouldn’t read :p And I want to mention that I agr

You probably wouldn’t have gotten downvoted as much if people hadn’t (ironically?) read the part you said they wouldn’t read :p And I want to mention that I agree with you about apple not selling to pros very well over the past 6 years. Your laptop is definitely very capable. But it’s barely a laptop. Why not build out a proper desktop? This precision would be a pain in the ass to carry around for most people, especially travel. Dell made sacrifices to get that kind of power: size, cooling, and battery life. Those are actually meaningful things when it comes to a laptop for most people, even pros. I think the fact that you’re even mentioning a MacBook <em>air</em> in the same sentence is very good for the Air. The M1 hasn’t really been marketed to the pro market until the recent release. Also, 5x faster at what? The M1 is about the same performance as a W-11855M at single core cinebench, and only 25% slower at multicore. So comparison to the M1 pro/max is not very promising for the Xeon chip.

scns 5y ago
Engineers in the field, on oil rigs, doing CAD, Simulations etc. need huge heavy desktop replacement laptops. The licensing cost for the software they use is usually above 100_000$, and only certified for RHEL or Windows. Even at 8k$ the laptop is often below 5% of the budget.
soylentnewsorg 5y ago
it's because you're using "geekbench" for your numbers. which is a combined number of misleading stats. it includes things like "encoding video" and "rendering html" - things that the m1 has specific optimizations for, which in the real world are done by the NVIDIA RTX on my Dell, with the CPU sitting at under 1% utilization. Yes, if you offload these tasks, which in the real world don't use the CPU at all, and run it on a CPU with special accelerators for these useless tasks, the CPU designed specifically to game "geekbench" metrics will win. In the real world, I got a multi-gig dataset I need to process and do calculations on. Go put a database on the M1 and see if it beats a xeon. Or for an easier test, just load up excel with lots of functions and lots of calculated rows and columns. Run that while running a couple of VMs for virtual appliances on your laptop too (128GB ECC RAM helps with that). You're literally here saying the M1 is going to replace a server chip. Newsflash - the M1 doesn't even run any of the needed code, because it's arm code - a small niche.

scns 5y ago

Engineers in the field, on oil rigs, doing CAD, Simulations etc. need huge heavy desktop replacement laptops. The licensing cost for the software they use is usually above 100_000$, and only certified for RHEL or Windows. Even at 8k$ the laptop is often below 5% of the budget.

soylentnewsorg 5y ago

it's because you're using "geekbench" for your numbers. which is a combined number of misleading stats. it includes things like "encoding video" and "rendering html" - things that the m1 has specific optimizations for, which in the real world are done by the NVIDIA RTX on my Dell, with the CPU sitting at under 1% utilization. Yes, if you offload these tasks, which in the real world don't use the CPU at all, and run it on a CPU with special accelerators for these useless tasks, the CPU designed specifically to game "geekbench" metrics will win. In the real world, I got a multi-gig dataset I need to process and do calculations on. Go put a database on the M1 and see if it beats a xeon. Or for an easier test, just load up excel with lots of functions and lots of calculated rows and columns. Run that while running a couple of VMs for virtual appliances on your laptop too (128GB ECC RAM helps with that). You're literally here saying the M1 is going to replace a server chip. Newsflash - the M1 doesn't even run any of the needed code, because it's arm code - a small niche.