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Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. H

Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of news outlets were suggesting it would. In fact, a lot of the GPU tests here show more or less what I’ve seen: That Apple has matched the power/performance of other leading-edge GPU hardware: > Pretty much what we would expect, with the M1 Max having about 8x less performance, but at 8x less power, so performance per watt is surprisingly quite comparable between the two. This is actually an impressive accomplishment out of Apple. I’m just afraid it might get overshadowed by the fact that it doesn’t live up to some of the fairly extreme performance claims that got tossed around in the days following the launch.

BurningFrog 5y ago
Pretty sure the panegyric performance claims are from Mac people comparing it to the rather sad previous generation of Macbooks.
whynotminot 5y ago
But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks. Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too. I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing fruit.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.
      - JohnBooty 5y ago
        By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for anything, they're somehow punishing everybody else with "penalties." What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else? At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with their unique vertical integration.
        vel0city 5y ago
        SSE/AVX/etc aren't optimizations for a single application, they're optimizations for specific kinds of math instructions. Any application using that processor can use them, and they're overall pretty general instructions. Hyper-optimizing for a particular application means the way that particular application works gets accelerated, but not things in general. Sure, if a browser behaved identically to Safari, it too would potentially experience the speed up barring any weird microcode/firmware that only allows those extensions to be used by Apple-signed binaries which is a whole 'nother level of nightmare. Stepping outside of that highly optimized path is essentially a penalty though as it by definition wouldn't be so highly optimized. And once that optimized path has been etched into the silicon, there's no real updating it unless we move to CPUs being more like FPGAs which isn't likely to happen.
- neogodless 5y ago
  There were really similar discussions in mid-2020 when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips launched, because they were beating Intel desktop chips. That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for Macbook users (and Mac Mini users). It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)
- p1necone 5y ago
  They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid. As you can see in the benchmark - lower power, proportionally lower performance. To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's just that Apples marketing hype is so over the top, and so many people buy into it so hard that people (such as me) still feel the need to bring it down to earth.
  - jshier 5y ago
    Apple's marketing page for the new MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max strictly mentions laptops and laptop GPUs in its comparisons. Apple makes no comparison to desktop systems directly. At most they make general comparisons to the power curves of PC CPUs and GPUs, but mostly when introducing the M1 and explaining why they built it.
  - minhazm 5y ago
    > lower power, proportionally lower performance Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly better on average. Only one of the examples in this post really talked about power usage and that example also says that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler and still achieves a similar performance per watt. If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech: > In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      For laptop usage, it's an amazing feat. But it's kind of a strained comparison. Power usage doesn't scale linearly with performance for any CPU (power consumption scales with the square of voltage) so squeezing the last 20% of performance out of a desktop chip could require doubling the power consumption. Which is actually find for a desktop because I really don't care if my CPU consumes 100-200W for a few minutes while doing a compile. But trying to compare performance-per-watt between two parts tuned for different parts of the power/efficiency curve is always going to be misleading. If we wanted to compare straight across, comparing to AMD's mobile Ryzen parts would make more sense. AMD has a 35W mobile part that isn't all that far behind the M1 parts: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445
- ziml77 5y ago
  Not just that it's even comparable to a desktop but that it also has excellent battery life. You've been able to get portable desktop replacements before, but they were power hungry even when barely doing anything.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing. But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to. So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a desktop for me. I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to have it.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. The problem with this take is this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the last few hundred MHz of clock speed uses a ton of power, and that's it. But then you have this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 Nearly double the multi-threaded performance at the same TDP, because it has twice as many cores and it only has to give back the last few hundred MHz of base clock to do it. A laptop with performance largely equivalent to <= 8-core desktops wasn't a novelty. What a desktop really gets you is the ability to have a lot more cores.
  - whynotminot 5y ago
    I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon. So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try to make a point. OK, you win that one. I'm talking about what the SoC as a whole does while running near-silently off a battery. Yes, a desktop gives you the ability to have more CPU cores. I'm sure that's what we'll get from whatever Apple decides to ship for its true Pro desktops.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing. People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months away when the M1 was released, but Zen 2 desktops were only a single digit percentage faster than Zen 2 laptops, so how does it compare to Zen 3 desktops? Meanwhile the primary real advantage of the M1 is that it uses less power. Compared to PC laptops, it's a somewhat less power. There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life (and no matter how little the CPU uses, you still have to run the screen and everything else), so the practical impact of this isn't enormous, but it's there. But if you compare the power consumption to PC desktops, OMFG! Except that nobody really cares about the power consumption of PC desktops. That's why they triple the power consumption to eek out 8% more performance. A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but people keep publishing SPEC benchmarks for comparison with PCs. Part of this is that a lot of the ordinary benchmark software either doesn't run on Mac at all or there was no native ARM version available yet. But SPEC was put together by a consortium of server vendors. Their incentive is show that their POWER and Xeon processors are worth the fat premium over regular desktop CPUs. So the suite skews heavy to benchmarks limited by memory bandwidth, because big servers will have like 16 times more memory channels than a desktop. Then Apple shows up with this SoC that has a ton of memory bandwidth because it's necessary to feed the GPU and it stomps all over those specific benchmarks. Then it's OMFG again even though those results aren't actually typical because most workloads aren't limited by memory bandwidth. It's not a bad chip. The level of hype is just extraordinary.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Laptop Zen and desktop Zen are basically the same in single core. The big difference is you're not more than 8 fast cores. The M1 Max also has basically 8 fast cores. It used to be different, but now frequency is so close to the absolute limits that adding more power doesn't help single core performance that much.
ardit33 5y ago
I was like you at first, seeing that my chrome speeds don't feel that fast, then I did my first XCode build. Holly.. it is so much faster than my 2017 Macbook Pro. Super fast builds, and A huge productivity boost. I think it shows that if software is optimized for it, M1 can be/feel crazy fast. Unfortunately, anything running with Roseta, will not feel that fast, as it's performance will be hobbled by the emulation layer.
- officeplant 5y ago
  Even the M1 port of Chrome is clunky, but then again chrome has always been clunky with MacOS. Firefox's M1 port actually got me to finally start transitioning out of chrome after being a fairly devoted chrome user since it released. It's the only third party browser on M1 macs that comes close to Safari in speed and handles window size changes (especially when video is playing) leagues better than Chrome.
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    Chrome completely crashes a few times a week on my M1 Max laptop. Very frustrating. Not even necessarily when I'm doing something actively, or intensively. I can have HN open as my only tab, be reading an article and I look back at the screen and Chrome has gone.
- glandium 5y ago
  Note that one part of this is that llvm is significantly faster to generate code for arm64 than for x86_64. I'm not saying that accounts for all the difference, but it helps.
- thatswrong0 5y ago
  Yet even still under Rosetta, my M1 Pro can handle more than twice as much "stuff" in my Ableton projects vs. my 2018 MBP, all while barely heating up and without _any_ fan noise (whereas my 2018 MBP starts sounding like a jet engine almost immediately after opening any sizeable project). So for me, its performance completely lives up to the hype. I don't think I'll need a new machine for a loooong time.
r00fus 5y ago
It's kind of hard to compete with raw power if you don't want a space heater of a device (hint: not wanted in laptop form factor). However, part of me thinks this is Apple doing iterative rollout best - they could have created a 20-core desktop version of this in 2021 but will likely delay that to next year for the new Mac Pro and iMac Pro.
Thaxll 5y ago
I don't understand why people keep talking about power performance per watt, do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the performance scales linearly? The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700 and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ). 5900x cost $480.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their machines "docked" 90% of the time. do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This should be pretty easy to extrapolate by comparing M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max power consumption and performance relative to the # of GPU cores. I would certainly like to see Apple go nuts and make a true, cost-and-power-consumption-are-no-object world destroying GPU. If only as a halo product. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
  - dboat 5y ago
    I think increasing cores/power limits just gets you up to some other bottleneck. At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more performance.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern. Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits. If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.
    - 5y ago
hereforphone 5y ago
Do you run virtual machines on it?
grishka 5y ago
I do fully expect to be blown away by the performance of the M1 Max when I finally receive mine as I'm coming from a 2012 MBP. I'm getting tired of the entire system grinding to a halt when I open one of those 25k-line classes in android studio. Probably even the regular M1 would handle this much better.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
For M1
tromp 5y ago
I wonder if it could perform much better than 1/8 of the 3090 on memory bound applications, given that its 400GB/s bandwidth is 1/2.34 that of the 3090's 936 GB/s...
ulfw 5y ago
It's a laptop with integrated graphics, not a desktop with high-end high-wattage discrete graphics. Astounding how far they've come and that's version 1.

BurningFrog 5y ago

Pretty sure the panegyric performance claims are from Mac people comparing it to the rather sad previous generation of Macbooks.

whynotminot 5y ago

But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks. Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too. I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing fruit.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for anything, they're somehow punishing everybody else with "penalties." What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else? At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with their unique vertical integration.
      - vel0city 5y ago
        SSE/AVX/etc aren't optimizations for a single application, they're optimizations for specific kinds of math instructions. Any application using that processor can use them, and they're overall pretty general instructions. Hyper-optimizing for a particular application means the way that particular application works gets accelerated, but not things in general. Sure, if a browser behaved identically to Safari, it too would potentially experience the speed up barring any weird microcode/firmware that only allows those extensions to be used by Apple-signed binaries which is a whole 'nother level of nightmare. Stepping outside of that highly optimized path is essentially a penalty though as it by definition wouldn't be so highly optimized. And once that optimized path has been etched into the silicon, there's no real updating it unless we move to CPUs being more like FPGAs which isn't likely to happen.
neogodless 5y ago
There were really similar discussions in mid-2020 when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips launched, because they were beating Intel desktop chips. That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for Macbook users (and Mac Mini users). It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)
p1necone 5y ago
They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid. As you can see in the benchmark - lower power, proportionally lower performance. To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's just that Apples marketing hype is so over the top, and so many people buy into it so hard that people (such as me) still feel the need to bring it down to earth.
- jshier 5y ago
  Apple's marketing page for the new MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max strictly mentions laptops and laptop GPUs in its comparisons. Apple makes no comparison to desktop systems directly. At most they make general comparisons to the power curves of PC CPUs and GPUs, but mostly when introducing the M1 and explaining why they built it.
- minhazm 5y ago
  > lower power, proportionally lower performance Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly better on average. Only one of the examples in this post really talked about power usage and that example also says that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler and still achieves a similar performance per watt. If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech: > In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    For laptop usage, it's an amazing feat. But it's kind of a strained comparison. Power usage doesn't scale linearly with performance for any CPU (power consumption scales with the square of voltage) so squeezing the last 20% of performance out of a desktop chip could require doubling the power consumption. Which is actually find for a desktop because I really don't care if my CPU consumes 100-200W for a few minutes while doing a compile. But trying to compare performance-per-watt between two parts tuned for different parts of the power/efficiency curve is always going to be misleading. If we wanted to compare straight across, comparing to AMD's mobile Ryzen parts would make more sense. AMD has a 35W mobile part that isn't all that far behind the M1 parts: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445
ziml77 5y ago
Not just that it's even comparable to a desktop but that it also has excellent battery life. You've been able to get portable desktop replacements before, but they were power hungry even when barely doing anything.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing. But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to. So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a desktop for me. I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to have it.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. The problem with this take is this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the last few hundred MHz of clock speed uses a ton of power, and that's it. But then you have this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 Nearly double the multi-threaded performance at the same TDP, because it has twice as many cores and it only has to give back the last few hundred MHz of base clock to do it. A laptop with performance largely equivalent to <= 8-core desktops wasn't a novelty. What a desktop really gets you is the ability to have a lot more cores.
- whynotminot 5y ago
  I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon. So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try to make a point. OK, you win that one. I'm talking about what the SoC as a whole does while running near-silently off a battery. Yes, a desktop gives you the ability to have more CPU cores. I'm sure that's what we'll get from whatever Apple decides to ship for its true Pro desktops.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing. People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months away when the M1 was released, but Zen 2 desktops were only a single digit percentage faster than Zen 2 laptops, so how does it compare to Zen 3 desktops? Meanwhile the primary real advantage of the M1 is that it uses less power. Compared to PC laptops, it's a somewhat less power. There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life (and no matter how little the CPU uses, you still have to run the screen and everything else), so the practical impact of this isn't enormous, but it's there. But if you compare the power consumption to PC desktops, OMFG! Except that nobody really cares about the power consumption of PC desktops. That's why they triple the power consumption to eek out 8% more performance. A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but people keep publishing SPEC benchmarks for comparison with PCs. Part of this is that a lot of the ordinary benchmark software either doesn't run on Mac at all or there was no native ARM version available yet. But SPEC was put together by a consortium of server vendors. Their incentive is show that their POWER and Xeon processors are worth the fat premium over regular desktop CPUs. So the suite skews heavy to benchmarks limited by memory bandwidth, because big servers will have like 16 times more memory channels than a desktop. Then Apple shows up with this SoC that has a ton of memory bandwidth because it's necessary to feed the GPU and it stomps all over those specific benchmarks. Then it's OMFG again even though those results aren't actually typical because most workloads aren't limited by memory bandwidth. It's not a bad chip. The level of hype is just extraordinary.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sudosysgen 5y ago
Laptop Zen and desktop Zen are basically the same in single core. The big difference is you're not more than 8 fast cores. The M1 Max also has basically 8 fast cores. It used to be different, but now frequency is so close to the absolute limits that adding more power doesn't help single core performance that much.

ardit33 5y ago

I was like you at first, seeing that my chrome speeds don't feel that fast, then I did my first XCode build. Holly.. it is so much faster than my 2017 Macbook Pro. Super fast builds, and A huge productivity boost. I think it shows that if software is optimized for it, M1 can be/feel crazy fast. Unfortunately, anything running with Roseta, will not feel that fast, as it's performance will be hobbled by the emulation layer.

officeplant 5y ago
Even the M1 port of Chrome is clunky, but then again chrome has always been clunky with MacOS. Firefox's M1 port actually got me to finally start transitioning out of chrome after being a fairly devoted chrome user since it released. It's the only third party browser on M1 macs that comes close to Safari in speed and handles window size changes (especially when video is playing) leagues better than Chrome.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Chrome completely crashes a few times a week on my M1 Max laptop. Very frustrating. Not even necessarily when I'm doing something actively, or intensively. I can have HN open as my only tab, be reading an article and I look back at the screen and Chrome has gone.
glandium 5y ago
Note that one part of this is that llvm is significantly faster to generate code for arm64 than for x86_64. I'm not saying that accounts for all the difference, but it helps.
thatswrong0 5y ago
Yet even still under Rosetta, my M1 Pro can handle more than twice as much "stuff" in my Ableton projects vs. my 2018 MBP, all while barely heating up and without _any_ fan noise (whereas my 2018 MBP starts sounding like a jet engine almost immediately after opening any sizeable project). So for me, its performance completely lives up to the hype. I don't think I'll need a new machine for a loooong time.

r00fus 5y ago

It's kind of hard to compete with raw power if you don't want a space heater of a device (hint: not wanted in laptop form factor). However, part of me thinks this is Apple doing iterative rollout best - they could have created a 20-core desktop version of this in 2021 but will likely delay that to next year for the new Mac Pro and iMac Pro.

Thaxll 5y ago

I don't understand why people keep talking about power performance per watt, do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the performance scales linearly? The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700 and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ). 5900x cost $480.

JohnBooty 5y ago
The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their machines "docked" 90% of the time. do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This should be pretty easy to extrapolate by comparing M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max power consumption and performance relative to the # of GPU cores. I would certainly like to see Apple go nuts and make a true, cost-and-power-consumption-are-no-object world destroying GPU. If only as a halo product. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
- dboat 5y ago
  I think increasing cores/power limits just gets you up to some other bottleneck. At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more performance.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern. Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits. If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.
  - 5y ago

hereforphone 5y ago

Do you run virtual machines on it?

grishka 5y ago

I do fully expect to be blown away by the performance of the M1 Max when I finally receive mine as I'm coming from a 2012 MBP. I'm getting tired of the entire system grinding to a halt when I open one of those 25k-line classes in android studio. Probably even the regular M1 would handle this much better.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

For M1

tromp 5y ago

I wonder if it could perform much better than 1/8 of the 3090 on memory bound applications, given that its 400GB/s bandwidth is 1/2.34 that of the 3090's 936 GB/s...

ulfw 5y ago

It's a laptop with integrated graphics, not a desktop with high-end high-wattage discrete graphics. Astounding how far they've come and that's version 1.