14 ms·

But at what thermal, power and monetary price? Edit: @deepnotderp[1] found the power adjusted basis: https://mobile.twitter.com/witeken/status/1478441037416828

But at what thermal, power and monetary price? Edit: @deepnotderp[1] found the power adjusted basis: https://mobile.twitter.com/witeken/status/1478441037416828932/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/witeken/status/147844103741682893... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29802359#29803502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29802359#29803502

artursapek 5y ago
Exactly. The M1 is awesome not because of raw horsepower, but because of efficiency.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  I love my fanless M1 Air primarily because it's fanless. The 14" pro looks great, but can anyone using it tell me whether the fan ever turns on?
  - thebean11 5y ago
    I have the 16" which has slightly better thermals. When it's in clamshell mode and I'm doing heavy stuff (maybe a zoom call + big compilation + running a few local services) I can feel a tiny bit of warm air coming out. Can't hear anything though.
    - dghlsakjg 5y ago
      Great to hear! I have an i7 16" intel and maxing out a single core will spin up the fans in short order. Maxing out multiple cores is kind of absurd how much noise and throttling happens
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    I have the 2020 pro and I have only heard the fan once and that was when a compile bugged out and got stuck. Otherwise I don’t even hear the fan while gaming.
  - avidphantasm 5y ago
    I have had the 14” since October and I have never heard the fan. For example, I have two 4K external displays at home and the fan on my i9 MBP was almost always on when the displays were connected (especially when using video conferencing). Not so with the 14”. Love this machine, better in every way.
  - mdasen 5y ago
    I thought that my fan never turned on. I was curious so I installed a fan meter (https://github.com/exelban/stats https://github.com/exelban/stats). If I'm playing a game and running a windows VM, it does sometimes turn on around 2,000 RPMs. I can't hear it even if I put my ear up to the vents. So, it doesn't seem to turn on almost ever for me. I've had it for over a month and I've never heard it turn on. I've seen it turn on (via the menu-bar monitor) and tried to listen for the fan and just can't hear anything. I'll be using it with the vents covered by a blanket and it doesn't seem to notice. It's one of the reasons that I love this machine. My 2020 Intel MacBook Pro would run those fans all the time making lots of noise. A web page would randomly start using a lot of CPU and my battery would drain, things would slow down, and the fans would sing their song. The magic of my new M1 Pro machine is that nothing seems to phase it. It's not like I had a crappy old laptop for comparison. I had a 2.4GHz Intel MacBook Pro that was over $2,000. I was wondering if the fan would go on and it might go on more if you're doing a lot of high-end rendering, but it doesn't for my usage. IntelliJ, Windows VMs, whatever, it mostly stays off and sometimes turns on, but low enough that I can't hear it even with my ear to the vents. It feels magical.
  - ostenning 5y ago
    Only time it turns on is when ive been playing Baldurs Gate 3 on extreme settings on my duvet for multiple hours.
  - fold3 5y ago
    I have the 14 pro and it is spookily quiet. Even when being at full load. Though perhaps after many years of dust accumulation this may change over the air. However I watched some tests of the M1 max on YouTube and it does seems like this one can get noisy
jeroenhd 5y ago
Depending on the workload: does it need to? Most people I've seen use laptops near chargers, or at least within 2 hours of the nearest charging opportunity. Sometimes people travel and need more, but I don't think it's that common to need eight hours of charge at maximum performance. Don't get me wrong, the M1 is an engineering marvel and as Apple's competitors move to a similar node size I hope they too will get these power usage benefits some way or another, but I don't think the average consumer needs all the features the M1 offers. If Intel can come up with a laptop that's faster than the M1 at two thirds the price with the only downside being that you only get four hours of battery out of it with all cores clocked to their limit, then I don't see why most people who need the horsepower would pay extra for the M1, especially with its restrictions on what operating systems it can run comfortably. The impressive efficiency of the M1 simply isn't that pressing a matter for most people. I hope Intel is right, and I hope they beat Apple. We've seen AMD overtake Intel and then saw their innovations slow to a crawl while they were ahead. Apple might end up doing the very same if there is no competition in this space. If Intel, AMD or Qualcom produce a chip even better than the M1, we can all only stand to gain from this.
- schappim 5y ago
  Agreed, but let's also not forget that Intel's #onejob is to build chips.
- ipqk 5y ago
  Heat & Fans matter too. 99% of my usage of my M1 macbook is in clam-shell mode, so I don't care about the battery life. But I do love that it doesn't dissipate much heat and that I never hear it.
- hamandcheese 5y ago
  I am always within 1 minutes of a charger. My i9 MacBook still dies on me all the time. Get to 5% and go to the bathroom? Oops, it died, and I can’t join my next meeting on time. Start a call at 10% battery? Will definitely have to interrupt to go plug in. I want performance and battery.
  - 5y ago
KindOne 5y ago
Power Chart with a Core-i9 11980HK (11th Generation) instead of a Core-i9 12900HK (12th Generation) discussed in the article. The chart is about half way down the page. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... Here are some power, prices, and other things can be viewed here about them. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=132215,213800 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...
015a 5y ago
Couple things that come to mind in response to that chart: Its impressive, but: Generally, take Intel's marketing material with a grain of salt. They're notorious for exaggerating, cherry-picking, and out-right lying in marketing materials. Related to that: While both the M1 Max & 12900HK have on-board iGPUs, the M1 Max has an especially powerful GPU for its class; one of the best iGPUs ever produced. That's going to contribute massively to package power draw, which is what they're measuring on the X-axis; if the Xe G7 can't compete, then these graphs are disingenuous to the overall experience some customers would be looking for (alternatively, other customers will be going dGPU anyway, so it doesn't matter). Related to that: Its unclear from the chart whether this is per-core relative perf or entire package and multithreaded perf. I'm guessing the latter, due to the size of that x-axis arc and because its roughly where we'd expect a 12th gen 14/20 configuration to land; that's an obscene amount of threads for mobile, far outpacing the 10/10 in M1 Max. In fact, I'd argue: if this is a multithread test, a 40% increase in cores w/ a 100% increase in SMT threads only arriving at a miniscule (~5%?) jump in perf at similar power draw is average, not good. The single-core perf, even on their high-draw cores under load, may be rather poor; so its end-of-day effectiveness may be very workload dependent. Overall, I'm hopeful the real-world performance matches the expectations they've set, and I'm bullish on Intel's strategy. Chip manufacturing is hard, but TSMC is becoming a bottleneck for both Apple & AMD. Hyper-optimizing large processes may work out for them; but the proof will be in the pudding.
- fomine3 5y ago
  My fix: Generally, take any marketing material from 1st party with a grain of salt.

artursapek 5y ago

Exactly. The M1 is awesome not because of raw horsepower, but because of efficiency.

Aperocky 5y ago
I love my fanless M1 Air primarily because it's fanless. The 14" pro looks great, but can anyone using it tell me whether the fan ever turns on?
- thebean11 5y ago
  I have the 16" which has slightly better thermals. When it's in clamshell mode and I'm doing heavy stuff (maybe a zoom call + big compilation + running a few local services) I can feel a tiny bit of warm air coming out. Can't hear anything though.
  - dghlsakjg 5y ago
    Great to hear! I have an i7 16" intel and maxing out a single core will spin up the fans in short order. Maxing out multiple cores is kind of absurd how much noise and throttling happens
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I have the 2020 pro and I have only heard the fan once and that was when a compile bugged out and got stuck. Otherwise I don’t even hear the fan while gaming.
- avidphantasm 5y ago
  I have had the 14” since October and I have never heard the fan. For example, I have two 4K external displays at home and the fan on my i9 MBP was almost always on when the displays were connected (especially when using video conferencing). Not so with the 14”. Love this machine, better in every way.
- mdasen 5y ago
  I thought that my fan never turned on. I was curious so I installed a fan meter (https://github.com/exelban/stats https://github.com/exelban/stats). If I'm playing a game and running a windows VM, it does sometimes turn on around 2,000 RPMs. I can't hear it even if I put my ear up to the vents. So, it doesn't seem to turn on almost ever for me. I've had it for over a month and I've never heard it turn on. I've seen it turn on (via the menu-bar monitor) and tried to listen for the fan and just can't hear anything. I'll be using it with the vents covered by a blanket and it doesn't seem to notice. It's one of the reasons that I love this machine. My 2020 Intel MacBook Pro would run those fans all the time making lots of noise. A web page would randomly start using a lot of CPU and my battery would drain, things would slow down, and the fans would sing their song. The magic of my new M1 Pro machine is that nothing seems to phase it. It's not like I had a crappy old laptop for comparison. I had a 2.4GHz Intel MacBook Pro that was over $2,000. I was wondering if the fan would go on and it might go on more if you're doing a lot of high-end rendering, but it doesn't for my usage. IntelliJ, Windows VMs, whatever, it mostly stays off and sometimes turns on, but low enough that I can't hear it even with my ear to the vents. It feels magical.
- ostenning 5y ago
  Only time it turns on is when ive been playing Baldurs Gate 3 on extreme settings on my duvet for multiple hours.
- fold3 5y ago
  I have the 14 pro and it is spookily quiet. Even when being at full load. Though perhaps after many years of dust accumulation this may change over the air. However I watched some tests of the M1 max on YouTube and it does seems like this one can get noisy

jeroenhd 5y ago

Depending on the workload: does it need to? Most people I've seen use laptops near chargers, or at least within 2 hours of the nearest charging opportunity. Sometimes people travel and need more, but I don't think it's that common to need eight hours of charge at maximum performance. Don't get me wrong, the M1 is an engineering marvel and as Apple's competitors move to a similar node size I hope they too will get these power usage benefits some way or another, but I don't think the average consumer needs all the features the M1 offers. If Intel can come up with a laptop that's faster than the M1 at two thirds the price with the only downside being that you only get four hours of battery out of it with all cores clocked to their limit, then I don't see why most people who need the horsepower would pay extra for the M1, especially with its restrictions on what operating systems it can run comfortably. The impressive efficiency of the M1 simply isn't that pressing a matter for most people. I hope Intel is right, and I hope they beat Apple. We've seen AMD overtake Intel and then saw their innovations slow to a crawl while they were ahead. Apple might end up doing the very same if there is no competition in this space. If Intel, AMD or Qualcom produce a chip even better than the M1, we can all only stand to gain from this.

schappim 5y ago
Agreed, but let's also not forget that Intel's #onejob is to build chips.
ipqk 5y ago
Heat & Fans matter too. 99% of my usage of my M1 macbook is in clam-shell mode, so I don't care about the battery life. But I do love that it doesn't dissipate much heat and that I never hear it.
hamandcheese 5y ago
I am always within 1 minutes of a charger. My i9 MacBook still dies on me all the time. Get to 5% and go to the bathroom? Oops, it died, and I can’t join my next meeting on time. Start a call at 10% battery? Will definitely have to interrupt to go plug in. I want performance and battery.
- 5y ago

KindOne 5y ago

Power Chart with a Core-i9 11980HK (11th Generation) instead of a Core-i9 12900HK (12th Generation) discussed in the article. The chart is about half way down the page. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... Here are some power, prices, and other things can be viewed here about them. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=132215,213800 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...

015a 5y ago

Couple things that come to mind in response to that chart: Its impressive, but: Generally, take Intel's marketing material with a grain of salt. They're notorious for exaggerating, cherry-picking, and out-right lying in marketing materials. Related to that: While both the M1 Max & 12900HK have on-board iGPUs, the M1 Max has an especially powerful GPU for its class; one of the best iGPUs ever produced. That's going to contribute massively to package power draw, which is what they're measuring on the X-axis; if the Xe G7 can't compete, then these graphs are disingenuous to the overall experience some customers would be looking for (alternatively, other customers will be going dGPU anyway, so it doesn't matter). Related to that: Its unclear from the chart whether this is per-core relative perf or entire package and multithreaded perf. I'm guessing the latter, due to the size of that x-axis arc and because its roughly where we'd expect a 12th gen 14/20 configuration to land; that's an obscene amount of threads for mobile, far outpacing the 10/10 in M1 Max. In fact, I'd argue: if this is a multithread test, a 40% increase in cores w/ a 100% increase in SMT threads only arriving at a miniscule (~5%?) jump in perf at similar power draw is average, not good. The single-core perf, even on their high-draw cores under load, may be rather poor; so its end-of-day effectiveness may be very workload dependent. Overall, I'm hopeful the real-world performance matches the expectations they've set, and I'm bullish on Intel's strategy. Chip manufacturing is hard, but TSMC is becoming a bottleneck for both Apple & AMD. Hyper-optimizing large processes may work out for them; but the proof will be in the pudding.

fomine3 5y ago
My fix: Generally, take any marketing material from 1st party with a grain of salt.