7 ms·

The single core performance looks really fast. Chip | Geekbench Score (Process) ---- | ------------------------ M1 | 2,419 (5nm) M2 | 2,658 (

The single core performance looks really fast. Chip | Geekbench Score (Process) ---- | ------------------------ M1 | 2,419 (5nm) M2 | 2,658 (5nm) M3 | 3,076 (3nm) M4* | 3,810 (3nm) In my experience, single-core CPU is the best all-around indicator of how "fast" a machine feels. I feel like Apple kind of buried this in their press release. M4 benchmark source: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8171874 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8171874

tomcam 2y ago
I don't know much about modern Geekbench scores, but it that chart seems to show that M1s are still pretty good? It appears that M4 is only about 50% faster. Somehow I would expect more like 100% improvement. Flameproof suit donned. Please correct me because I'm pretty ignorant about modern hardware. My main interest is playing lots of tracks live in Logic Pro.
- mjlee 2y ago
  Apple claim up to 1.8x in the press release. They're cherry picking so 50% in a benchmark seems about right.
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Appreciate the sanity check.
- the_king 2y ago
  That's only single core. I think Logic is pretty optimized to use multiple cores (Apple demoed it on the 20 core Xeon Mac Pro back in 2019). But if the M1 isn't the bottleneck, no reason to upgrade.
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Very good to know, thanks.
- giantrobot 2y ago
  The M1 was pretty fast when it debuted. If you own an M1 Mac its CPU has not gotten any slower over the years. While newer M-series might be faster, the old one is no slower. The M1s are likely to remain pretty usable machines for a few years yet, assuming your workload has not or does not significantly change.
  - herpderperator 2y ago
    No CPU gets slow after any amount of years. That's not how it works. I think what you're trying to say is: Software gets more resource-intensive.
- matthew-wegner 2y ago
  Some of it depends on which variant fits you best. But yeah, in general the M1 is still very good--if you hear of someone in your circle selling one for cheap because they're upgrading, nab it. On the variants: An M1 Max is 10 CPU cores with 8 power and 2 efficiency cores. M4 Max is 16 cores, 12 + 4. So each power core is 50% faster, but it also has 50% more of them. Add in twice as many efficiency cores, that are also faster for less power, plus more memory bandwidth, and it snowballs together. One nice pseudo-feature of the M1 is that the thermal design of the current MacBook Pro really hasn't changed since then. It was designed with a few generations of headroom in mind, but that means it's very, very hard to make the fans spin on a 16" M1 Max. You have to utilize all CPU/GPU/NPU cores together to even make them move, while an M3 Max is easier to make (slightly) audible.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > it's very, very hard to make the fans spin on a 16" M1 Max. You have to utilize all CPU/GPU/NPU cores together to even make them move, I routinely get my M1 fans spinning from compiling big projects. You don’t have to get the GPU involved, but when you do it definitely goes up a notch. I read so much about the M1 Pros being completely silent that I thought something was wrong with mine at first. Nope, it just turns out that most people don’t use the CPU long enough for the fans to kick in. There’s a decent thermal capacity buffer in the system before they ramp up.
    - matthew-wegner 2y ago
      Huh! I regularly max CPU for long stretches (game development), but I found I could only get the fans to move if I engaged the neural cores on top of everything else. Something like a 20+ minute video export that's using all available compute for heavy stabilization or something could do it. The M3 is much more typical behavior, but I guess it's just dumping more watts into the same thermal mass...
- KptMarchewa 2y ago
  Those kinds of improvements are way of the past. Modern hardware is just too good.
lukev 2y ago
It's not really buried... their headline stat is that it's 1.8x faster than the M1, which is actually a bigger improvement than the actual Geekbench score shows (it would be a score of 4354).
- the_king 2y ago
  Call me cynical, but when I see headlines like "up to 2x faster", I assume it's a cherry-picked result on some workload where they added a dedicated accelerator. There's a massive difference between "pretty much every app is 80% faster" and "if you render a 4K ProRes video in Final Cut Pro it's 3x faster."
giobox 2y ago
> I feel like Apple kind of buried this in their press release The press release describes the single core performance as the fastest ever made, full stop: "The M4 family features phenomenal single-threaded CPU performance with the world’s fastest CPU core" The same statement is made repeatedly across most the new M4 line up marketing materials. I think thats enough to get the point across that its a pretty quick machine.
- the_king 2y ago
  Exactly my point. Saying something is the fastest ever is marketing code (at least to me) for minor improvement over the previous generation. If you're 30% faster than the previous generation, I'd rather see that because my assumption is it's 5%.
  - bluSCALE4 2y ago
    Yeah, better than the glaring, 10x better than i7 Intel Mac. Like that's even a valid point of reference.
    - Atotalnoob 2y ago
      Not really fair to the absolutely ancient i7 Intel Macs.
      - KerrAvon 2y ago
        6 years ago isn't that old.
        Atotalnoob 2y ago
        For cpus? Yes?
        metadat 2y ago
        Not really. Intel CPU performance hasn't changed by orders of magnitude in the last ten years. My ten year old Windoze 10 desktop keeps chugging along fine. My newer 2022 i7 Windows machine works similarly well. However, attention to keeping Intel Macs performant has taken a dive. My 2019 16" MBP died last week so I fell back to my standby 2014 MBP and it's much more responsive. No login jank pause . But it also hasn't been eligible for OS updates for 2 or 3 years. My new M3 MBP is "screaming fast" with Apple's latest patched OS. My god, it's ridiculous. I really prefer Linux desktops. They've been snappy for the past 30 years, and don't typically get slow UI's after a year or two of updates.
pazimzadeh 2y ago
that's interesting, the scores are accelerating? 9.8% better, 15.7% better, 23.8% better
choilive 2y ago
They also explicitly called it out in their announcement videos that the M4 has the fastest CPU cores on the market.
kadomony 2y ago
Conversely, the M3 supposedly has better multi core performance? How is that possible?
- wmf 2y ago
  It doesn't.
kwanbix 2y ago
Mx is such a incredible achievement by apple. Sadly installing Linux is a no unless you use some budu.
- ezfe 2y ago
  Installing Linux is easy...
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 2y ago
Absolutely incredible to see Apple pushing performance like this. I can't wait to buy one and finally be able to open more than 20 Chrome tabs.
- KptMarchewa 2y ago
  For a year, maybe. Web apps will use the opportunity and get slower enough so that you'll get old experience on new hardware soon.
toxicdevil 2y ago
These numbers are misleading (as in not apples to apples comparison). M4 has a matrix multiply hardware extension which can accelerate code written (or compiled) specifically for this extension. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339248
- grecy 2y ago
  So you're saying Apple added something to the design to make it do things faster...which is literally the definition of improvement. When a company adds a supercharger to a car does it not count as faster? When I add more solar panels to my roof does it not count as more power? Surely doing this kind of thing is exactly what we want companies to be doing to make their products faster/better.
  - miahi 2y ago
    It will be faster only for code that uses/is optimized for that specific extension. And the examples you give are not really correct. If you add a supercharger you will get more power, but if the car's transmission is not upgraded, you might just get some broken gears and shafts. If you add more solar panels to your roof, you might exceed the inverter power, and the panels will not bring benefits. It's true that you will benefit from the changes above, but not just by themselves - something else needs to change so you can benefit. And in the case of the M4 and these extensions, the software needs do be changed and also to have an use case for these extensions.
    - bilbo0s 2y ago
      Are you implying there are no use cases for matrix multiply? In any case, the two main deep learning packages have already been updated so for the place this change was almost certainly targeted for, your complaint is answered. I'm just stunned that anyone would complain about hardware matrix multiplication? I've wondered why that hasn't been ubiquitous for the past 20 years. Everyone should make that improvement in their hardware. Everyone should get rid of code implementing matrix mult and make the hardware call instead. It's common sense. Not to put too fine a point on it, but your complaint assumes that GeekBench is based on code that has implemented all those changes.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
I wonder how reliable geekbench tests are. Afaik it's the most common benchmark run on apple devices, so apple has a great interest in making sure their newest chips perform great on the test. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the geekbench developers are heavily supported by apple's own performance engineers and that testing might not be as objective or indicative of real world perf as one would hope.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Wouldn't it be more surprising to you Apple has been selling 4 generations of the M series to great acclaim on the performance but it all turned out to be a smoke and mirrors show because the hardware is optimized for one particular benchmark they didn't even reference in their comparisons? From the data side: the M4 hasn't made it to the charts yet but the M3 already holds the 4th place in PassMark's single thread chart as well https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html as well as tops Cinebench 2024 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_2024_single_core https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_2024_s... The only areas the M series "lags" is in the high end workstation/server segment where they don't really have a 96+ core option or in spaces where you pop in beefy high end GPUs. Everything else the M4 tends to lead in right now.
  - KeplerBoy 2y ago
    Okay, the linked benchmarks proved me wrong. I trust cinebench numbers a whole lot more than a geekbench score. My bad. And just to be clear: I didn't speculate that Apple tune's its chip to Geekbench, I speculated that geekbench was overly optimized towards apple's latest chip.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > (...) but it all turned out to be a smoke and mirrors show because the hardware is optimized for one particular benchmark they didn't even reference in their comparisons? I know iOS developers who recently upgraded their MacBooks and they claim they now feel more sluggish. I wouldn't be surprised if it was due to RAM constraints instead of CPU though. So, take those artificial bencmarks with a grain of salt. They are so optimized that they are optimized out of the real world.
crest 2y ago
Beware that some of the Geekbench number are the result of them suddenly gaining support for streaming SVE and SME just when Apple implements it. I'm not doubting the number represent real peak throughput on M4. There is just a taste to the timing lining up so well. Also they don't take advantage of fully SVE2 capable ARM cores to compare how much a full SVE2 implementation would help especially at accelerating more algorithms than those that neatly map to streaming SVE and SME. The single core performance gains of M4 variants over their predecessors are distorted, because the streaming SVE and SME are apparently implemented by combining what used to be them AMX units of four cores.
- drunkenmagician 2y ago
  Processor roadmaps a multi year plans, I doubt Apple aligned their roadmap to geekbench supporting SVE. More likely a happy alignment of plan(et)s.
seec 2y ago
It's kinda true but also not at all. In general, having better single thread performance means a more reactive UI and snappier feeling because blocking operation gets executed more quickly. On the other hand, many modern software having been extremely optimized for multi-threading and not all categories of software benefit that much from faster UI thread. If parallelization isn't too expansive, throwing more core at something can make it actually faster. And the big thing you leave out is that it all depends on how well the software is optimise, how much animations it use and things like that. My iPhone has MUCH better single-thread performance than my old PC, yet it feels much slower for almost everything. And this is exactly how I feel about Apple Silicon Macs. On paper, impressive performance. In actual practice it doesn't feel that fast.

tomcam 2y ago

I don't know much about modern Geekbench scores, but it that chart seems to show that M1s are still pretty good? It appears that M4 is only about 50% faster. Somehow I would expect more like 100% improvement. Flameproof suit donned. Please correct me because I'm pretty ignorant about modern hardware. My main interest is playing lots of tracks live in Logic Pro.

mjlee 2y ago
Apple claim up to 1.8x in the press release. They're cherry picking so 50% in a benchmark seems about right.
- tomcam 2y ago
  Appreciate the sanity check.
the_king 2y ago
That's only single core. I think Logic is pretty optimized to use multiple cores (Apple demoed it on the 20 core Xeon Mac Pro back in 2019). But if the M1 isn't the bottleneck, no reason to upgrade.
- tomcam 2y ago
  Very good to know, thanks.
giantrobot 2y ago
The M1 was pretty fast when it debuted. If you own an M1 Mac its CPU has not gotten any slower over the years. While newer M-series might be faster, the old one is no slower. The M1s are likely to remain pretty usable machines for a few years yet, assuming your workload has not or does not significantly change.
- herpderperator 2y ago
  No CPU gets slow after any amount of years. That's not how it works. I think what you're trying to say is: Software gets more resource-intensive.
matthew-wegner 2y ago
Some of it depends on which variant fits you best. But yeah, in general the M1 is still very good--if you hear of someone in your circle selling one for cheap because they're upgrading, nab it. On the variants: An M1 Max is 10 CPU cores with 8 power and 2 efficiency cores. M4 Max is 16 cores, 12 + 4. So each power core is 50% faster, but it also has 50% more of them. Add in twice as many efficiency cores, that are also faster for less power, plus more memory bandwidth, and it snowballs together. One nice pseudo-feature of the M1 is that the thermal design of the current MacBook Pro really hasn't changed since then. It was designed with a few generations of headroom in mind, but that means it's very, very hard to make the fans spin on a 16" M1 Max. You have to utilize all CPU/GPU/NPU cores together to even make them move, while an M3 Max is easier to make (slightly) audible.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > it's very, very hard to make the fans spin on a 16" M1 Max. You have to utilize all CPU/GPU/NPU cores together to even make them move, I routinely get my M1 fans spinning from compiling big projects. You don’t have to get the GPU involved, but when you do it definitely goes up a notch. I read so much about the M1 Pros being completely silent that I thought something was wrong with mine at first. Nope, it just turns out that most people don’t use the CPU long enough for the fans to kick in. There’s a decent thermal capacity buffer in the system before they ramp up.
  - matthew-wegner 2y ago
    Huh! I regularly max CPU for long stretches (game development), but I found I could only get the fans to move if I engaged the neural cores on top of everything else. Something like a 20+ minute video export that's using all available compute for heavy stabilization or something could do it. The M3 is much more typical behavior, but I guess it's just dumping more watts into the same thermal mass...
KptMarchewa 2y ago
Those kinds of improvements are way of the past. Modern hardware is just too good.

lukev 2y ago

It's not really buried... their headline stat is that it's 1.8x faster than the M1, which is actually a bigger improvement than the actual Geekbench score shows (it would be a score of 4354).

the_king 2y ago
Call me cynical, but when I see headlines like "up to 2x faster", I assume it's a cherry-picked result on some workload where they added a dedicated accelerator. There's a massive difference between "pretty much every app is 80% faster" and "if you render a 4K ProRes video in Final Cut Pro it's 3x faster."

giobox 2y ago

> I feel like Apple kind of buried this in their press release The press release describes the single core performance as the fastest ever made, full stop: "The M4 family features phenomenal single-threaded CPU performance with the world’s fastest CPU core" The same statement is made repeatedly across most the new M4 line up marketing materials. I think thats enough to get the point across that its a pretty quick machine.

the_king 2y ago
Exactly my point. Saying something is the fastest ever is marketing code (at least to me) for minor improvement over the previous generation. If you're 30% faster than the previous generation, I'd rather see that because my assumption is it's 5%.
- bluSCALE4 2y ago
  Yeah, better than the glaring, 10x better than i7 Intel Mac. Like that's even a valid point of reference.
  - Atotalnoob 2y ago
    Not really fair to the absolutely ancient i7 Intel Macs.
    - KerrAvon 2y ago
      6 years ago isn't that old.
      - Atotalnoob 2y ago
        For cpus? Yes?
        metadat 2y ago
        Not really. Intel CPU performance hasn't changed by orders of magnitude in the last ten years. My ten year old Windoze 10 desktop keeps chugging along fine. My newer 2022 i7 Windows machine works similarly well. However, attention to keeping Intel Macs performant has taken a dive. My 2019 16" MBP died last week so I fell back to my standby 2014 MBP and it's much more responsive. No login jank pause . But it also hasn't been eligible for OS updates for 2 or 3 years. My new M3 MBP is "screaming fast" with Apple's latest patched OS. My god, it's ridiculous. I really prefer Linux desktops. They've been snappy for the past 30 years, and don't typically get slow UI's after a year or two of updates.

pazimzadeh 2y ago

that's interesting, the scores are accelerating? 9.8% better, 15.7% better, 23.8% better

choilive 2y ago

They also explicitly called it out in their announcement videos that the M4 has the fastest CPU cores on the market.

kadomony 2y ago

Conversely, the M3 supposedly has better multi core performance? How is that possible?

wmf 2y ago
It doesn't.

kwanbix 2y ago

Mx is such a incredible achievement by apple. Sadly installing Linux is a no unless you use some budu.

ezfe 2y ago
Installing Linux is easy...

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 2y ago

Absolutely incredible to see Apple pushing performance like this. I can't wait to buy one and finally be able to open more than 20 Chrome tabs.

KptMarchewa 2y ago
For a year, maybe. Web apps will use the opportunity and get slower enough so that you'll get old experience on new hardware soon.

toxicdevil 2y ago

These numbers are misleading (as in not apples to apples comparison). M4 has a matrix multiply hardware extension which can accelerate code written (or compiled) specifically for this extension. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339248

grecy 2y ago
So you're saying Apple added something to the design to make it do things faster...which is literally the definition of improvement. When a company adds a supercharger to a car does it not count as faster? When I add more solar panels to my roof does it not count as more power? Surely doing this kind of thing is exactly what we want companies to be doing to make their products faster/better.
- miahi 2y ago
  It will be faster only for code that uses/is optimized for that specific extension. And the examples you give are not really correct. If you add a supercharger you will get more power, but if the car's transmission is not upgraded, you might just get some broken gears and shafts. If you add more solar panels to your roof, you might exceed the inverter power, and the panels will not bring benefits. It's true that you will benefit from the changes above, but not just by themselves - something else needs to change so you can benefit. And in the case of the M4 and these extensions, the software needs do be changed and also to have an use case for these extensions.
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    Are you implying there are no use cases for matrix multiply? In any case, the two main deep learning packages have already been updated so for the place this change was almost certainly targeted for, your complaint is answered. I'm just stunned that anyone would complain about hardware matrix multiplication? I've wondered why that hasn't been ubiquitous for the past 20 years. Everyone should make that improvement in their hardware. Everyone should get rid of code implementing matrix mult and make the hardware call instead. It's common sense. Not to put too fine a point on it, but your complaint assumes that GeekBench is based on code that has implemented all those changes.

KeplerBoy 2y ago

I wonder how reliable geekbench tests are. Afaik it's the most common benchmark run on apple devices, so apple has a great interest in making sure their newest chips perform great on the test. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the geekbench developers are heavily supported by apple's own performance engineers and that testing might not be as objective or indicative of real world perf as one would hope.

zamadatix 2y ago
Wouldn't it be more surprising to you Apple has been selling 4 generations of the M series to great acclaim on the performance but it all turned out to be a smoke and mirrors show because the hardware is optimized for one particular benchmark they didn't even reference in their comparisons? From the data side: the M4 hasn't made it to the charts yet but the M3 already holds the 4th place in PassMark's single thread chart as well https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html as well as tops Cinebench 2024 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_2024_single_core https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_2024_s... The only areas the M series "lags" is in the high end workstation/server segment where they don't really have a 96+ core option or in spaces where you pop in beefy high end GPUs. Everything else the M4 tends to lead in right now.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  Okay, the linked benchmarks proved me wrong. I trust cinebench numbers a whole lot more than a geekbench score. My bad. And just to be clear: I didn't speculate that Apple tune's its chip to Geekbench, I speculated that geekbench was overly optimized towards apple's latest chip.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > (...) but it all turned out to be a smoke and mirrors show because the hardware is optimized for one particular benchmark they didn't even reference in their comparisons? I know iOS developers who recently upgraded their MacBooks and they claim they now feel more sluggish. I wouldn't be surprised if it was due to RAM constraints instead of CPU though. So, take those artificial bencmarks with a grain of salt. They are so optimized that they are optimized out of the real world.

crest 2y ago

Beware that some of the Geekbench number are the result of them suddenly gaining support for streaming SVE and SME just when Apple implements it. I'm not doubting the number represent real peak throughput on M4. There is just a taste to the timing lining up so well. Also they don't take advantage of fully SVE2 capable ARM cores to compare how much a full SVE2 implementation would help especially at accelerating more algorithms than those that neatly map to streaming SVE and SME. The single core performance gains of M4 variants over their predecessors are distorted, because the streaming SVE and SME are apparently implemented by combining what used to be them AMX units of four cores.

drunkenmagician 2y ago
Processor roadmaps a multi year plans, I doubt Apple aligned their roadmap to geekbench supporting SVE. More likely a happy alignment of plan(et)s.

seec 2y ago

It's kinda true but also not at all. In general, having better single thread performance means a more reactive UI and snappier feeling because blocking operation gets executed more quickly. On the other hand, many modern software having been extremely optimized for multi-threading and not all categories of software benefit that much from faster UI thread. If parallelization isn't too expansive, throwing more core at something can make it actually faster. And the big thing you leave out is that it all depends on how well the software is optimise, how much animations it use and things like that. My iPhone has MUCH better single-thread performance than my old PC, yet it feels much slower for almost everything. And this is exactly how I feel about Apple Silicon Macs. On paper, impressive performance. In actual practice it doesn't feel that fast.